The imagination economy
Commodify, alienate, repeat
A quick reminder that if you’ve read APOCALYPSE: How Catastrophe Transformed Our World and Can Forge New Futures, I would be forever grateful if you wrote an Amazon review! Let’s keep those algorithms happy!
All the tabs have been about one thing lately: generative AI. It’s been a few years since Chat GPT and its ilk were made available to the public, and now the public—or at least a certain segment of the public—would like to weigh in on the consequences: It’s bad. Not all bad, maybe, but mostly. The rampant cheating. The disastrous climate impacts. The soulless plagiarism. The shameless use of stolen work and exploited labor. The death-spiral destruction of online publishing. The dangerous enabling of delusional worldviews. The fascist kitsch.
We’re told by both AI proponents and detractors that we’re entering a new phase of…something. I’m beyond skeptical that AI will reshape humanity itself, and I think it’s laughable to call its development a potential apocalypse on par with climate change or societal collapse (even though it would probably be good for book sales if I made the rounds saying so; at the very most AI could be one of many intertwined factors that contribute to the texture of those kinds of events, which are always driven primarily by human agency). That doesn’t mean AI won’t reshape our lives, however, in ways that stretch beyond questions of personal use. I don’t have a car, but I still have to live physical world we built to serve their needs. I don’t use social media (anymore), but that doesn’t insulate me from the higher order effects of the attention economy. My AI use is limited to transcription, and I plan to keep it that way, but that won’t save me from the structural changes currently being forced upon us.
In his book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, Chris Hayes compares the commodification of attention in the 21st century to what Karl Marx described happening to labor in the 19th century: “In both cases something within us, intimate to us and possessed by us, was transformed, through a series of technological, legal, and market innovations into a commodity that was extracted from us at a price. This ubiquitous commodification transformed the most granular and private aspects of our entire lives and produced widespread alienation.”1 We become alienated from our work and its results, Marx wrote, when “his [the worker’s] labour becomes a labour that anyone can perform.”2 We become alienated from our attention when it can be bought and sold by companies, in increments of seconds, and we find ourselves reduced to being one interchangeable “eyeball” among millions. “It’s a feeling that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will,” Hayes writes.3
Of course there are things we can and should do individually to resist the commodification of our attention (read books), not to mention our labor (have hobbies). But societally speaking, those revolutions are over. And now, with the rise of generative AI, we’re witnessing capitalism coming for something it could never extract from us before, no matter how abusive or intrusive it became: Our imaginations. We’re moving from the attention economy to the imagination economy.
The imagination economy’s goal is to replace creating, daydreaming, wondering, thinking, and trying with prompting a machine. Write the correct prompt, or a series of them, and AI will do the imagining for you. Or at least, it will produce a text (or image, sound, line of code, etc.) that is plausibly the result of imagination, especially if you aren’t really paying attention to it, as we have already been trained to do over the past 20 years. Imagination, once limited in how much money it could generate by the effort and time it took to both dream something up and create it, is now available to be commodified—or at least, a simulacrum of it is, which is good enough for the people buying and selling it.
The result of this commodification is, inevitably, alienation. It’s already showing up in academia, where AI adoption has happened faster and more destructively than anywhere else (so far). In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Clay Shirky writes about “hearing a growing sense of sadness from our students about AI use”: “I’ve become lazier. AI makes reading easier, but it slowly causes my brain to lose the ability to think critically or understand every word,” one student says. (We could substitute “critical thinking” for imagination, especially in the educational context.) “I feel like I rely too much on AI, and it has taken creativity away from me,” says another.
Meanwhile, from the professor side, “engaging earnestly with bot-written text is mentally deadening, and frankly I do resent when I have to read it. There’s just no there there, especially if what you’re looking for is a human you can have a conversation with,” writes Andrew Dana Hudson in his newsletter Solar Shades. His students are using it, but they’re also mad about it: “AI is just a new layer on top of the addictive tech stack of phones and screens and social media and Zoom and online educational platforms they’ve spent their whole lives in. Many of them deeply resent that they never had a choice about all this.”
Like the attention economy before it, we can abstain, we can refrain, and we can complain about the imagination economy—individually. But the cultural and economic shift is coming as, collectively, we are encouraged/forced to outsource our thinking and dreaming to a machine that fundamentally can’t do either. The fact that commodified imagination cannot be anything but an empty imitation of the real thing makes this project even more insidious than what came before it. Attention is still attention even when it’s degraded or reduced to tiny increments. But imagination is not imagination without the process of imagining. Someone who otherwise would have been capable of creating something truly special instead “becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”4 That’s Marx and Friedrich Engels, in 1848.
When I was really sick, I learned something about imagination I wish I didn’t have to know: It’s optional. I don’t mean that we can or should choose not to imagine when it suits us. I mean that when a body’s resources are depleted, imagination is the first thing to go. In my post-COVID fogs, I could not believe how empty my mind was. There were simply no thoughts in there. No wondering, no daydreaming, no imagining. No self. I’ve never had better meditation sessions in my life.
This is why, collectively, we’re vulnerable to the lures of generative AI right now: We’re exhausted out here. Students, by and large, chatbot their way to degrees not because they don’t want to learn anything, but because in an educational system suspicious of process and obsessed with results (grades, college admissions, and at the end, a job), it has never been safe for learning to feel hard. Even in creative and email jobs, many of us are already being asked to work against our natural rhythms and leave ourselves drained churning out trivialities that have no value other than making bosses feel better. So who cares if a machine churns out the trivialities instead, especially if it means we’re slightly less tired at the end of the day?
Ideally, by recruiting a machine to do alienated and alienating “creative” labor, we could free up our imaginations for pursuits that excite us and contribute something new to the world. But we can only do that if we remember what it feels like to have and use an imagination in the first place, and if we have sufficient material and cognitive resources to nurture ours. Decades of being pushed toward the financial, physical, and psychological edge of ruin in the name of someone else’s profit have left too many of us without the energy or capacity for the risk and uncertainty required to engage in critical thinking or creativity. A society at the breaking point has jettisoned the possibility of imagination just as surely as my body did when its survival was on the line.
And now the imagination economy has arrived to deal the final blow, by convincing us that we’re not missing anything. By telling us that a simulacrum of imagination is better than the real thing, because it works without friction, effort, or fear. I deeply understand why avoiding those sensations feels necessary right now. But without them, it’s not imagination. It’s not creativity. It’s not real, or meaningful, or capable of changing anything at all.
Our tolerance for intellectual difficulty, emotional discomfort, and deep engagement with the real world has already been eroded to the point where the promise of living without them feels like relief and freedom. Once we fully embrace that lie, it will be tremendously hard to pull ourselves back to even where we are now. Turning ourselves into “appendage[s] of the machine” in the imagination economy will never give us the energy we desperately need to restore our critical thinking and creativity. It will only alienate us further from them. And then the same people who already profit off our labor and attention will have us where they want us—incapable of imagining, let alone fighting for, a better world.
