Reclaiming Your Attention Is a Sacred Act
If you liked "reclaiming a sense of the sacred", you might like taking your attention back
Things That Should Exist is the name of this newsletter.
I originally chose this title when I started this newsletter back in 2021, because I wanted to explore the speculative–more specifically speculative futures, design, and technology here.
I have ideas for things that should exist, and am continually fascinated and inspired but other peoples’ ideas re: things that should exist.
For instance, Ant Farm, Mary Mattingly’s Swale, Swoon’s Swimming Cities of Serenissima, the Dome of Visions, solarpunk illustrations, sci-fi fictions of the future, and on and on and on.
Here’s one of Ant Farm’s inflatable “Environmints”.
And an image of Swoon’s floating pirate barge, at the Venice Biennale.
And, finally, some solarpunk art:
I was also inspired by the book Speculative Everything, and by Julian Bleecker’s Near Future Laboratory, especially their design fiction stuff.
From Speculative Everything, the concept of “social dreaming” is especially rich to me, at least as I understand it.
To me, the term social dreaming is simple, and implies the question, “How can we dream together for the benefit of all?”
“All” meaning for the benefit of all humans, and the natural, living world i.e. the “web of life”, or what anthropocentric minds call “the food web”.
Aspirationally, I want to shape TTSE to become a place for for social dreaming. This could be in the shape of guest writers, an online community, even an offline community, whose central purpose is collectively dreaming towards a healthier and more sustainable future.
The Solarpunk to Doomer Optimist Pipeline
These days, I’m less of a “solarpunk idealist” or “techno-optimist”.
I like the term “Doomer Optimist”. Maybe that fits best until I define a better one for myself.
Since starting the blog two years ago, it’s become fairly clear to me that things are not going back to normal.
This seems to be the consensus now?
I don’t expect the cost-of-living to improve. Nor do I expect to see widespread progressive change in this country in the next 10 years.
In my opinion, web3 has run its course. ChatGPT is fine–it’s fun for looking up programming stuff or creating a silly song in the voice of a pirate–but there doesn’t seem to be much practical utility, despite so much rah-rah shouting about it on Twitter.
Big Tech has been promising that “technology will save us” since the beginning of the internet. This myth has been around since the beginning of the Industrial Age.
At this point, it seems clear to me that technology will not save us, and neither will our government. If anything, both of these entities seek to control those they see as a only “users” or “citizens”–a phenomenon encapsulated by the term “surveillance capitalism”.
Some Fires Should Just Be Left to Burn
There was a point where I was really into Venkatesh Rao’s work. He’s still one of my favorite living writers.
If you don’t know of him or his work, Rao writes about culture and technology, from the perspective of the fringe-ier of management consulting.
That might sound kind of brainy, but the main has written some phenomenal pieces on topics like “how organizations work”(The Gervais Principle, 2009), “how class functions in America”(The Premium Mediocre Life of Molly Millennial, 2017), and “lore”(On Lore, 2022).
I’m oversimplifying here–Rao’s work is more complex, richer, and funnier, than what I’ve described here.
(Full disclosure: I was active member of his Discord community, Yak Collective, and ran YC’s newsletter for a few months. I also worked with Venkat to create an ebook from a collection of his posts.)
Anyway, I say all of this to share that, once upon a time, I tried to fashion myself as a fringe-y management consultant myself. In addition to Venkat’s writing, I also steeped myself in the writing of consulting luminaries like Peter Drucker, and lesser-knowns like Alan Weiss.
Somewhere, I came across a framework that goes like this:
For any job or role, there are three kinds of tasks: “On fire”, “Needs attention”, “Research and development”.
I don’t remember what the actual framework was called, or if those are the right categories. This LinkedIn post captures the spirit of that type of thinking.
I find this framework useful for the present moment because I want to write things that are useful to people. We are in a “we need to put out fires” moment.
In this moment of a mass plants and animal die-offs, mass shootings, mass public health crisis, technology is not going to be the magic bullet that solves the worlds’ problems.
AI, crypto, social media, etc are not providing any solutions to the problems people face every day. If anything, these things are exacerbating the scarcities and divisions between the ultra-rich and everyone else.
Here’s a tweet thread I discovered today that I feel illustrates this problem.
Name the Biggest Fire You Can Think Of
It seems the biggest fire of all, is attention.
One study by a team of European scientists claims that our collective attention is shrinking. The scientists studied “Twitter data…, books from Google Books going back 100 years, movie ticket sales going back 40 years, and citations of scientific publications from the last 25 years”, and found that the amount of time that a topic stays in the public consciousness has been decreasing for the past 100 years.
For instance, they found that, “in 2013 a hashtag stayed in the top 50 for an average of 17.5 hours. This gradually decreases to 11.9 hours in 2016”.
This quote sums it up well:
"It seems that the allocated attention in our collective minds has a certain size, but that the cultural items competing for that attention have become more densely packed. This would support the claim that it has indeed become more difficult to keep up to date on the news cycle, for example." says Professor Sune Lehmann from DTU Compute.
Perhaps you’ve also experienced this, feeling that it’s harder to focus than ever.
We are living in a world that’s more distracted than ever. Without an ability to focus, we lose our ability to think deeply.
We can’t expect to create systems or socially-impactful movements, while our attention span continues to shorten year-over-year.
And it’s not just the news cycle that stretches our abilities to focus and to follow the current events of the day.
In fact, the theft and brokering of attention has proven to be incredibly lucrative for the advertising and tech industries. $600 billion dollars were spent on digital ads in 2022, with growth expected to surpass $800 billion in 2025.
Enter: The Attention Crisis
I recently listened to this episode of the Upstream podcast with Johann Hari. Hari has a new book out, titled Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention.
For the book, Hari traveled the world for three years interviewing scientists and experts on the subject of attention. He was inspired to write it from his own experiences, and feeling that “wherever my generation gathered, we would lament our lost capacity for concentration”.
One scientist interviewed for the book, Dr. Joel Nigg, says we must ask if we “are living in an attentional pathogenic culture”.
In the book, Hari cites research that, “college students found they now only focus on any one task for 65 seconds”.
He also cites a study that claims, “office workers found they only focus on average for three minutes”.
His message is that our inability to focus is not a personal failure, but rather, our attention has been stolen from us by the advertising industry and Big Tech, as mentioned above.
Hari’s message echos one of consumer capitalism’s core tenets, which is that any difficulty we have is a personal failing, and that if we just work harder and/or buy the right product, everything will work out.
Hari also calls for an “attention rebellion”, inciting us all to wake up and to fight for our right to reclaim our attention. He relates his own struggle to reclaim his attention, and stresses the importance of regulating advertising and tech monopolies.
You can read his piece for the Guardian here, or listen to the podcast below.
How Can I Reclaim My Attention?
In the interest of shaping this publication towards being “solutions-focused media”(an idea that I first heard on Upstream here), I wonder, “How can I reclaim my attention?”
I’ve tried meditation for years, but my feeling is that it doesn’t solve the problem. It helps, but it’s hard to track if it’s working. My hunch is that if I invested serious time into my practice it would generate noticeable and lasting results. I posted this post by researchers Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davision last week, on how a consistent meditation practice changes the brain over time.
As it stands, I’m averaging 2-3 hours per week. It’s more of a palliative than a cure. It seems that meditation and mindfulness are a great tool, but there are things “upstream” that must be addressed before really diving into a meditation practice and seeing transformative effects.
I think, to reclaim your attention, you first must understand how it works.
It seems their are two ways to heal your attention. The first, is by understanding how your ability to focus works, and improving your ability to do that. The second (much harder thing), is to audit your environment and lifestyle for things that steal your attention, and to begin to make incremental changes to alter and remove those things from your life. Things like being exposed to ads, checking news sites and social media, blocking out time for sleep, play, and deep work, and so on.
Here are three precepts to understand how to focus deeply. I’m summarizing this from the Guardian article above, where Hari talks with “flow state” researcher, Prof Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
The brain is bad at multi-tasking. There is the “switch-cost” effect, which means that every time your switch your focus from one activity to another, you have to expend additional energy to re-focus on the first task, as opposed to if you did not switch.
Have a meaningful goal. Having a meaningful goal makes it easier to focus and get into a flow state.
Operate at the edge of your abilities. This also helps, by creating a dynamic tension that allows you to become fully immersed in your task or activity.
Hari says we need to band together and fight back. This is true, but I wonder if before we do that, we need to find a smaller, more “grassroots” solutions and practices.
We need to realize that there is a relationship between attention and self-worth, and that the attention we pour into social media and streaming video services has a cost. Maybe we would be best served to apply the old adage, “you are what you eat” to include our information diet as well as our nutritional diet.
50 years ago, we didn’t know that cigarettes and fried foods kill us.
In 50 years, this age may be looked upon as similar to that of the robber barons in terms of greed and institutional avarice.
I don’t have a complete solution to reclaiming one’s attention, but the significance is clear.
What do you think?
Are we in an attention crisis?
Would providing solutions to the attention crisis that are accessible to the common person have significant effects in starting to fix a world in crisis?
Great essay- I think we're both looking at this for the sense-making crisis that it is: https://www.adamkaraoguz.com/attention-1
Thanks, Adam! Reading your essay now and will lodge my thoughts in response here soon