In other words, as has happened many times before in history, we may be entering a completely new kind of economy, with new rules, new meanings, and new goals. But that notion is problematic if we assume that economies center around the effort to obtain what is not only desirable, but scarce. Far from being scarce information is overwhelming us all, and it continues to increase exponentially. Obviously not material objects. The only real alternative is attention.
Attention is intrinsically scarce because it has to come from the minds of others.
But unlike material goods or even information, there is hardly any limit to how much attention one might usefully want, up to that of everyone else on earth. Information technologies make a desire of this sort attainable, at least in principal, at a pace never before possible. Historical figures like Confucius and Aristotle have gotten huge amounts of attention, but it almost all came well after they were dead, so it presumably didn't directly benefit them. If you have one form, you often have access to others, especially when you have a large audience. Further, anyone who has attention can at least temporarily pass it on to you.