The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Unlike direct monopoly rent, the buying, selling, and leasing may not change who owns the land itself; you’re trading on proximity or some other relationship. Every time you buy a souvenir on vacation, you’re trading on indirect monopoly rent.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
The role of culture in urban development has always been understood as a reserve of political power whether that be as a means of distraction and subjugation or a rallying cry for liberation.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Indirect monopoly rent is when you can buy and sell things based on their relationship to something that derives direct monopoly rents.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Dilution of authenticity through the commodification of a place’s culture is just one of the many problems with making money through authenticity peddling.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Authenticity is a poison pill at the end of a long rat race. Nothing short of dispensing with the inherently capitalist notion of authenticity will give us relief.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Sure, profits can be made in healthy economies, but the biggest returns can be found where investors buy low and sell high: whether it’s decades of disinvestment or an acute disaster, the biggest profits are to be found amid rubble and ruin, not milk and honey.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Perhaps, then, we should return to our initial supposition: authenticity isn’t about a person’s or a thing’s origin; it is about how we feel. What if authenticity emerges out of a relationship between tourist and destination, audience and celebrity, or, generically, subject and object?
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Cities are synonymous with modernity not just because they usually contain the latest technologies or play host to the latest trends, but because they socialize us into modern people who seek status, validation, and uniqueness.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Practically, they are also the only places that provide a decent assortment of options to try on. They also force us into cash economies because the scarcity of land makes it such that the necessities of life must be bought rather than made or grown on a homestead. Cities are, definitionally, social things.