In the digital kingdom, locks mostly come in three forms: firewalls, encryption algorithms, and of course username/password combinations. Keeping the baddies' fingerprints off our email addresses, credit card numbers, nude selfies, what-have-you is the point.
But, genius that he was (or is?--we won't know until 2016), Moriarty didn't mention another species of baddie to whom locks were also immaterial. Namely the counterfeiter. Throwing back to Sherlock Holmes, this time the original incarnation: "...the counterfeiter stands in a class by himself as a public danger." Why? Counterfeiting is really a double-crime because, if undetected, it ultimately debases the value of the real deal.
You can make the case that spam, clickbait, and SEO shenanigans fall into this category, particularly when they're done convincingly. And they will only become better at pick-pocketing our attention. Doubtless, there are already children in pre-school born with immunities to NewsMax skeeziness coded into their DNA, so I shudder to think of the evolutionary counter-strike coming soon to a browser window near
We demand an internet with locks in place to prevent our money (and any personal brand we might cultivate online) from being stolen. We resent the bandwidth siphoned off our data plans by spam & ads. "You wastin' my minutes" denotes the waste of both money and time. But I find it absolutely bizarre that we do not guard our attention with the same jealousy we apply to our money and time. To a degree, it's understandable. Multi-tasking is a prized skill--has been since Julius Caesar's reputation for dictating four letters at once...all while other people were yakking at him, no less.
The conventional wisdom is that a knowledge economy is our future. (Personally, I'm not buying it, but that's a whole 'nuther blog post for a whole 'nuther time.) If you subscribe to that notion, though, you pretty much have to trade the adage that "time is money" for the more accurate "attention is money." In an economy powered by three shifts of people standing in front of machinery, attention took care of itself. Lack of attention on the part of the worker generally ended in maiming or death and possibly a starving family afterward. That was a world of time-clocks and piece-rates.
Powering this more nebulous economy of knowledge-y thingamajigs, however, is not a series of discrete steps performed by interchangeable labour. There can--and should--be a process in place, certainly. Metrics, too, one hopes. But the emphasis is on collaboration, not a waterfall assembly-line. (Hence the dreaded open-office layout.) And, at least in theory, a key differentiator will be the quality of worker--not only as individual talent, but also how well their atom bonds with other atoms in a team's molecule.
But, at some point, all that cross-pollination is supposed to gestate into some innovative-y, disruptive-y, paradigm-shift-y thing that will make the company the next Google or Apple. And that absolutely, non-negotiably, requires focus--a.k.a. uninterrupted attention. You know how those last couple hours on a Friday (when the office has mostly cleared out) can be more productive than the entire rest of the week? Behold, the power of attention.
Yet here we are in 2014, when the most politically important meetings are too often the useless ones. In 2014, we still believe that Silicon Valley is "innovating" when apps. like Snapchat are handsomely rewarded for dumping still more navel-gazing bits into the internet. (And somebody, for the love of Cthulu, pretty-please tell me that "Yo" is dead. Please?) In 2014, neither Twitter nor (especially) Facebook have added a "Snopes this before you look like a moron, m'kay?" button. (Okay, maybe that last one's wishful thinking, and sites like Snopes and Politifact might not appreciate the surge in traffic anyway.)
Let's pretend for a minute that the knowledge economy isn't just another hand-wavy term made up by MBAs to make us believe that there's light at the end off the offshoring tunnel. If that's actually true, then we need to treat attention--ours and others--as the coin of the realm. Prioritise the technologies who can boost signal and/or cancel out noise.
Given my druthers, I'd like to see the counterfeiters put out of business for good--specifically the greater good of the internet. It would free up resources--including mine--to solve more pressing problems. For the time being, however, here in the kingdom of firehoses, the woman with the sieve is Queen.
