

ENTJ , casual verbal sparrer and conjurer of creatures. I muse upon matters such as death, equality and the human condition.
…g attention. Most paid apps have no ads and are designed to support a task we consciously agree to. When companies make a profit from selling attention, they design the interface to encourage us to change our activity without express consent.
[Attention] is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one, out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought… It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction.
Making money off attention, rather than off actual goods and services, is part of what Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff describes as a move from market capitalism to a new kind of “surveillance capitalism,” which relies on the extraction of customer data. In Zuboff’s eyes, the “deals” we make with internet companies do not establish constructive producer-consumer reciprocities and are closer to selling our souls to the devil than they are to standard exchanges of goods and services in traditional market economies.