Attention, Algorithms, and AI
Attention is an inflation-proof asset.
Politicians As Celebrities?
They call DC “Hollywood for ugly people” but now with the fame-obsessive media outlet TMZ setting up shop on Capitol Hill, politicians are getting treated more like the “celebrities” they’ve become. There’s been a lot of giggling about it around town but it’s the most obvious thing to happen in Washington in decades.
Andrew Breitbart understood “politics is downstream of culture” and culture is downstream of entertainment. We’ve been living through a decades-long transition to the current state of politics as entertainment. C-SPAN and cable news gave us the made for TV candidate, but now with the free for all of the fragmented modern media ecosystem we have the influencer/creator candidate.
A candidate’s ability to get elected, to lead, and to govern is directly tied to his or her ability to navigate the attention economy. Smart ideas are trees falling in a lonely forest unless it comes with some entertainment (maybe even some drama).
That means the problems solved and policies championed by our politicians are prioritized by their ability to become content in the form of clips or edits. While that may seem scary, I think it might not be a bad method of triaging.
The challenges facing our country are complex, immense, and urgent, but our ability to find and form consensus is as weak as it’s ever been. So how do we decide what to tackle? Follow the attention.
Attention – how we allocate the time we spend – is an asset that doesn’t experience inflation. We all have the same 24 hours a day. And while there are any number of organizations, industries, and interest groups spending historic sums of money to influence and shape our political dialogue, the way to win is by attracting and retaining an audience.
Audience Building = Governing
We unpacked what this means for politicians and the influence industry in my recent podcast conversation with Doug Usher (watch here), but what does the TMZ-ification of politics mean for our country? It’s probably not a good thing… even if it’s amusing to watch.
The Two Electorates
Our polling from the Center for Campaign Innovation shows that we’re divided into two electorates: the hyper-partisans who intimately know the ins-and-outs of politics minute by minute and the disengaged who avoid the news but still turn up to vote when they remember.
AI As The Solution?
Polarization is baked into social media platforms. It’s part of their DNA. So instead of algorithmic attention filtering setting our priorities and identifying solutions, maybe AI is the way?
Bruce Schneier introduced me to a concept - the four S’s of AI: AI excels at speed, scale, scope, and sophistication. Our political and governance challenges check all four boxes.