A lie about attention has become invisible by embedding itself in everyday institutions

Evidence

At the heart of the attention economy is a LIE. … It is a lie about what attention is, and how it works, and what it is for. It is the most pervasive and sinister kind of lie—that is, the kind of lie that has been so deeply baked into the way that our world is put together that it becomes invisible. Its disguises? Shape-shifting and familiarity. Where originally the lie was a verifiable claim (something that can be true or false, or in-between, but which, at minimum, merits careful scrutiny and active judgment), now it is a simple taken-for-granted characteristic of our technology, our education, our social lives, and our self-regard. When such a transformation happens—when an idea disappears into plain sight—something else disappears with it: the awareness that there is an alternative. MANY alternatives, in fact. A whole universe of them! And since every idea can, as we have seen, shape the world in its image, a whole universe of alternative ideas represents a whole universe of alternative worlds. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 165

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the manifesto’s central diagnostic move: a once-verifiable claim that slid into taken-for-granted status.
• XREF: The ‘idea disappears into plain sight’ argument parallels how assumptions about attention and silence get naturalized, a theme in the reader’s silence-related reading.