41

Commercial advertisement occupies and exploits our most precious resource, our attention, which is about to become a form of capital as important in our economic calculations as money itself. Technologies of attraction developed on an industrial scale by the mass-media (first analog, then digital) bring about a new form of “mental capitalism.” In this article, which synthesizes the book he devoted to this topic, Georg Franck provides a whole range of concepts and principles in order to help us analyze the new modes of exploitation, along with the new sources of social conflicts, raised by mental capitalism.