I’ve got some random loose end posts from my time at last week’s ETech conference that I really should post before they get any older. Here’s one…
Seth Goldstein of Root.net introduced his company’s Vaults product, which aims to give individual consumers a place to bank their “attention data.” Today you can open a “vault” for free and stash your Amazon purchase history and your general clickstream data (derived from a browser plug-in); tomorrow, presumably, much more. Goldstein talked about “PPAs” (“promises to pay attention”) and “attention bonds” and drew a comparison with the way the mortgage industry’s adoption of mortgage bonds helped make housing more affordable.
Well, everyone needs a place to live; what problem is Root aiming to solve? The idea seems to be: Companies are already collecting and claiming large amounts of information about our financial lives and online behavior. That’s data that we ought, by rights, to control — and if it’s going to be exploited commercially, we should get our slice.
Fair enough. But the Root Vaults idea applies a Wall Street mentality to the “attention economy” concept, and when Goldstein unveiled the Vault home screen before the ETech crowd, it resembled nothing so much as a sort of Bloomberg screen for the mind. There’s something potentially dismal about this — are we going to convert every last remnant and scrap of our earthly existence into the margin-eking terms of financial markets?
On the one hand, I can imagine Root Vaults as offering a nifty way for us all to do what Howard Rheingold long ago advocated — pay attention to where we’re paying attention. On the other hand, I’m wary of letting the bond-trading worldview colonize my choices of entertainment and edification. I’m not looking to become the CEO of my own mind, fiddling with spreadsheet optimizations of my own personal satisfaction.
I mentioned this reaction to Goldstein, and he readily admitted that clickstream data has its limits: “You gotta start somewhere. Is it an accurate representation of a person? No. You don’t want to reduce people to data on a Bloomberg dashboard. But this is a natural resource that people are already producing.”
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