Monoculture-like attention-economy communities are more vulnerable to takeover than diverse ones

Evidence

A community in the thrall of the attention economy feels like an industrial farm, where our jobs are to grow straight and tall, side by side, producing faithfully without ever touching. Here, there is no time to reach out and form horizontal networks of attention and support—nor to notice that all the non-“productive” life-forms have fled. Meanwhile, countless examples from history and ecological science teach us that a diverse community with a complex web of interdependencies is not only richer but more resistant to takeover. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 514

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names one of the book’s central redirections — attention redirected to horizontal networks of support among strangers, framed via ecology.
• XREF: Parallels the industrial-farm monoculture metaphor with the earlier dam metaphor for the self — consistent ecological lens across chapters. — connects to: Human attention has been reduced to a monoculture like American farmland — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 486