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# Rise of the Memeocracy — and its cost
- URL: https://onemanandhisblog.com/2019/01/memeocracy/
- Published: 2019-01-28T11:22:04.000Z
- Updated: 2019-03-12T10:37:48.000Z
- Description: We reward the ability to win attention with fame, validation and money. But that comes with a psychological price.
- Author: Adam Tinworth
- Tags: influencers, social media celebs, attention, attention economy, memes, mental health

James Rush explores [the new nature of fame](https://medium.com/recycled/what-happens-to-the-children-of-tomorrow-when-we-make-our-sociopaths-the-aspirational-high-point-3c951cd9fad6?ref=onemanandhisblog.com), where income is directly proportional to the amount of attention you can generate single-handedly:

> Bregoli is an example of what I‘ve termed the ‘Memeocracy’. It overtook and supplanted the meritocracy in the early part of this century. It is a system set up via social media that rewards people with money and prestige for attention rather than talent. Bregoli and those who have engineered her rise hijacked a psychology that favours outrage over hard work.

Of course, it could — and should – be argued that the ability to generate attention is a form of talent. But we should still be cautious about the sort of talents we choose to reward…

Equally, we should be aware, as a society, of some of the consequences of the attention markets we're building. This recent BBC piece explored that:

There's a couple of stand-out points in there. The role of algorithms in making life *more* pressured for successful creators is certainly part of it – and is one of the reasons we're seeing the ethics and morality of algorithms discussed more and more — but so, too, is the unhealthy validations cycle that simplistic analytics like Likes give to our discourse. 

As I [explored for NEXT Conference](https://nextconf.eu/2019/01/forget-augmented-reality-were-already-living-in-an-augmented-society/?ref=onemanandhisblog.com), we are augmenting our social world with these digital tool - and the current wave of content creators are our guinea pigs. There are going to be consequences above and beyond the accidents [we've already seen](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/23/taiwans-bikini-hiker-dies-after-falling-into-ravine-solo-trek/?utm%5Fterm=.291f6768eec8&ref=onemanandhisblog.com).