MusicWatch Monthly: Betterment of self or world * Oregon ArtsWatch

"The earth has moved under our feet in just the past few decades. The largest industry in the world now is quite literally the attention-seeking industry. Just as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the global economy was dominated by natural-resource extraction, today the world's largest companies have grown as large as they have entirely on the promise of providing to their clients the attention, however fleeting, of their billions of users."

"The role that users of 'free' online platforms occupy might sometimes feel creative, or as if it has something in common with traditional work or leisure. But this role sometimes appears closer to that of a domesticated animal that is valuable only to the extent that it has its very self to give. We do not usually provide our bodily fluids, and are not usually asked to do so,"

"sites such as Ancestry.com do ask for saliva as part of their data-collecting efforts, and health bracelets and other such devices owned by Apple and Amazon are increasingly discovering ways to monitor a number of our vital fluid levels. But even if we are not giving our fluids, we are giving something that has proven more valuable to the new economy than milk ever was in the system of industrial agriculture: information about who we are, what we do, what we think, what we fear."

The global economy has shifted from natural-resource extraction to an attention-seeking industry dominated by platforms that sell user attention. Users provide streams of personal information—behaviors, preferences, fears—that platforms harvest and monetize, often without traditional labor recognition. The term 'data-cow' captures how users are treated as domesticated assets valuable for their informational output. Firms increasingly collect bodily and physiological data through services and devices, extending surveillance into bodies. Information about identity and behavior now often yields more economic value than raw natural resources, reshaping labor, privacy, and power relations in contemporary digital societies.

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