The attention economy and online governance, with Nathan Schneider

Nathan Schneider (@ntnsndr), professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder and director of the Media Economies Design Lab, joined the Decentralization Research Center's podcast to discuss his new paper, “Online Governance Surfaces and Attention Economies,” how attention functions as labor, and what it means to design governance systems that respect people’s time and focus.

Timestamps:

02:31 Why attention and governance are inseparable

04:47 The hidden costs of democracy: governance as labor

09:44 Attention scarcity vs. collective abundance

12:59 “To look is to labor”: attention as work

18:45 Designing ethically for people’s attention

22:18 Case study 1: DAOstack and prediction markets for governance

27:20 Case study 2: Stewards and delegated attention

31:25 Case study 3: The limits of automation

37:31 Five heuristics for designing attention-aware governance

46:34 How to evolve attention economies as organizations scale

56:27 Upcoming projects from Nathan’s lab and Metagov