The Dawn of the Reliance Economy
Your attention was never the endgame
“Once you hit the first intersection in town, make a right onto Main Street. Go past the fire station and over the railroad tracks. Make your second right after the tracks. If you see a large metal building with a truck parked in overgrown grass, turn around; you’ve gone too far…”
These are part of the directions to the house I grew up in. For decades, these directions, in one form or another, would be dictated to people planning to visit for the first time. Once I could drive, I would reference equivalent narratives, hastily scribbled down on paper, as I made my way to somewhere new.
This was a deeply inefficient process. It required an upfront conversation to get the directions, followed by significant effort and consternation to decipher them en route. If you were lucky enough to have a “navigator” in the passenger seat next to you, that opened up a whole separate level of coordination. “Wait, was that the big tree with the ‘Y’ in it? Wasn’t that our turn? You were supposed to be watching for the ‘Y’ tree!”
But while inefficient, this process represented something profoundly valuable: awareness and connection.
In order to rattle off a narrative like that, tethered to a landline phone in your kitchen, you had to maintain a…
