CONCEPT
The Attention Commons
The shared space of human evaluative capacity in which creative work is produced, consumed, and assessed — finite by the limits of human attention and saturated by AI-accelerated production to the point that the evaluative mechanisms quality depends on are strained beyond their capacity.
The attention commons is the third flow of the intelligence commons. Attention has always been finite — there are only so many hours in a day, only so many works that a person can evaluate with genuine care — but AI has accelerated the production of output to a degree that threatens to overwhelm the evaluative mechanisms on which quality depends. When anyone can produce a polished essay, a competent design, a functional application in a fraction of the time previously required, the volume of output increases dramatically, and the mechanisms through which the community identifies quality — critical review, peer assessment, editorial judgment — are strained beyond their capacity.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Attention is subtractable in the most direct sense. Attention given to one piece of output is attention not given to another. When the volume of AI-generated content increases, the fraction of