Attention Machines and Future Politics Highlight

So the core challenge, as I see it, is to use external attention in a way that allows us to see ourselves as deeply, as completely, as these external systems presently see us, and in this way overcome the corrosive and pre-empting effect they have on our own agency. This is one major sense in which I understand what it means for external attention to be democratized.

To devise the means for this “exteriority” — this is a challenge of symbolic engineering. On the one hand, I take it to mean decomposing attention into a set of primitives valid for any biological or non-biological system (a conceptual challenge) and operationalizing them in a non-extractive way (a technical challenge), in which folks, wielding a sort of exploratory tool, would be enabled to recombine and compare and, in theory, apply the filters or salience policies of any attention system to any data set.