Attention scarcity is a capitalist construction, not a universal given

Evidence

Indeed, as our review of the ethnographic literature will show, attention is not necessarily a scarce resource: For the skilled master in the entrapment of her own or others’ minds, attention is not automatically a zero-sum game, but stretchable and plastic. While the belief that attention is limited and under constant and perhaps growing pressure is undoubtedly one that many people (including the authors) recognize all too well, scholars should seriously consider the possibility that this limitation may be due to the near omnipresence and -potence of capitalist imaginaries in our current age, which figure time as a constrained resource that needs to be optimized (cf. — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 25

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s attention/platform/surveillance reading purpose — a core challenge to the scarcity premise underlying most platform-economy critique, echoing CHT’s ‘time well spent’ and Bear’s critique of a single chronopolitics. — connects to: Scarcity makes human existence itself a threat to others and the root of violence — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 472; Scarcity has shifted from production of goods to consumption of attention. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 41; Industrial capitalism both produces inattention and pathologizes it — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 61 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: This reframes the entire attention economy debate: if scarcity is produced by capitalist imaginaries rather than intrinsic, then the anthropology of attention has a different subject matter than the surveillance-capitalism literature assumes.

Related

• Attention is becoming the hegemonic resource restructuring material production (similarity 0.87)
• Attention is a socially produced and politically governed resource, not merely a scarce one. (similarity 0.87)
• Attention is the scarce resource that powers the information economy. (similarity 0.85)
• Attention is socially and materially mediated, not just a scarce mental resource (similarity 0.85)
• Abundant information makes human attention a scarce economic resource. (similarity 0.84)
• Human serial attention limits make attention the scarce resource (similarity 0.84)
• Scarcity has shifted from production of goods to consumption of attention. (similarity 0.83)
• Attention has emerged as a site of political, economic, and moral struggle (similarity 0.83)
• Attention has long been treated as valuable and manipulable, not only digitally. (similarity 0.83)
• Attention is a finite resource whose unequal distribution produces symbolic misery (similarity 0.83)
• Attention is an activity that forms persons, not a resource that platforms act upon (similarity 0.83)
• Information abundance creates a scarcity of attention (similarity 0.82)
• Attention scarcity can be turned into an asset through redistributed attention (similarity 0.82)
• Paying attention differs from spending time or being aware. (similarity 0.82)
• Attention is an interactive relation to one’s life-sustaining environment, not a resource (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Scarcity is deliberately manufactured to sustain perceived value. #corroborates (0.90) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1879
• Most scarcity is socially defined rather than intrinsic to resources #corroborates (0.85) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 387
• Capitalism requires perpetually unsatiated desire to maintain civilizational growth #expands (0.80) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3420