Instagram and the Cult of the Attention Web: How the Free Internet is Eating Itself

I’m disappointed about Instagram’s most recent announcement. They’ll be shifting their photo feed from a chronological list to an algorithmically driven one, ordered based on which posts they think you will like most. My disappointment is not based in nostalgia or a lament of change. I’m disappointed because the decision is a symptom of a larger problem that is eating the web.

Over the past few decades a significant portion of the economy has shifted. Once upon a time companies and services were geared toward enticing you out of your money. Today, the goal of many is to entice you out of your time. Which, in turn, is leveraged as collateral to attract money from advertisers.

Our current version of the internet lives and breathes off a currency of human attention. With the success and failure of many internet companies predicated on how much of a person’s time they can capture.

This model has reshaped much of the internet into an “attention web”, with companies fighting tooth and nail to own every possible moment of your time.

As laid out in a recent New York Times piece about the Instagram change:

“These companies want to always, always give you the next best thing to look at,” said Brian Blau, a vice…