The prairie-to-monoculture story is the template for what industrial attention farming did.

Evidence

Every time we think about our attention we should remember those prairies—and the monocultures that have replaced them. Because the attentional world we navigate today is monocultural: What we talk about when we talk about “attention” is, in fact, just one very narrow and specific (if also, now, totally dominant) species. It is the kind of attention that has been cultivated by a century of industrial “attention farming,” and we hardly remember all the other attentional modalities that it has displaced. Which attention has carpeted our landscape? The mechanomorphic, instrumentalized, stimulus-and-response kind of attention that became the central preoccupation of the military-industrial complex across the twentieth century. The kind of attention that focused on screen-vigilance (key for radar monitors and the monotonous labor of regulating machines), and the tap-click incorporation of human beings into cybernetic systems (key for shooting down enemy craft, or making timed decisions in complex models). This was the kind of attention studied in laboratories, quantified by advertisers, and now optimized by AI-driven search engine algorithms. And it is the kind of attention too many of us find ourselves trying to defend, or improve, or manage in our daily lives. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 488

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The corn monoculture metaphor extends the ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay’s tree-as-infrastructure thinking into cropland-as-attention — a follow-up angle on what counts as cultivation.
• STORYSTEM: A near-future story where a character discovers a ‘wedge of old-growth’ attentional practice surviving at the margins of a screen-monoculture world — she must protect it as a rare species.
• XREF: connects to: Human attention has been reduced to a monoculture like American farmland — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!: A Manifesto of the…, 486