ABSTRACT
As early as eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment writer David Hume's essay, "On Money," economists have emphasized the idea that currency is, at its core, a social contract. And as David Hume notes, "Money is nothing but the representation of labour and commodities, and serves only as a method of rating or estimating them", highlighting the fact that currency is simply a visible marker of perceived value, just as records of attention are within the attention economy. The site of authority and its relationship to attention is represented differently in the three novels, but all suggest a smaller, more distributed locus of authority within the attention economy. Although authority is a key site of anxiety for both monetary theory and the novels, it is not the only one that emerges in an attention economy. Theories of the attention economy further suggest that the novels are not merely speculative, but they are reflective of changes already under way in our own cultural moment.
