The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Under modernity, each person must be a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: completely unique but predictably so—a piece that is different from all those around it but still able to fit into a larger picture. We have more artifacts, both material and digital, than ever with which to enact our identities, yet we can never seem capable of staying unique for
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Harvey notes that this is common and leads us to the third and final contradiction: “The most avid globalizers will support local developments that have the potential to yield monopoly rents even if the effect of such support is to produce a local political climate antagonistic to globalization!”
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
When we hear the phrase “attention economy,” we tend to associate it with social media companies, but the truth of the matter is that attracting the attention of potential employers and grant-making foundations is just as important and common as seeking YouTube subscribers.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Even better if you can develop your resistant identity (“everything around me is fake and trivial”) into a project identity (“I will move to Albany and make a new community worthy of my conformity”).
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
The value of direct monopoly rents works in degrees along a spectrum. If you sell a famous landmark, you’ll probably get a hefty chunk of change. Sell a house that is next to a nice park, and you will also see an increase in the price of the property, which is derived from your direct monopoly rent of being one of the few houses next to the park.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Whereas in pre-modern times, you were just a peg looking for a hole and authenticity meant nothing, the postmodern condition tells us that authenticity is something you create rather than something you achieve. You are a drill boring holes to fit the pegs that life throws at you.
David A. Banks • The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
A legitimizing identity is directly related to a dominant force, usually the state. To identify as a “patriot,” with all its connotations, helps to legitimate the power of the state by indicating that there are people willing to die for its continued existence. A resistance identity also related to power but is usually forged in reaction to an
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Project identities, though, are truly fascinating. These are created when “social actors, on the basis of whatever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society and, by so doing, seek the transformation of the overall structure.”44 It is a way of saying, “I exist, therefore society must
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The creative-class thesis described me to a tee. And to some degree it always was going to. Countless cities had rebuilt themselves to attract people like me: a white, overeducated guy who wants to try the new slider place with a great tap selection.