We quit our jobs (if we can afford to). Perhaps we take a sabbatical. When we do, we discover a whole other economy designed to help us properly pay attention (note the metaphor): fancy mindfulness retreats, self-help literature, a cottage industry of “brain hacking” tips, apps designed to keep us off other apps, and influencers on those apps promoting their chosen method for digital detoxing. “I’m worried about my child — should I limit their screen time?” a parent types into Chat-GPT, and spends two hours refining the responses. Somewhere a Zen master laughs and claps his one hand together.

But what is being lost in this collective hysteria around the loss of our attention, and our frantic attempts to preserve it? For one thing, our extremely narrow definition of it. Even a brief look at scientific attempts to study and measure attention will reveal this. The term “attention span” is the limited product of countless 20th-century laboratory experiments — often funded by advertisers or through military research grants — which studied not the human experience, but very specific forms of response to stimulus. They often focused on simple screen-based tasks, like seeing how quickly a person can push a button on an aural cue, or watch a radar without distraction. Much of this research was done directly with marketing in mind.

Even today, you can look at an institution like the London Centre for Attention Studies, and find among its staff computer scientists, professors of marketing and entrepreneurship, software analysts, neuroscientists, and media studies experts. But not one historian, religious scholar, philosopher, or artist of any kind — no matter what these people might be able to teach us about different modes and practices of attention.

Today, then, when we worry about our inability to pay attention, when we lament the damage being done to our “attention spans”, we are doing so within a very specific context. The joint project of behavioral science and market research defines our attention in an extremely narrow way, as watching a single thing over a particular duration — life reduced to a mere stimulus response. Ironically, our attentions have been trained and focused upon a very specific idea of attention, and the entire realm of our embodied experience confined to what can be measured of our lives onscreen.

It’s this apparent trap which the collective calling itself the Friends of Attention has set about attempting to address. Associated with the Strother School for Radical Attention in New York City — and guided by the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett, the filmmaker Alyssa Loh, and Strother School Director Peter Schmidt — the Friends have published an official written salvo for the public, Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. Their stated mission: “…to push back against the fracking of human attention by coercive digital technologies”. It’s a good metaphor — “attention fracking” — and it appears often throughout the manifesto.

On the one hand, the Friends are concerned with how to get people together to practice what they call “radical”, or un-fracked, attention. Most of which they maintain is already being done every day, by religion practitioners, artists, hobbyists, or craftspeople. They also preach the clear value of places like museums and libraries as “sanctuaries of attention”, and within the manifesto’s self-identified aspiration to become “a kind of Silent Spring for our era”, it is in fact quite good at painting a damning portrait of those technological and corporate ventures, the advertising-and-cybernetics blitz which the Friends aptly call a “demented behaviorist arms race”, which has invaded our sensual lives for decades.

Attensity! lays out two particular definitions of attention, which the Friends intend to harmonize. The first — that narrow technology-dependent idea which gave us the “attention span” — is exemplified by the 2001 book by Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy. The influence of Beck and Davenport’s work on our limited popular idea of attention heavily reinforced the old instrumental concept of attention as a tool to be used towards discrete tasks. However, the second kind of attention has much more to do with the larger picture of human consciousness left out from the first, exemplified by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s 2008 book Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. As Stiegler points out, this deeper, more static kind of attention is contained in the French root of our English word: attendre (“to wait”). This is the kind of practice at the heart of most religious, mystical, and meditative traditions, which often strives to prolong held attention into a sense of infinity.

The proposed alternative to these two extremes, the Friends’ “radical” attention, comes from — of all places — literature. In their attempt to define it, they turn to a poetic phrase from the American novelist Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove: “an empty cup of attention.” In the context of the Friends’ manifesto, this phrase remains unfortunately vague, a half-baked Koan never really suggesting anything concrete. For the Friends, “radical” attention is something both full and almost nonexistent. But how this differs from the kind of mystical, held attention (attendre) available to the contemplative traditions they mention, is difficult to discern. The manifesto frequently suggests that what is going on already in many artistic, religious, and scholarly practices, if wedded with their version of attention activism (which seems to consist of collective study, meditation, and other communal activities of the Strother School), would produce this third more ambitious kind of attention.

Suggested Reading

Big Tech has stolen our children

By Matt Feeney

This would then be a step towards unfracking our attention, the Friends say, if we could only get together more often to practice less constricted attention on things we find important — whether that’s making art, visiting museums, staging Happenings, or engaging in intense academic study. This makes sense, insofar as the manifesto calls for more places like the Strother School, places with the explicit mission of providing “sanctuary” for attention, perhaps even training us to deal better with all the attention-fracking we face in our day-to-day lives. Yet this last idea leads to one of the manifesto’s more inadvertently disturbing ideas, in what the Friends imagine as a kind of “gym for the mind”. Just as the fitness revolution over the last few decades has led to the ubiquity of gymnasiums to counter our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, so the Friends imagine there might eventually be an analogous place for people to go to work out their sedentary brains.

To be clear, Attensity! has several valuable, noble things on its mind. Just like the Strother School itself, its mission is genuinely important and good — yet that’s why it is only right to quibble with certain particulars. Being presumably fit middle-class people, the Friends don’t seem to notice the darker picture their metaphor suggests. Tellingly, they do not suggest a “church for the mind” or a “school for the mind,” nor do they even consider something like “a swimming pool for the mind”. No — they go immediately to the gym, one of the least natural places possible. Though I doubt they intended it, the metaphor immediately conjures up pictures not of free bodies in movement in the real world, but a wholly artificial indoors, itself dedicated to dissociated, repetitive physical tasks which have little to do with the way human bodies evolved to live in the world.

This is to say nothing about the reality of today’s quasi-fascist gym culture, or the ways many men and women distort and chemically abuse their bodies in pursuit of physical perfection. Nor even to mention the clear class dynamics at work, where the replacement of aristocratic leisure with bourgeois athletics has become one of the most plainly middle-class ways of signaling one’s alignment. This is then almost always contrasted against those poor, stereotypically obese lower classes, who can’t afford good food, and who actually have to use their bodies at work. Is there anything really “radical”, then, about ideals of mystical awareness being yoked to this idea of a secular practice of repetitive attentional fitness?

One may well ask: how exactly are we going to get beyond our current prison-language of attention? There is one alternative considered in a very different book, Attention! A (short) History by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Joshua Cohen, first published in 2013. In fact, many of the points Cohen makes about the creation of modern attention theory, through that unholy conjunction of information theory and advertising, seem to have covertly or overtly influenced the Attensity! manifesto. There are many other reasons to suspect the debt, and not just the title, since Cohen himself also buttresses his opening chapter with examples from Henry James. Cohen’s version of Attention! is exhausting and exhaustive, yet as literature it has the virtue of communicating more naturally through story and history. Essentially, it’s a long, sustained meta-joke on the absurdity of such an idea as attention itself, unfurled in the form of a hyper-detailed and deliberately overwritten book, covering everything from the Phoenician alphabet to the pharmaceutical industry’s involvement in ADHD as a nebulous modern diagnosis.

Suggested Reading

The flattening of the human mind

By Kathleen Stock

Cohen also has the immense advantage of not having to preach: since his concern is literature, he can embody the paradoxes he’s examining, taking the reader through ancient Sumerian scripts, the development of typewriters, or the complex philosophy of time in St. Augustine’s theology — all for Cohen to admit in the end that the entire thing was written on speed, and so over-researched he can barely remember doing it. In the course of Attention! memory itself becomes a joke, attention itself a droll riff on the simultaneous nonexistence of past, present, and future. In the characteristic Cohenite non-formation, such a thing as “radical” attention could only mean an impossibility, an absurdity. As Cohen states, finally: “Wondering why fictionalists and poets didn’t write much about attention at the turn of the twentieth century is to wonder why they didn’t write much about climate change, or Islamo-theoterrorism—the topic hadn’t yet occurred to them, or hadn’t yet occurred. They didn’t feel their attention had been threatened, perhaps, because they hadn’t been conditioned to regard their attention resourcefully.”

That is, Cohen suggests that simply having written an exhausting, overpacked history of Attention is a dramatic exercise in attention, and in the futility of trying to define attention. Since we’ve been conditioned to consider our attention as a conditionable thing, now we pay more attention to attention than anything else. The trap reproduces itself, in an infinite regress. As the Friends of Attention make clear, and argue passionately, the real issue at stake is freedom — the freedom to treat our attention as something that truly belongs to us. Cohen suggests that the greatest freedom doesn’t lie in simply rejecting what society has to sell and signing up for a movement rebelling against it. This freedom isn’t going to be gained by turning to some “gym of the mind” or to any specific communal exercises. Rather, it may be that the most subversive thing one could be doing today is cultivating an irony which goes to the real heart of the situation.

Because Cohen’s deeply literary irony (embodied in a book that disavows its own subject) is something like the insights of Zen, Christian contemplative prayer, Sufism, and any number of mystical traditions. It is an irony which recognizes that freedom is not part of a dialectic with unfreedom — that a “liberated” or “radical” attention is not the opposite of a “hacked” or “fracked” one. Instead, within the purview of the mystic, at least, freedom consists in the recognition that one is already free. One cannot “have” attention to begin with — the idea itself was created precisely to confine us within the idea. The real lesson of something like Cohen’s Attention! is that, once we’re done with the book, we ought to go find some real literature to read and stop paying so much attention to ourselves. It’s a recognition of an essential paradox of human life: it’s only once we recognize something doesn’t truly exist that we can start to understand why we need it.

This is a genre of writing that I, a historian by training and an around-the-clock worker by disposition, consume like Lay’s potato chips. I’ve waded through these swift waters accompanied by everyone from former Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman’s 2021 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, to ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus’s Enchiridion — keenly aware that no moment of immersion is the same as any other and none of them will ever recur. The one thing that history doesn’t do, for good or ill, is repeat itself. What I have sought is something I will never have: more time. Not better nor more meaningful time, as Odell is proposing to find, but merely more, in terms of sheer quantity. Because while I don’t want to live forever, I do hope to live long enough to do everything I’ve committed to do, such as help my daughter enter adulthood and support my parents and spouse in their old age.

Odell is a writer about whose prior work, How to Do Nothing, I have decidedly mixed feelings. It starts promisingly enough: the opening line, “Nothing is harder to do than nothing”, is, as the kids say, a “banger”. But it soon becomes clear that Odell, an admittedly privileged person who has had lots of free time across various academic residencies, has nothing to offer me, a person who has been working 40 hours a week since his 16th birthday. Nothing, you see, is the easiest thing to have in your bank account, but you cannot subsist for long on a diet of zero income and birdwatching in Oakland’s Morcom Rose Garden. Odell, having been freed from being “occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff”, as Thomas Jefferson would have wanted it, she is able to fill an inordinate amount of it.

Bubbling below the surface of How to Do Nothing is a sense of climate emergency, or climate apocalypticism. Odell is constantly out and about in nature, and conversant with all the worrywart liberal commentary about the heat death of the planet — which, like Jesus’s return in the Gospel of Mark, is always already imminent. This concern deeply informs Saving Time, giving it some of its urgency; it otherwise does the usual yeoman’s work of citing people such as British labour historian E.P. Thompson on the development of time and work-discipline, Frederick Winslow Taylor on industrial efficiency, and German philosopher Josef Pieper on leisure — all names you will encounter frequently if you have found the time to bathe in the waters of the time genre.

More from this author

America is fighting the wrong university wars

By Oliver Bateman

Odell, to her credit, seizes upon the opportunity to situate the climate emergency in a discussion of the ways ancient Greeks delineated time: Chronos — time as a sort of forward, linear progression — and Kairos — a “crisis” or rupture in time. We all live in linear time, yet experience reminders — floods and famines — of the perpetual crisis in which we have found ourselves. Odell, in prose that betrays the vast condescension of our present, seems to think of this as a 21st-century phenomenon.

It most certainly is not; Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted “Theses on the Concept of History” reckons with a similar dichotomy of time: the “history of organic life on earth” as opposed to “Messianic time, [which] comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement”. For Benjamin, the powder keg that was Germany’s war on Europe — which, as an expatriate Jew facing repatriation in 1940, drove him to suicide — was the crisis, his “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage” in front of him as he is propelled into the future. Humans from the emergence of civilisation, have always perceived themselves as living on borrowed time — because, of course, we are; we have always been, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “mortal men doomed to die”.

It is the approach to mortality that separates Odell’s work from, say, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks — a title that references the average human lifespan. Odell, an atheist, is concerned with climate damage to the entire ecosystem; Burkeman, who is at least culturally Jewish, is concerned with trying to lead a balanced, moderate life in the amount of time allotted to him. It is the latter view that has always appealed to me — the Earth might be ending, but to those of us raised with anything resembling a coherent religious worldview and now struggling to raise a family, everything is already ending. As Father John Misty sings in “Holy Shit”, “Carbon footprint, incest streams…planet cancer, sweet revenge…but what I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me.”

It is interesting, yet unsurprising, to see discussions of personal mortality get so little attention in a work like Saving Time. As my father lay on his deathbed — he died in his own bed, at home — he remarked to me that he had always thought it easier to die alongside millions of others in a meteor strike or global conflict than quietly and at home as an old and feeble man. This, he admitted, was a narcissistic strain of thought he inherited from his own father, who despised the civilian life that followed his time as a Second World War submariner, because it offered no promise of a collective death that would serve as a coda to some grand heroic saga. Today, as Odell acknowledges, we are bombarded with daily alerts of one crisis or another. So it requires an act of will to remember that one’s own death is not an event so significant that it must coincide with the end of life as we know it. It will only coincide with the end of life as you know it.

Suggested reading

Is this the end of the world?

By Doug Coupland

It seems odd, then, that Odell cites Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper — not his description of Leisure, the Basis of Culture, but the fact that preparation for death is behind everything written therein. This is because, for the devout Pieper, as for Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, life is a preparation for eternity. “As a teacher usually says to the youthful student, who is even now finding the time of schooling too long, ‘Now, just don’t you get impatient, you have a long life before you,’” Kierkegaard writes in The Gospel of Sufferings, “so eternity speaks with more reason to the sufferer: ‘Just wait, do not become impatient, there is plenty of time, there is eternity.’”

I am, per my earlier admission, a workaholic. The clocks that inaugurated the Industrial Revolution rule my every waking minute; right now, as I type this, it is 2:04am in Pittsburgh. I have a Zoom meeting at 9:30am and another at 11am. This is not a complaint; it is the life I have made for myself. I have read Pieper and Thompson and all the rest. I understand how time, per the historian Fernand Braudel, passes both slowly for the unbending structures of society and quickly for individuals like me. But most important, in a way that none of these books on time emphasises, I know I am going to die. My father and mother never ceased with these reminders, which echoed those of Epictetus: “What harm is it, when you are kissing your little child, to say: Tomorrow you will die?”

When my mother and I would read Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth — my favourite book in the early years of my homeschooling — we would linger lovingly over the passages about time. (There are many: one of the main characters is Tock, a “watchdog” with a clock embedded in his torso.) She would point out the inanity of the main character Milo’s early thoughts about wanting time to pass — “wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered” — given that each moment we are bestowed by nature or heaven is a gift, the “present” (another cliché, of course). The great takeaway of the book, which brilliantly skewers the ways we waste time, was that we have as much time as we’re going to get: “Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.” Or, as Kierkegaard puts it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.”

For those of us who have already watched our parents and a good many of our close relatives die — particularly for people, like me, who do not share Pieper and Kierkegaard’s belief in eternity — this is cold consolation, but consolation nevertheless: we’re given the time we need to have the time of our lives, and no more. Our lives, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger puts it, are defined by “finitude”, even as “a world is worlding around us”. We exist in a state of “being-towards-death”: a fascinating state, if only to us personally or to our families and friends, that will endure until it doesn’t. There is no way to buy more time, to waste time, or even, in the final analysis, to save it. You get what you get.

It’s dull, and not even very lucrative. Now, to make matters worse, it appears that the robots may be coming for even its meagre wages. ChatGPT, a “large language learning model” optimised for conversation, launched at the end of November, and within a week garnered over a million users. It represents a step-change in AI writing, synthesising immense bodies of information and responding to chat prompts with uncannily clear, coherent and usually fairly accurate paragraphs of reasonably well-written text.

It appears, in other words, that robot “writers” are now so advanced they can match or exceed an averagely competent human writer across a vast range of topics. What, then, does this mean for human toilers in the textual saltmines? There have been breathless reports on how robot writing has the potential to disrupt all manner of writing-related fields, from online search through the kind of “content marketing” I used to do for a living, to academic writing, cheating at schoolwork and news reporting.

Are writers destined to go the way of the artisan textile-makers who starved to death after the inception of the mechanical loom? Perhaps. But this is complicated by the fact that it was the industrialisation of writing that created the role of “professional writer” as we know it — along with much else besides. Now, the digital revolution is on its way to destroying that model of authorship — and with it, driving former denizens of the “world of letters” into new and strange cultural roles.

As the writer Adam Garfinkle has argued, the world of print was, to all intents and purposes, the democratic world of liberal norms. In the UK, literature, high finance, and a great many political norms we now take for granted emerged from the same heady atmosphere in the coffee-houses of 18th-century London. It was this explosion of competing voices, that eventually distilled into ideas of “high” and “low” literary culture, norms of open but (relatively) civil debate on rational terms — and, as literacy spread, the ideas of rationally-based, objective “common knowledge” and mass culture as such.

Print culture in the 19th century saw an astonishing volume of writing produced and devoured for self-improvement, entertainment and political engagement. Industrial workers self-funded and made use of travelling libraries stuffed with classics in translation, exhibitions and museums were popular, and public lectures could spill out into the street. These conditions also produced the “author”, with a capital A, in the sense that those of us over 40 still retain. This figure has two key characteristics: first, a measure of cultural cachet as a delivery mechanism for common culture, and second some means of capturing value directly from this activity.

But the digital revolution has already all but destroyed the old authorship model, even if a small subset of writers still manages to get very rich. De-materialising print served to democratise “authorship”, publishing, and journalism, but by the same token made it far more difficult to get paid. There are a great many bloggers and “content creators” out there; meanwhile very few authors make a living from writing books, and journalist salaries have been stagnant for years. Growing numbers of would-be writers simply head (as I did) straight to PR and communications where the money is somewhat better.

Suggested reading

Would you sell a kidney to be famous?

By Mary Harrington

Now, when even routine PR and communications writing work can increasingly be done by robots, we can expect the terrain to mutate still further. We can expect some of the types of work I spent 15 years doing to become fact-checking work instead: a machine, after all, doesn’t know how to judge if its output makes sense. We can glimpse some of the necessity of this in the fact that Stack Overflow, a knowledge-sharing platform for organisational knowledge, has already temporarily banned input from ChatGPT because too many people were posting robot-generated content, and it wasn’t reliable enough.

But even those writers lucky enough to avoid the sense-checking saltmines will struggle to make a living unless they’re already famous. In this context, expect to see patronage making a comeback: a phenomenon that is, in fact, a reversion to the historic norm for creators. The appearance of “slam poet” Amanda Gorman at the inauguration of US President Joe Biden is only one prominent instance of the trend; I can think of a great many interesting and popular new publications, with clear cultural value, which are funded wholly or in part by wealthy philanthropists.

But this won’t be the end of ways that a mechanised acceleration in the volume of content will change the field of letters. For if the print era cultivated habits of long-form reading and thinking that profoundly structured our pre-digital culture and politics, the digital revolution has already taken us from scarcity to excess — and is taking print-era liberal discursive norms with it. In the brave new digital world, “deep literacy” is replaced by an attention economy in which every paragraph has to compete with a trillion others, meaning the incentive is for engagement: thrilling stories, grotesquerie and clickbait.

Think of the change in tone since the New York Times shifted its focus to digital subscriptions, and you’ll see what I mean. Now accelerate that a millionfold with AI-generated text. Anyone clinging to any residual optimism about the norms of objectivity or civil discourse under those conditions hasn’t been paying attention. Nor have those still optimistic about free speech and the marketplace of ideas. For along with an attention economy comes attention politics: the tussle to control what people notice, or who gets a platform, in which some censorship is now inevitable.

We may decry this as “illiberal”, but it’s not wholly unjustified. For while the Twitter Files have revealed just how consequential control of the censorship mechanisms can be, few would deny that “misinformation” is, under digital conditions, genuinely easy to manufacture and spread. Consider, for example, the sophisticated propaganda campaign, powered by bot farms, through which Chinese authorities propagandised Western electorates into demanding their governments introduce China-style Covid lockdowns.

In this context, “speech” itself fades in significance, relative to control over the algorithmic parameters of speech. And the fight is on over who sets the rules governing which opinions the algorithms are allowed to index, transmit, learn from – or suppress. The writer James Poulos calls this “catechising the bots”. The necessity of such catechism was learned the hard way, in 2016, when Microsoft released Tay, a chatbot that learned from user input fed in via Twitter. Within a day, mischievous contributors had “taught” Tay to say Nazi things of the kind that recently got even Kanye West cancelled.

Suggested reading

Don't punish Kanye West

By Hadley Freeman

In this sense, AI design is rapidly taking on an explicitly moral dimension, as a kind of post-human curator of the “common culture”. One excited tech CEO recently celebrated this as a positive change, saying of Chat-GPT that “It’s just like a human being except it has all the world’s knowledge.”

In the 18th and 19th centuries, then, the Author with a capital A enjoyed status as guardian of and contributor to the common culture. Today, though, we’ve long since ceded that terrain to robots, and to the cyborg theologians who catechise them. No matter how fast you read, there’s no competing with a machine that can instanteously index and synthesise a century’s books; an entire generation has now grown up with Google. Chat-GPT just formalises robots as curators of the consensus view. What’s left, then, for human authors to contribute?

To state the obvious, there are still plenty of things those robots can’t do besides fact-checking — not least because of their catechism. If you want the bland, normative, politically unimpeachable top-line consensus on any given topic, ask Chat-GPT about it and you’ll get three paragraphs of serviceable prose. That’s all well and good for cheating in a school essay, but bland, faceless, normative views aren’t the only kinds of writing for which there’s an appetite.

Suggested reading

Why should humans be in charge?

By Mary Harrington

In the AI age, expect human writers to specialise in the esoteric, tacit, humorous or outright forbidden speech that robots either can’t capture (ChatGPT is reportedly rubbish at jokes), or that “AI bias” teams work hard to scrub from the machine. As one Right-wing anon put it (appropriately colourfully) recently, one way to prove you’re human as a writer in the Chat-GPT age will be to say incredibly racist things.

If I’m right, we can kiss goodbye to what’s left of the print-era connection between “author” and “authority” in the sense of generally-accepted objectivity. But I expect many creators to thrive anyway. It’s just that instead of trying to beat the machine at synthesising the consensus, humans will be prized for their idiosyncratic curation of implicit, emotive, or outright forbidden meanings, amid the robot-generated wasteland of recycled platitudes.

Successful creators in this field may not even be writers in the old sense; at the baroque end of this emerging field, we might place Infowars host Alex Jones, while at the more mainstream-looking end, Elon Musk’s chosen Twitter Files mouthpiece, Bari Weiss. Whatever you think of the narratives either produces, they are less “authors” in the old sense than sensemakers amid the digital noise.

Suggested reading

How robots make us human

By Mary Harrington

All of this will feed into the political cleavage I described last week: the emerging disagreement over whether it’s wiser to trust the judgement of human individuals, or the inhuman (and catechised) synthetic consensus of the machine. This divide, which I characterised as “Caesarism” vs “Swarmism” is, in practice, not really about despotic governance as such. (The Covid era was, after all, a sharp object lesson in how tyrannical swarmism can be.) Rather, it’s about whether we think there’s anything of value in individual human judgement, despite (or perhaps because of) its mess and bias and partiality.

So the world of post-liberal letters will displace the human element from consensus “common culture”. Instead, some humans will be employed sanity-checking the machine consensus, others will tussle over the right to catechise the bots, and others again will forge high-profile careers curating new kinds of sensemaking. Meanwhile, we’ll see the moral status of human sense-making grow ever more politicised, as elites fight over whether or not all of culture can (or should) simply be automated — however nightmarish the result so far whenever this has been tried.

If something remains distinctively the domain of human creators in this context, it’s not curating common knowledge but the hidden kind: the esoteric, the taboo, the implicit and the mischievous. The machine still can’t meme. May it never learn.

At the time a committed anti-capitalist, I experienced the ever more intrusive presence of advertising in the built environment as an unacceptable invasion. It felt like being tapped on the shoulder every three seconds by annoying canvassers while enjoying a quiet ciggie break.

So I set out to see if it was possible to ignore them. It was, it turned out, difficult: advertisers spend a great deal of money on being attention-grabbing, and it took a huge mental effort to tune out all that expensive effort to snag my awareness.

The “attention economy” was first theorised by the economist Herbert Simon in 1971: he called attention to the “bottleneck of human thought” and argued that in a world where this was a scarce resource, the smart money focused on grabbing a slice of it. After all, you can have the best product in the world but if no one has noticed you exist, you’ll still sink without trace. An immense amount of lucrative time and effort goes into the arms race for attention, and the results — not just on the Tube — are often eye-watering.

If it was difficult to swim against the commercial messaging tide two decades ago, it’s even harder now. When I did my Tube experiment, averting my eyes from the tsunami of paid-for messaging became exhausting after a few days. After a while, it was easier just to give in and swim on the tide of people trying to tell me what to buy. And today, the experiment would be harder still, with adverts covering every available surface and sometimes moving as well.

Over the same period, too, something equivalent has happened to the whole media universe. A vast commercial and political industry has developed with the aim of grabbing the punter’s attention and persuading us to buy, say or think something or other. The boundary between PR, journalism and propaganda is blurry to say the least, and flourishes atop an immense ecosystem of opinion-havers. And there’s no outside to it, short of moving to an uninhabited island with no internet access and never talking to anyone.

More from this author

We are all Teletubbies now

By Mary Harrington

As a result, we don’t just have an attention economy. We also have an attention politics: a byproduct of the explosion of content that came with the transition to digital culture. In that politics, what gets noticed isn’t just a bottleneck on the way to commercial success; it’s also the gateway to political power.

In the new attention politics, older information ideals curl up and die. For the liberal framework for thinking about communication dates back to a point before the internet, when information was relatively scarce, and could be suppressed. In that context, liberals wanted to resist such suppression, arguing that “free speech”, would enable a collective search for objective truth via a “marketplace of ideas”.

Along with this came the belief that free information and lively debate carries us all toward objectively agreed truths, while religious faith and moral principles should be as much as possible a private matter. Contemporary defenders of this gestalt gather at Quillette and other such “classical liberal” outlets, ever ready to mount a defence of free speech as a bulwark against bad ideas, or the importance of debate to the scientific method.

Now, though, we all have free speech. In a digital environment, you can’t really suppress it. Ban someone, and they’ll just pop up elsewhere (or in the case of Donald Trump, start their own social media platform). Not unrelatedly, what we have is no longer a scarcity of information but a superabundance.

The problem is, you can’t really have a functioning society where anyone can say anything — or at least it won’t function for long. So a great deal of soft social effort goes into constraining free speech, while still permitting speech to be (at least nominally) free. We can all say what we like; the battleground is now what gets noticed, and by whom.

Suggested reading

No woman is safe on Twitter

By Kate Clanchy

What does or doesn’t make the public eye is managed by a stifling social consensus that governs what gets liked, shared or referenced; what should be boosted by algorithms; and what should make it into the respectable press. Even the original Luke Skywalker, Mark Hamill, has fallen foul of this, after committing the dastardly crime of publicly noticing a Tweet by JK Rowling.

At the same time, too, “facts” have also become visibly unstable. In some cases, they vary dramatically according to local political conditions: for example, according to US officials, “gender affirmation” for children is officially “suicide-prevention care”. Meanwhile, officials in the UK and Sweden are rowing swiftly in the opposite direction.

And even where the facts themselves are not disputed, they aren’t really the main event any more. Instead, they’re data points for curated narratives. “NJ woman who forced daughter she fathered into child porn sentenced to 25 years in prison” is, on its own, just a story; but added to a curated list of related stories such as this one, it looks like a pattern of criminality worthy of notice — or of being deliberately ignored.

This sort of attention politics, the manipulation of narratives, sounds a death knell for the liberal ideal of politically neutral individuals or institutions. For confronted with an excess of competing and contradictory messaging, most sensible people don’t want to spend all their time working out what’s real. And when attention is scarce, political power accrues to those who are trusted to curate.

Most visibly, legacy media outlets now play this role: filtering the chaos of possible stories for a selection that fits (or at least doesn’t jar too sharply with) the readership’s worldview. But the facts, or stories, or data points we curate add up, cumulatively, to moral choices. If I notice the vulnerability of males who identify as women within all-male prisons, while (deliberately or not) ignoring stories that point to the vulnerability of women to males who claim to identify as women within all-female prisons, this adds up to a statement about what (or who) I think is important.

This variation in what’s emphasised (or mentioned at all) is easy to see across the national press: try toggling between New York Times universe and that of the New York Post, or between the Guardian and the Telegraph. You don’t need a media studies degree to infer the differences in moral framework that drive this differential noticing. And in any case, this isn’t an abstract game for media studies nerds. Our moral choices have real-world consequences.

Which set of “facts” is accepted by officials as true, about the right way to care for gender dysphoric children, will have significant medical consequences for youth in different jurisdictions. Or consider recent news that the state of New York is proposing to legislate for prisoners to be “presumptively placed” in accordance with their “self-attested gender identity unless the person opts out of such placement”. Set that against the list of crime reports above, and the decision to notice or not notice the link between the male sex and sex-offending adds up to a political choice that — as others have noticed — places real women at risk.

Suggested reading

Why Libs of TikTok terrifies the media

By Kat Rosenfield

And this is where the politics of noticing grows more contentious. For the general public aren’t mere passive bystanders. Noticing subcultures have swiftly emerged, sometimes sharply at odds with the official ones, and in which an effective curator can have real-world political impact. For example, the “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account is credited with having transformed US education debates — simply by collating video statements made by progressive teachers.

In turn, this has spawned a whole meta-industry of NGOs whose remit is to stop unofficial noticers getting out of hand. Recent years have seen a boom in “fact-checking” organisations, who aim to extend the governance of noticing out into the internet badlands, often funded by immensely wealthy philanthropists — many of whom have well-documented political agendas.

This looks variously like an attempt to defend truth from manipulation by bad actors, or else covert censorship riddled with obvious bias. But the internet abounds with people who have assembled truly outlandish narratives from their preferred data points, such as in the QAnon conspiracy. And “misinformation” isn’t just a self-serving elite story: bot farms are routinely used in information warfare, to give the appearance of mass support to overseas messaging operations.

It should come as no surprise, then, that even the US Government is now an overt player in the politics of noticing. Last week, Joe Biden launched a “Disinformation Governance Board” whose job it is to tell the rest of the English-speaking world what is or isn’t real on the internet. Predictably, though, the reaction to this body was cynical. And no wonder: for Biden’s intervention does no more to address the loss of facts, objectivity and truth-seeking driven by information superabundance, than obviously biased “fact-checking” bodies funded by progressive philanthropists.

Suggested reading

What fact checkers get wrong

By Gavin Haynes

But no amount of such “governance” will stop people noticing when narratives are uplifted, deprecated, or transformed from “disinformation” to accepted fact — or prevent them wondering about the context for such shifts.

Many Americans noticed, for example, when the insalubrious contents of a laptop belonging to then-Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter went from “Russian disinformation” to “authenticated by the Washington Post” in the time it took his father to beat Donald Trump at the polling booth. We’ll never know if burying that story swung the election. But it probably helped: an intuition that is, for many, just one more data point in the pattern of “neutrality” and “objectivity” serving as mere fig-leaves for partisan manoeuvring.

It’s common now to complain about the other side being guilty of “post-truth” politics, or to blame variously “woke tyranny” or “Right-wing authoritarianism” for the sense that truth has been replaced by something dismayingly slippery and chronically biased. But it’s a mistake to imagine that this is all the fault of whoever you consider your political enemies.

Free speech, objectivity, facts and the “marketplace of ideas” really are hopelessly compromised. But what killed them wasn’t Those Bad People Over There; it was the internet. It gave us too much information, and with it came attention politics. Now even the most die-hard defenders of political neutrality might as well lean into their own biases, because even if they don’t people will still notice them.

What we don’t know yet is how far it’s possible to go in forcing public assent to narratives that are flagrantly untrue. That’s ultimately a question of how completely a given elite is able to control the public sphere, in a hyper-mediated culture, if a critical mass of ordinary people doesn’t want to play ball. In any case, I suspect we’re on track to find out.