Commercial attention industries displaced religion as the incumbent attention monopolist

Evidence

At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it. But over the twentieth century, organized religion, which had weathered the doubts raised by the Enlightenment, would prove vulnerable to other claims on and uses for attention. Despite the promise of eternal life, faith in the West declined and has continued to do so, never faster than in the twenty-first century. Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline. Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 84

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s platform/surveillance history thread — religion as the pre-modern attention incumbent parallels how broadcast TV and then social platforms each displaced predecessors as attention monopolists. — connects to: The war technostructure outsourced demand creation to the attention industry — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 150; Religious attention-monopolizing disciplines persisted into the eighteenth century. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 83; Advertising converted attention into revenue by selling consumers a receding ideal — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 225 (+1 more)
• SEED: Potential essay angle: attention as a zero-sum game tracing the succession of incumbent attention-capturers from Church to department store to broadcast to platform.

Broader Connections

• Advertising converted attention into revenue by selling consumers a receding ideal #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 225
• Mass-media profits derive from non-reciprocal attention exchange #expands (0.72) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 251