Your Attention, Spent

VINCENT Hendricks is a professor of formal philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, applying mathematical modelling to philosophy, psychology, and social science. His research spans knowledge transmission, attention economics, and game theory. He is the author of a trilogy, The Zero-Sum Empire, which examines online behaviour through three archetypes: the hustler, the sucker, and the nobody-cares agent.

The Confluence: Could you give us a brief introduction to your background and research interests?

Dr. Hendricks: When we say ‘formal’ philosophy, we mean philosophy wherever the tools of mathematics bite on problems in philosophy or its neighbouring fields: computer science, psychology, sociology, social science. I’ve done a lot of mathematical modelling of how knowledge transmits from one person to another, and for the past decade or so I’ve focused on attention economics and the information market, which is essentially the business model of big tech and much of the internet: bystander effects, cascading effects, pluralistic ignorance, and how they shape the way information moves across the web.

More recently I’ve been building game-theoretical models of human interaction based on three archetypes I call the hustler, the sucker, and the nobody-cares agent. The hustler knows how to play the system for engagement, aware that anger works and truth doesn’t especially matter. The sucker believes in truth, reciprocity, that online opinion counts.

Under common knowledge of rationality, in principle those two should cancel each other out: if I know you’re a hustler and you know I know it, there’s no one left to hustle. But there’s a third type who participates without caring about the outcome, voting because it’s a civic duty but not caring who wins, holding social media profiles but not caring what happens on them. And it turns out common knowledge of rationality doesn’t eliminate that type the way it eliminates the other two.

If I’m a hustler and you’re nobody-cares, it doesn’t pay to hustle you, and it would be stupid of me to be a sucker either, because you don’t care. So if you act as if you don’t care, the most rational thing for me to do is act the same way. You end up with a lot of people participating without really caring, and the price we pay for that is hollowness: democracy functions, but nobody puts much stock in it. My latest trilogy, The Zero-Sum Empire, is a mathematical working-out of exactly that.

The Confluence: Why does misinformation often spread faster online than the truth does?

Dr. Hendricks: There’s always an exchange: your attention on one end, the information you consume on the other. Herbert Simon, who’d go on to win the Nobel Prize, said back in 1971 that in an information-rich world, a wealth of information creates a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes, and what it consumes is fairly obvious: the attention of its recipients. It’s always attention in exchange for information.

The thing is, it isn’t that everybody has a voice, it’s about who gets heard, and that’s a different question. The information market, ruled by the attention economy, meaning the system that treats people’s limited attention as the scarce resource being traded, doesn’t necessarily reward truthful information. It rewards whatever sounds spectacular, gets repeated, has a good catchphrase, regardless of whether it’s true. That’s a market defect: the system can reward information that draws attention even when it isn’t accurate.

That matters because a qualified decision depends on reliably inferred information: it’s the best means we have for qualified deliberation, decision, and action. Manipulate the information and you manipulate the decision, and the action that follows it. That’s also what hybrid or information warfare is: putting manipulated information into circulation so people deliberate, decide, and act in ways that suit whoever put it there, whether or not it serves their own interests or their society’s.

The Confluence: You’ve written about a ‘nobody-cares equilibrium’ on issues like climate change, where people see the problem but disengage anyway. Is it actually rational to be indifferent?

Dr. Hendricks: Yes. The way much of our information society is set up, the system is rigged so that if you can’t see that your caring makes a difference, why would you bother? If you post your honest opinion and take all the abuse of a pile-on, but nothing changes, why keep offering it? Not caring turns out to be rational if it pays at least as well as being a hustler or a sucker, and often it pays better.

Game theory is about finding your best reply given what everyone else does. If you act as if you don’t care, whether or not you actually do, I can’t tell the difference between that and genuine indifference. So it doesn’t pay me to hustle you, and it doesn’t pay me to be a sucker either. The most rational thing for me to do is also not to care, and that’s how a nobody-cares equilibrium spreads: not through apathy exactly, but through the rational calculation that caring doesn’t pay.

The Confluence: Could you explain common knowledge with a simple, non-digital example, before we get back to the internet?

Dr. Hendricks: Britain drives on the left, Denmark drives on the right. Everyone in Britain knows this, knows that everyone else knows it, knows that everyone knows that everyone knows it, and so on. That’s common knowledge, not just information that happens to be shared.

The internet was supposed to build exactly this kind of common ground at global scale. Instead it tends to build echo chambers: clusters of people who each have a lot of information in common with each other but not with anyone outside the cluster, which is a very different and much weaker thing than genuine common knowledge, and it’s part of why the internet, despite moving more information than any system in history, has arguably made shared understanding harder rather than easier. That’s what feeds the info-storms: overload that makes people stop judging what is true for themselves and start simply copying what the people around them already believe.

The Confluence: What would you actually tell a teenager to do differently, given everything you’ve just described?

Dr. Hendricks: Think of your attention as money. Before you spend it on something online, ask yourself honestly whether you’d pay for it if it cost you real money instead of just time, because that is in fact the exchange happening whether you notice it or not.

And don’t get insulted on your own intelligence: a lot of what performs well online is designed to make you feel something quickly, anger especially, rather than to tell you something true, and noticing that gap is most of the battle. It also matters what you trade your attention for. If you’re mostly trading it for a sense of vanity or social capital, saying things you don’t quite believe because they get more engagement, you should notice that too, because it’s a real cost, not a free transaction.

The Confluence: Where does the University of Copenhagen and your own work with mathematics fit into all of this personally?

Dr. Hendricks: I’ve spent my career applying mathematical modelling to philosophy and social science because I think it’s the only way to make some of these ideas precise enough to actually test and argue about, rather than leaving them as vague intuitions everyone can interpret differently. The attention economy is a genuinely mathematical structure, a market with its own defects, and treating it as vague cultural commentary rather than an economic system with identifiable failure modes means you never get anywhere close to fixing it.

The Confluence: Any final thought for our readers?

Dr. Hendricks: Your generation, not mine, will decide whether the attention economy wins outright or whether something better gets built in its place. That’s not a comforting thing to say, but it’s true, and it’s worth taking seriously rather than treating this as somebody else’s problem to solve.