Our history begins on the African savannah. Economy was based on meat. Meat was something to build an economy on: it was available in limited quantity and obtaining it required special skills. Meat, in its original form either ran away very fast or, even worse, fought back. So was the cow invented -- thus the importance of meat as the base of the economy dwindled and now the land where you could grow your cow was more important. So the land became the base of wealth and land was available in limited quantities and soon every land belong to some thus trying to obtain it again lead to conflict. As the time passes, some people get hold of more and more land. You can read in the Bible "for he had possessions of flocks and herds and a great household, so that the Philistines envied him" but have you ever read about the herds of, say, Charlemagne? So says Wikipedia "Frankish Empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy" there is no mention that he was owning, I do not know, a million cows. Money is present but no matter how wealthy you are, you won't have the power to execute the next fellow at your whim while those with land can do that so there is little doubt where the real power lies.

Next change comes from two factors: the discovery of America kills the scarcity of land. Also, industrialisation can be seen as a mean to use land much more efficiently which also killed the importance of land. In its place came gold. Now, gold was scarce and, again only scarcity creates value. You might say that the wealth was money -- throughout history, money was always present behind the scenes but only as a easier way to count real wealth, in itself it was never important, however strange this sounds. You can have money with pretty numbers printed on it like "one billion" but if there is no real value, something scarce to back its value then this is what you can do with it.

However, since 1971 there is no gold standard. Is now all money worthless? Hardly. But then, there should be something backing the money, but what? This thing is Attention. Attention is inherently scarce thus it makes a good measure of wealth. As the article says, real attention at any given time can only be pointed to one thing -- ever tried to pay attention to an interesting presentation while reading and understanding a book? This transition was well underway by 1971 -- when FDR was giving a Fireside chat then he gripped a considerable amount of the attention of the nation. Or what about the Nixon-Kennedy battle on television and radio in 1960? Merely a decade later it was Nixon who abolished the gold standard. Surely he was led by concerns of how much gold covered the USA dollar at the time and not how attention was becoming wealth. And yet these things seem connected somehow.

Attention is a curious thing as its not tangible and harder to measure. It's easy to say "I have 135 cows" or "I own the land between that mountains and the seashore" or to say "I have a ton of gold". However, "7.3 million viewers age 18 to 49" or "service receives 120 million unique visitors every month" -- these are, after all, a similar measurement. It will be some time before we can establish good measurements of this phenomenon but there is little doubt that money already serves as a counter for attention, most clearly visible maybe on a box office hit. Literally, the more attention the music or the movie gets, the more money flows to its authors. Side note: music swapping seems a break of this, but it is actually not, it's a great way to easily acquire attention. In this case, the attention-money swap happens at concerts.

Now, come back to code. Code, at least the one we create, builds websites and websites are a tool to acquire attention. It is content, however, that diverts attention to you, not the tool. You might have the first bugfree website in the whole world, loading pages in a fraction of a second but if you do not have the right people, the right marketing it won't worth a damn. So, release your code because it's worthless anyways but if you release, you might get a better tool to help in acquiring attention.

But then why should the coders paid if they create worthless things? Because they customize things for you, they build things tailored for you -- in other words, they hold your attention for a certain time. If you do it yourself based on released code, then you spent time with it, time when you were unable acquire others attention...

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