REDEF ORIGINAL: The Attention Economy Crisis: The Future of Content, Commerce and Culture

There is a long-standing, widespread belief that attention carries value. In English, attention is something that we “pay.” In Spanish, it is “lent.” The Swiss literary scholar Yves Citton, whose study of the digital age, “The Ecology of Attention,” argues against reducing attention to economic terms, suggested to me that it was traditionally consi... See more

These companies, the attention economy itself, and the consumerist society that gave birth to it, deploy vast resources to turn as many people as possible into passive consumers, to reduce us to our eyeballs and our wallets. Because the more control a company can get over those things, the better their stocks will perform.

First, consumerism turned... See more

"The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention."