The Attention �Gift Economy
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Sam Berstler (MIT)
9 June 2026
LMU Colloquium in Practical Philosophy
slides available: www.samberstler.com
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By any measure, the size of the global attention economy is on the order of trillions of US dollars. For the USA alone, Evans estimated it at US$7.1 trillion and 437 billion hours in 2016.
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In 2004, subjects spent an average of 2.5 minutes per computer screen. In 2012, it was 75 seconds. In the past five years, it was 24 seconds.
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Q2. What is valuable about our capacity to pay attention?
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Q2. What is valuable about our capacity to pay attention?
I sketch a new answer to Q1.
And so I also sketch a new answer to Q2.
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Contested market model
Attention should not be bought and sold as a commodity.
The attention economy is like the market in human organs.
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Contested market model
Attention should not be bought and sold as a commodity.
The attention economy is like the market in human organs.
Addiction model
Individuals suffer from a reduced capacity to pay attention.
Warping of preference structure
Impairment of agency
Impairment of virtue
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Contested market model
Attention should not be bought and sold as a commodity.
The attention economy is like the market in human organs.
Addiction model
Individuals suffer from a reduced capacity to pay attention.
Warping of preference structure
Impairment of agency
Impairment of virtue
Public health
model
Decline in economic activity
Decline in educational outcomes
Decline in mental health outcomes
The attention crisis is a mass sickness.
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Addiction model
Individuals suffer from a reduced capacity to pay attention.
Warping of preference structure
Impairment of agency
Impairment of virtue
Diminished embedding within community
Public health
model
Decline in economic activity
Decline in educational outcomes
Decline in mental health outcomes
Decline in social cohesion
The attention crisis is a mass sickness.
The mass sickness is degrading our social infrastructure and undermining social cohesion.
My approach
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A gift economy is a practice that properly functions to build and maintain social cohesion within small scale groups.
Bronislaw Malinowski
Marcel Mauss
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A gift economy is a practice that properly functions to build and maintain social cohesion within small scale groups.
This is a thesis about what a gift economy does: why it emerged and persists.
It is not a thesis about why individuals participate within it.
Bronislaw Malinowski
Marcel Mauss
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A gift economy is a practice that properly functions to build and maintain social cohesion within small scale groups.
This is a thesis about what a gift economy does: why it emerged and persists.
It is not a thesis about why individuals participate within it.
Bronislaw Malinowski
Marcel Mauss
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Emile Durkheim
Social cohesion a measure of integration or unity within a group.
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Emile Durkheim
Social cohesion a measure of integration or unity within a group, often produced through:
…cooperative activity, like economic exchange
….fellow feeling, like love, solidarity, affection
….reciprocal non-economy relationships, like friendship
…a sense of shared group identity
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A gift economy is characterized by an unofficial norm of unofficial reciprocation between sender and receiver.
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A gift economy is characterized by an unofficial norm of unofficial reciprocation between sender and receiver.
Gift economy exchange is constitutively not quid pro quo exchange
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A gift economy is characterized by an unofficial norm of unofficial reciprocation between sender and receiver.
The norm is unofficial because it isn’t enforced through economic regulation.
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A gift economy is characterized by an unofficial norm of unofficial reciprocation between sender and receiver.
What is unofficial reciprocation? It’s not quid pro quo. We must somehow “mark” that the exchange is unofficial, through:
-delaying reciprocation
-declining to negotiate terms
-declining to announce, “This is
reciprocation!”
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A gift economy is characterized by an unofficial norm of unofficial reciprocation between sender and receiver.
What constitutes appropriate reciprocation is not solely determined by the value of the first gift. Social rank and context play a role in determining appropriate reciprocation.
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A gift economy is characterized by an unofficial norm of unofficial reciprocation between sender and receiver.
Because reciprocation is unofficial, participants can’t easily come to a consensus about when the gift debt has been “discharged.”
And because of that, participants tend to become lodged in giving-receiving cycles.
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A gift economy is characterized by an unofficial norm of unofficial reciprocation between sender and receiver.
You win esteem through playing the gift exchange game well.
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Gift economies function to both consolidate and redistribute material resources.
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Because of the practice structurally creates open-ended giving-receiving cycles, a gift economy tends to bind people together in long term relationships.
Gift economies function to both consolidate and redistribute material resources.
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Attention is a non-tangible good that flows through the gift economy.
In the most interesting cases, it flows as non-tangible ritual good.
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Attention is a non-tangible good that flows through the gift economy.
More precise: we pay each other attention through cognitive effort and attention-conducive behavioral modifications like eye contact
Normally, we also have to show each other that we’re doing this.
In the most interesting cases, it flows as non-tangible ritual good.
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A ritual good is a good that we value giving and receiving within a gift economy primarily because we value what the act of giving or receiving that good expresses about:
…our relationship with our
exchange partner, or
…our social status
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Familiar ritual goods
Greeting cards
Commemorative coins in the US military
Tech industry challenge coins
Fine wedding china
Flowers
Gift wrapping
“Thinking of you” souvenirs
Wedding rings
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Non-tangible goods like time, effort, labor, and information circulate within gift economies as both ritual goods and substantive (non-ritual) goods.
Pierre Bourdieu
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Labor: you help me move flats
Time: at a major conference, you go to my conference session
Information: you gift me a bit of gossip
Pierre Bourdieu
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Gifts of attention are often necessary “parts” of a bigger ritual good
Watching a bride come down the aisle
Paying attention during a colloquium talk
“Thinking of you” cards
Turn-taking and information-sharing in conversation
Acknowledging a tragedy
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But sometimes we really just do seem to care about the attention
Acts of pure “bearing witness”
“Hanging on” someone’s words
Noticing a change in someone’s appearance
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Erving Goffman argued that total institutions are morally problematic not just because they (a) deprive inmates of material resources and (b) profoundly constricted their autonomy. They destroy the ritual-social-symbolic life of inmates.
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The patients of St. Elisabeth’s psychiatric hospital were ritually impaired: they lacked the material means to develop a flourishing ritual gift economy.
Their form of social life was therefore systematically diminished.
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Goffman’s critique:
The healthcare apparatus often fails to consider the way in which illness impacts the social structure of a family, workplace, or other small group.
So it fails to identify the way in which the ill person’s behavior can be both symptom and cause of severe social dysfunction.
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Q2. What is valuable about our capacity to pay attention?
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Should I invite Alex to coffee?
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Should I invite Alex to coffee?
Even if I pay attention to him, he’ll struggle to pay attention to me.
So I won’t invite him to coffee.
So he won’t have reason to invite me for coffee a next time.
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Q2. What is valuable about our capacity to pay attention?
A. Attention is an almost free ritual good that flows via the ritual economy. When we cannot pay attention, we cannot give attention. That means we are ritually impaired.
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Q2. What is valuable about our capacity to pay attention?
A. Attention is an almost free ritual good that flows via the ritual economy. When we cannot pay attention, we cannot give attention. That means we are ritually impaired.
When mass numbers of people are ritually impaired, the social infrastructure of the gift economy weakens.
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Addiction model
Individuals suffer from a reduced capacity to pay attention.
Warping of preference structure
Impairment of agency
Impairment of virtue
Diminished embedding within community
Public health
model
Decline in economic activity
Decline in educational outcomes
Decline in mental health outcomes
Decline in social cohesion
The attention crisis is a mass sickness.
The attention gift economy is an on-ramp to other kinds of moral virtues. Through non-moral mechanisms, it incentivizes us to pay attention to each other. This functions to redistribute concern beyond a narrow “circle of intimates.
My approach
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Q1. What is bad about the attention crisis?
Addiction model
Individuals suffer from a reduced capacity to pay attention.
Warping of preference structure
Impairment of agency
Impairment of virtue
Diminished embedding within community
Public health
model
Decline in economic activity
Decline in educational outcomes
Decline in mental health outcomes
Decline in social cohesion
The attention crisis is a mass sickness.
We are losing a low cost but high value way in which we can choose, deepen, and expand informal networks of people. The attention crisis is eroding the social infrastructure that glues communities together.
My approach
Thank you!
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more here:
www.samberstler.com