Your Attention Is Not a Resource

What Illich sought to defend was what he called the “vernacular domain.” Of his use of the word vernacular, Illich explained, “I would like to resuscitate some of its old breath to designate the activities of people when they are not motivated by thoughts of exchange.” The term, as he meant to use it, “denotes autonomous, non-market related actions... See more

Every single action we take — calling our grandparents, cleaning up the kitchen or, today, scrolling through our phones — is a transaction. We are taking what precious little attention we have and diverting it toward something. This is a zero-sum proposition, he realized. When you pay attention to one thing, you ignore something else.

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... See more

It is not simply that my work lies in the realm of value and my children in the realm of the good. At a given moment it may be good for me to attend to my work, and at another the good requires that I set my work aside to attend to my children. My point all along has been that I have just as much attention as I need in either case, so along as I ca... See more

Already today,” he observed at the time, “no matter what you do, the money you receive is more and more likely to track the recognition that comes to you for doing what you do. If there is nothing very special about your work, no matter how hard you apply yourself you won't get noticed, and that increasingly means you won't get paid much either.”&n... See more

Illich explains that value is “a generalization of economics. It says, this is a value, this is a nonvalue, make a decision between the two of them. These are three different values, put them in precise order.” “But,” he goes on to explain, “when we speak about the good, we show a totally different appreciation of what is before us. The good is con... See more

Chief among these certainties was the presumption of scarcity. In fact, in 1980, Illich announced his intention to write a history of scarcity. That history never materialized, but a number of pieces of that larger work Illich was working toward were published in a variety of contexts. 

Despite their obvious faults, the industrial age institutions Illich targeted in his scathing critiques proved to be more resilient than he anticipated, and not necessarily because they were, in fact, useful, just, and sustainable enterprises. Rather, Illich came to the conclusion that we remained locked into these inevitably self-destructive insti... See more

But it may be, too, that my initial proposition requires a qualification. Let’s put it this way: 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.This qualification also stems from Illich’s insights, so allow me to elaborate. His crusade against the ... See more

Yet, ours is not truly an information economy. By definition, economics is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce - especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it. So a key question arises: Is there som... See more