Scarcity has shifted from production of goods to consumption of attention.

Evidence

Whatever the case may be with these questions, to which we will return in the following chapters, the attention economy seems, from the middle of the 1990s, to have established itself as a great reversal taking the form of a challenge: the new scarcity is no longer to be situated on the side of material goods to be produced, but on the attention necessary to consume them. With the following slightly disconcerting practical consequence, which rapidly takes shape as a prophecy: my editor has taken advantage of your naivety and inherited economic ideology to sell you the book that you are holding in your hands (or the digital file that is currently scrolling on your electronic reader), as if he were the one with the rare and precious resource (the book and its contents) at his disposal; in fact, it is you, the readers, who have the upper hand – though no one has dared tell you and you have not yet realized – since, faced with the plethora of works written and disseminated each month, it is your attention, which you are mobilizing right now as you follow this sentence, that is now the scarcest and most fervently desired resource. In all fairness and in all logic, it is me, the author of these lines, who not only should be thanking you, but paying you for the service you are doing me when you dedicate your precious time to reading this book instead of the millions of texts, songs and films available on the internet. Which brings us to the prophecy: in a few years or decades, we will be able to request payment for giving our attention to a cultural good instead of having to pay for the right to access it, as is still required of us in this backward epoch. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 41

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘great reversal’ — scarcity on the consumption side, not production — is precisely the Marxian inversion of use-value that Frankfurt School critique anticipates. — connects to: Market rhetoric shifted attention from production to consumption; Attention is becoming the hegemonic resource restructuring material production — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 47; Attention scarcity is a capitalist construction, not a universal given — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 25 (+5 more)
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘The reader is the product’ — how Citton’s joke about paying readers becomes a proposal for attention remuneration and basic-income experiments.
• FICTION: The prophecy that readers will be paid for their attention inverts the current platform economy — a near-future fiction premise about an attention wage.

Broader Connections

• Attention is becoming the hegemonic resource restructuring material production #expands (0.88) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 47
• Market rhetoric shifted attention from production to consumption #corroborates (0.82)
• Attention merchants now shape the course of human lives and futures #expands (0.80) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1143
• Attention now functions like money as a common metric for cultural value. #expands (0.78) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 18
• Attention scarcity is a capitalist construction, not a universal given #qualifies (0.75) — Annual Review of Anthropology contributors (⚠ verify author line), The Political Economy of Attention, 25
• Post-war capitalism discovered attention as a new market. #corroborates (0.75) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 126
• Under spectacle capitalism, appearing replaced having as the commodity exchanged #complicates (0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 304
• Advertising converted attention into revenue by selling consumers a receding ideal #exemplifies (0.72) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 225