SubSight - Inquiries in the Subversion of the Attention Economy

In 2020, in the midst of the online expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement, a multitude of channels and media started to relay information about ways to donate or help their community. As a result, millions of individuals started to relay posts and facts about the murder, and more globally about the lack of attention given to police brutality towards BIPOC. While many sharing and reposting strategies were surfacing to raise funds and reparations for the victims involved, one particular format took form: watch-to-donate videos. At its core, these videos would display content or music made by Black creators and all the collected money from the advertisements played on those videos would be redirected to the selected cause. The video “Black Lives and Voices Matter: an art exposition (fundraiser closed!)”, posted in May 2020 collected more than 11 million views, enabling a considerable amount of profit to be collected and re-distributed. The act of directing individual will and attention in order to drive social change and enable economic re-distribution has since then been experimented with, leaving more activists and creators to use the same strategy. Through an almost identical procedure, these attempts were all trying to re-direct individuals’ time and gaze, leading  us to formulate the following research question: If we can’t avoid it, how can we subvert the current attention economy to alter it in favor of a greater pool of individuals or causes? From Watch To Donate to generating Tabs for a Cause, our research unfolds concrete ways in which viewers can redirect their attention in order to participate in wealth and attention redistribution. During this public presentation, we seek to shed light on our research, our findings, and the main key takeaway when thinking about the future of the attention economy.