Here is a proposition for you to consider: you and I have exactly as much attention as we need. In fact, I’d invite you to do more than consider it. Take it out for a spin in the world. See if proceeding on this assumption doesn’t change how you experience life, maybe not radically, but perhaps for the better.
I very much appreciate the challenge to the framework of attention as a resource. It definitely exposes the intrusion of economics. But it’s quite difficult to escape the intrusion of economics because of how profoundly our society is shaped by economics. It doesn’t just affect the way we think about things; it shapes the reality itself, which forms us in particular ways that most people don’t even know how to resist, even as it deforms us and diminishes what it means to be human. As I was reading this, it occurred to me that the tendency to think of attention as a resource is intimately tied to the tendency to think of time as a resource, or commodity, since attention dwells within the realm of time; and time has clear, immovable boundaries. That tendency is then tied to the idea or value of productivity. Americans in the upper-middle class in particular tend to be quite married to our schedules because of the way we guard “our” time. As a result, we don’t easily welcome intrusions, disruptions, or interruptions. Even in my own lifetime this represents a major shift. When I was growing up, it was commonplace for us to spontaneously drop in and see neighborhood kids and friends. Now, people, including children, are so scheduled that if a child wants to see a friend who lives one street over or even across the street, a parent needs to call ahead (but it’s better to text because people don’t like to talk on the phone if they don’t have to). Also, so many parents have given their children smartphones even at a young age that children just communicate through apps. Those without them just… don’t get communicated with. All of these things work against the spirit of hospitality (and thus conviviality). I find it incredibly depressing. It’s been hard for us as a family to find place-based community in every large city we’ve moved to over the last 14 years because of these dynamics. We invite people over and attempt to build relationships, but we ultimately find it nearly impossible to overcome certain fixed social structures. What I mean by that is that in more affluent neighborhoods, the people who live there are part of social clubs or churches of their choice (which as rarely neighborhood churches), and they send their kids to private schools. The loci of human connection for them become those places rather than the neighborhood. They’ll be friendly to you as a neighbor, but they won’t easily enfold you or be enfolded because their social energies are already committed elsewhere. Everyone in the neighborhood is super busy and super scheduled, but not in a way that builds a sense of neighborhood or neighborly cohesion. The leisure time and incidental meetings on the sidewalk that are required to make a place feel like A PLACE feel incredibly scarce. That supports the overall feeling that people’s attention is a scarce commodity. But it shouldn’t be this way. I feel that for those who do “well” within the larger capitalistic system, the endless accumulation of material wealth and possessions, the need to support those acquisitions (additional mortgages, additional car payments) by working more and more, the internalized value of productivity over being, and the pursuit of individualistic goals over communal ones have altogether created a reality that actively works against the formation of community.
And for the working poor, there’s something else going on related to time. For them, there’s a sense that time is tied not just to productivity but to survival. Time is shackled to survival because of how the economy is structured. Their labor is assigned a low value, which translates to low wages. In order for them to live (pay for food, rent, bills), they have no choice but to work many hours. In this way, their time is stolen from them, so time does become scarce, and it’s arguable that the attention they wish to apply to certain things follows suit. They can’t even give their children the time and attention they wish to give them. And then, before they know it, they’re grown. For them, debates about the attention economy as it relates to screen time isn’t relevant. But discussions about how scarcity is externally imposed by a draconian economic system is.
The image first: I teared up while reading this post, the kind of tears purely symptomatic: somewhere down deep, something stirred that caused a ripple on the surface. No definable emotion; just the ripple. I’ll come back to this.
Lump 1: About scarcity of attention, metaphor defies the value/good binary. Maybe that’s why we love metaphor. It allows us hold two values at once, without having to choose. Immanuel Kant’s “purposelessness” of a work of art approaches this goal, too, because for Kant, every element in an organic work of art has a purpose, though the work is art *because* it lacks utilitarian purpose.
Lump 2. But we can’t escape a feeling of purpose. Even if attention to our children serves “good” for its own sake (and we can call that an analytic proposition that outlasts momentary attention: what’s good is what’s worth doing for its own sake), purpose matters very much because of that pesky “for.” My high-school students are now watching The Truman Show, whose date coincides with the birth of the attention economy you describe. These Instagrammers and TikTokers are still repulsed by the film’s premise on the one hand: how could a person’s life be used so coldly? But on the other, as long as they *feel* they control the attention paid to them in the attention economy, they feel they have that currency to spend.
My point here is that despite having commoditized themselves in the college admission and meritocratic traps, they have a keen sense of the good, almost a yearning for it (I’m picturing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) ; the film’s conceit is a metaphor for what matters, what is worth pursuing regardless of its current market value.
this is brilliant, thank you! since time is so related to attention, I tried on the phrase "I have all the time I need" and was struck by how different this is from how I feel almost all the time. As an artist who spends so much of my time in what could maybe be considered "vernacular activities" (making artistic work with the knowledge that I will never see any kind of economic compensation), not to mention all the other important activities that come with daily life, being able to justify vernacular activities in what feels like a time/money-scarce context, has been an interesting challenge over the years. A couple years ago I remember reading some interesting words from Jessica Abel about the "scarcity tunnel", and in particular how it relates to artists. The idea that when you feel things are truly, pressingly scarce (be it food, time, money), it totally changes your psychology and reduces your bandwidth to make decisions about your life. It's very anxiety provoking to constantly feel this way about time, and it's rare for me to not feel that I am close to "burning out". And being this way certainly doesn't offer me the bandwidth to be receptive to what might actually be "good" in any given moment.
One more: I play squash, an indoor racquet sport with a small and not very bouncy ball. The pleasure of focused attention on that ball, even for brief seconds, feels transcendently good. There is something of Prospero’s speech in The Tempest here; temporary transcendence that can’t be bought or sold because it is here, now. And then gone. Like those children.
I also think “value” is problematic. Here, when opposed to “good” it denotes monetary worth, cost, that which can be measured, compared, counted, but for me its first sense is of values, like virtue, or loyalty. And I thought that you / Illich should use a word like cost, or amount, but actually its ambiguity is part of its usefulness - it’s precisely because we confuse the value of something (its monetary worth) with the value of something (its “goodness”) that we get into a muddle. My time / attention has value - I can sell it to someone - but it also has value in that deeper sense; I should respect it more, treat it with more care.
Thanks for the interesting probe. For me, its benefit is in the extent to which it foregrounds my tacit or explicit choices about what's good, and my attention's alignment with them.
I'm eager to read the next installment furthering this line to speak to our embodied presence. Lately, I'm running the opposite direction, wondering whether these metaphors of scarcity or even economy don't arise at a level much closer to the body than critics often imply. If we reunite attention with its biological, material substrate, the salience of finitude is harder to brush off.
I think Lakoff et al would have to agree. I'm not suggesting that this means metaphors surrounding scarcity are more ontologically basic than others we might employ, just more experientially basic. I'm not sure we need them repeated and amplified by industrial economies in order to have a sense for them, i.e. pacing ourselves in work or exercise, trying to preserve diminishing hearing, or favoring a cracked tooth.
One thing that I'm struggling with here is the large amount of work being done by your use of "the good" and "order". Maybe I just need more explication there, but even if we can achieve sufficient and clear understandings of those (and maybe, in order to ground them, what Goffman would call our "situation"), it seems like you're asking us to accept that these intrinsically can't come into conflict with other goods or orders the way values might. In so doing, I worry that we're dodging the most difficult part of the issue (tragic choices).
There is something that makes certain people instinctively recoil from these reductions, intrusions, and extractionistic, instrumentalized ways of being or of getting away from being. I'm not sure why it appeals to some and is so repellent to others even when their culture has long been assimilated to and shattered by it.
You're going down a good track here. I'm glad you seem to be on a common wavelength now with Ed and Dougald at The Great Humbling, now starting their third season. I look forward to all your voices.
I began by wanting to disagree with you (I’d just persuaded myself how nice it felt that I had something valuable - my attention - to decide to disburse to various deserving causes, such as you) and ending up completely persuaded of your point - that we always have plenty of attention to give, but we have to choose, and do so wholeheartedly, the good things to which we give it - including and perhaps especially, the stand and stare times. I choose to meditate for 2 hours a day, and do so happily in rejecting all those so important (not) other claims, however loudly they seem to shout.
I very much appreciate the challenge to the framework of attention as a resource. It definitely exposes the intrusion of economics. But it’s quite difficult to escape the intrusion of economics because of how profoundly our society is shaped by economics. It doesn’t just affect the way we think about things; it shapes the reality itself, which forms us in particular ways that most people don’t even know how to resist, even as it deforms us and diminishes what it means to be human. As I was reading this, it occurred to me that the tendency to think of attention as a resource is intimately tied to the tendency to think of time as a resource, or commodity, since attention dwells within the realm of time; and time has clear, immovable boundaries. That tendency is then tied to the idea or value of productivity. Americans in the upper-middle class in particular tend to be quite married to our schedules because of the way we guard “our” time. As a result, we don’t easily welcome intrusions, disruptions, or interruptions. Even in my own lifetime this represents a major shift. When I was growing up, it was commonplace for us to spontaneously drop in and see neighborhood kids and friends. Now, people, including children, are so scheduled that if a child wants to see a friend who lives one street over or even across the street, a parent needs to call ahead (but it’s better to text because people don’t like to talk on the phone if they don’t have to). Also, so many parents have given their children smartphones even at a young age that children just communicate through apps. Those without them just… don’t get communicated with. All of these things work against the spirit of hospitality (and thus conviviality). I find it incredibly depressing. It’s been hard for us as a family to find place-based community in every large city we’ve moved to over the last 14 years because of these dynamics. We invite people over and attempt to build relationships, but we ultimately find it nearly impossible to overcome certain fixed social structures. What I mean by that is that in more affluent neighborhoods, the people who live there are part of social clubs or churches of their choice (which as rarely neighborhood churches), and they send their kids to private schools. The loci of human connection for them become those places rather than the neighborhood. They’ll be friendly to you as a neighbor, but they won’t easily enfold you or be enfolded because their social energies are already committed elsewhere. Everyone in the neighborhood is super busy and super scheduled, but not in a way that builds a sense of neighborhood or neighborly cohesion. The leisure time and incidental meetings on the sidewalk that are required to make a place feel like A PLACE feel incredibly scarce. That supports the overall feeling that people’s attention is a scarce commodity. But it shouldn’t be this way. I feel that for those who do “well” within the larger capitalistic system, the endless accumulation of material wealth and possessions, the need to support those acquisitions (additional mortgages, additional car payments) by working more and more, the internalized value of productivity over being, and the pursuit of individualistic goals over communal ones have altogether created a reality that actively works against the formation of community.
And for the working poor, there’s something else going on related to time. For them, there’s a sense that time is tied not just to productivity but to survival. Time is shackled to survival because of how the economy is structured. Their labor is assigned a low value, which translates to low wages. In order for them to live (pay for food, rent, bills), they have no choice but to work many hours. In this way, their time is stolen from them, so time does become scarce, and it’s arguable that the attention they wish to apply to certain things follows suit. They can’t even give their children the time and attention they wish to give them. And then, before they know it, they’re grown. For them, debates about the attention economy as it relates to screen time isn’t relevant. But discussions about how scarcity is externally imposed by a draconian economic system is.
Two lumpy responses, and an image.
The image first: I teared up while reading this post, the kind of tears purely symptomatic: somewhere down deep, something stirred that caused a ripple on the surface. No definable emotion; just the ripple. I’ll come back to this.
Lump 1: About scarcity of attention, metaphor defies the value/good binary. Maybe that’s why we love metaphor. It allows us hold two values at once, without having to choose. Immanuel Kant’s “purposelessness” of a work of art approaches this goal, too, because for Kant, every element in an organic work of art has a purpose, though the work is art *because* it lacks utilitarian purpose.
Lump 2. But we can’t escape a feeling of purpose. Even if attention to our children serves “good” for its own sake (and we can call that an analytic proposition that outlasts momentary attention: what’s good is what’s worth doing for its own sake), purpose matters very much because of that pesky “for.” My high-school students are now watching The Truman Show, whose date coincides with the birth of the attention economy you describe. These Instagrammers and TikTokers are still repulsed by the film’s premise on the one hand: how could a person’s life be used so coldly? But on the other, as long as they *feel* they control the attention paid to them in the attention economy, they feel they have that currency to spend.
My point here is that despite having commoditized themselves in the college admission and meritocratic traps, they have a keen sense of the good, almost a yearning for it (I’m picturing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) ; the film’s conceit is a metaphor for what matters, what is worth pursuing regardless of its current market value.
this is brilliant, thank you! since time is so related to attention, I tried on the phrase "I have all the time I need" and was struck by how different this is from how I feel almost all the time. As an artist who spends so much of my time in what could maybe be considered "vernacular activities" (making artistic work with the knowledge that I will never see any kind of economic compensation), not to mention all the other important activities that come with daily life, being able to justify vernacular activities in what feels like a time/money-scarce context, has been an interesting challenge over the years. A couple years ago I remember reading some interesting words from Jessica Abel about the "scarcity tunnel", and in particular how it relates to artists. The idea that when you feel things are truly, pressingly scarce (be it food, time, money), it totally changes your psychology and reduces your bandwidth to make decisions about your life. It's very anxiety provoking to constantly feel this way about time, and it's rare for me to not feel that I am close to "burning out". And being this way certainly doesn't offer me the bandwidth to be receptive to what might actually be "good" in any given moment.
One more: I play squash, an indoor racquet sport with a small and not very bouncy ball. The pleasure of focused attention on that ball, even for brief seconds, feels transcendently good. There is something of Prospero’s speech in The Tempest here; temporary transcendence that can’t be bought or sold because it is here, now. And then gone. Like those children.
I also think “value” is problematic. Here, when opposed to “good” it denotes monetary worth, cost, that which can be measured, compared, counted, but for me its first sense is of values, like virtue, or loyalty. And I thought that you / Illich should use a word like cost, or amount, but actually its ambiguity is part of its usefulness - it’s precisely because we confuse the value of something (its monetary worth) with the value of something (its “goodness”) that we get into a muddle. My time / attention has value - I can sell it to someone - but it also has value in that deeper sense; I should respect it more, treat it with more care.
Thanks for the interesting probe. For me, its benefit is in the extent to which it foregrounds my tacit or explicit choices about what's good, and my attention's alignment with them.
I'm eager to read the next installment furthering this line to speak to our embodied presence. Lately, I'm running the opposite direction, wondering whether these metaphors of scarcity or even economy don't arise at a level much closer to the body than critics often imply. If we reunite attention with its biological, material substrate, the salience of finitude is harder to brush off.
I think Lakoff et al would have to agree. I'm not suggesting that this means metaphors surrounding scarcity are more ontologically basic than others we might employ, just more experientially basic. I'm not sure we need them repeated and amplified by industrial economies in order to have a sense for them, i.e. pacing ourselves in work or exercise, trying to preserve diminishing hearing, or favoring a cracked tooth.
One thing that I'm struggling with here is the large amount of work being done by your use of "the good" and "order". Maybe I just need more explication there, but even if we can achieve sufficient and clear understandings of those (and maybe, in order to ground them, what Goffman would call our "situation"), it seems like you're asking us to accept that these intrinsically can't come into conflict with other goods or orders the way values might. In so doing, I worry that we're dodging the most difficult part of the issue (tragic choices).
There is something that makes certain people instinctively recoil from these reductions, intrusions, and extractionistic, instrumentalized ways of being or of getting away from being. I'm not sure why it appeals to some and is so repellent to others even when their culture has long been assimilated to and shattered by it.
You're going down a good track here. I'm glad you seem to be on a common wavelength now with Ed and Dougald at The Great Humbling, now starting their third season. I look forward to all your voices.
I began by wanting to disagree with you (I’d just persuaded myself how nice it felt that I had something valuable - my attention - to decide to disburse to various deserving causes, such as you) and ending up completely persuaded of your point - that we always have plenty of attention to give, but we have to choose, and do so wholeheartedly, the good things to which we give it - including and perhaps especially, the stand and stare times. I choose to meditate for 2 hours a day, and do so happily in rejecting all those so important (not) other claims, however loudly they seem to shout.