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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

My footsteps echoed as I walked towards the ticket gates at Bank during what used to be the evening rush hour. I was the only person in that corridor, and when I passed through the ticket barrier, I noticed for the first time that the presentation of a valid Oyster card causes the word ‘Enter’ to flash up. It had a sinister connotation, as though Vincent Price were cackling in the background.

At the time of writing, ridership is a little over 10% of the normal figure, even though as many as 90% of the usual number of trains are operating at peak times. Whereas I hear “Wish the flipping pubs would open” all the time, I’ve never heard, “Can’t wait to get back on the Tube”. In the time of Covid-19, a trip on the Tube seems to be just what the doctor didn’t order, and the disease might have been designed to underline all those associations of the Tube with interment, the underworld and death.

When writing a history of the Underground, I discovered that Bank station was effectively built in the crypt of St Mary Woolnoth church, which still stands, looking slightly affronted at the proximity of the station. In The Wasteland, St Mary Woolnoth ‘kept the hours’ as the commuting crowd flowed on (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’).

In the first half of the 20^th Century, avant-garde writers were much concerned with the Tube as a symbol of modernity. Most took a baleful view. In The Waves, Virginia Woolf wrote that, for one character, “descent into the Tube was like death. We were cut up, we were dissevered by all those faces and the hollow wind that seemed to roar down there like desert boulders.” And there was an imbalance, in that the writers more favourably disposed to the Tube tended to find it interesting rather than straightforwardly pleasurable. “I travelled by a tube train,” wrote F.T. Marinetti, the Futurist, in 1912, “I got what I wanted – not enjoyment, but a totally new idea of motion, of speed.”

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The great artist of Deep England

By Niall Gooch

I myself have always enjoyed the Tube, possibly because I have never had to commute. I subscribe to what might be described as the official line, which is that it is a beautiful, humane system, doing its best to mitigate the unnaturalness of the subterranean environment. This might also be described as the Frank Pick view, and my purpose in outlining it here is to commend it to anyone stuck with using the Tube right now.

Frank Pick was second-in-command of the Underground in the inter-war years. He was in charge of the aesthetics, to which he applied the principles of the Design Industries Association, which had evolved from those of the Arts and Crafts Movement, as set out by William Morris: elegant utility and fitness for purpose. In The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, Michael T. Saler contends that Frank Pick “dreamed of establishing Morris’s earthly paradise… the Underground would be a model of aesthetic integration and communal service, a catalyst for a more harmonious London of the future.”

Pick moved to London after growing up in York (as I did myself). According to Saler, he regarded London as “a hundred towns divided one against another”, whereas York was “the model for the integrated city life that Pick hoped could be re-established in all communities, especially London”.

By means of the Underground, Pick would make London a comprehensible as York, and to make the Underground comprehensible he commissioned Harry Beck’s diagrammatic Tube map. The above-mentioned Johnston typeface was another Pick commission. It adorned directional signs, sometimes illuminated (in light boxes) in the geometric, light-filled stations of Pick’s protégé architect, Charles Holden. Holden’s suburban masterpieces, such as Arnos Grove, Cockfosters, Tooting Bec, are open for business, and if they figure in your essential journey, consider: you are experiencing works of art at a time when all museums and galleries are closed.

Holden’s central London masterpiece is Piccadilly Circus. Oliver Green, the author of many good transport books (most recently London’s Underground) once suggested to me that Piccadilly Circus, with its seven pedestrian entrances from the street, ‘epitomises Frank Pick’s doctrine of passenger flow.’

The circular Piccadilly Circus ticket hall was conceived by Pick and Holden as a ‘concourse’ or ‘circulating area’ – new words when it opened in 1928. The station was overtly glamorous, like the people in the posters commissioned by Pick encouraging Londoners to make the most of their city. One poster proclaimed “The Playgoer Travels by Tube”. It shows a tail-coated waiter bowing to a couple in evening wear, and such attire was not incompatible with the mellow lighting in opal glass of Piccadilly Circus (which deliberately suggests a promising early evening), the use of brass, marble and expensive hardwoods, the cosmopolitanism implied by the World Clock, a map traversed by a mechanism showing the time anywhere in the world.

Last week, my journey from Bank took me to Piccadilly Circus. I was one of two passengers in the ticket hall and we were outnumbered by the four staff. It was like being in a ballroom before the ball; I half expected one of the staff to offer me a glass of champagne.

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Is it time to move to Milton Keynes?

By John Elledge

Not all of the glories of the Tube date from Pick’s time. If your journey involves the original parts of the Metropolitan Line (the world’s first underground railway, opened in 1863), look out for the steampunk fantasia of the stretch between King’s Cross and Farringdon, which lies in a cutting of towering arcaded walls, with the Fleet River carried in a giant pipe overhead. (If you crane your neck out of a carriage window you can just about see it.)

Or perhaps your habitual run is along the central parts of the Piccadilly or Bakerloo Lines, or the West End branch of the Northern Line. These are the Edwardian Yerkes Tubes, built by the American financier, Charles Tyson Yerkes, who gave London what are perhaps its most beautiful Tube stations, Holden’s work notwithstanding. (Holden’s Piccadilly Circus was a rebuilding of a Yerkes station.)

Yerkes’ architect, Leslie Green, created a different tile pattern for each station, so regular users would identify it as ‘home’, a place of their own. My favourite is Regent’s Park, which has the colours of a chocolate sundae: brown, cream mustard. I also like Covent Garden: white, yellow, orange, brown, with pale green art nouveau depictions of ticket windows. Both stations, being old, have lifts instead of escalators, so they are currently closed (because you can’t social distance in a lift), but you can appreciate the tiling as the trains roll past the deserted platforms.

The relative emptiness of the Tube also permits study of the moquettes, the carpet-like woollen material covering Tube seats. This is expensive to apply, and Londoners are lucky to have it. In most other cities you’d be sitting on stainless steel or plastic. You are gripped in your seat by the moquette’s pile (upstanding fibres) and like any sheep, moquette has thermal properties, being relatively cool in summer and warm in winter. Pick set high standard of moquette design, commissioning the likes of Paul Nash and Enid Marx. He favoured green, which he believed lent ‘a serene atmosphere’, being reminiscent of the countryside.

Those high standards are maintained by the principal suppliers of the moquette to the modern Tube, the high-end fabric designers Wallace-Sewell. Their smart blue and red Barman moquette — named after Frank Pick’s right-hand man, Christian Barman — is found on several lines and is highly popular, perhaps because it has a figurative element, incorporating pixelated images of London Bridge, the Eye, the dome of St Paul’s and Big Ben. Emma Sewell, originator of the design told me she was influenced there by Russian Constructivism, “the way a tractor, say, might be represented in those designs”.

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Will Covid spell the end of city life?

By Barney Norris

A darker version of Barman, seeming to show the same landmarks at night, is on the Bakerloo Line, and the crepuscular mood suits those old trains, which date from 1973, and have a sort of faded grandeur.

Or perhaps your necessary journey takes you along the newest line: the Jubilee Line Extension, opened in 1999. Its stations were ‘future-proofed’. They’re big, in other words, particularly Canary Wharf, which is cathedral like, with massive ovoid concrete pillars lined at the base with stainless steel so they are not dirtied by people brushing past. (Fitness for purpose, you see.)

Even on the JLE, social distancing will not be possible if everyone who previously used the Tube returns to it. I suppose people will not return en masse until the virus has been somehow dispatched, or largely forgotten about, but not everyone will be back. The long-promised home-working revolution might finally be here, and London is currently full of wobbling tyro cyclists, some of whom will stick at it. The prospect of a less congested system is a piece of good news in difficult times, another reason to see the Underground bar and circle logo (championed and refined by Frank Pick) as suggesting a rising, rather than a setting, sun.

Andrew Martin’s latest book is Seats of London: a Field Guide to London Transport Moquette Patterns. His website is at https://jimstringernovels.com/