The Sun’s 1986 headline, “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster”, was one of the most attention-grabbing ever produced by any newspaper. Was it true? Who knows? Who cares? Freddie Starr got plenty of publicity from it. In this Information Age everyone is after your attention. As Chris Hayes says in his recent book, Siren’s Call, the Information Age is really the Attention Age. And because information is potentially infinite, but our attention is finite, there is growing friction in the system. Apps like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Netflix utilise the internet and smart phones to constantly grab and hold our attention. Simply because they are monetising it. Money flows where attention goes. But because attention is a scarce resource the market is competitive. You know when the competition for attention is heating up, because you get sensory overload, clickbait, flashing lights, and ringing bells, accompanied by a race to the content bottom. To quote Hayes, “In competitive attention markets, amusement will outcompete information, and spectacle will out compete arguments. The more easily something attracts our attention, the lower its cognitive load, the less friction there is for us to be drawn to it. Why read a book when you can watch a movie? Why read a newspaper when you can play a video game?” Just understanding this is an important first step in reclaiming our focus, our sanity, and perhaps even the planet.
There are many things happening today that we do need to pay clear eyed, focused attention to. Some of these have a high cognitive load, that require us to think long and hard. Climate change, materialism, spirituality, capitalism, the political drift into authoritarianism, artificial intelligence, biodiversity, and life outside this planet. These are just a handful of topics which I believe demand our attention today, but which seem to be getting very little of it, drowned out in a sea of attention-grabbing headlines, apps, videos, games, and ‘celebrities’. In our attention strained state, it’s little wonder that the world’s most powerful nation is being run by a man who demands to be the centre of everyone’s attention all the time. Is this what the apogee of a capitalist system looks like? First it possesses things, then it monetises labour, and then our waking attention. What’s next, adverts in our dreams?
Using apps, playing video games, and watching movies are not bad things by themselves. I do all of these. The problem comes when we spend too much of our limited attention on them, and as a result spend less of it in more productive pursuits. In this distracted age, questioning what we are paying attention to is vital. Having the ability to direct and maintain our focus on what’s important is essential. At least being able to see and to articulate the problem are the first steps. As a society we then need to use our newly liberated attention to focus on the big topics of our times, and then to make serious efforts at addressing the underlying malaise. At its core I believe that the monetising of attention is a symptom, along with climate change and falling biodiversity, of the problem. Which is materialism and its logical offshoot capitalism. These ideas are built on a contradiction of infinite growth with finite resources. This point was made in the 1972 Club of Rome work, The Limits of Growth, which inspired a generation of environmentalists. But wait a minute, I hear you say, the predictions they made about how a system built on limitless growth with finite resources inevitably leads to sudden collapse have not come true, or at least not yet. Is the advent of new technologies, and the capitalist pricing system’s ability to self-correct, enough of a counterbalance, or is it just delaying the inevitable collapse? Do we need to change this model, or will it change by itself when the need arises? And what, if any, are the alternatives? Tune in next week and find out.
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” Mark Twain
