The Epistemic-Attentional Scissors: A Conceptual Framework for Epistemic Abdication and Stratification in AI-Mediated Communication

This concept note introduces the term epistemic-attentional scissors to name the intersection of two cost curves that cut only when they close together. The first blade is productive: the marginal cost of fabricating plausible content — text, image, video — approaches zero with generative AI. The second blade is attentional: the attention budget available for verifying that content also approaches zero, not by accident but by design, in an ecosystem that monetizes attentional capture. Where the blades close, verification becomes economically irrational for the individual: epistemic abdication is not a citizen failure but a rational response to a cost structure. The note makes four moves. First, it argues that the scissors do not close symmetrically: the same technological condition that blinds the citizen improves the relative epistemic position of actors with data-fusion infrastructure, making the scissors a mechanism of epistemic stratification. Second, it specifies the mechanism of abdication, distinguishing two doors — a trust door (miscalibrated confidence in AI systems) and a budget door (rational impossibility of verification even under distrust) — which would jointly explain both credulity and generalized cynicism. Third, it identifies the dynamic that completes the mechanism — a delegation loop in which verification is entrusted to systems of the same class, and potentially the same lineage, as those that produce the content — and states a closure condition — the threshold past which growth in machine verification stops adding effective verification — within a framework where effective verification is V_eff = V_h + (1 − ρ)·V_m and ρ, the producer-verifier error correlation, is proposed as the missing observable of the field. Fourth, it translates the framework into policy: if abdication is structural, effective responses must be infrastructural and collective — media and information literacy as infrastructure, attention as a commons, content provenance — with the municipal scale as laboratory. A research agenda for the full working paper closes the note. Keywords: epistemic-attentional scissors; epistemic abdication; epistemic stratification; attention economy; generative AI; verification; misinformation; trust calibration; media and information literacy; AI-mediated communication; delegated verification; producer-verifier error correlation; closure condition; LLM-as-a-judge ---