Mediatized market societies increasingly waste resources producing demand rather than goods

Evidence

So an ATTENTION ARMS RACE is set up: the more a market society becomes mediatized, the more it must dedicate a significant proportion of its activity to the production of demand, investing ever greater resources into the machinery of attention attraction. Like military arms races, this attention arms race is in itself a tragic waste, thanks to a sub-optimal organization of inter-human relations. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 172

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Frankfurt School critique of the culture industry and Habermas’s colonization of the lifeworld — the attention arms race is the digital-era analogue of reification. — connects to: State-society interpenetration replaced deliberation with managed publicity aimed at passive consumers — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2376; Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production; Market discourse displaces the Marxian model by shifting from production to circulation (+4 more)
• ADDENDUM: The arms-race framing of competitive attention-seeking parallels the sacrificial competition dynamics in ‘Grafting & Growth’ where species divert resources to signaling—here applied to economic structure.

Broader Connections

• Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production #expands (0.80)
• Market discourse displaces the Marxian model by shifting from production to circulation #expands (0.75)
• Market-centered accounts of capitalism function as ideology masking production #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 475