I’m glad you feel we’re on the same page, but metaphors are never sound ways of determining issues. Their value is not to convince, but to convey an idea. Flowers in your yard are not even close to working like advertising. Where’s the money in this metaphor?
Perhaps it’s in the nectar fueling the insects and the nutrients for growth of the plants. Each flower is the culmination of a massive amount of “proof of work” by each individual plant, and advertises a genuinely valuable benefit to those insects - the life giving energy. Putting out flowers doesn’t obtain the means (sunlight, water, nutrients) to put out even more flowers.
Flowers and insects are part of a sound “economic” system, balanced carefully to ensure the survival and well-being of both, in an otherwise incredibly hostile environment.
You use this false argument to excuse the ability for those with money to “manage the flow of collective attention” in order to obtain more money:
“managing the economy of attention; advertising is really a way of managing the flow of collective attention.”
Your “vision” is for money to be able to “manage” my attention, in fact the attention of the collective. At least you’re not hiding the sinister nature of advertising.
How you square that with this, I don’t see:
“Instead, at Synereo we’re figuring out ways of mitigating the influence of money so that the natural organizing role of social advertising can serve its social function.”
If this was your goal, I’d expect you to ensure that the means to promote is disconnected from the ability to make money. Clicking “like”, or taking the time to write a post or a tweet, are mini-proofs of work, they reflect the values of the collective. Paid for likes, like paid advertising, override the values of the collective.
The problem arises when promotion can be bought, and promotion is used to create profit. That’s a closed feedback loop, and that is unstable, and why our society is currently riding high on a wall of death. Decentralised systems and disintermediation provide an opportunity to break the loop, and create a stable economic ecosystem before the ride collapses and takes billions of humans with it. For us to coexist with each other, like the bees and the flowers.
I’d love Synereo if it was part of that.