[...] with the reduction to zero of the marginal costs for the transmission of digital goods we are in the midst of the emergence of something absolutely novel with profoundly revolutionary implications. But, on the one hand, the costs of production of the material goods necessary for the existence and circulation among us of cultural goods are far from evaporating, remaining ecologically unsustainable at their current levels. While, on the other hand, and above all, when attention phenomena are taken into account, we find competition returning at the time of reception of cultural goods. This was certainly Herbert Simon's central message in 1969:

In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. [...] Human beings, like contemporary computers, are essentially serial deices. They can attend to only one thing at a time. This is just another way of saying that attention is scarce.

We touch concretely here on the mechanism by which the attention economy is rooted in a CIRCULAR SELF-REINFORCING DYNAMIC: attention attracts attention. Attention accumulated in the past and the present supports the future accumulation of attention. It is because millions of tourist have come to see the Mona Lisa that millions of tourists rush to see the Mona Lisa. [...]

If orthodox economic science, neoliberals and capitalism's apologists really wanted to promote 'free and unskewed competition', they would start by putting an end to (or drastically taxing) advertising activities, where the unequal powers with respect to the propagation of costly signals constitutes a 'market distortion' that is much more sinister than any of the interventions for which the state is berated. [...]

So an ATTENTION ARMS RACE is set up: the more a market society becomes mediatized, the more it must dedicate a significant proportion of its activity to the production of demand, investing ever greater resources into the machinery of attention attraction. Like military arms races, this attention arms race is in itself a tragic waste, thanks to a sub-optimal organization of inter-human relations. [...]

This same asymmetry can be found at the global level of GEOPOLITICAL ATTENTION EXPLOITATION: 'the most advanced--Western--cultures export information massively and import huge amounts of live attention for it, while the cultures of other regions export very modest amounts of information and accordingly earn little attention for it'. [...]