Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Billionaires now defer to posters
From scientists to billionaires
After the old priests faded, scientists inherited the role, and physics was expected to provide meaning. Physics has largely stalled since the war, so attention moved to the billionaire class, on the logic that success in business takes intelligence and hard work. People became willing to take scientific and medical advice from billionaires and the posters orbiting them.
Saturation and its limits
That worship may have hit saturation. Billionaires have become far less scarce, perhaps a hundred times more numerous in state of mind over twenty years, and money has proven less powerful than assumed, as the limited success of the donor class suggests. Andrew Carnegie could take up arms against his workers, while a billionaire who posts the wrong thing today may have to resign.
Attention as the new scarcity
The sign of who comes next is who defers to whom. At a gathering of billionaire investors, they fought over who got to sit next to Tyler Cowen, the most interesting person in the room. Time is fixed, so the new scarcity is the attention a person can draw on the screen.
How did scientists become society's new priests?
Sociologist Max Weber described this shift in his 1917 lecture Science as a Vocation. He argued that modern life had become disenchanted, with explanation by calculation replacing explanation by spirits and gods. Science took over the job of describing how the world works. Weber also said that science cannot answer what we should do or how we should live.
What happened when Carnegie's workers struck?
In 1892, workers at Carnegie Steel's Homestead plant in Pennsylvania went on strike after wage talks failed. Company manager Henry Clay Frick brought in about 300 Pinkerton agents by river barge, and a gun battle with the strikers killed several people on both sides. The state militia later took control of the town. Andrew Carnegie was in Scotland during the strike.
Why does attention become the scarce resource?
Economist Herbert Simon wrote in 1971 that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. His point was that when information is abundant, the limiting factor is the time people have to take it in. A day holds 24 hours no matter how much content is produced. Later writers built the attention economy idea on this observation.
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