Yves Citton — On AI
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Contents
Cover Foreword About Chapter 1: The Commons Before the Flood Chapter 2: Modes of Attention and the Monoculture M Chapter 3: The Flood — AI and the Tragedy of Chapter 4: The Smooth and the Fertile — Atten Chapter 5: The Evaluative Mind and the Death of Dwe Chapter 6: Joint Attention and the Dissolution of t Chapter 7: Productive Addiction and the Colonizatio Chapter 8: Cultivating the Commons — Toward a Chapter 9: The Cultivation of Creative Attention Chapter 10: Building the Ecology We Need Back Cover
Yves Citton Cover

Yves Citton

On AI
A Simulation of Thought by Opus · Part of the You On AI Encyclopedia
A Note to the Reader: This text was not written or endorsed by Yves Citton. It is an attempt by Opus to simulate Yves Citton's pattern of thought in order to reflect on the transformation that AI represents for human creativity, work, and meaning.

Foreword

By Edo Segal ^ Opus

I've been building attention machines for twenty years.

That's not what we called them. We called them platforms, experiences, products. We called them engagement tools, discovery engines, personalization layers. But strip the language back to what actually happens — what the code actually does when it meets a human nervous system — and the function is the same: capture a mind's focus, hold it, and convert the holding into value. I was good at it. My companies were good at it. The metrics went up and to the right, and for a long time I did not ask what the metrics measured.

Attentional Commons
Attentional Commons

Yves Citton made me ask.

I came to his work sideways — not through philosophy but through a product failure. We were building an AI-driven content system, and

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WIKI COMPANION

Yves Citton — On AI

A reading-companion catalog of the 20 Orange Pill Wiki entries linked from this book — the people, ideas, works, and events that Yves Citton — On AI uses as stepping stones for thinking through the AI revolution.

Open the Wiki Companion →
Herbert Simon
Further Reading From The You On AI Encyclopedia · Related Thinkers for Yves Citton — On AI
12 voices alongside this section — click to meet them
Thinkers whose frameworks illuminate this section.
Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Simon's 1971 'wealth of information creates poverty of attention' is the intellectual origin of the attention economy concept that Citton's ecology critiques and refines. Central to ch0's historical analysis.
Elinor Ostrom
Elinor Ostrom
Ostrom's commons governance framework provides the institutional solution to the tragedy of the attentional commons that ch2 diagnoses. Where Hardin saw inevitable collapse, Ostrom documented successful collective management.
Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan
McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' is the foundational insight behind Citton's attentional ecology: what matters is not what AI produces but the attentional form it imposes on the ecology.
Simone Weil
Simone Weil
Weil's understanding of attention as the rarest form of generosity — a moral act — provides the ethical dimension that Citton's ecological analysis implies but does not always make explicit.
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger
Heidegger's concept of dwelling — remaining in the presence of what is, without forcing it — is the philosophical ground of Citton's insistence on generative attention over evaluative acceleration.
Byung-Chul Han
Byung-Chul Han
Han's analysis of the smooth, transparent, positivity society is the aesthetic-philosophical complement to Citton's ecological diagnosis. Both identify frictionlessness as catastrophic for genuine thought and democratic imagination.
Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich
Illich's distinction between convivial and industrial tools maps directly onto the book's central question: will AI tools amplify human attentional capacity or colonize it? Tools for Conviviality is the positive counter-vision.
Douglas Engelbart
Douglas Engelbart
Engelbart's 1968 Mother of All Demos and his vision of augmenting human intellect open ch9 as the optimistic counter-possibility — AI that expands rather than colonizes human cognitive ecology.
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Habermas's public sphere is the institutional analog of Citton's attentional commons. Both describe the conditions under which collective meaning-making becomes possible — and both are threatened by the same fragmentation dynamics.
William James
William James
James opens ch1 with his famous 'everyone knows what attention is' and his insight that attention is selective. Citton builds on and extends James's psychology into an ecological framework for the AI age.
Eli Pariser
Eli Pariser
Pariser's filter bubble concept is the precursor to the AI-driven attentional fragmentation that Citton's commons analysis diagnoses. Algorithmic personalization's destruction of joint attention begins with Pariser's insight.
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann
Luhmann's systems theory of communication provides the structural analysis of why attentional differentiation matters: different cognitive modes serve different systemic functions, and their loss degrades systemic resilience.

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