This is WaterDespite the deep disruption of the traditional media ecology, the change in the prevailing methods of influence remains largely quantitative. Instead of better aligning the interests of organizations and stakeholders, the ascendancy of the FAANGs and other technologies of mass persuasion has mainly automated and super-charged the subversion of human attention. As a result, the effectiveness PR-as-conceived-by-Bernays has spiked sharply ever since FAANGs emerged as the new captains of humanity’s collective consciousness. In the meantime, the new markets of the Attention Economy remain starved for integrity, not another rebrand of corrupted or weaponized information. At the very least, organizations need a new consensus about the governance and accounting standards for the trade in the new scarce economic resource. These standards would help reduce the pollution of our media ecology and provide clear guidance to organizational leaders and professional communicators. Without this stabilizing factor, the Attention Economy will remain a kleptocratic Artificial Intelligence (AI) for the high-frequency manipulation of human attention in the service of unholy goals. This economy will also remain highly vulnerable to the viral impact deep fakes and other tools of informational warfare. Around 2009, I started writing and speaking about PR's sustainability roadmap. Since then, I've heard lots of lip service from agency principals and corporate communicators. But I've also seen a growing cadre of organizations take the ethics of influence seriously. Many other industries have embraced sustainability sooner and more wholeheartedly. In financial markets, for example, we've seen environmental, social and governance (ESG) risk metrics move from the fringes of the investment community to the normative center. Despite predictable institutional inertia, the shift to sustainability in capital markets happened when the pain of the status quo started to exceed the pain of change. After several watershed moments (particularly circa 2001 and 2008), traditional asset managers seemed far less inclined to view the "value of values" as a hollow slogan; increasingly, they found, it's a way to mitigate the impact of mispriced risk. The influence industry -- whether it is dominated by FAANGs, flacks or mad men -- will not improve its sustainability either through lip service or through hortatory preaching. But improvements can happen, the way they did in the investment community, through the development and deployment of new taxonomies of "red flags" that reveal misalignments of organizational beliefs, communications and actions. These metrics can materially enrich the broader risk taxonomies under development by organizations such as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB). Of course, commitment to sustainability is no panacea. For example, in my research on deep, I was struck by the strong consensus among experts in AI and disinformation that we -- as a society, as organizations and as individuals -- are essentially defenseless against the rise of deep fakes because technology continuously lowers the barriers to entry into influence without integrity. Lately, much of this polemic has focused on the vulnerabilities of the political system, but all organizations and individuals are vulnerable to deep fake attacks, false reviews, fake blogs, bogus websites, pseudo-events, astroturfing and Trojan Horses. In a media ecology so hopelessly polluted with corrupted information, it seems naive to speak of integrity and sustainability; indeed, the Attention Economy may be thought of as a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah, arguably beyond redemption. However the Attention Economy evolves, it will continue to amaze me that it doesn't rank higher on lists of trending topics, an oddity eloquently explained in David Foster Wallace's famous This Is Water speech. My CTA
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