Attention extraction is a historical contingent result of human choice

Evidence

The wholesale fracking of human beings for the money-value of their humanity (their interest, their curiosity, their sense of freedom, their capacity to care—in short, their attention, understood in its full richness and complexity) is not “natural.” It is not “inevitable.” It is the historically anomalous result of human actions—which is to say, the result of the decisions and commitments and planning and programming of specific persons; and the failures to act of others. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 190

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the book’s signature concept — ‘human fracking’ named and defined in full detail.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s stated purpose — this is the core definition to pin down. — connects to: Today’s attention choices shape the devices that will condition tomorrow’s attention — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 533; Email’s adoption functioned as large-scale operant conditioning preparing users for later attention harvesting — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 656; Attention functions as a political economy embedded in specific temporal contexts — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 25