Industrial capitalism both produces inattention and pathologizes it

Evidence

It was a problem whose centrality was directly related to the emergence of a social, urban, psychic, and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory input. Inattention, especially within the context of new forms of large-scale industrialized production, began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem, even though it was the very modernized arrangements of labour that produced inattention. It is possible to see one crucial aspect of modernity as an ongoing crisis of attentiveness, in which the changing configurations of capitalism continually push attention to new limits and thresholds, with an endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information, and then respond with new methods of managing and regulating perception. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 61

Categorization

• XREF: Directly bridges Frankfurt School analysis of commodified consciousness to today’s attention economy debates. — connects to: Capitalism had to teach people to stop paying attention to pollution. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 324; Industrial capitalism damaged nature where surveillance capitalism damages human nature. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1099; Capitalism simultaneously destroys and expands human potential — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 639 (+6 more)
• QUESTION: If labor itself produces inattention, what would non-pathologizing remedies look like?

Broader Connections

• Attention scarcity is a capitalist construction, not a universal given #expands (0.90) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 25
• Industrial capitalism damaged nature where surveillance capitalism damages human nature. #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1099
• Capitalism simultaneously destroys and expands human potential #complicates (0.75) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 639
• Reason itself becomes an instrument of domination in late industrial society #corroborates (0.70) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 34