CONCEPT
Commodification of Consciousness
The terminal extension of market logic — beyond labor, land, and money — into the capacity for awareness itself, completing the commodification the attention economy began and producing destruction uniquely self-concealing because the person being commodified experiences the extraction as enhancement.
The attention economy commodified awareness — capturing human attention as a resource to be sold to advertisers through engagement-optimized platforms that trained billions of people to treat their awareness as a commodity. AI completes what the attention economy began: commodifying not merely the medium of consciousness but the processes the medium enables — judgment, analysis, creativity, the formation of beliefs, the making of decisions. When a language model produces a legal brief, it does not merely capture attention but replaces the lawyer's cognitive process. The lawyer's consciousness, the awareness that made professional judgment possible, is being treated as a productive input — valuable when no cheaper input is available, dispensable when one is. What distinguishes this commodification from all predecessors is its self-concealing character: the person being commodified experiences amplification rather than degradation, making the extraction invisible to the person most affected by it.
