Ethics and the Attention Economy

Clinton Castro (Florida International University), Adam Pham

Ethics and the Attention Economy

Clinton Castro & Adam Pham

“If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer---you’re the product.”

What do you do when your phone pings from across the room? Do you jump up to see what app is sending you a notification? Do you feel annoyed, stimulated, or curious when you hear that sound?

Economics studies the allocation of scarce resources. In our current era, the economy has increasingly shifted toward information technologies. But information is not a scarce resource. What, then, does the contemporary economy run on? One possible answer is: our attention. Attention economics is a branch of thought that treats human attention as a scarce commodity. It addresses questions about how human attention can be captured, monetised, exploited, and conserved, in a landscape of evolving technologies.

This panel features two prominent experts on the topic, the philosophers Clinton Castro (Florida International University) and Adam K. Pham (Caltech), who will talk to us about their recent paper “Is the Attention Economy Noxious?”

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https://sandiego.zoom.us/j/95967250671