Shuya Gong
@ohmygong
Shuya Gong
Occupying the “third space” withing the attention economy is important not just because, as I’ve argued, individual attention forms the basis for collective attention and thus for meaningful refusal of all kinds. It is also important because in a time of shrinking margins, when not only students but everyone else has “put the pedal to the metal,” and cannot afford other kinds of refusal, attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw. In a cycle where both financially driven platforms and overall precarity close down the space of attention—the very attention need to resist this onslaught, which them pushes further—it may be only in the space of our own minds that some of us can begin to pull apart the links.
Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing
As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour. But you’d be wrong. Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling—instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful—it... See more
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
Couture computing—and what happens when you have AI augmenting your hobbies and natural abilities?
“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky
― Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dylan O'Sullivan • Tweet
Using AI to Talk to the Dead
Some people are using artificial intelligence chatbots to create avatars of departed loved ones.
Dr. Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75, but she still turns to her father, William Lucas, for advice. How did he deal with racism, she wonders. How did he succeed when the... See more
instagram.comUsing AI to Talk to the Dead
Some people are using artificial intelligence chatbots to create avatars of departed loved ones.
Dr. Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75, but she still turns to her father, William Lucas, for advice. How did he deal with racism, she wonders. How did he succeed when the odds were stacked against him? The answers are rooted upon William Lucas’s experiences as a Black man, from Harlem, who made his living as a police officer, FBI agent and judge.
Oney listens to the answers, delivered in her father’s voice, on her phone, through an app powered by artificial intelligence. It generates responses based on hours of interviews conducted with William Lucas before he died, in May 2022.
"The real scarcity isn’t content anymore. It’s attention."
Gaby Goldberg • Curators Are the New Creators
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