The commodification of attention: Revisiting the harms of the attention economy

Campbell, Douglas R

doi:10.22059/jcss.2025.394786.1145

The commodification of attention: Revisiting the harms of the attention economy

Document Type : Original article

Author

Douglas R Campbell

Department of Philosophy, Alma College, Alma, Michigan, USA. Alma College, Alma, MI, USA

10.22059/jcss.2025.394786.1145

Abstract

Background: The economy wrongly commodifies attention. The commodification is morally objectionable because our attention is not properly subject to market forces.
Aims: A crucial aim of this article is to broaden the debate about the attention economy.
Methodology: Conceptual analysis of the attention economy, the right to attention, and the influence of market forces on commodities.
Discussion: In the first section, I survey the conventional approach to the attention economy, which treats the ethical problems here as instances of questions about the moral limits of markets. I agree that this approach is justified, but I aim to broaden the debate by focusing on whether attention should be commodified at all. In the second section, I argue that attention is not properly subject to market forces. In the third section, I argue that subjecting attention to market forces leads, predictably, to the development and use of technology that violates the right to attention. In the fourth section, I argue that coercive paternalism offers the correct response to these problems and that two other solutions— the reliance on nudges and the reliance on social antibodies— are inferior.
Conclusion: The attention economy is a rights-violating and noxious market. Its wrongful commodification of attention produces a market that does not respect the boundaries between commercialized and non-commercialized spaces.

Keywords

attention economy

attention merchants

coercive paternalism

commodity

moral limits of markets

Subjects

humanities & social sciences

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