I want to talk about attention. Some conversation about it is embedded in the zeitgeist as people try to cope with Trump slurry. It's weaponized by social media and courted from every corner by those with something to sell. It's at once something we're invited to try, desperately, to protect, but often find ourselves at the mercy of whatever ride it's on. That ride is increasingly dictated by A.I. and algorithms that understand human patterns of attention better than any human ever could.
I just paused a song I was listening to because it was drawing too deeply from my attention. That I had an unconscious instinct to listen to music while I wrote in the first place is it's own thing to examine. Now paused, I'm hearing the noises around the library I'm attempting to write in. "My" attention is hardly my own, and even attempts to focus it or dial it in can do precisely the exact opposite. The Mormon "regulars" I see here as often as I come just walked in. Time to write about their baby faces and religion? No, of course not.
I've been dipping pretty heavily into my TV shows. It's when I reflect on them that I can better recognize patterns related to my attention. I like getting hit with absurd premises that contain mysteries that you'll find in certain kinds of anime like Assassination Classroom or No Game No Life. I really want to know how/if they're going to kill the teacher, and I was curious as fuck how they would win games. The solutions were creative and not things I could immediately access. At the same time, I could trust there was going to be a reasonable solution. My investment and expectation of that resolution wasn't going to be betrayed as something easy or arbitrary.
This key observation alone is why most things aren't particularly compelling. The problem is simple, the solution is simple, and 99 out of 100 times, the story of why you are or aren't getting a desired result is some kind of negligence or arbitrariness. It undermines the inclination to desire anything from your interaction at all. Soap operas made a genre out of this sensibility. The ZoMg RaNdOm vein of cartoons did the same thing. Think GIR in Invader Zim. A child will laugh at peek-a-boo. An adult who does so at the functional equivalent of that game is, charitably, undercooked.
The game Last War takes a solid portion of my attention over the last few months. It's by design, needing to click dozens of different things in order to achieve the simplest ends. 90% of the time I spend tapping could be done with a single button or different design, but then I wouldn't be on the game for nearly as long. The longer I'm on, the more familiar it feels, the more I can find myself in little lottery-adjacent feelings of "winning" or "collecting." The more it can invite me to buy something, or join digs, or engage in the chat, the more "I" will begin to "identify" with the whatever I'm doing in the game as a natural extension of me and what I like to do.
Thankfully, I'm not an addictive type nor is it something I do instead of something more compelling. It's a shitting, TV-watching, or waiting-around kind of thing, and I happen to spend a lot of time doing just that. At the same time, a new question arises of why I have so much time on my hands. Why would, by malicious design, a phone game or bad TV show take up hours of every day? Like, isn't fascism ascendant? There's no real world problem and movement to be a part of? No door to rattle? No incredibly pressing concerns to organize around? Could I not be dumping my proverbial bucket of water on so many inviting fires?
We don't want to falsely equivocate or frame things in a way that are absurd and impossible. You could call any set of personal life responsibilities your set of fires to keep contained. You might also do a perfectly reasonable job of doing so your entire life. Until recently, your life wasn't just whatever was cultivated between you and the algorithm. It would follow more matter-of-factually what your responsibility to our shared reality was. Once we started leaning into the active fracturing and arresting of our attention, there was nothing left to share but vibes and feelings.
When it's not a TV show or a capitally malicious design of a video game, I have a certain amount of attention when I have an opportunity to teach. When I'm exercising my brain to adequately translate what I've learned, I'm not thinking about picking up my phone or how the world is burning. There's a lot of information that, at one point, was new to me, and helped me form a more coherent narrative around my experience and decision making. The chance to talk about those things reinvigorates. The opportunity to see someone's confidence grow because they took and ran with something you passed on can't be matched by doing anything less.
We carry on like we're not being taught every day. We're being taught that "the way" to one mind state, social status, or sense of achievement is through engagement with the systems on hand. How do you answer questions? Brand name. How do you find food? Brand name. How do you date? Brand name. You wouldn't know human society had a way of operating before apps. Wanna be happy? Apply the right filter. Want to achieve financial success? Pump and dump and create a brand once you've hawk tuah'd our imaginations.
There is no concept of long-term anything in the minds of regular folk. Invest? Invest what? The money you don't have? In the country doom-casted via breaking news every few moments? In the kids who can't read as they don't have real teachers nor anyone interested in paying or educating altogether? Invest in your career about to be overtaken by A.I.? Invest in your family sitting under the modern awakening as to what constitutes generational abuse and trauma? Truly, what's the point if it's not viral?
What goes viral? Sometimes it's absurd for the sake of absurd. Often it's "impassioned plea" or "indignant finger-wag." Anything that can confirm the ongoing fear and dread experienced by the third of the country/world with decently working brains. The truth of the feelings on full display. The exact opposite of focused attention, forever on offer, dopaminergic provocation.
Well, I know this. You might profess to know it, but I have my suspicions. Time to turn off this blog and step back into the mess, no? Take no heed of the warnings offered by Sam Harris and his Waking Up...app.
I get attention to write because there's an ongoing mystery to being alive and how to resolve the slurry. At the end, I usually feel some form of resolution, even if it's never complete. I feel, deeply, all of my standing hatred for things, judgmental thoughts, itchiness, need to shit, fullness, neck pain, or exhaustion, and the infinite series of moments between me and one where I choose how to go about things.
It's easier to let things burn when you stay aware of and accountable to the things you're not allowing to go that way. My responsibility will always be to speak to them, even if I can't fix them. I can always strive to be honest to my experience, and how it gets away from me. I'm not at the mercy of the chaos though. That's something I don't think most people can assert for themselves most of the time. If more war breaks out, or roving bands of illegal militias start going door to door, I can make peace with getting the fuck out, or I can bemoan how the circumstances I took for granted have gone away. I can only do that if I attend to that potential reality, not proactively submit to its inevitability.
So it goes with so many preventable catastrophic scenarios. I think we lack imagination for how bad it's been, can get, and is likely to be if we keep allowing ourselves the excuses for not paying attention. It's one of the best concepts. Yes, you have to pay. It has to cost you something, and if you value that cost, you'll ensure you're filling your attention with things that help more than hurt. Like any addict, you'll need to accept the broad nature of how that hurt manifests first. You'll have to identify how it intersects with every area of your life. You'll need to establish boundaries and find the bravery and sense of ownership that let's you invite the consequences of holding them. So, you know, we're fucked lol.
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