Albert Wenger

So these are just some examples of what we're not paying enough attention to.

And I might add, given the time that we're now talking, is we're also not paying enough attention to

fundamental structural inequity in society and how to address those, right?

And instead, what we have the situation is where the market-based system has been so successful at solving a certain class of problems that we have somehow convinced ourselves that it can solve all problems.

But that's just not true.

And the reason it's not true is because the market-based system, for it to work, it needs prices.

And the most important things that we could allocate attention to don't have prices and more importantly, cannot have prices.

There is no system that you could construct by which these things would have prices attached to them.

Well, they're certainly unhealthy from a social perspective, right?

So what we've done is we have companies where the entire business model resolves around reselling your attention.

I mean, that's the fundamental nature of advertising.

Advertising, going back to, let's say, newspaper advertising, is I have a bunch of your attention.

You're paying attention to the newspaper.

You turn the page, and boom, I throw something in your face, right?

Big, whatever, full-page ad.

so when that's your fundamental business model and that's certainly the case for um uh companies like microsoft uh sorry like facebook and and um

and Twitter and YouTube, for example, when that's my fundamental model, then my incentive is to grab as much of the attention as I can.

And so how do I do that?

I frequently alert you, here's a new piece of content you might find interesting.

Once you're in there, I'm like, and here's another piece of content and yet another piece.