Attention is unequally distributed along class and environment lines

Evidence

In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention: privileged spaces where some (but not others) can enjoy the fruits of contemplation and the diversification of attention. One of the main points I’ve tried to make in this book—about how thought and dialogue rely on physical time and space—means that the politics of technology are stubbornly entangled with the politics of public space and of the environment. This knot will only come loose if we start thinking not only about the effects of the attention economy, but also about the ways in which these effects play out across other fields of inequality. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 665

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Gated communities of attention’ names Odell’s core structural diagnosis — that attention economy effects unevenly track existing inequalities.
• QUESTION: Odell frames the entanglement of tech, public space, and environmental politics as the book’s central thesis — a candidate answer to the reader’s question about what she actually wants attention redirected toward.