Attention Machines and Future Politics Highlight

Machine attention has special properties too. These properties enable surveillance capitalists to hack and exploit weaknesses in the biological attention and memory systems of their users, converting customers into reliable hubs of resource extraction.

However, if access to these external attention systems were democratized, I think we could use them to defend against precisely these sorts of intrusions which, for over a decade, have cognitively re-engineered us against our will. We could learn to see ourselves more robustly, and even learn to red-team our forms of self-knowing against the intrusions of persuasive technology.