Thirst is as unappealing a characteristic now as it was when Willy Loman displayed it, but it is also basically the business model of the entire attention economy. All of culture from art to music to writing now requires a kind of relentless self-promotion, as digital culture critic Rebecca Jennings observes, “in the form of cheap trend-following,

Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 40–41. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE

“Under…Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions,”

Alongside fossil fuel companies were car companies like Ford Motor and industrial behemoths like DuPont. Today, Forbes’ list of the largest US companies is dominated by banks and tech firms: Microsoft; Apple; Google’s parent, Alphabet; Meta; and Amazon.[30] The central locus of economic activity has moved from those firms that manipulate atoms to

the attention age has been a boon for conspiracy theories. Most notably, one of the two major parties labors under a widely shared and dangerously violent delusion that the election of 2020 was the subject of systematic widespread fraud so massive that it tipped the balance of an election decided by seven million votes.

It is easier to grab attention than to hold it.

What matters for our purposes here is the distinction between these two aspects of attention: voluntary and involuntary. In the

Scientists call this inattentional blindness.[10]

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. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”[4]