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
