Attention Is Not a Resource

You have plenty of attention, just decide to stop wasting it on dumb shit.

Except that might actually be giving the author too much credit, I'm not sure there's actually as salient a point as that buried in there.

Attention discourse proceeds under the sign of scarcity. It treats attention as a resource, and, by doing so, maybe it has given up the game. To speak about attention as a resource is to grant and even encourage its commodification. If attention is scarce, then a competitive attention economy flows inevitably from it. In other words, to think of attention as a resource is already to invite the possibility that it may be extracted. Perhaps this seems like the natural way of thinking about attention, but, of course, this is precisely the kind of certainty Illich invited us to question.

I can hear the rejoinders taking shape, of course: But attention is scarce. Right now I’m giving it to your writing and not to something else. I have only so many waking hours, and so much to which I must or would like to give my attention. At any given moment, I’m likely to find my attention divided and fragmented. Etc.

Given the intuitive force of these claims, further variations of which I suspect you can readily supply, is the claim that we have all the attention we need even plausible?

So here is a proposition for you to consider: you and I have exactly as much attention as we need. In fact, I’d invite you to do more than consider it. Take it out for a spin in the world. See if proceeding on this assumption doesn’t change how you experience life, maybe not radically, but perhaps for the better. And the implicit corollary should also be borne in mind. If I have exactly as much attention as I need, then in those moments when I feel as if I don’t, the problem is not that I don’t have enough attention. It lies elsewhere. (There is an additional consideration, which is that I’ve failed to cultivate my attention, but, again, this is not a question of scarcity.) In any case, I obviously can’t make any promises, but, you may find, as I have of late, that refusing the assumption of scarcity can be surprisingly liberating.

1) attention is a scare resource. this is a law of the universe (opportunity cost) until some technology or phenomenon figures out how to manipulate time. The article anticipates this response, but doesn't successfully refute it.

2) The article seems focused, towards the end, on the idea that the individual requires more attention. They don't, but this isn't the major issue with the attention economy (in my opinion). It IS an issue with our fame, celebrity, media, novelty and fomo obsessed culture though, granted.

3) a huge problem are institutions and cultures reinforcing attention/ consumption in a kind of cultural attentional arms race. this means that even if you don't care about getting attention, literal trillions of dollars and incalculable man hours will be spent trying to get yours whether you want to give it or not.

4) a general high level problem about whether this arms race (and the general ways we are manipulated into wanting to give attention) is psychologically adapting and damaging people into being unable to sustain attention, and in general unable to give attention to the things worthy of it (the last phenomenon probably is addressed in the article, albeit not explicitly tackling this source/cause, but maybe it takes this as assumed knowledge).

For me, a non-native speaker, it makes the article more enjoyable. It's like restoring the appropriate colors of a previously desaturated picture. The only thing I missed was a floating media control widget, so I could pause the audio and give myself some time to think.