@seth

On Thursday, March 16 2006 I had a conversation with Michael Goldhaber in Oakland as a follow-up to his experience the week prior at ETech. He said that:

“Money is narrowband. Attention is broadband.”

For example, if you are a waitress you can choose to look at somebody solely in terms of their ability to pay the bill. But this would be ignoring a lot of other information about the person.

If you ask a successful hedge fund manager why he still trades, even after he may have made hundreds of millions of dollars, he will say that money is just a way to keep score. The real drive comes from the challenge to compete with other great minds.

Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo! and every other social media environment are all competing for the Attention of their users. One consistently hears about the “influence” that these captive demographics represent. The page views and advertising revenue that they generate reduce their complex value to simple units for keeping score.

The cost of these simple scores is that they quickly become fetishes and absolve their leaders from the responsibility of continued competition.

Financial institutions have no incentive to pay closer attention to the personal information of applicants, when a fico score is trusted by all institutions as a fair measure of credit-worthiness (even though it was never designed for this application). That many people are labeled sub-prime and forced to pay usurious rates is a necessary consequence of this habit.

But people are more than the historical algorithms that creditors have calculated for them.

Just as I am more than my ability to pay for my cheeseburger at the diner.