Digital platforms extract money by tapping core human desires for connection

Evidence

We believe that the early twenty-first century presents a strikingly parallel scenario. A new series of technological innovations (massive information storage and processing systems, highly visual and interactive and intimate digital prosthetics, the pervasive financialization of social infrastructure, which has been largely translated into virtual forms) have together created unprecedented possibilities for dehumanizing exploitation—in the form of human attentional fracking. Our desire for connection to others; our hunger to see and be seen; our native curiosity and tendency to care—all these aspects of our most essential natures have been tapped as access points from which money can be siphoned into the pockets of private equity financiers. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 213

Categorization

• DEFINE: Pins down the mechanism of ‘human attentional fracking’: core human drives converted into revenue access points by digital prosthetics and financialization.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s article on dark patterns and attention economics; also parallels Shoshana Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism frame. — connects to: Dating apps monetize access to an imagined unlimited partner market — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 343