The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

Information is abundant; attention is scarce. Information is theoretically infinite, while attention is constrained. This is why information is cheap and attention is expensive.

This process of standardization is what Marx calls the commodification of labor. A commodity is any resource that has what economists call “substantial fungibility,” where each instance is indistinguishable from another. Each barrel of crude oil is interchangeable with every other barrel of crude oil. The same goes for each metric ton of softwood pulp, or kilogram of rubber. Once something is transformed into a commodity, it unlocks its potential to be traded on markets, to be swapped and transferred and to serve as an economic instrument with which to leverage bets on future price movements. To commodify something is to standardize it, abstract it, and de-individuate it.