The Attention-and-Time-Costs of Sourcing
JUNE 28TH, 2026
In today's post for the Public Domain Art Portal (PDAP), I mentioned that I'd had trouble finding reliable sources for a piece.
This isn't unusual, and it concerns me because the attention-and-time-costs of maintaining the PDAP are increasing amidst the rising tide of enshittification, scrapers, and slop.
Even with chatbot assistance, every week it feels like it's getting incrementally more difficult and time-consuming for me — an art enthusiast with no art history training or institutional affiliations — to find sources I trust amidst the AI slop and increasingly locked-down art sites.
Fortunately I've already saved a lot of source links in my Obsidian files that can be included in future PDAP posts, so I'll be OK for quite awhile. But fully half of the thousands of images I've collected and would like to share for the PDAP do not currently have verified, trustworthy sources listed. Many of these images were collected in the days before the internet became enshittified and AI-dominated.
For the time being I find myself relying more heavily than I'd like on Wikimedia Commons for sourcing, in part because I don't have to pay an attention-and-time-tax by checking a box or creating an account or solving a captcha or what-the-hell-ever to prove I'm not a bot when I visit the site. The mini-taxes on time and attention can add up quickly, and the accumulated frustration impacts my enjoyment of the project too.
I wonder... how many reliable sources will I manage to save in my files before the attention-and-time-costs become too high for me to continue?
Image: The Fruits of Commerce - oil painting by John La Farge (1885)
