Il valore dell’attenzione nel capitalismo delle piattaforme

This paper rejects the standard “attention economy” view that treats information as abundant and attention as a scarce good to be allocated. Instead, it argues that, in platform capitalism, information and attention are productive forces inside the process of capital valorization. Platforms do not simply compete for a fixed stock of attention: they engineer its extraction. Interface design and algorithms turn lived time into countable actions standardize uneven behaviours, and make them commensurable and thus convertible into exchange value. On this basis, the user is not only a consumer but an (often unpaid) producer of signals and data: the “spectator” becomes an attention worker. Drawing on Marx and post-operaist debates, the article links these dynamics to shifts in the relation between living and dead labour and to “machinic surplus value”, where value increasingly comes from human–machine concatenations and the management of flows, not from measurable labour time alone.