The Attention Economy

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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There’s a good book of philosophy called 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep where the author talks about the attention economy of eyeballs looking at screens. This was published over 10 years ago now, before smart phones were really a ubiquitous thing and before social media became what it is today. The book is free to read online, btw.

The attention economy has grown to become dominant in all of our lives. Most of our lives are governed by it. Right now, as I look at the glowing screen in front of me and type these words, I am within the (digital) attention economy. Key word here is digital. Technically all of life is an attention economy but it was only weaponized to its current form when it became digital.

This modern attention economy leads to dopamine-trigger addiction which leads to tolerance and burnout over time. We need that next hit, the next thing on the screen to draw our attention. Crary in his book focuses on the whole eyeballs on the screen thing, I focus on what happens in the mind. We become addicted (that’s not a good word, I will use habituated instead) – we become habituated, to needing some small little flash or movement on a digital screen to keep our dopamine hits continuously triggering. The designers of smart phones, social media and gaming apps certainly know this and have exploited this aspect of human psychology.

There’s not much we can do other than try and limit our time in this space, and be aware of how it affects us. Nothing about reading a book or living in the real world compares, we become more passive and dependent as we habituate more and more to the digital attention economy giving us the nonstop hits of attention and rewarded good feels. It comes to the point where we don’t even care what we are doing online so long as we are doing something online that adequately allows this process to unfold.

Then think about Apple Vision and other similar products that are rolling out now. They actively shoot lasers into your eyes to track your eye movements. But what is more crazy is how they can algorithmically map your mind via the association between what content is put on the screen and how your eyes respond to it. Probably this is already occurring. And with the addition of eye movement tracking the process becomes nearly perfect. You can be mapped and then slowly changed over time, anything you think or feel or want or believe becomes potentially subject to subtle change based on how the device produces content and monitors how you interact with that content. Then just imagine the added power of coupling this setup with social credit score systems and CBDC reward-based incentives. Humans really will become lab rats, if they aren’t already.

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Ways of Attending: How our Divided Brain Constructs the World, Iain McGilchrist 2018
Amazon splurge:
"Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. And nowadays in the West we generally attend in a rather unusual way: governed by the narrowly focussed, target-driven left hemisphere of the brain.

Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The result is that one hemisphere is good at utilising the world, the other better at understanding it.

Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal. This book helps you to see what it is you may have been trained by our very unusual culture not to see."