Of the Attention Economy and the Real Economy

The "attention economy" is just like the rest of the economy to which it has become so integral. The chances of really big "success" are cynically and insanely overhyped, the luring of five thousand--five million--donkeys onward with a single carrot. Where the contest for that carrot is concerned it isn't a "level playing field," and it isn't a "meritocracy"--though this doesn't prevent people of small and conventional minds from insisting that they are. In what is very close to being a "winner take all" game the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Those who are in the former category get called "geniuses," regardless of whether they really merit the invidious label, while those who are in the latter category are sneered at as "losers," and anyone who is anything but satisfied with the outcome of their efforts is told that they have no one to blame but themselves, something many of them are sufficiently indoctrinated in the aforementioned conventionality to believe--while many more than will dare admit it don't believe, because the heresy in such thoughts is so little tolerated, and so consistently and brutally punished by the champions of orthodoxy without ever distressing the "free speech absolutists."