The struggle for attention as the prime moral challenge of our time
I’m posting this from Andrew Curry mainly so I don’t forget the books referenced (already added to my Literal.club queue) and so that I can remember to check back on the Strother School of Radical Attention that he mentions.
Sadly, their awesome-looking courses are either in-person (US) or online at times where it’s the early hours of the morning here in the UK.
There’s something of a history now of writing about the commodification of attention as a feature of late stage capitalism. [Rhoda] Feng [writing in The American Prospect] spotlights a few. Tim Wu’s book The Attention Merchants traces this back to its origins in the late 19th century. James Williams’ Stand out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy positions the struggle for attention as the prime moral challenge of our time. Williams had previously worked for Google. The more recent collection Scenes of Attention: Essays on Mind, Time, and the Senses “took a multidisciplinary approach”, exploring the interplay between attention and practices like pedagogy, Buddhist meditation, and therapy.
[…]
In her review, Feng critiques the framing here of attention as scarcity—essentially an economics version that goes back to Herbert Simon in the 1970s—he said, presciently, “that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Frankly, it is more serious than that: as James Williams says in Stand Out of Our Light,
“the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information … but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes.” The issue, one might say, is less about scarcity than sovereignty.
There are pockets of resistance which are trying to reclaim our sovereignty. Feng points to Friends of Attention, new to me, whose Manifesto calls for the emancipation of attention.
Source: Just Two Things
Image: Markus Spiske