After Your Attention, Your Intention and Health are the Targets of Homo economicus
New technologies exploit, in scale, our individual trusting moments online
Welcome to the age of Homo economicus. If you have read my articles or my book (including the diagram below), you know many of our fellow humans, suffering from broken feedback loops in neurotransmitters and hormones (neuro-endocrine) systems, are evolving (metamorphosing) into a new species I call Homo economicus. While our ancestral Homo sapiens relied on adaptive traits which were physical (strength, speed, fitness, hard work), cerebral (creative minds) and spiritual (kindness, empathy, fellowship of friends and family), the new species thrives on “numbers” and “digits” and in “quantifying” everything for speed and convenience. It constantly finds ways to “scale up” systems or processes to maximize the “monetization” of their unit of “time” (which was called “life” by Homo sapiens) on this planet. In the economic systems built by Homo economicus, everything is a tradable monetizable commodity as long as it can be tracked, quantified and exploited in scale.
We all know about the “attention” economy of the late 20th century which quantified and tracked our attentions and commoditized it in scale by selling to marketers granular data on “who paid attention to what.” The concept of internet “cookies” was a euphemism for digital tokens to track and quantify our valuable (and once private) attention space online for marketing or control purposes. Search engines and browsers like Brave and Firefox and communication software like Tor (The Onion Router) are now trying to help people avoid tracking by anonymizing or partitioning data they exchange online.
To overcome the setbacks caused by an overly crowded attention-getting space (everyone using cookies to track everyone) and an overly-distracted mistrusting public (suffering from “attention” deficit), Homo economicus is now doing away with tracking cookies to quantify and monetize our attention, but instead targeting the precursor to our “attention,” namely our “intention” buried deep in our soul and mind (what remains for many of us). But how do they do that?
Well, by giving us educational or helpful content we really like to see or hear for free, no (apparent) strings attached, no (instant) monetization or (directly) selling sponsored products! In other words by acting as as good Samaritans who want to give us high quality free education (but if you read my Simplescience articles, you know I call true education an “orphan” because it rarely has a non-exploiting sponsor), they understand (quantify and then sell/monetize in scale) our “intent” by gaining our “trust.” Who would have thought subscribing to read a “free educational” article from a do-gooder “expert” about “Best wrinkle treatments” or “Home improvement” or psychological health (on sites like Verywell Mind) we are sharing our “intentional” sphere with Homo economicus who is harvesting, quantifying, packaging and selling every “harvestable” thing about us!
And in the age of Homo economicus, it’s not only our mind and soul (intent) but our body (and health) which is increasingly the target of digitization (quantification, tracking and scaling up of monetization). Recently billionaire Larry Ellison (supreme alpha Homo economicus founder of Oracle, the supreme tool to quantify, track and monetize scale) bankrolled $82 million to Tony Blair (alpha Homo economicus, the former British Prime Minister, wearer of many masks who monetized a war in Iraq and many other world affairs) in his efforts to create a vaccination database in Africa (Both seen in the picture). The apparent reason, as always with folks like Blair, is philanthropic: “To create a central database of vaccination records to monitor and combat a variety of diseases, including yellow fever, polio and measles.”
But if you read further you realize the Homo economicus motives include selling more vaccines/medicines to the large (scalable=profitable) African continent (which is mostly resisting vaccines and medications), helping governments better track/control their citizens, and of course, adding to the Ellison’s “digitization” empire over our attention, intents and health: “Last year Oracle bought the US electronic health record company Cerner for almost $30 billion as part of Ellison’s vision to create a single source of medical records within America’s healthcare service.”
The world of Homo economicus is a world of masks, crutches and daggers. Is there anything we can do not to be exploited by Homo economicus or become one? My research into the neuro-endocrine systems of human body shows me a lot of our problems are rooted in our metabolic imbalances. I share details of my own thoughts and research with you in my articles and a book with that same title.