PERSON
Yves Citton
The French media theorist who gave the attention economy an ecology—insisting that attention is not a commodity inside individual skulls but a relationship between minds and environments, and that what AI is destroying is not just focus but the modal diversity on which creativity, empathy, and democratic life all depend.
Citton is the ecologist of the mind. Where economists treat attention as a scarce resource to be allocated efficiently—a commodity measurable in clicks and dwell-time—Citton insists on a prior question: what kind of attending are we talking about? His foundational argument is that attention is not a single fungible thing but an ecology of distinct modes, each requiring different environmental conditions to flourish, each serving different cognitive and social functions.
Deep attention—sustained, effortful, resistant to interruption—is the medium of complex thought.
Floating attention—diffuse, receptive, unfocused—is the soil in which creative insight germinates.
Joint attention—two or more minds knowing they are looking at the same thing—is the cognitive infrastructure of communication, empathy, and democratic deliberation. The
attention economy has been systematically degrading all but one of these modes—the rapid, evaluative, individually targeted mode that generates monetizable behavioral signals—and AI-generated content, optimized for individual capture