“The World’s Most Endangered Resource”
It means almost nothing to them, and everything to us.
The next ATTN CLUB meeting will take place at The Shop in Crescent Hill on Tuesday, January 28 at 6pm.
I woke up at 4 this morning with a sense of panic. I was thinking about taxes and my upcoming travels. When I realized I wouldn’t be able to sleep, I went to my office and I tried to journal, to locate the source of my unease. Only in the past year or so have I been able to reliably identify that although I might be having a feeling, the feeling doesn’t directly reflect any new, emergent reality. Instead, different aspects of my lived experience dip in and out of my awareness, and their importance is inflected by my mood, by chemical exchanges happening in my body.
So, I went out to dinner with Claire last night, and we played minigolf to offset the single-digits winter doldrums, and I didn’t think once about wildfires in Los Angeles or Trump’s inauguration or the potential impact on my job as a result of tariffs on Canadian goods. (If you thought homes were expensive now, wait till you find out where we get much of our dimensional lumber. But I digress.) As you can tell, these thoughts crept back into my mind like the frigid arctic air leaking in around the window frames in our drafty old apartment. I tend to think these things woke me up without my conscious awareness of them.
Though I’d already unsubscribed from the New York Times, and mostly stopped reading the news, I still saw death and destruction on Instagram, I saw Trump announcing that the US will only recognize two genders, I saw the commentariat snippets of Elon Musk sieg heil-ing. My theoretically nonpolitical Reddit feed is equally compromised. I have no reason to believe things will go back to “normal.” I have no reason to believe I can absorb these things without them changing me. So I am faced with a choice, again and again, at every moment, to recuse myself, to not pick up my phone to peer into the social media void.
On the latest Ezra Klein Show episode (“Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.”), Chris Hayes discusses his new book The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. He is viewing it first through a lens of politics, and the political dimension of attention cannot to be overstated. But in describing what has happened to our attention, and how our oligarchic overlords bluntly wield it, he touches on the way in which all personal things shade political. He compares what has happened to attention with what happened to labor during the Industrial Revolution:
“When Marxists say that labor was the source of all value, they were right. In the aggregate, take away all the workers and the Industrial Revolution doesn’t happen. But to the individual worker in the sweatshop, the little slice of labor that you’re producing is both everything you have as a person and worth nothing in the market, almost nothing. And I think we have the same thing with attention.”
I find this description deeply poignant. You may or may not know that the extra bit of time it takes to load a webpage does not indicate your internet speed; rather, it is a near-instantaneous auction happening to determine how many fractions of a penny your eyeballs are worth and, consequently, which ads will load on your webpage. This is worth almost nothing to them. Yet look what it has done — is doing — to us.
Thinking I should get all this dying off of my mind.
I should really know better than to read the headlines.
Does it matter if I see it?
No, really, can I not just cover my eyes?
— The Weather Station, “Atlantic”