Art in the Internet Age IV: The Attention Economy

It’s not a coincidence that so many male content creators are becoming prize fighters and so many female content creators are making OnlyFans. The market incentivises a progressive increase in stakes, and sanctioned boxing matches/ pornography are at the upper limit of this (at least in terms of legality). The TikTok prankster, Mizzy, is an example of someone crossing this limit, in a style reminiscent of the Dada art movement, and their offshoot The Cacophony Society. Umberto Eco, in his book On Beauty, argues that art in the first half of the twentieth century was a struggle between provocation and consumption, which ended in the 1960s when the avant-garde art movements petered out. With the internet, however, provocation and consumption have merged, facilitated by the attention economy which profits from our inability to look away.

As Shoshana Zuboff explains in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the sites we use extract our data in exchange for free services. This data is sold to advertisers who use this information to target us specifically. Not only can they accurately predict our behaviour, they’re able to modify it to meet ‘profitable outcomes’:

Eventually, surveillance capitalists discovered that the most-predictive behavioral data come from intervening in the state of play in order to nudge, coax, tune, and herd behavior…