Ambient Engineering: Hyper-Nudging, Hyper-Relevance, and Rhetorics of Nearness and Farness in a Post-AI Algorithmic World

This essay argues that algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) are producing a transformation in the economics of attention. Attention is a limited concept, a point I demonstrate by providing a phenomenological understanding of attending via Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, specifically showing the usefulness of the existential and platial concepts of nearness and farness. Emerging, AI-driven techniques of hyper-nudging and hyper-relevance address themselves to our senses of nearness and farness. Hyper-relevance is particularly significant as it is proleptic in trying to anticipate concernful engagement, without directly soliciting it, by transforming the conditions of possibility for modes of attending. I call such techniques ambient engineering, which are concerned with transforming the conditions for producing salience. Ambient engineering has consequences for rhetorical practice and theory, including greater focus on subattentive engagements, and thus also an elision of more traditional forms of suasion.