A day or so ago I had an idea, but it probably still needs work. Can it be said that we now live in a kind of economy of attrition, where people aren’t just motivated by the need for money, but by the increasing desire for other people’s attention? Online especially, we all seem to crave the attention of other people. We want as many people as possible to look at what we post. Influencers thus post more and more deranged, bizarre and provocative things, just to entice people to click on it, and irrespective of any negative feedback they might receive. How else do you explain something as moronic as Flat Earth? We no longer care what we say, as long as it satisfies our craving for hits. Of course, I still need to work out the extent to which this can really be likened to an economy, given that nothing is actually being exchanged; yet I find it striking that money may no longer be our prime motivation for creating and producing material.

With more and more people posting things online, be it on Youtube, twitter, blogs or wherever, it has brought about a kind of competition for hits, where we’re all motivated by the desire for attention. While some influencers post to make money through sponsorships etc, their overriding desire is to get people to watch their videos. After all, why would anyone ever post anything if you didn’t want people to look at it? Yet in turn this has brought about a race to become more and more extreme, to stand out. The more provocative you are, the more you stand out, and the more people watch your stuff. Maybe this could explain the increasing lunacy we are seeing both online and in real life.