If Your Attention Isn’t a Resource, What Is It?

The “attention economy” offers the wrong definition

Welcome to Ever Not Quite—essays about technology and humanism.

This one grew directly out of my account, published towards the end of last year, of my time at the Matthew Strother Center for the Examined Life, one instance of the many pockets of intrinsically-motivated readers taking shape within the emerging world of “para-academia”. I hope reading it is as helpful to your thinking about the nature of attention as writing it has been to my own.

I have timed the release of this essay to coincide with the publication of the new book Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement by the Friends of Attention which comes out today, January 20th. You can find them here on Substack at The Empty Cup. Needless to say, I haven’t read the book yet, but I did pre-order it a few months back and now I’m looking forward to finally picking it up.

As always, thank you for reading. If you’d like to support my work, consider subscribing and sharing this essay around within your circles. It helps more than you may know.

“The astonishing reality of things and persons—this is the object of pure attention.” The Friends of Attention, “Twelve Theses on Attention”

You’ve heard the various figures of speech which seek to capture the extractive dynamics of what we have come to call the “attention economy.” Like radio and television before them, we speak, for instance, of the ways social media platforms engage in “attention mining,” in which human attention is reduced to the data which it produces and that data is extracted and sold to advertisers. More recently, some have suggested that attention fracking provides the more precise economic metaphor: that is, one highly-processed industrial product (in this case, digital media “content”) is directed at the senses at high pressure in order to bring the valuable commodity—the viewer’s data—bubbling to the surface. Whatever the shape of the particular methods involved, each conceives of attention as a resource which is extracted, captured, and sold to buyers at a price set by the market.

As far as I’m concerned, this framing of the situation isn’t wrong, so far as it goes; it does succeed in capturing the commercial realities in which human attention has become entangled under the conditions of modern digital media. But the limitation with all this, of course, is that it views attention through the lens of the very economic model which it typically aims to critique.

One recent contribution to the attention discourse which came out early last year is The Sirens’ Call by Christopher Hayes. “My contention”, Hayes writes in the book’s opening chapter, “is that the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource—our attention—is also the very thing that makes us human.”¹ I think this is basically right, provided that we interpret “attention” in a particular way. Attention has indeed been turned into a resource, a commodity put up for sale on a market, and this economic reality goes a long way towards defining what makes our era distinct from any which came before. And it may also be true that attention is the very thing that makes us human; I’ll come back to this last idea towards the end. But the rest of this post will be my attempt to explain how I think Hayes’ contention should best be understood.

To be precise about it, attention isn’t a commodity just like any other; it’s what the economic historian Karl Polanyi called a fictitious commodity: that is, the faculty of attention is characteristic of human life as such, and it plays a role independent of its place within a market system. Unlike a genuine commodity, attention is not manufactured for the purpose of being traded in the market. Perhaps the most straightforward example of a fictitious commodity in Polanyi’s sense is labor: wherever there are people, you will find that there is labor being done, yet that labor is not necessarily the same commodified and alienated labor which an individual sells to an employer in exchange for a wage—in fact, labor did not have this quality prior to the rise of modern industry in the eighteenth century. The same is true of land, which is not manufactured for the purpose of market exchange, but exists whether or not it has been brought into a market system and acquires a price on the basis of which it might be bought and sold.

Polanyi observed that the introduction of the market mechanism posed a danger to these elements of society which play a vital role in shaping the quality and conditions of human life. “[L]abor and land are no other than the human beings themselves of which every society consists and the natural surroundings in which it exists”, he wrote in The Great Transformation, published in 1944. “To include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market.”² To call them “fictitious commodities,” then, is to acknowledge that, unlike the widget which is brought into existence solely for the purpose of its exchange as a commodity, labor and land play a social role prior to and outside of the context of market forces. Polanyi continues:

To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment, indeed, even of the amount and use of purchasing power, would result in the demolition of society.³

Unlike, say, oil, which also exists prior to and outside of any economic system—that is, deep underground where biological and geological forces conspire to produce it—fictitious commodities not only originate outside the market, but are always already an integral part of society, whether or not they are priced and traded within a market. For Polanyi, once the market has been allowed to swallow them, a fateful inversion has taken place: “instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”⁴ This is central to Polanyi’s Great Transformation.

Attention, to the degree that it has been swallowed by the market, is just such a fictitious commodity in Polanyi’s sense. Wherever there are people, you will find that there is attention of one form or another, and the shape of attention not only gives shape to society, but is constitutive of the experience of life itself. To speak, as has become customary, of an “attention economy” is to speak of attention as it has been transformed into a commodity by its exposure to economic forces.

Polanyi was writing in the 1930s and ’40s, long before the emergence of the digital media that we have today. The idea of the “attention economy”, however, is often dated back to around 1971, with the publication of a paper by Herbert Simon called “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”. Simon was perhaps the first to notice that, because economics assumes that anything with economic value must exist under conditions of scarcity, information is the wrong concept around which to understand the economic pressures which prevail in what we now call the “Information Age.” Here’s the most well-known passage from Simon’s paper, which captures his thesis succinctly:

[I]n an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.⁵

This conclusion—that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention—is the most precise statement of the underlying dynamics of the attention economy you are likely to find: according to its logic, attentional poverty is just the inescapable consequence of a surplus of the information that might receive it, and out of this poverty arises the need to price and trade it in order to allocate it wherever it has the most value.

Here, I’m reminded of a remark Ezra Klein made back in 2023 about conversations he had been having with AI researchers about its possible dangers. More than a tool to help meet human needs, they seemed to perceive AI as an entity which exerted upon them a peculiar moral force compelling them to build it, regardless of the risks. “[A]fter a few pushes,” Klein observed, “I find they often answer from something that sounds like the A.I.’s perspective.” In much the same way, I’m inclined to think that Herbert Simon’s “scarcity” interpretation of attention does something similar: it implicitly constructs the issue around the needs of information to have attention fixed upon it. That is, it only makes sense to say that attention is scarce when there isn’t enough of it relative to the needs of information.

A few years back, L. M. Sacasas answered the “poverty of attention” thesis with a proposal to reconsider these premises. The conclusion is right there in the title: Your attention is not a resource. This is not to say that attention cannot be treated as a resource, its scarcity and abundance measured and valued according to what advertisers are willing to pay for its capture; it’s that conceiving of attention as a resource is both to misunderstand what attention is and also “to grant and even encourage its commodification.” “If attention is scarce,” Sacasas concludes, “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.” The social goods which are transformed into fictitious commodities according to the process narrated by Polanyi have a vital place within the human sphere prior to their exposure to market forces, and these come under threat the moment we interpret them through an economic lens.

Towards the end of the essay, Sacasas arrives at the beginnings of an account of what we might call an ethics of attention: “you and I have exactly as much attention as we need at any given moment provided that at that moment we also know what it would be good for us to do.” If our attention suffers from any kind of defect at all, it isn’t that its stores are insufficient relative to the needs of the vast quantities of information which compete for it; it’s that we don’t always know how to direct the attention we have, and consequently we often find that we have distributed it in ways that are unwise. The predicament of attention is thus re-formulated from its alleged quantitative insufficiency into an ethical question about how to live well under the limitations which are proper to it: under conditions of information surplus, what you need at any given moment isn’t more attention to satisfy the needs of all this excess information, but only the discernment to know what is best to do with the attention you do have.

---

This brings me to the question in the title of the present essay: If your attention isn’t a resource, what is it?

There’s a famous moment in Book VI of Augustine’s Confessions which is perhaps the earliest account from antiquity of a person reading silently in rapt attention. Augustine, now perhaps around thirty years old, has recently come under the mentorship of Ambrose, Bishop of Milan. Augustine laments that he, relatively unknown among the many people in his teacher’s orbit, is unable to draw his sustained attention in order to engage him in conversation about the spiritual questions which then plagued him. In Augustine’s account, part of the problem is Ambrose’s practice of silent reading which renders him all but unreachable. “[A]s he read,” Augustine marvels, “his eyes glanced over the pages, and his heart searched out the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” Augustine was amazed by this ritual, which was as remarkable in his time as it is commonplace in our own. We all recognize, and have doubtless experienced, the silent absorption in reading which hindered Augustine’s access to his mentor: “for who dared interrupt one so intent?” And perhaps there is some irony to be found in the fact that attention—dually expressed by the words “intentio” and “attentio”—would become central to the theology and its accompanying account of mind, memory, and selfhood which the mature Augustine would go on to develop.

This passage is often cited as an important moment in the history of literacy:⁶ At that time, a text would normally be read aloud to an audience, likely made up of individuals who were themselves unable to read. And it is often remarked that this practice of deep reading which so fascinated Augustine is among the most critical casualties of the modern digital economy’s regime of attention-capture. But what exactly has been lost here? What happens when someone reads silently, immersed, as Ambrose is doing in these moments when Augustine feels he is beyond his reach? Is “doing” even the right word for whatever is happening here?

I thought of this passage recently as I read an essay by Adam Robbert which takes up deep reading to illustrate a point about the broader phenomenon of attention:

Writing is relaxed focus. Reading is much the same. Think honestly to yourself about the number of times you are able, really able, to conjure the resources needed to attend carefully to the text you are reading. The act is difficult because close reading is downstream of close attending, and close attending is a mode of skilled perceiving that needs training.

But what is happening here?

The intentional focus of consciousness lets the object of your attention unfold into greater detail. Reading is one example, but think also of viewing a painting, an oak tree, or a sunset. The scene unfolds inside the quality of your attention. The shape of your attention is there, with the scene, giving space for it to unfold. In fact, the scene is your attention in concert with the phenomena present to your awareness.⁷

The scene unfolds inside the quality of your attention: this is attention in the fullness of its dignity, pure, untransformed. It is the role we ourselves play in the co-creation of a textual passage, a work of art, or a scene. It names the encounter between ourselves and that portion of reality sitting before us, which falls under our sensory purview and offers itself to our awareness. It is the world opening itself as human perception. In a word, attention names the quality of the unfolding of things, and not—or at least not in any essential sense—a quantity, a measurable magnitude or a pre-existing storehouse which might pour itself into a proportional quantity of information; it is less a limited resource that can be drawn down than a generative power which discloses all that offers itself.

Attention can be said to be a resource only to the degree that reality itself has already been conceived in terms of the resource-value which its extraction makes available. The limits of my attention, in some very real sense, mean the limits of my world, and the quality of that attention gives shape to the reality that bears itself to me at any given moment. Attention thus establishes the tether which binds together the human will and the worldly totality which surrounds it, and this means that any authentic ethics of attention must begin in its training and discipline rather than merely from its maximization for the information economy in which we happen to find ourselves.

Let me return here at the end to Chris Hayes’ preliminary contention, which, you’ll recall, was that “the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource—our attention—is also the very thing that makes us human.” Hayes is right, I think, that the defining feature of our age—at least in terms of what fuels its economic engine—is that attention is both one of its principal economic commodities and, in an altogether different sense, the foundation of our encounter with reality itself. But here’s the wrinkle I’d want to introduce to this formulation: it can’t be both at the same time. When we talk about attention being bought and sold on a market where it is traded as what Karl Polanyi would have called a “fictitious commodity”—which is just to say when we conceive of attention as a “resource”—we have ceased to understand it truly. This is the conflict which lies at the heart of all our talk about the “attention economy”: it manages to reveal a sort of objectified reality—one which is quantified, priced, and traded—but its very success in doing so is also the measure of our confusion about what it is that we’re actually talking about.

And so, tolle lege!

---

Walter Launt Palmer (1854-1932). Winter Snow Scene, c. 1900. Oil and pastel on panel.

1. Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became to the World’s Most Endangered Resource, pg. 12.

2. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Farrar & Rinehart, 1944), pg. 72.

3. Ibid., pg. 73.

4. Ibid., pg. 57.

5. Herbert Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”, pg. 40-1. You can find a copy of Simon’s paper here.

6. See Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, Ch. 2, “The Silent Readers”. “Observing the reading of Saint Ambrose that afternoon in 384,” Manguel remarks, “Augustine could hardly have known what was before him. He thought he was seeing a reader trying to avoid intrusive visitors, sparing his voice for teaching. In fact he was seeing a multitude, a host of silent readers who over the next many centuries would include Luther, would include Calvin, would include Emerson, would include us, reading him today.”

7. Adam Robbert, “Attention is an Art Form” in Practice in Still Life, pg. 29 (italics mine). You can find the essay on Substack here.