Curiosity must be protected from both industrial discipline and financial extraction

Evidence

But this fund of collective intelligence is only ‘given’ to any one of us provisionally and precariously. It is only regenerated to the extent that we know how to take care of its echosystem. It is at this level that current debates on attention may influence our future. Suppressing the excedence of curiosity in the name of good old disciplines dating from the industrial era may prove to be as harmful as abandoning it unprotected to the hegemony of financial logics. In the same way that it is important at the individual level to help everyone to supplely modulate periods of hyper-focusing with periods of partial attention and multi-tasking, we must, at the collective level, develop attention echologies that enable us to subtly harmonize dynamics of unison, counterpoint and improvising polyphony. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 553

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the core construct of ‘attention echology’ as collective-level harmonizing of attentional dynamics — unison, counterpoint, polyphony are the technical vocabulary.
• ADDENDUM: The unison/counterpoint/polyphony framework of attention operates at group scale, complementing the collective micro-politics discussed in the author’s grafting/trees piece on infrastructural commons.
• XREF: connects to: Curiosity is a market-produced deformation, not a universal human trait — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 126; Attention economy pits financialization against alternative forms of value; Mechanized knowledge creates monopolies that endanger freedom of thought — Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, 1123

Broader Connections

• Curiosity is a market-produced deformation, not a universal human trait #contradicts (0.85) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 126
• Mechanized knowledge creates monopolies that endanger freedom of thought #corroborates (0.75) — Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, 1123
• Attention economy pits financialization against alternative forms of value #qualifies (0.70)