Really nice think piece on the discourse of attention in the modern world
Thank you for the podcast tip!
And just to derail: itās kind of interesting how conviviality has turned up for me in the most unexpected places this past week. Even more interesting as my vacation just started, and itās been (and will be for another 5 weeks) spent constantly in company with other people. Iām normally very much a loner. I like how life just gives you these little nudges sometimes.
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Whats your take some of the themes in the article @Srinath? As an actually free person, are there any points in particular that stand out as important?
I think Mr. Sacasas did an excellent job addressing what seems to amount as beliefs and half-baked ideas that his peers have been pushing. A lot of these beliefs are currently shared by many people I meet and interact with.
He imagines that under alternative models, such as subscription based services for example, companies would be incentivized to offer better products: āFacebook and other social media companies have to ask, āWhat does Sean want?ā Oh, Sean wants to be able to pay attention. Letās design our app not to maximally hack and invade his attention and ruin it, but to help him heal his attention.ā In my view, this overestimates the power of benevolent design and underestimates the internal forces that lead us to seek out distraction. Something must, at the end of the day, be asked of us, too.
Something must, at the end of the day, be asked of us, too.
Mr. Sacasas hits the nail on the head with that line, imo.
Klein and Illing, while both sympathetic to Hariās concerns, expressed a certain skepticism about his proposals. Thatās understandable. In this case, as in so many others, I donāt believe that policy tweaks, regulations, shifting economic models, or newer technologies built on the same assumptions will solve the most fundamental challenges posed by our technological milieu. Such measures may have their role to play, no doubt. But I would characterize these measures as grand but ultimately inadequate gestures that appeal to us exactly to the degree that they appear to require very little of us while promising to deliver swift, technical solutions. For my part, I think more modest and seemingly inadequate measures, like tending more carefully to our language and cultivating ways of speaking that bind us more closely to the world, will, in the admittedly long, very long run, prove more useful and more enduring.
That was really well said. And itās very nuanced to recognize the impact attending to our language has.
Vibe shift coming for us all soon! 
ā¦we are not addicted to devices [ā¦] we are addicted to one another, to the affirmation of our valueāour very beingāthat comes from other human beings. We are addicted to being validated by our peers.
I think this is the most important point of this whole thingā¦ itās not just that we seek out social interactions as a driver of our attention, but all of our interactions are socially driven, even when we are alone- āI am humanity and humanity is me.ā Whether that is a flighty, ADHD seeking (as the author is bringing up here), or a long, slow, deep, exhaustive seeking - the end-goal is still social validation in some form or another.
Perhaps it is the case in such moments that we do not want to be alone with our thoughts. But perhaps just as often we simply donāt want to be alone.
The other side of this is all the times that weāre in someoneās company and really desire to be alone, or to be in someone elseās company!
We desire to be seen and acknowledged. To exercise meaningful degrees of agency and judgment. In short, to belong and to matter. Social media trades on these desires, exploits them, deforms them, and never truly satisfies them, which explains a good deal of the madness.
This props up the fantasy that this desire can ever be satisfied by anythingā¦ almost everyone lives in this delusion, that if only they or others behaved in a certain manner that this loneliness would vanish, but as Richard discovered the loneliness has deeper roots and a different source.
āNothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.ā
This experience is why Richardās claim that we are fundamentally frightened, lonely children in the world immediately rang as true for me
āThe only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion. And yet it is the greatest of our miseries. For it is that above all which prevents us thinking about ourselves and leads us to destruction. But for that we should be bored, and boredom would drive us to seek some more solid means of escape, but diversion passes our time and brings us imperceptibly to our death.ā
The following point that some themes & subjects have much more of a tendency to draw human attention is especially on pointā¦ I would argue again that most of what we do (as humans) is somewhat calculated to generate positive attention, or any attention at all in times when there is none
ā¦our attention is more readily elicited by that which presents itself as being somehow āfor me,ā by that which, as Thomas de Zengotita has put it, flatters me by seeming to center the world on me.
It isnāt arranged so that you can experience it, you didnāt plan to experience it ā¦ Thatās when we are not being addressed. Thatās when we go without the flattery intrinsic to representation.
This is an interesting statement, and it reminds me of the experience of the mystic wherein everything that happens is some coded message from God, in other words everything is the flattery intrinsic to representation.
Asking what āgoodā we are chasing is a great question which reveals that as feeling-beings weāre not even sure what weāre trying to accomplish, just chasing whatever instinctual feeling next comes across us. So thereās all this āoptimizingā and planning for something that we donāt even understand. It makes sense in this context how popular religion or whatever other āschemeā isā¦ it gives us something to do!
I was playing some video games last night and I was noticing how in games thereās structure inherent to the rules of the game, where the direct experiencing of the world doesnāt have that type of structure, itās very open. I think a lot of why I (and many others) are attracted to games is because of that structure, it makes it clear what success is, when I am doing the āright thingā and the āwrong thing,ā it tells me where to place my attention.
In the actual world this refuge doesnāt exist, and āIā am like this cockroach forever scuttling for cover in some rule-system to feel safe, to feel like Iām doing āthe right thing.ā I suppose that is what ego is.
tending more carefully to our language and cultivating ways of speaking that bind us more closely to the world, will, in the admittedly long, very long run, prove more useful and more enduring.
Thatās a very āliteratiā conclusion to come to right there
ā
For my part, I certainly experience this difficulty focusingā¦ I think it is a mix of the cornucopia of entertainment options available a fingertip away, and a simple insecurityā¦ āIā have things I imagine I want to pay attention to, but the āIā that is is also constantly being distracted away by various other things that are also attractive to āIā
There is another wrinkle here, which is that frequently the diversion of attention comes when a fear crops upā¦ it may be a subtle one, but there is a desire to escape from the present situation which manifests as distraction. So this is all another way of attempting to make āmeā live in the present, when really āIā want nothing to do with what is happening right nowā¦ āIā eternally wish to be else-where, to be attending elsewhere.
So attention is the same as reduction of the selfā¦ with no āme,ā Iām just paying attention to whatever is happeningā¦ apperception.
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@edzd @henryyyyyyyyyy nice thoughts and agreed.
I guess I liked that he traces the anxiety about technology and its effects on attention to the 19th century in its current form. But possibly much earlier than that if we get looser with our definitions and look outside the West e.g. Buddhismās āmonkey mindā.
I think that parking the problem closer to our essential nature as a species - rather than something āout thereā that is fucking us up is the right move. But he doesnāt let techno-culture off the hook either. As to what extent a fully free person can avoid being captured by these forces Iām not sure. To a good extent yes, based on my experience as someone with an extant social identity. But I donāt think one can entirely escape being a product of ones times.
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