The Attention Economy

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise." - Proverbs 6:6
"Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." - Matthew 5:5

It's late September, and for some reason articles about termites are popping up in my newsfeed. Three days ago, in "What termites can teach us" Amia Srinivasan explored the concept of the "extended organism" and what Radhika Nagpal calls "extended stigmergy." Just two days ago, in "A giant crawling brain: the jaw-dropping world of termites" (an extract from "Underbug: An Obsessive Tale of Termites and Technology") Lisa Margonelli writes "one scientific metaphor for the inscrutable termite is a neuron in a giant crawling brain." [3] Okay, so termites are interesting, but if you want to see what eusocial insects are really capable of, consider ants, specifically the Argentine ant, Linepithema humile, whose name literally means “humble” or “weak.” About this species a paper was written titled "The global expansion of a single ant supercolony."

Feng Gao at the 2014 Umbrella Movement

It's the ability to indirectly coordinate large groups of individuals, via the mechanism of stigmergy, that makes these insects so successful. They benefit from the synergistic effects of working together. The central insight of stigmergy is that global coordination can be achieved by individual agents interacting locally. Two fundamental principles govern this: 
1. No matter how large the environment grows, because agents interact only locally, their limited processing capabilities are not overwhelmed. (This is useful, since today no single person understands every aspect of society which affects them.) [4]
2. Through the dynamics of self-organization, local interactions can yield a coherent system-level outcome that provides the required control. (This is useful, since we have a need to coordinate goals with people we will never speak to.) [1,7]

Originally, the concept of stigmergy was used to build up a coherent explanation of the so-called "coordination paradox" between the individual and the societal level. The explanation to the coordination paradox provided by stigmergy is that individuals interact indirectly: each affects the behavior of others by indirect communication. [2] Andy Clark and David Chalmers' paper "The Extended Mind" explores a related concept to stigmergy and other forms of indirect communication/coordination, they write: "Does the extended mind imply an extended self? It seems so. ...This view will have significant consequences. It may be, for example, that in some cases interfering with someone's environment will have the same moral significance as interfering with their person. In any case, once the hegemony of skin and skull is usurped, we may be able to see ourselves more truly as creatures of the world." [5]

If this is as far as we go, then we understand the basic idea of stigmergy and may even suspect that it could be capable of greater utility. Radhika Nagpal, in her TED talk, said "We can actually take these rules that we've learned from nature and combine them and create entirely new collective behaviors of our very own." [6] Leave it to Daniel Estrada and Jonathan Lawhead to give what I consider to be one of the best descriptions of how stigmergy can be leveraged in human society. In doing so, they bring in several additional ideas. The first of these is the concept of "natural human computing," (aka human-based computation). [18] This is analogous to stigmergy. Just as we can think of ants or termites as neurons within a brain, individual human behavior patterns, via their interaction, can be thought of as cooperating to compute the solution to a problem. The second of these ideas is that of the "attention economy." The short explanation is that an attention economy treats our attention as a finite resource constantly produced by conscious attenders. Today we live in a money-based economy, so the movement toward an attention-based economy would parallel the movement from the “object dimension” to the “subject dimension" of philosophical space. [8] Per Estrada, "what makes this flow of attention different from every financial economy we are familiar with: you can't store attention. You can't stockpile attention or reserve a bank of attention units. There is no debt in an attention economy and there can be no surplus of attention. There is just the total amount of attention being produced, and the many ways we allocate that attention among all the things we spend our time doing.” [9]

Now we are ready for Estrada and Lawhead's paper "Gaming the Attention Economy," which establishes two very important ideas: (1) how to leverage the normal behavior of individuals to solve complex problems, and (2) how to uncover the real value of things that our current economic system fails to recognize. By utilizing the new tools enabled by augmented reality and digital communities for exchanging goods and services (like Craigslist), we can efficiently address energy, environment, and resource related problems. To me, the potential for addressing climate change holds significant promise. [15, 17] Today we have just glimpses of how utilizing the computational dynamics of natural human activity, acting upon high quality information about local patterns of attention, use, and interaction, can solve the economic optimization problem (and even non-economic social problems). In fact, as Daniel Estrada and Jonathan Lawhead write, that’s a reason why it may eventually replace our current money-based system.

According to Estrada, “Attention models are fundamentally a measure of consensus and therefore may function as the legitimate grounds for a self-organized system of governance, while at the same time working as a model for collectively planning the production, distribution, consumption, and recycling of our natural resources. In this sense, an Attention Economy is a complete system for social organization, and therefore may function in the ideal case without significant contributions from either money or centralized political institutions. ...The attention economy unifies what have traditionally been considered the “separate magisteria” of human social organization: the domains of economics, of governance, and of culture, each of which are traditionally assumed to operate by their own internal dynamics. In fact, these domains are deeply interconnected, and an attention economy will allow us to visualize these relations directly. ...As we collectively confront problems that require social, coordinated action, human societies will increasingly appeal to attention-based models rather than other kinds of models for solving coordination problems.” [9] "[These] provide the essential feedback loops for allowing human communities to self-organize at a global scale," [10] end various forms of exploitative hierarchical systems, and restore the traditional reverse dominance hierarchy to humankind.

Paraphrasing Estrada, we have a lot of work to do: the social networking tools for generating spontaneous direct actions and broad democratic consensus are important. They must operate openly, transparently, and independent of any centralized state or corporate control. [13, 14] State and corporate interests often diverge from the collective interests of the people, so instead of state power generating conformity to social norms, self-organizing social networks will need to ensure that control stays on the side of the people, and include a method for social credit monitoring to manage the distribution of labor and resources such that they are effectively abundant and accessible to all participants in a fair and democratic way. [11, 12, 16] We have some good models for how to do this, but we are a long way from realizing their potential. 

Tags: attention economy, human-based computation, social computing, superorganism, (extended) stigmergy, extended mind, distributed cognition, agent-environment feedback loop, crowdsourcing, augmented reality, gamification (in government), game theory, social credit system (China), Aadhaar (India), persuasive technology, coordination paradox, multi-agent systems, interpersonal utility comparison problem, distributed autonomous organization (DAO), personal autonomous organization (PAO), social physics, sousveillance (reciprocal accountability), algorithmic social contract, Scalable Cooperation Group, 共識主動性社會 (stigmergy society)

Footnotes:
[1] A Survey of Environments and Mechanisms for Human-Human Stigmergy, 2006
[2] Cognitive Stigmergy: A Framework Based on Agents and Artifacts, 2006
[3] Heylighten, Accelerating socio-technological evolution, 2007: "Quantitative stigmergy is nearly identical to the process of reinforcement learning that differentially strengthens connections between neurons in the brain. Qualitative stigmergy is the true motor of innovation."
[4] Heylighen, Stigmergy as a Universal Coordination Mechanism: components, varieties and applications, 2016: "Compared to traditional methods of organization, stigmergy makes absolutely minimal demands on the agents... by coordinating initially independent actions into a harmonious whole."
[5] The Extended Mind
[6] What intelligent machines can learn from a school of fish
[7] Heather Marsh, A societal singularity: We have reached a "societal singularity" characterized as a state where "no one can understand every aspect of society which affects them" yet we have a need to "coordinate goals with people we will never speak to."
[8] Walter Benesch, “An Introduction to Comparative Philosophy.”
[9] The Attention Economy 
[10] The Attention Economy Primer
[11] Sesame Credit will (eventually) make fully automated luxury queer space anarcho-communism possible
[12] David Brin: "The combined weight of all the new surveillance technologies heading our way is a recipe for disaster, beyond Orwell’s wildest nightmares. The only way we can stop them from becoming instruments of repression is by giving everyone access to these tools so that the powerful will be stymied and held accountable, and ordinary citizens will be empowered. By answering surveillance with sousveillance. By demanding that Aadhaar report to the people more effectively than to the mighty."
[13] Alex Pentland, Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data: “The most efficient and robust architectures tend to be ones that have no central points. It means that there's no single place for a dictator to grab control."
[14] LeRon Shults, Artificial Intelligence Shows Why Atheism Is Unpopular: “It’s going to be done. So not doing it is not the answer.” Instead, he believes the answer is to do the work with transparency and simultaneously speak out about the ethical danger inherent in it.
[15] Inducing Peer Pressure to Promote Cooperation, 2013
[16] Morality in the Machines, "Jonathan Zittrain’s ambition for the AI initiative is immense: to democratize social media’s secret algorithms, artificial intelligence and similar technologies."
[17] Gamification and Climate Change Activism - Beneficial or Detrimental?
[18] Human computation is an approach to solving complex problems that leverages the personal informatics of normal individual behaviors to increase the effect of coordinated action. It does this by using the tools of social computation (social networks, marketplaces, fine-grained details, augmented reality, etc.) to make information about normal human behaviors available to their users. This increased information availability creates robust progress feedback loops that allow humans to select individual behaviors or characteristics for either reinforcement, interruption, alteration, (etc.)
[0] Peter Corning and Eörs Szathmáry, "Synergistic Selection": A Darwinian frame for the evolution of complexity, 2015: "...new forms of information have played a key role in the emergence of complexity at every level, from DNA coding sequences in the genome to pheromone “signals” in social insects, the evolution of language in humankind, and (now) the binary/digital code of the internet age."

Additional Sources:
Big Idea: Attention Economy
Daniel Estrada on Bruce Sterling’s “The Caryatids” As a Model for the Attention Economy
Vivek Singh, Ankur Mani, and Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Social Persuasion in Online and Physical Networks
Daniel Estrada, Rethinking Machines: Artificial Intelligence beyond the Philosophy of Mind (The central issue in human computation concerns the integration of human brains into a general computing architecture that allows for efficient and useful results when applied to challenging computational tasks. How do we attract and sustain the attention of multiple agents, and under what conditions do they perform well?)
Social Norms: Social Identity, (how social identities and relationships motivate choices and actions)
Daniel Estrada's Polytopolis: A distributed framework for organizing communities and values (inspired by the psychology of social identity and collective behavior).
Patchwork theory
Heather Marsh, Inteligencia Colectiva para la Democracia (video presentation)
Heather Marsh, The evolution of democracy (transcript of above presentation)
Stigmergic epistemology, stigmergic cognition, 2007
A Brief History of Stigmergy
Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration, 2007
Kosorukoff, A., Goldberg D. E. “Evolutionary computation as a form of social organization”
Introduction to Human Computation
Jane McGonigal “Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World”
Climate Change? There’s a Game For That
Gamification for health and wellbeing: A systematic review of the literature (persuasive technology, serious games, and personal informatics; game design elements can be mapped to established behavior change techniques; like personal informatics, gamification tracks of individual behaviors, displayed to the user, enrolled in some form of goal-setting and progress feedback)
Gamification: An Introduction to Its Potential (human based computation game) Game mechanics and dynamics tap into fundamental human needs and desires, such as the desire for reward, status, achievement, self-expression, self-efficacy, competition, and altruism, among others. Intrinsically rewarding activities can be enhanced with gamified elements (and access to greater information and new forms of social interaction), potentially accelerating real-world change on an individual, social, and global scale.
Hive-mind solves tasks using Google Glass ant game
New game creates a hive mind out of Google Glass users