Digital iconoclasm and the new challenges of cognitive ethics: the case of web project Fiber

ABSTRACT This article takes the form of an analytical commentary by the developers of ‘Fiber’, a web project, which actualizes the potential to influence the intentionality of users’ attention. The application raises the question of shifts in cognitive reality in the wake of the ‘Data Revolution’, as well as the means by which digital tools may provide access to them. Attention has become one of the most important phenomena in the formation of social reality in the era of late capitalism. Fiber examines attention as data in the age of cognitive capitalism. This article posits a relationship between the visualization of invisible cognitive processes (‘iconoclastic imagery’), emergent means of access to them, and cognitive ethics – a way of processing data that in the predigital age belonged to the individual world of the subject, and now, having being converted into data, has been included in and co-opted by economic and communication exchange.