Capital exploits exhaustion to capture attention that would otherwise go to serious culture
Evidence
Commuting time is probably the time when many people are paying the most attention to culture. It’s not that I was immune to this — you’d see the headline on it, about some celebrity you half know and are not even interested in, yet you’d still want to know. It was this form of curiosity where you are not even interested in it. So you’d read the whole of this paper, not even interested in it, but at the same time it had drawn me in. This is what I mean about boredom and fascination. I imagine many people like myself have had serious books in their bag that they would have read if these papers weren’t there. It tells you a lot about the way capital takes advantage of the worst instincts and exhaustion. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2261
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes Fisher’s ‘semiotic pollution’ concept and Debord/Huxley critiques of managed stimulation replacing critical attention. — connects to: Cultural forms are causally rooted in the daily circulation of capital. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1888; Attention operates as a form of capital that accrues interest and concentrates inequality. — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 16; Transnational capital is seizing human attention as its newest exploitable frontier — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 214 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Transnational capital is seizing human attention as its newest exploitable frontier
#expands(0.90) — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 214 - Attention operates as a form of capital that accrues interest and concentrates inequality.
#corroborates(0.88) — Michael H. Goldhaber, The Attention Economy and the Net, 16 - The culture industry both presupposes and manufactures distracted listeners
#expands(0.80) - Cultural forms are causally rooted in the daily circulation of capital.
#expands(0.78) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1888 - Capitalism neutralised boredom by demanding audience participation, not pacification
#qualifies(0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1763