(Roughly) Daily

… and then I’ll sell you something.

D. Graham Burnett on how an alliance between psychologists and advertisers at the turn of the 20th century taught us how to measure (and monetize) human attention…

Our eyes are worth money. We know that, now. It has become a commonplace that our “attention economy” is functionally an eyeball economy. But how did eyeballs come to look like dollar signs? Let’s dig into what we might think of as the original Faustian Bargain by which the sciences of human perception (with their sophisticated technologies of precision monitoring and measurement) cut a deal with those who move the money around…

An illuminating account of the history of a powerful– and profitable– alliance: “Fracking Eyeballs,” from @asterisk_mag_.

* Jose Ortega y Gasset

###

As we analyze attentiveness, we might recall that it was on this date in 1994 that Laurence Cantor unleashed the “Green Card” spam (advertising the law firm that he operated with his wife, Martha Siegel, and its immigration law services) on the Usenet. While it wasn’t the very first instance of spam, it was the first commercial Usenet spam; and its unapologetic authors are seen as having pioneered the modern global practice of spamming.