The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary. - Ursula K. Le Guin
Hello Friends,
Is there any way to have a conversation without talking about the events of the past week or so? (Hint: No.)
Recently, I had a very kind friend reach out about a Substack post I wrote a few weeks ago, worried that I shouldn’t have told the story of my dreams about Trump and his sycophants. But I figure Trump fans are not going to want to read anything on Be a Cactus, so no harm. (Unless they are members of my extended family—then they put up with me. 😁) The narrative that most upset her was my dream about Trump delivering his poo goo to the American people. Well, well—two weeks later and here we are! It was a premonition! 😉
At first, I couldn’t believe what I was reading about Trump posting images of himself as a king—defecating on Americans—but also of Vice President J.D. Vance in a royal crown, suggesting that American democracy has been supplanted by tyranny that will last past Trump into the future. I imagine you’ve seen these, but in case you think I am making this up:
Trump reposting a JD Vance post of Trump in a crown
Trump pilot video (Trump crapping on the American people)
If the psychological/mental illness aspect of all this interests you, have a look here:
As Ron Charles said: “This week, Trump’s tireless spectacle has moved from dumping virtual excrement on Americans to literally tearing down parts of the White House, reifying in fractured stone and shattered timbers what many once dismissed as mere hyperbole about the destruction of democracy.”
So—Since Trump ‘rules’ through social media posts, I’ve been interested in the pull of social media. Why is it so compelling, why do we pay attention? From my local library, I checked out:
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The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes
“The problem with the main thrust of the current critiques of the attention economy and the scourge of social media is that (with some notable exceptions) they don’t actually go far enough.” (11)
Before you inform, insult, seduce, or anything else, you must make sure that your voice doesn’t end up in the muted background static that is 99.9 percent of speech directed our way. Public discourse is now a war of all against all for attention. Commerce is a war for attention. Social life is a war for attention. Parenting is a war for attention. And we are all feeling battle weary.” (25)
“The more diversion we have access to, the more diversion we crave. The more diversion we need, the more quickly we become bored.” (73)
Here are my thoughts:
The Sirens’ Call begins slowly with background on various technological developments throughout history. Each, in its own time, created worry over the human ability to focus. We might laugh at our forebears’ anxiety that the written word would be the end of human attention, but it makes sense in its time. Since then humankind has worried over the invention of the radio, television, video games, and more. If none of those things caused the end of civilization, how is our current reliance on the smart phone and its tech cousins different?
Religious ritual was an early form of paying-attention-together. Concerts and plays do the same. Even TV and video once had that quality—chatting during commercials or everyone deciding on what to bring home from Blockbuster to watch together. “With each new technology, and with each new development, the experience of shared spectacle is replaced with isolated attention. What once was collective experience becomes solitary.” (147) Or at least asynchronous.
In looking at how groups and corporations have tried to catch people’s attention over the centuries, Hayes begins with a review of Odysseus’ adventure in hearing the sirens’ song. He then defines a siren’s call as one that “compel[s] our attention against our will” as police, ambulances, and fire trucks must do. (3) While he quotes William James’ The Principles of Psychology (1890) as defining ‘experience’ as what we agree to attend to, we now feel that we don’t agree to much of our experience. Our phone in our pocket is a “little attention box” that “pulses there like Gollum’s ring.” (4)
Too many of today’s sirens announce information that has nothing to do with emergencies.
Information is unlimited. Attention is finite. And unlike resources that exist outside ourselves (oil, coal, land), attention is embedded in our psyches. “Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” (12)
How, then, does someone ‘crack into our minds?’ It’s not particularly difficult. We involuntarily pay attention to some things because, through evolution, we have become wired to do so, just as we are wired to enjoy junk food.
“That system of compulsory, preconscious attention provides the lowest common denominator for those seeking to extract our attention from us. It’s the attentional equivalent of fast food, and you can find it anywhere from a casino floor to Times Square to your iPhone. The world’s largest corporations, brightest minds, and most powerful entities expend staggering resources seeking to compel us to look at and listen to what they want us to. The junk food isn’t just what we put in our bodies; it’s increasingly what we feed our minds. We end up snacking until our very souls feel over full and queasy.” (46)
The second answer to ‘what will we pay attention to?’ is ‘anything.’ As examples Hayes gives the subjects of YouTube videos with millions of views: door ringer repair and unboxing videos. Add to this the fact that social media corporations track our habits and give us what we want without our asking. “Over time this process, thanks to machine learning, and the efficiencies of genuinely competitive markets, will get better and better, finding what grabs your attention at a given moment and giving you nothing but that.” (53-4)
Hayes has read widely and, throughout the book, quotes from or discusses literature both ancient and contemporary to highlight the fact that attention, distraction, and boredom have always been human issues.
“‘When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men,’ philosopher Blaise Pascal observes in his collection of essays, Pensées, published in 1670, ‘I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.’” (60)
Nearly two centuries later, Soren Kierkegaard wrote that boredom is the root of all evil. Hayes notes that boredom in the post-industrial age is compounded by tedious jobs in which many workers don’t produce an entire anything on their own, but rather perform the same task repeatedly. Since we cannot attend to our work, we attend to other people. Attending to loved ones is positive, of course. The trap is in attending to everyone in our field of attention, including online influencers. “[U]nlike the aspects of relationships that give life meaning, social attention is not inherently reciprocal” (91) and loneliness may be the outcome. Add to that, when social attention is paid to us online, it can be quite negative and emotionally damaging. Caring too much about what others think of him is Willy Loman’s flaw in The Death of a Salesman, and it is becoming the fate we all have. While the fault may lie in ourselves, scrolling technology makes it a lot worse. Attention, no longer a means to an end, becomes the end itself. Without it, we feel alienated.
Yet it wasn’t so very long ago when the general public could attend to a serious subject—slavery—in multiple three-hour debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. It was also the era when things began to shift, beginning with The Sun ‘newspaper’ in 1859, which used the technique we now think of as clickbait (crazy headlines, often gruesome details).
By the 1970s, students of the digital revolution were warning us about what was to come. In Future Shock,one of things Alvin Toffler got right was that information overload creates a kind of PTSD. Nobel Prize economist Herbert Simon’s 1971 lecture “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” warns that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” Unfortunately, information providers did not heed his call to help people filter and manage that information.
From Pascal onward, the need to allocate our attention wisely has been on the minds of great thinkers. Even George Saunders (one of my favorite writers) has a moment in Hayes’ discussion of “The Braindead Megaphone.”
A contemporary source Hayes discusses is David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest—which I am guilty of starting and never finishing. He notes that what in 1996 was the basis for a novel—entertainment that colonizes a person’s attention so thoroughly that they watch it until they die—is now our reality. And here is the crux of Hayes’ argument: “[I]nfinite entertainment is now what we confront: A film ends. A TV show ends. A board game, even a long one, ultimately ends. But the scroll on the phone has no finite limit. You could, theoretically, scroll TikTok until the end of your days. It’s the source of infinite jest.” (71) Add to this that the source of the endless scroll is portable.
“Designed by Silicon Valley engineer Aza Raskin, the infinite scroll changed the way the web worked. Once upon a time, you would arrive at the end of the webpage. If you wanted to read more, you had to click somewhere, akin to turning a page. But Raskin got rid of this tiny little bit of intentional friction. Now, on X or Facebook, you can just gently edge your thumb down on your phone and keep going.” (71)
Since politics has become an endless social media festival, Hayes includes the “signature aspect of the Trump years”: “people watching coverage and complaining that the coverage is excessive … a particular kind of alienating experience in which audiences rebelled against outlets that were giving them what, according to the numbers, they were demanding.” (140) In a later chapter (“Public Attention”), he more thoroughly covers how Trump is “repellent but transfixing” and receives ‘value neutral’ attention. (212) Trump’s success with this is highly unusual, as most people who come off as constantly nasty (Kari Lake, Hershel Walker, etc.) do not get the most votes.
One frightening and necessary reminder of how powerful attention is: quite early, Fox News called the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona, which resulted in fallout with their base. To recover viewers who had pivoted to Newsmax and One America News, Fox turned to lying about the election results (and later had to pay Dominion, the maker of voting machines, $787 million because of those lies).
Sadly, just as labor has been commodified, so too has our attention, leading to ‘surveillance capitalism’—which is how the back-end business of the internet makes money by using “ever more information about its users to target ads” (172)—and spam. Public discourse is often reduced to trolling, whataboutism, and conspiracism.
“‘We used to colonize land, that was the thing you could expand into. And that’s where money was to be made … They are now trying to colonize every minute of your life they’re coming for every second of your life.’” (Quoting Bo Burnham, 144)
in the chapter “Reclaiming Our Minds,” Hayes has some advice for doing just that, which include leaning in on some older technology: vinyl records for a complete listening experience, print newspapers for an organized and hierarchical reading experience, DVDs for a single viewing experience that ends when the movie does, dumb phones, apps that reject ‘growth hacking’ and more. This also means paying attention to who is trying to get your attention and noting whether they are actually in a relationship with you.
You may think, “Oh I already know social media is a cesspool.” But Sirens’ Call is well worth reading for the depth and for the consideration of how attention and experience have been examined over the centuries.
In the index, you can look up lots of attention-grabbing people and look back at how they ‘leverage attention into cash’—Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, even Volodymyr Zelenskyy (who has converted attention to himself into money for his country’s war against Russia). There is also one of the very few people who has been able to spend money (billions of dollars—cash into attention, a reversal) to garner attention to himself—Elon Musk.
“The age we’re living through is akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism.” (217) … “[W]e must keep people’s attention and tell them things that are important for self governance in a democratic society.” (221)
Thanks for reading!
