Industrialized attention extraction despoils the shared human spirit as pollution despoils water.

Evidence

Now we are well into the twenty-first century, and a comparable process of industrialized exploitation-plus-destruction is taking place. Only this time, it’s not water or air that is being despoiled, but the intangible stuff of the human spirit: our curiosity, our hopes, our relationships, our desires, our aspirations, and our actual dreams. These are the movements of the mind that power the mills of the attention economy. And these are the parts of ourselves that we are coming to see not as private pools (for self-gazing), but a river from which all of us draw water. The activating insight of the environmental movement was that all bodies are materially connected, and that, therefore, so is our physical health. The attention movement is teaching us a parallel lesson: that our attention is connected. That our reaching and receiving and seeking all move through the same systems. That we are in this world together. That what we do with our minds and our time and our senses is what gives us what there actually is—the experience of being here. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 479

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the book’s core diagnostic claim — attention is a collective commons, not private property, and its connection (the environmental-movement parallel) is the framework everything else leans on.
• XREF: Parallels the environmental-movement ‘web of life’ argument that attention connects people the way bodies connect through ecosystems. — connects to: Water symbolizes the for-itself because its fluidity mirrors consciousness. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1405; Capitalism had to teach people to stop paying attention to pollution. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 324; Consciousness is the vital human resource now in need of conservation — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1140 (+3 more)