Pay Attention!
All ideas/concepts (memes) are fundamentally mind viruses that infect and inhabit the human mind in a host-parasite relationship. Humans have evolved such that the limbic system (“monkey brain”) governs the cortex (“intelligence”). To rule a human from within, any mind virus must conquer and dominate the limbic system. However, any information (i.e. the mind virus bootloader) that a human receives must first be given attention by the human and get processed by the cortex.
Information theory defines wealth as knowledge and growth as learning. There is 59ZB (zetta bytes) or 59 trillion gigabytes of information available to humanity. Every day 2.5PB (peta bytes) or 2.5 billion gigabytes are created. Your Mac can store about 1,000 GB of data. By 2025, there will be 175ZB of data, equivalent to 175 billion of the devices you’re reading this article on. That’s 25 of these nicely designed 1,000+ Petrodollar devices for every man, woman and child in existence. Storage is abundant, processing capacity is scarce. The human civilization is incredibly data wealthy, with majority of online humans suffering from attention deficit disorder. Human attention span is about 5 seconds. This increases if the limbic system is stimulated.
Human data processing is either passive — unquestioningly downloading information into your cortex — lazy, convenient, cheap. Or active — discerning the veracity of the data download — scanning it for mind viruses. The latter requires effort, energy and is expensive. Attention is the ultimate currency.
Currently, humanity has been infected by various mind viruses and unwittingly doing their bidding — like the ant, unwittingly climbing to the highest blade of grass only to be eaten by a grazing cow so that the virus can continue its life-cycle. In the journey of furthering mind viruses, humanity has inflicted/sustained tremendous damage onto ourselves or each other. We have lost/pushed away our friends, loved ones, been physically beaten in protests, died in wars, mutilated our sex organs because we unwittingly took in a mind virus that took over our limbic system and told us to do all that.
Mind viruses feed on attention. To kill a mind virus its attention supply must be shut off. Centralized social networks have been spectacular in information warfare, spreading fake news and uploading mind viruses into the brains of unsuspecting captive audiences since the early days Cambridge Analytica and Brexit, followed by Trump 2016, Hong Kong protests 2019 and Covid-19 psyops campaigns. Companies are owned by a small number of private individuals and optimize for profit not the well-being of their clients.
A decentralized, community-owned social network would optimize not for user engagement and advertising revenue but for the veracity of the information on the network. Validating users would earn ATTN token in a factcheck-to-earn setting, users would pay ATTN to post. This may be the best hope of humanity to free itself from its mind parasites and live life to the fullest.
