Attention Economy
The Attention Economy is the framework treating human attention as a scarce commodity in an information-rich world. Coined by Herbert A. Simon (1971) and later developed by Michael Goldhaber and others, the concept holds that as information becomes abundant, the bottleneck shifts from information scarcity to attention scarcity — and that the primary economic and political struggle of the digital age is the competition for, and monetization of, human conscious awareness.
Preliminary Connections
- The attention economy is the modern instantiation of cybernetic control: social media algorithms function as feedback loops that capture and redirect awareness, functioning as a Demiurgic system that traps consciousness within curated reality tunnels.
- Connects to Meme_Magic and Hyperstition: in an attention economy, memes that capture the most attention become the most “real” — the operational definition of hyperstition at scale.
- The MKUltra programs sought to control individual attention through pharmacological and psychological means; the attention economy achieves this at civilizational scale through algorithmic curation.
- Psychic driving — Cameron’s technique of looped audio bombardment — is structurally identical to algorithmic content recommendation: forced repetition to overwrite existing cognitive patterns.
See Also
- Cybernetics — the feedback-loop framework underlying algorithmic attention capture
- Meme_Magic — cultural virality as a weapon in the attention war
- Hyperstition — fictions that capture enough attention to become real
- MKUltra — the institutional precedent for attention/consciousness control
- Veil_of_Maya — the grand illusion that attention capture reinforces
- Bio_Digital_Convergence — the technological substrate enabling attention monetization