Attention resists exchange because it is always particular and embodied

Evidence

Just as attention cannot be spontaneously accumulated as such, requiring individual memories as well as media banks in order to behave as capital, it is in no way self-evident that it can be equated to a means of payment. A bank note provides a purely quantitative general equivalent which can be exchanged indifferently for a book, a few litres of benzene, a box of macaroons, a train ticket or a haircut. But you never have a ‘general’, purely quantitative, amount of attention available, which is indifferent to its object and which can be exchanged for an infinite range of heterogeneous experiences. You are always dealing with a particular person, endowed with a sensibility that is unique to them, paying attention to something precise, in determinate spatial and temporal circumstances. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 164

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The central friction in the whole attention-as-capital analogy: unlike money, attention is irreducibly qualitative and situated, making its financialization a violent abstraction rather than a natural equivalence.
• XREF: connects to: Deep disciplined attention resists appropriation better than shallow attention does — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 415

Broader Connections

• Deep disciplined attention resists appropriation better than shallow attention does #expands (0.80) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 415