Industrial attention farming originated in military-industrial screen-vigilance and cybernetics.

Evidence

It is the kind of attention that has been cultivated by a century of industrial “attention farming,” and we hardly remember all the other attentional modalities that it has displaced. Which attention has carpeted our landscape? The mechanomorphic, instrumentalized, stimulus-and-response kind of attention that became the central preoccupation of the military-industrial complex across the twentieth century. The kind of attention that focused on screen-vigilance (key for radar monitors and the monotonous labor of regulating machines), and the tap-click incorporation of human beings into cybernetic systems (key for shooting down enemy craft, or making timed decisions in complex models). This was the kind of attention studied in laboratories, quantified by advertisers, and now optimized by AI-driven search engine algorithms. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 488

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ infrastructure essay — a genealogy of what kind of attention became tissue. — connects to: Human attention is being extracted and commodified by an industrial-technological complex. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 514
• QUESTION: Is the military-industrial origin claim historically defensible, or is it manifesto shorthand worth checking?