Why should you care about attention?
What can I even ask of a machine that knows and predicts my every thought, mood, and move?
You cannot give something you don’t have
Were you born around 1990? You were fucked. Born after 2005? You were majorly fucked.
Technology took over the old ways of making relationships, doing business and pretty much everything. Because progress compounds, reality has changed more in the past 10 years than in the previous 100.
“I know something is really wrong, but I don’t know what it is…”
Like evil wizards, profiteering opportunists and marketers consume all the energy of their unsuspecting followers. They take attention in return for promises of riches and adoration without giving appropriate benefits back. Ethics as always aside to an unevenly spread profit.
Johann Hari does an excellent job of explaining how we’ve been farmed for our attention in his book Stolen Focus, but if you are like me and need a video watch this: Why You Can’t Pay Attention with Johann Hari | SXSW Sydney 2024 Keynote .
The damage to society is visualized as a heartless statistic of increasing ADHD and anxiety. The lacking focus is a discussion on productivity and efficiency. Our attention has been exhausted because everything and everyone is an emergency(!!)
In short: we get no rest.
Without rest you cannot dream
Maybe it is because I have just finished the excellent adaptation of Sandman (which is even more excellent in its original comic book form) that I cannot stop thinking about dreams.
During sleep, brain cells actually shrink to more than half their size. When the cells shrink more space is created for the liquid that’s in the brain to flow through. But this brain liquid needs to be moved by waves that only come during the deepest stage of your sleep.
Basically, if your brain is the ocean, your sleep is the moon that brings the tides. Tides are vital for life on Earth.
Dreaming is the opposite of attention. Dreaming is when we lose track of who, where, or what we are. Our attention dissolves. Attention is the sun, while dreaming is the moon.
Dreams take everything we have paid attention to and shape it to something new. During the waking when attention returns, parts of the dreaming hitchhike back into reality. That’s how dreams shape our reality.
Niels Bohr came up with his model of the atom after dreaming of planetary systems circling a central sun. This dream was foundational to quantum theory.
Dreams bring hope.
Dreams bring love.
You dream of the perfect partner. You inadvertently start making steps that increase your chances of finding that love. Making yourself more attractive and available. Being open minded and vocal about your hopes. In psychology this is known as self-fulfilling prophecy, or commonly known as manifesting.
Whether you explain it through science-fiction, pseudo-science, or science, dreams are the blind ambition that gets us out of the bed everyday.
Dreams rely on attention to make them a reality.
“Attention is not something we merely own; it is what we are. Learning to wield it isn’t just about returning to the “present moment,” but rather about creating infinite, dazzling realities – because what we choose to see in the present moment is unique to each of us.
The world, after all, is more than just what we inherit. It’s what we choose to notice, nurture, and build. Everything around us – for worse, yes, but also for the better – is made up of where we direct our attention. If we learn to channel it wisely, we can decide what type of future we want to see.”
- Nadia Asparouhova, Antimemetics
To infinity and beyond
I like to remember my childhood house with an outhouse in the backyard. In the wooden door of the outhouse my grand aunt cut out a heart-shaped hole that each night displayed the Big Dipper.
Without devices or magazines this hole was the only way to entertain my mind while doing my business. The stars showed me the past from a hundred years ago and curbed my ego to think of my place in the universe. This little heart-shaped hole grabbed my attention and let me dream.
Today that hole is my smartphone connected to infinity.
I replaced the serenity for busy infinity. Instead of darkness of the night, constant blinding light. Loud and provocative luring me like a moth.
As I fart I see Outdoor Boys surviving in the dead cold of Alaska. I flick my thumb to someone I have never seen before to tell me about their last day at work. Flick again and I’m in a calm pottery studio in Kyoto.
That’s a lot of travel for my mind in 1 minute.
Humans don't deal well with infinity. How much is an infinity anyway? To our low processing minds the digital world is infinite. What do you need to browse infinity?
Answer, it seems, is: Attention is All You Need.
The remainder of the attention that hasn’t been stolen, we have opted into an infinity-retrieval machine.
Thousands of intelligible words can now be written constantly to infinity, to go along with an infinity of images and sounds. Millions of lines of code create an infinite number of programs.
We have been given the power to create infinite dazzling realities but lost the ability to dream them.
Mid-20th century philosopher Jacques Ellul talked extensively about the threat to human values created by modern technology:
"Every time you use technology and technique to solve a problem, there will be positives for sure, but you will generate more problems than you solved."
Every invention is an exchange with a rate unknown until later.
For example: I have never ridden a horse.
When we invented cars we brought everyone much closer, just as much as further away. The rural life moved to cities. In the process we have replaced horses and our connection to nature.
It is human nature to invent and seek challenges. But somehow the more we invent the more we distance ourselves from the rest of nature.
Curiosity never killed a cat –right?
I’m curious of the day, a couple years or decades from today, when all my attention and dreams have been taken away.
What will I ask of the infinity-retrieval machine that can do anything? What can I even ask of a machine that knows and predicts my every thought, mood, and move?
Will I ask the machine for the questions to ask it?
I’m also hopeful.
Our change has always come through ingenuity of rare individuals who were wired, molded and situated just right. If that minimal chance has now increased infinite-fold, maybe that’s a great thing.
Humans invent and dream to be above nature. To one day stop dreaming and instead reach our dreams. To traverse towards eternity in a metal tube or as shapeless energy blobs.
Maybe towards my Big Dipper.
The question as always is: what will remain of humanity when we get there?
Maybe all the human vices will be left behind with the virtues in a fair even exchange. Maybe the worst of us will survive. Maybe the best.
