Attention Heuristics and Collective Action
It’s 3:45pm on a Thursday afternoon. We’re having nice weather here and I want to go outside for a walk. I should be writing my dissertation right now but instead I am bursting at the seams with impulsive criticism. I can’t stop checking my phone. I want to quit instagram but I am procrastinating.
In today’s news:
“Orange Bozo just outlawed unusual animal friendship memes and defunded the FBI.”
“According to a memo published by the department of homeland security, crucifixes must now be hung in front of every urinal in New York City.”
“Kanye West was just made the director of the CIA.”
“Lizard Kennedy announced the triumphant return of polio and mandatory avian flu for kindergarteners.”
“The department of defense announced a new program where they exclusively hire men named Brian and Chad with bachelors degrees from midwestern state colleges.”
“Florida just annexed the eastern seaboard and the White House will now be referred to as Mar a Lago north.”
Gosh it’s all so overwhelming.
Today we are going to discuss the heuristics of attention and our potential for collective action. What this means is I’m going to talk about how our behavior online is in a feedback loop with the platforms we use for sharing information to create our current political climate. These systems are omnipresent and difficult to extricate from. Let me let you in on a little secret.
This machine thrills Fascists.
But first, let’s discuss panic attacks.
A panic attack is when your nervous system can’t tell the difference between something that is going to hurt you, and something that is unpleasant but isn’t going to actually hurt you. It’s this lack of differentiation which is important to note. Your lizard brain has two states of arousal. In the first, fight or flight, there is hyperarousal: you become ready to fend off of danger and possibly run for your life. Your body produces more adrenaline, your blood pressure goes up, and the blood moves from your extremities into your center, causing dizziness and tingling sensations. Sometimes it feels difficult to breathe. In the second, the parasympathetic nervous system releases GABA into your blood stream and deescalates the fight or flight response.
While I am sure you all appreciate the anatomy lesson, I believe that this fundamental response embedded in our mindbody has been weaponized against us. In the last 20 years big tech discovered mechanisms of interaction through user experience research that activates our sympathetic nervous system so we are in a constant state of hyperarousal. It has to do with the structure of the internet under capitalism, the way things get funded, and the ways in which we consume what is now referred to as content. It has to do with the wholesale devaluing of entire industries like journalism and music. It has to do with our vanity. It has to do with greed.
The issue here is that we have structured the entirety of the online network agora around internet advertising. Billions of dollars of market-value is riding on advertising. Google, Meta, Amazon. Marketing.
Online marketing works like this: all of the data you generate online while living your life is aggregated by online brokers. Through that data and some clever black box algorithms, companies who want to sell you stuff can deduce things about you with frightening accuracy. While the urban myth that Instagram is monitoring our conversations directly may not be true, they might as well be able to because of the ways in which they are indirectly able to infer the same information about us. Your “data body” is auctioned every second you are online, which determines which ads you see while you are doom scrolling Instagram or googling whether or not you have lymes disease every time you get a headache.
The reason online marketing predominates throughout the social web, is this is how internet startups are reliably able to convince their funders that they will eventually be able to turn a profit. Most internet startups just have an idea. Instagram was wildly successful with a linear timeline until meta bought them and they needed to boost engagement with users. Henceforth we’ve had an algorithmic timeline. Why would they introduce this? Because they are able to prioritize content that will be more provocative and solicit a response. Any likes, comments, reshares constitutes a net win for the platform. It means you’re paying attention. They aren’t really invested in what. You could be amplifying a post about alien moon bases or doom posting about whatever the 5 alarm clusterfuck of the day is coming through the White House press room. It doesn’t matter.
Through this rubric, we have the baseline structure of the attention economy. Since the early days of social media, we have been trained to compete for attention on the attention economy for the peripheral benefits that come with having a large following. For those of us with large enough followings, perhaps opportunities for financial advancement come out from the woodwork. You are an influencer and a brand wants to pay you to plug their product. Do you know who isn’t paying you for your content? The platform you are posting on. Our labor is appropriated by the platform in exchange for making us visible to an audience. Some platforms like Instagram aren’t even giving us that anymore, instead opting to show our posts to a maximum of 20% of our followers under the guise that if you want more engagement you’ll be willing to pay for it.
What this does it is teaches us to complete for attention by posting increasingly provocative content in order to get the appropriate response. For some, it means posting more of their bodies. For others, it means being funny. For others, it means reposting news stories so you seem informed. Yet for others it implies creating carefully crafted narrative portraiture of how great your life is. Maybe it’s posting pictures of your children, or your pets. God I hate seeing pictures of your children. However I digress.
We are all participating in this all day, every day, whether we realize it or not. In a sense, we are creating a collective hyperarrousal state. The news, what is left of it, must participate in this charade or face going out of business. While the New York Times loves to rip on Orange Bozo, they also need him in order to stay relevant. He is great for ratings. Same thing for CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.
What Orange Bozo has figured out is that he can leverage the attention economy to keep us in a constant state of panic. The constant stream of pronouncements, executive orders, illegal power grabs and racist dogwhistles are meant to keep everyone off balance. In effect, as before, he has weaponized the attention economy. Each item that makes it into the news makes us upset, with good reason. It is terrible. But often times what do we do? We repost the article, maybe with a tidbit of commentary stating how much we don’t like it? Good job. You just reinforced the collective dopamine addled hyperarousal of your immediate network.
Orange Bozo is in a sense keeping us in a permanent state of panic in order to enact their political agenda. Most of it is a distraction and that is the point. If we can make everyone nuts because they are banning transgender athletes from playing women’s basketball, (which is obviously a pressing issue) maybe they won’t pay attention to the evisceration of the social safety net.
I have some pretty far out theories on this, which includes the idea that Orange Bozo is not so much a political figure, but a post-human assemblage of different networked power structures that are congealing around the suppression of domestic human rights and tax rebates for the ultra rich. In essence, Orange Bozo couldn’t exist without the attention economy. In the Marxist-historicist tradition, one might even say that even if we didn’t have Orange Bozo, we would have someone else who would be catapulted to political influence through their manipulation of the attention economy. Marx was essentially saying that the stage of capitalism we are in creates the historical figure, not the other way around. However I digress. The point here is actually how to separate the signal from the noise. I think part of this has to do with media literacy training in the age of algorithms, and the other part has to do with consciousness.
We briefly discussed above how online marketing works so let’s take an easier example. Spotify. Spotify is horrible on every conceivable level for the music industry. And yet we all use it. Musicians protest it while still putting their music on it. And like a river following the path of least resistance, we consumers opt for convenience and subscribe. I’m not going to lie, I still have an account even though I know how toxic it is. The point here is to make a brief example as to how just as easily, me, you and everyone we know could just stop using Spotify. Literally. What is preventing us from doing this? Consciousness.
It’s as if the perceived convenience of using a platform prevents us from critically engaging it so that we can leave it if need be because it’s damaging something we care about. Seeding the platform with subversive content misses the point. You’re still feeding the platform.
So the most obvious way to protest the platform is to log off. Logging off is its own form of consciousness. In one of his last public addresses before he died, Gene Youngblood, legendary theorist of media art did an interview through Grey Area in San Francisco where he implored the audience to “drop out of the broadcast.” At the time I thought it was rather outdated and quaint, but in retrospect I think he was on to something.
In December of 2021 I was sitting in a hot tub with my partner having a lovely afternoon two hours south while Boulder Colorado was on fire. They were setting up evacuation shelters for covid positives in a parking lot of a supermarket that recently had a mass shooting. We were at the tail end of orange bozo’s first term. Things were bleak. The thing was, in retrospect we were ok. We were sitting in a hot tub and later on had brunch. I later found out about the devastation through my immediate network that was affected by the tragedy.
My partner and I, since the pandemic began, spent our time taking walks in the woods, making dinner and watching Star Trek. I had deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts because I couldn’t stand the constant doom posting. I opted out of clout chasing on twitter. I spent time and intention interacting with friends and collaborators online.
The lesson here is that world can be falling apart and the news may be screeching every inane thing Orange Bozo says, but remember where you are. Most of it isn’t real for you in this moment. We are dealing with a fundamentally cognitive assault. Participating in it by amplifying it or trying to fight it only makes it stronger. In other words, your participation on these platforms serves to amplify everything you don’t want to give power to.
The second aspect of consciousness I want to discuss is that we are living in a shared and collective reality that we have more agency over than we might think. Think about your participation in terms of feedback. What are you amplifying? What are you negating? Are there dimensions you aren’t seeing or feeling? Part of this is grounding in your body and your direct experience. The first time around being online didn’t help. Getting caught up in the news didn’t help. Going for walks did. The second part of this involves thinking about your effect on others. Are you amplifying panic and distress? Are you projecting your own panic and distress onto others? What aspect of our political reality are you amplifying to your immediate peer group? One of the things I like about Mastodon is that there are trigger warnings you can place over you content, so somone scrolling by wont’ be subjected to it without their consent. The implied meaning here is that in a sense, if all of us stopped amplifying the Orange Bozo show, we would greatly reduce its power over us.
We can literally opt out of the media spectacle which is designed to distract and disorient us.
Media literacy plays a part in this aspect of developing shared consciousness. When we interact with and through an algorithm, we have to be critical and ask questions about what we are seeing and how our behavior is being recycled back to us. This could serve to do several things, which reinforces your own biases, locks you into an ideological echo chamber, as well as plumb your own sense of deficiency so that you are more easily sold on various Ponzi schemes and marketing claptrap.
We need to understand the nature of journalism and the difference between tabloid headlines designed to grab your attention, versus substantive reporting on stuff that is actually happening. Differentiating between rhetoric and actualities is difficult. We need a heuristic system. Part of it is media literacy in the age of algorithms. Part of it is journalism 101 i.e. “is this actual news?” Someone saying something doesn’t mean it’s actually happening. Similarly, just because something is happening doesn’t mean it is happening. For instance, the news was reporting that federal funding for trillions of dollars of programs was suddenly stalled by the executive branch. This was within days overturned by the federal court because it is illegal. It is in a sense, a bait and switch, where Orange Bozo is simultaneously testing the reach of his power while creating headlines that confuse and disorient all of us. So, if the algorithm is feeding us this content which is designed to fuel the outrage machine, perhaps we should think twice before amplifying it?
The point here shouldn’t be understated. Yes, you may be affected by illegal or problematic policy. We likely all will. Some of us may very well be in danger, especially those of us who are in precarious situations due to citizenship, race, gender and sexual orientation. But you should only react when something is actually happening and seek to take proactive steps to protect yourself and your community. Reacting constantly is going to accomplish nothing except burning you out so you can’t react when something is actually happening. For instance, one could use a tool like Signal to set up alternative networks to track things like ICE raids in your immediate community. In this case, this would be urgent and happening directly in your community and wouold require a response.
In an ideal situation, we would have news journalism that actively filters out the noise for us, but until we get better reporting that isn’t being incentivized by the online marketing model, we have to do that filtering ourselves. Not all of us can do this and not lose our minds. It is important to take care of yourself and your mental health right now, as opposed to being an online martyr for your followers. I guess what I am saying is it is ok to check out if you need to.
For those of us who can and will try and resist what is happening, we need to think about online and offline modes of organizing that will actually be felt. We need to generate affect. While I am not ruling out the power of demonstrations, I also think of it as a somewhat 20th century model which is easily ignored or conversely violently suppressed by authoritarian goons. There may be complimentary ways of weilding influence.
In a system in which political agency is being rapidly replaced by economic agency, one of the ways we can direct our attention is through our consumption. I know it sounds rather vain, but in a sense, we can still vote with our dollars. Companies are constantly exerting influence in order to maintain their market position. If you threaten their market position or reward them for making good decisions, this has an upstream affect in the political space. I actually think that this moderate inconvenience on our part may have massive potential. For instance not buying from Amazon means you are forgoing the convenience of getting the thing immediately. Same thing for Walmart. However by buying local, your money is supporting your community exponentially more than you otherwise would.
Up to this point we’ve discussed developing media literacy and consicousness, voting with our dollars. The last aspect I want to discuss is the notion of tools. While weilding agency over your tools is one of the most important steps we can take towards a more democratic and less toxic online media space, it doesn’t supplant developing media literacy and collective consciousness. What tools can do is amplify good habits that we are already practicing.
Where are you getting your information? Where are you connecting with your friends? Where are you learning about events? There are a myriad of ways to do this, from setting up an affinity group via discord or another chat based server like mattermost, to innovations happening in the federated social media space like Mastodon. While Mastodon as a twitter clone may not be everyone’s cup of tea, there are other types of interfaces being developed through the activitypub protocol that mimic photo sharing applications like Instagram, to event pages like Facebook.
Duckduck go is a fantastic search engine and browser that doesn’t track your online activity. Peertube is an alternative to YouTube. The point here is that we can create alternative networks that we can wield more power over with a little bit of effort on our part. I think that the outcome will be worth it and together we can make our experience of being together online less toxic and perhaps even more interesting and even joyful.
Here is a list of equivalents you should consider:
Whatsapp <> Signal
Twitter <> Bluesky
Twitter <> Mastodon
Instagram <> Pixelfed
Youtube <> Peertube
Google Chrome <> Duckduckgo
What I am trying to communicate here is that there is a feedback loop between the technologies we use to communicate, the systems that enable the construction of those technologies, how we behave with those technologies, and our larger political climate. At some point we need to develop literacy and consciousness around these platforms and tools so we can direct our attention towards more productive means and less toxic ends.
I want us all to realize that we are in this together, and we can choose an alternative. Literally. Just like that. We can leave Meta platforms. We can leave Spotify. We can stop rewarding sensationalist news journalism. We can disempower opportunist politicians who seek to use the attention economy to paralyze democratic discourse. All we have to do is decide that we want it badly enough.