The attention economy treats attention as uniform when its quality is secretly variable

Evidence

What the attention economy takes for granted is the quality of attention, because like all modern capitalist systems, it imagines its currency as uniform and interchangeable. “Units” of attention are assumed undifferentiated and uncritical. To give a particularly bleak yet useful example, if I’m forced to watch an ad, the company doesn’t necessarily know how I am watching the ad. I may indeed be watching it very carefully, but like a practitioner of aikido who seeks to better understand her enemy—or for that matter, like Thomas Merton observing the corruption of the world from his hermitage. My “participation” may be disingenuous, like Diogenes rolling his barrel industriously up and down the hill to appear productive. As a precursor to action, these drills and formations of attention within the mind represent a primary space of volition. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 345

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s recorded claim that ‘attention is the faculty by which you constitute a world’ and to the idea of unobserved interiority as refuge. — connects to: Attention works as a needle weaving global links at the price of inequality — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 560; Attention cannot be treated as a value-neutral economic resource because it shapes ends — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 80; Attention also varies in quality and mode, not just quantity — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 123 (+10 more)