For those uninterested in digging through the article to get to the point, here it is: Attention discourse proceeds under the sign of scarcity. It treats atten

For those uninterested in digging through the article to get to the point, here it is: 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.