Thread · 4 tweets · 9 Apr 2021

It's one of the things I like about your writing: even if I disagree with something I still feel it was good to read. Towards the end of your piece, I thought you were heading to the collective aspects of attention. Between Cayley and Illich, "it's there."

There is something about how we pay attention that I feel is always directed at others. We have conversations with books. We engage with ideas. When we are alone and just receiving a stream or feed, it feels more like nihilism than attention.

Maybe attention isn't so much scarce as it is attenuable and damageable, like togetherness. It's not that we deplete it, but we can organise in such a way that we have less of it, and its "supply" is threatened. We could have more than enough, unless we break the source.

In that sense, it would still be a form of commons.