On Attention

or: What, if anything, can an anonymous private think, striving towards rigid uniformity in the soldier(s)'s morning call, in the time between attention and dismissal?

I was tapping through Instagram Stories. To adults who first watched the 24-hour news cycle flourish on TV, I imagine it must have been rather jarring to switch from a young journalist telling you about a massacre oceans away, to an animated cat advertising its favorite [cheapest] cat food, to a meteorologist predicting the weather outside your own home. They had the luxury of each of these worlds being delivered to them by a different mouth, even if it all fell under the banner of NBC. The propriety of a source was not simply a matter of truthfulness, but of time, place, manner, and programming block.

On Instagram Stories you can see a dead body next to a cute puppy next to a slutty selfie, all from the same friend, all equalized in their vying for your attention. Free Palestine then Free the Nipple, or the other way around; what’s it matter, I support the right causes and feel all the righteous emotions which, so I’ve been told, are the ferment from which action belches out.

In between the stories I saw this ad:

Those who grew up with a Gen-X hatred of pandering, all those who learned to hit ‘MUTE’ on the TV remote whenever it switched to commercial break, they have by-and-large won the war on traditional advertising: we no longer become enchanted by the invitation to mimesis bubbling off beach-bound babes and brawny brawlers. We have considered that the American Advertisement is peddling our national delusion that we are each Superman and, turning up our noses in pointed self-awareness, forgone any engagement further than a withering, skeptical glance. To consider an ad further is to fall into the advertiser’s trap.

It’s an attention economy — no news there. But within that term there is a equalizing of our modes of attention under an umbrella of enrapturement. There is no difference between the binge watch and the single subliminal frame: both capture the viewer and deliver them unto the direction of the ‘makers’. This is a limited view of attendance. One can mark a student absent, and this is within the realm of attendance, but one ought to mark a student browsing an online clothing store during class as ‘in attendance’ only in appearance. They are not in attendance for the class or for learning, but present and attentive to the punitive forces which push them away from being anywhere EXCEPT the classroom.

I propose that this bare minimum of attendance is not only pervasive, but that it is not only in disinterest. No, this unseeing attentiveness is the state which is actively chosen by and for a significant portion of our population: it is that of the test subject.

The test subject’s sole function is to make themselves legible for their watchers. All other matters are dictated to them by the circumstances in which they find themselves. The best tests are double-blind, triple-blind, as many layers of obfuscation as you can put between the test subject and what you want out of them, so as not to skew the results. The test subject, dropped into a room of sleek surfaces, even sleeker calculations, and a purposeful abjection of any depth in the world around them, they can only turn themselves inside-out, splay themselves for examination, and put their insides back together. The depth is provided by them because the environment is not allowed to be deep, lest that skew the results even more.

One goal of a television show, particularly those that have been manufactured algorithm-first, is to inspire you to see yourself in it. This is not for the sake of imparting an artistic experience, although the nobility of that lie has a certain truth in the idealist hearts of many in the board rooms/sets/editing suites, but rather so that you can tell them why this is you. You do not have to tell them directly. They are already watching how many times you put the show back on, rewind, post screencaps to socials, recommend it to a coworker, and help to build a web of people whose hearts have become attached, no, claimed by that which you have exclaimed as your own.

The test subjects make themselves legible and are rewarded with pride. They are rewarded with increasingly specialized, racialized, and sexualized programs.

The Christian folk-songwriter John Darnielle (of The Mountain Goats), writing of the wrestling on TV he would watch as a child, composed a heart-breaking elegy to the loser whose head is shaved in shame, “Hair Match”. It is not a recounting of any particular match, nor even all that concerned with wrestling in specific. It is a song about being in humiliating, public pain.

Some people leave, before it’s over, but most of them stay

Some hide behind their programs, some turn away.

The wrestling may be a case of a specificity striving towards the universal, but we must not forget that these are not mere witnesses to an unexpected pain: they are the audience. They are here to attend to this event. But even having paid, even watching the spectacle itself — not even having witnessed its conclusion, but its transformation into the symbolic, the moment where the visceral enjoyment of fists must briefly substitute for a more ritualistic, premodern meaning —; even choosing to be there, most cannot be present.

We hide behind our programs. We hide behind our favorite TV shows, our favorite songs, our favorite algorithms, our favorite catchphrases, truisms — we hide ourselves in mimicry, pantomiming the very medium we hold up to obstruct our face. We have forsaken advertisements and, in return, have lost the ability to recognize that we now treat all media as advertisement. It’s all an invitation to a mimicry that will allow us to forget ourselves.

Knowledge is a program too. Any curriculum is. This is not a matter of mere education, nor enlightenment, nor even survival itself.

This is a matter of play.

In between the stories I saw this ad:

“I am addicted to my phone.” It is easier to be addicted to a phone than to any other object, because the phone alone has the terrifying endlessness and variety endemic to all our media on immediate touch command. Everything else requires interaction with an intermediary to disrupt its function as an information broadcast: the TV remote, the laptop keyboard, the radio dial. The phone itself is whatever you want it to be. In this confusion is where the illusion of freedom arises. The issue appears to not be the phone, but rather what is done on it. But I cannot look elsewhere than the screen, because I am attentive to the punitive forces which push me away from looking anywhere outside. The Real has become punitive to behold.

“Replaced social media scrolling with these little tidbits of learning” — I ask, if one were to follow all the highest-minded accounts, dedicated only to the reportage of absolutely true facts which, hitherto, you have been wholly unaware of, what difference would this app make? I suspect that many have a gut instinct that there is something cheap about the knowledge coming through Instagram, something gaudy in the embrace of our learning becoming directed by Silicon Valley titans. But it often ends at the app. One is encouraged to substitute Twitter for Bluesky, Instagram Reels for TikTok, the bookstore for Amazon, Google for ChatGPT; all stops must be bid adieu, lovingly, on our non-stop shot towards absolute digital perfection.

Consider the ad for learning and you will realize that it is superfluous — it is there for the same reason why public parks still need a sign outside. It is not there for the ecosystem, but to designate where those looking to study are bound within, lest they butt up against private property and that right increasingly exclusive to wealth itself, privacy. The ad is there not to convince you of this particular app’s virtues, but to foreclose upon the idea that your newly freed-up “social media time” might be better spent off your phone. Because knowledge is power, education is everything, self-betterment is the new mode of self-preservation, and everyone knows that there’s more knowledge in the microprocessor of one Samsung Galaxy than in the all of the scrolls burned in the Library of Alexandria.

Knowledge isn’t power — I hope you don’t learn anything from reading this, especially if you’re doing it hunched over your phone in the spare minutes you can spend to ‘attend’ to whatever sense led you to continue moving your eyes down the page. But do not attend to me, nor to my words, but to that sense that scrambles you towards some digital revelation. Whether it’s your fault, the world’s, what the world has made you into, or what you’ve made your world into: toss fairness out the window.

The sense is yours to deal with. It is a tool. It is primarily a destructive one.

It is Election Day in my country. Every American is paying taxes that are funding a genocide.

Some people have turned their attention myopically to the domestic, the very real concerns of abortion access, union preservation, and a declining standard of living. These people are those who leave before it is over: they are those with jobs too important to lose a single minute’s sleep replaying the violence they are all too complicit in.

Some people have turned their attention to the party apparat, believing that solidarity behind ideals and icons will inspire the groundswell of repressed emotions that really must explain the privative cruelty everywhere in our generally abundant lives; they hide behind their programs.

Some people have refused to see or to not see. They turn away. This motion, especially to hold, is surprisingly taxing on the spine and neck. Try it: turn your head away from this essay and hold it.

One must always turn back, eventually. In that space of aggravating silence is our only hope of a shout, whether words or the tearing of the vocal cords themselves. You could once get a channel to black-out across the country with a good, clear, uncensored, and unanticipated “Fuck”!

The sense is yours to deal with. It is a tool. It is primarily a destructive one.