Payment in the Currency of Attention (Homage to Adorno)

Abundance, that is, the cornucopia of goods and services at affordable prices promised by advancing technological civilization, is now being paid for in attention capitalized by an advertising model set loose. Worse than the more or less obvious payments tendered to the tedious TV commercial or the targeted ads of Google search and Facebook, which are payments in full, increasingly attention is only part of the price of admission and thereby looked over in the act of the explicit monetary payment in traditional paper and plastic money. Ads proliferate, now smuggled everywhere and into everything, from the movie theater to the passenger plane seatback. They generously boost the purchasing power of the destitute masses by accepting minds as credit. The economic laws of exchange, contrary to appearances, are not abolished in the distribution of content, goods and services free of charge. There's no such thing as a free lunch, but no longer is there an affordable one either. Free stuff, liberated by advertising, is now also affordable stuff, and this simultaneously obscures the exchange relationship and raises the stakes.

Amplified by perpetual economic crisis, universal commodification does not discriminate and devours body as well as mind, the prostitute and kidney as well as stupefied eyeballs glazing over in capitulation. Unlike the others, however, the promissory notes written in the repatterned perceptions of the eyeballs are only as good as the market exchange value of the human carcass they are attached to. Bereft of assets, attention will continue to be collateralized until, like the value of mortgage backed securities that plummets along with underlying home prices, its value proves illusory as real wages approach zero, unemployment balloons, and more individuals declare bankruptcy on their own sovereignty. The fate of liberty is now to be a pyre for our emancipation; and the autonomy over desire and preference, already smoldering, is now stoked by the opacity of heteronomy as we lose ourselves in the ventriloquism of consumer activity. By secreting exchange under the guise of the free, the last vestige of subjectivity, caveat emptor, is annulled.