Attention commodification reduces human beings and relationships to quantifiable, saleable things.

Evidence

“Existence in late capitalism is a permanent rite of initiation,” argued Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, their classic analysis of midcentury American capitalism. “Everyone must show that they identify wholeheartedly with the power which beats them.” Today, in the age of influencer culture, the power that beats us determines the relative value of individual lives through the ability to gain and maintain attention, intimacy, relatability. Yet the infinite scroll of social media appears as a constant stream of the same, in which one’s “success” or “failure,” as an individual, as a person, as a worker, is reduced to the instrumental measurement of attention given through the metrics supplied by platforms. This reduction of social life, personal life, and economic life is tacitly accepted by many. One either gains attention and is valuable or remains unseen and invisible, a failure, to disappear and remain beyond value. Beaten. “Unless I am seen, then I am a failure,” says the influencer—and that is that. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 12 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

In the discomfort and unnaturalness of the moment in which Collin and Miles stare at each other, you can feel the “stretching toward” (ad tendere) in attention. They do not just have their eyes directed toward each other; they are seeing each other. It was this scene that made clear for me the connection between attention, perception, bias, and will. In effect, the opposite of a racist view is Buber’s “I-Thou” perception, which assiduously refuses to let the other collapse into any one instrumental category. Recall that Buber refuses to see the tree as image, species, or relationship of numbers. Instead “thou” has the same depth as I. Seeing this way means foregoing all of the many easier and more habitual ways to “see,” and as such, it is a fragile state requiring the discipline to continue. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 419 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: An attention economy requires reducing diverse attention to one quantifiable substance. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 228; Commodified time reduces time to exchangeable units divorced from human meaning — Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 169; Attention extraction reduces people to quantifiable commodities and demands collective remedy. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 32 (+13 more)

Broader Connections

• Human fracking reduces persons and relationships to quantifiable commodities. #corroborates (0.97)
• Platform metrics reduce a person’s entire value to measurable attention #exemplifies (0.92) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 12
• Attention is etymologically a stretching toward that resists collapsing others into instrumental categories #complicates (0.75) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 419
• Sale of attention depends on transitory attention while well-being needs sustained attention. #complicates (0.74) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 439