"Google takes on more of the responsibilities of the state, becomes a central gateway to the basic services of city"
"Become the go-to partner for “Smart-City”, displacing all other competitors from this market because of focus on human behavior."
"This could give you a monopoly over both physical and digital realms, leading the next generation of global tech conglomerates..."
It's also painfully hard to use (the maximum attention setting involved 4 overlapping animations at one point), and scary in a factual relativity sort of sense I've never even tried to pin down. It vaguely reminds me of the sort of manipulation NewsDiffs was created to counter - stories changing tone and even facts in real time with no acknowledgement of that fact.
I don't see any sign of that happening on this page, but imagine one of those sliders with conflicting content at different attention levels. I find it creepy on a level I have trouble explaining.
At a first guess, my bad reaction to the slider was based on an intuitive fear that the differences would be something more substantive than best-effort restatements of one idea.
#1 way to make me discount your ideas before I've even read them.
However fragmented this message is, I get that they're trying to propose a program to bridge the gap with the physical world, but that results in regional monopolies. Sure, cities and states can help regulate it, but it's best if the organization was aligned entirely with the people living in that region.
Is this an appeal to Google to monopolize Orwell's Nightmare?
Get ready for hordes of robots mining fake attention for money, though. We'll continue to ship bits around the internet by robots for robots to validate marketing budgets.
This future phenomenon is probably the best argument for a private web, if not a decentralized one.
