Technology-enabled attention extraction both creates the crisis and reveals attention’s true importance

Evidence

What we are against is exploitation. But we are totally pro-technology. Indeed, we believe that our current conditions are pregnant with fabulous futures. The most exciting feature of our moment is that, as we have argued above, the very conditions that have placed human attention under unprecedented financial and technical pressure have, in effect, pushed the whole issue of our attention—its existential and political importance—to the surface. And this is the birthing of a NEW WORLD. We see the centrality of our attention in new ways exactly because of our novel and revolutionary circumstances. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 265

Categorization

• QUESTION: Test this bet: is it actually true that pressure made attention’s importance visible, or is that post-hoc justification for the movement’s existence?
• XREF: Dialectical framing echoes the reading-list note connecting crisis to opportunity; also parallels how noisemaking pressure in ‘One Square Inch of Silence’ made silence’s value newly visible. — connects to: Attention and technology co-evolve through reciprocal causation — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 534; The war technostructure outsourced demand creation to the attention industry — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 150; Attention-maximizing technologies can reduce rather than increase user control over attention — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 635 (+2 more)