In the movie Dream Scenario they explained to us what happened when a normal person, a professor played by Nicolas Cage, became the most famous person on the planet. And not because he had done anything special: he simply started appearing in everyone's dreams. All the people in the world claimed, really or to not be left out, that they had seen Professor Matthews in their dreams, for others, a gray and forgettable character. Fame arrived in a way as gratuitous as it is currently arriving for Tim Payne, a football player from New Zealand participating in the current World Cup. Payne has done nothing to be famous; precisely, he is famous now because he wasn't. Or because he was the one with the fewest followers on social media in a team not very promising for victory (he has never won a match in a final phase). But Payne was the chosen one by an Argentine content creator to make him famous; he simply chose him and asked everyone to sympathize with him above the explosions of patriotic pride that usually underpin footballing passions. And yes, in a few days Payne went from being any footballer to having more followers on social networks than his own country has inhabitants, simply by a whim or idea of an influencer from the other side of the world, and in an even more arbitrary way than the professor in the film. In the current economy of attention, however, this is not an anecdote or a curious story. Just like in the film, the first thing the professor thought was how to take advantage of it, since nowadays having people's attention (knowing who you are and listening to you) is the main capital from which personal and collective economies can grow. So, needless to say, the footballer has gone all out; he has addressed his millions of new followers and has "thanked them for their support". Here's how the attention economy works: everything is based on capturing and maintaining people's attention, in whatever way possible, thanks to social networks, of course, which create new fame almost every day, with the same arbitrariness as dreams. Now that Payne has the attention of the masses, or of certain people on the planet, he will be able to capitalize on it: he will do advertisements, paid posts that millions of people will see, fame creates more fame and money will make more money. And it all starts from a whim or a gamble of the new digital gods, or from the frantic idleness of the new networked masses, who train themselves with the game of attention while yearning for something similar to happen to them. Or that, by a stroke of luck, some of their content goes viral; or they even do things, or live them, according to the performance they can get from them on the networks. But just like in Cage's movie, the tables can turn at any moment. The professor began to appear not in dreams but in nightmares, surrounded by blood and pain, and the infamy of being hated as gratuitously as he had previously been admired began.
