This is a long post challenging the idea of the attention economy, and especially the idea of 'capturing' attention by locking people into a platform (for example, Facebook). The theory is that "Free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to themselves, to the companies they deal with, and to the marketplace." How this manifests is in the idea that people, making choices for themselves, are better able to express their needs than algorithms or surveillance systems. I would want to see some proof of this. Anyhow, the way people best express these needs, says Searls, is by stating their intentions "to whole markets, but without being trapped inside any one company's walled garden... this is called intentcasting." I can see the value of this in an educational context, but we need to keep in mind (where Searls does not) that people's intentions are very susceptible to marketing, manipulation, and other forces.
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