Innovative culture needs absorbed drift that cyberspatial alerts continually fragment.

Evidence

We’ve grown so accustomed to repetition and recycling that we no longer notice them. Yet it’s no surprise that this is the case. New cultural production requires a use of time that communicative capitalism is profoundly hostile towards. Most social energy is sucked into the vortex of late-capitalist labour and its vast simulation of productivity. Innovation depends upon an absorbed (rather than distracted) drift; but it is increasingly difficult to muster the attentional resources necessary for such immersion. Cyberspatial urgencies — the smartphone’s flashing red light, the siren call of its alert — function like trance-inhibitors or alarm clocks that keep waking us out of collective dreaming. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1636

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the appealing opposition between ‘absorbed drift’ (productive of the new) and ‘distracted’ hyperattention (which communicative capitalism enforces).
• XREF: An extension of ch73’s claim that all music either embeds or disrupts habituated behaviour into the register of attention itself.