In his essay, The Economics of Attention, Richard Lanham examines the evolving modalities of our world as it quickly habituates itself towards digitalization. Our physical world is dissolving into a non-reality of subsidized dairy cows picturesquely grazing in Swiss countrysides, of reserving Mt. Everest to challenge its iconic human inhospitality. As our world became more artifice, more tragically homogenized and information saturated, the value of attention becomes more competitive.

The more cruise ships we launch, the fewer real ports will be left for them to visit. Mountain climbers have to make a reservation for Everest. The Galapagos Islands, the archetypal paradise of un- spoiled nature, has had to ration access, too, lest the ecological balance be up- set. Every city worth its salt has parked up its “old town” or, if unlucky enough to be new, has invented one. In such a world, all the world does indeed be- come a stage, staging itself for the visitor’s eyes. Dramatic self-consciousness increases like global warming. Tourism, invented to restore our naive wonder at strange places, destroys them instead.

Attention is now a profitable resource. Knowledge is a new means of production. Our world is more informational than realistic; our knowledge that happy fat cows should blot Swiss pastures is an expectation, a true economic demand. But this denotes a paradigmatic change–a merging of human intellectual life and productivity. Our economic incentives–why we work, the nature of that work, what we spend our wages on–are shifting. The Internet is the new commons for which people source their incentives and deposit their productive labor. Institution or industry-based economics are losing viability as we become collectively more remarkable with our digital reality.

What are the new modes for surviving the new information-based frontiers of human experience?

One mode, Lanham presents, is to release long-prevailing, but nevertheless inherited ideas. The law of property is one such idea. Material ownership no longer represents the seat of wealth in an economy. Information is the resource, and in a digitalized world, it is widely available as both profundity and drivel. Not a great deal of resources or elite means are necessary for its access.

As the world further becomes information-central, however, it will strain against the old paradigm of materialism/ownership as the means of a productive economy. What we’re experiencing then, and what the quality of our transforming collective human intelligence signifies, is a wrestling of two modes: From a material, “stuff” based world, pitted with shoddy effort and lackluster human participation, to a world of intangible communal wealth. Capturing and sustaining human attention is the new seat of pursuit. How do you lure and retain the increasingly precious resource of human attention?

This oscillation embodies the background/ foreground reversal we began with: the object from a stuff economy and the algorithm from the world of nonstuff. The economics of attention finds its center in just this oscillation between the two worlds, in the paradox of stuff.

So the world is changing because knowledge is flowing. Cicero‘s crucial element for good rhetoric was having a vast knowledge. This is viable, in an intuitive way. In the film Legally Blonde, long-shot wannabe lawyer Elle Woods wins her first case against a murderous heiress by recollecting the chemical make-up of hair permanent.

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Elle Woods represents a modern phenomena. On the whole, individuals’ sphere of knowledge and worldliness are no longer confined as they have historically been. Anybody (not just rich white Western men) can improvise parts of a shaky oral report, or tighten up the convincingness  of an essay, by knowing analogous information to the topic. As we are saturated in knowledge, we all ought to be very convincing rhetoricians. We all ought to be smart.

We aren’t, however. Our potential as a knowledge-based world is complicated as we, Lanham explains, “hug the ground,” afraid of floating off into this seemingly insubstantial digital reality. We are overlapped by a competing conflict between material & information paradigms. Insight is the trick to navigating out of the paradox of ownership and information.

Driven by our central paradox, the more efficient our instruments of electronic attention become, the more stuff we can, and do, turn out, and the more important it becomes.