Attention Machines and Future Politics Highlight

it is their capacity for seeing us which serves as the foundation for the massive architecture of behavioral management and control that’s now emerging.

Now, our choices are increasingly pre-empted before they arise. Through techniques like tuning (changing the choice architecture in an environment), herding (group-level orchestration), and conditioning (habitual reinforcement through operant feedback), predictive systems intervene on our behavior directly. And as these systems advance, the cognitive ecological foundations of agency itself are quietly degraded. After Gutenberg, external memory fragments — texts — flooded Europe, and attention became scarce: there was too much information, too little attention. [2] Now external attention systems are everywhere and, being used to power predictive systems, they are rendering unpredicted, unanticipated behavior ‘scarce.’ Put differently: the capacity for self-determination — for authoring novel patterns of behavior—is itself in danger of becoming scarce. Another name for this capacity might be agency