Aarushi Bhandari’s Attention and Alienation is a story of the internet. It describes the emergence of the attention economy, which creates conditions for unequal exchange between attention and alienation. Bhandari uses the Marxist theorization of alienation to explain how the online proletariat is exploited to generate capital for the ruling class. This tale starts in Nepal, where the author grew up, while gradually being introduced to various kinds of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Her auto-ethnographic accounts from the Global South blend well with the theoretical and empirical narratives. She employs both quantitative data and methods, as well as postmodern feminist and indigenous epistemologies, in this study. One of the major strengths of the book lies in its methodological nature.
Divided into seven chapters, the book covers the author’s social position as a child growing up in a changing Nepalese society; explores attention and alienation as specific forms of unequal exchange internationally; looks at unequal development as a historical factor, much before the advent of modern ICTs. In the fourth chapter, she uses data from the Mass Mobilizations Data Project to argue how the nexus between nation-states and the tech ruling class stifles online social movements. Chapter 5 is an interesting exploration of the micro-level of individual online users. The book draws together cross-national, meso-level social movements and micro-level implications.
The attention economy is built on the fact that attention is infinite and unlimited. Only time is the limit. Algorithms are made in such a way that a specific amount of time and attention is given to the social media marketplace. Bhandari draws from the Marxist concepts of attention and alienation, along with the works of Christian Fuchs and Jenny Odell, to explain what she means by the international political economy of attention. It is a process of capital accumulation, which extracts time, focus, mental fortitude, creative spirit, and emotional energy from the human body (p. 18). The algorithm mines attention, information and time for profit. The profit is not redistributed but retained by the technological ruling class. Everyone else is part of the online proletariat (p. 18). Attention itself is the commodity, and free in its supply for the capitalist. It is offered voluntarily for enjoyment. Whenever people connect with free services such as social media or streaming videos, their behaviour and attention become a commodity which is sold by the social media companies owning these services.
Human beings are alienated from their inner selves, which is leading to a spiralling mental health crisis. The exchange is deeply unequal—humans give attention and receive alienation. The attention economy turns alienation into capital. This capitalist economic system is different from the factory system. The online proletariat logs into websites like X, TikTok, and Reddit for distraction. Even that time is converted into capital for the profit of another entity. Unlike the factory system, the breaks also constitute work and profit. Alienation is not simply profitable but also reproduces the attention economy.
The attention economy is built on technologically unequal exchange, as countries in the global south are exploited by the technological ruling class. Their identities and selfhoods are commodified through the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). In the world of neoliberal development, the rural is often overlooked, except when it serves to further entrench neoliberal capitalism. Bhandari draws from examples of intersections between caste and rural areas in Nepal. She argues that foreign development aid may help certain struggling communities occasionally, but it expands the wealth of people working in the development sector in the global south. Development aid has rarely worked as intended in Nepal, where there is inequality in access to the funds.
The attention economy stifles social movements with alternative imaginaries that threaten the capitalist world system. State intervention and political surveillance are interconnected; the state can use the data from the attention economy to crack down on dissenters. Nonviolent protests, which become visible, can be stifled online through the power of algorithms and big tech companies. This was visible in the United States during the indigenous-led protest against rerouting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in 2016-17. The #NoDAPL was trending. The state used law enforcement wings to violently intervene and protect the interests of Dakota Access, LLC. Online forums provide live and active spaces for discourse. But to become social movements, they need more. Online discourse doesn’t encourage movements that seriously threaten the current capitalist world system. Those movements are stifled through algorithmic manipulation. Neo-liberal forces integrate with social movements, including the Black Lives Matter Movement, which threatens them becoming successful in the long term. For instance, one can also see the refashioning of Women’s Day, celebrated on 8th March worldwide. Originally coined to mark the socialist history of working women, it has become a neoliberal capitalist appropriation of awarding women free vouchers and tickets. The attention economy overturns social movements into neoliberal appropriations.
Bhandari demonstrates how information and communication technologies pose threats to collective and individual flourishing. However, this is not to say that technology is not full of transformative possibilities. What society requires is figuring out how to harness this transformative possibility for collective flourishing rather than trauma. She asserts that healing is praxis. To reclaim authority over one’s own attention is an overt act of resistance in the attention economy. To reclaim authority over one’s own attention is an overt act of resistance in the attention. There is a need to acknowledge that we as a society are terribly addicted and saving ourselves is not possible without reclaiming our attention.
Attention and Alienation’s sociological trajectory of the internet is a timely reminder of how we have become consumed by technology today. This book will be useful to students of Sociology, Media Studies, Digital Studies and Internet Studies for both its theoretical and methodological insights. It is a welcome addition to works on capitalism, surveillance, and technology after Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Big Power (2019), and Virginia Eubanks’s Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police and Punish the Poor (2018).
Rituparna Patgiri teaches Sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, Guwahati.