Attention extraction is coercion and theft, not a trade-off

Evidence

Yes, there are, predictably, a few tech apologists who try to argue that the benefits of this arrangement outweigh its risks. But they mostly don’t let their own kids have phones until they go to college, and make them study violin (with tutors, in fortress-mansions). More significantly, the whole idea of treating the situation as a cost-benefit analysis ignores the fact that our dehumanization cannot be quantified. This is not a conversation about trade-offs. This is a conversation about coercion, theft, and the instrumentalization of human life. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 84

Categorization

• CANDY: The apologists-keep-phones-from-their-kids barb is neatly quotable.
• DEFINE: Names the enemy and frames the moral category shift: not trade-offs but coercion, theft, instrumentalization.
• XREF: connects to: Attention ecology rejects a coercive de-alienation of distracted audiences. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 481; Attentive extraction and object excess are the same act; Fragmented attention is functional for capital, not an accidental side effect — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1631