How I Got My Attention Back
Technology is commanding our attention in infinite, insurmountable loops. A country trip off-grid helped me escape.
There are a thousand beautiful ways to start the day that don’t begin with looking at your phone. And yet so few of us choose to do so.
For twenty-eight days this winter I lived on the grounds of an old estate down in central Virginia, next to a town called — terrifyingly — Lynchburg, making good on a residency I had been offered by the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. I had done other residencies before, and knew in order to eke out maximum productivity, internet disconnection was nonnegotiable. And so it began, the day after the election: my month without the internet.
It felt like a cop-out—like I wasn’t allowed to escape the “real world” so easily. But the quieter my mind became, and the deeper I went into my own work, the more I realized how my always-on, always-connected state had rendered me largely useless.
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” wrote Blaise Pascal. Did any of us remember how to sit quietly, alone, without a phone in hand? I certainly didn’t. By the time the curtain closed on act one of our political tragedy, if there was action to be taken, I was in no state to take it. I had long since lost control of my attention.
I want my attention back.
That was the first thought I had the morning after the election. I woke. The crushing weight of a new reality reimposed itself on my mind. And then: I want my attention back.
I walked Brooklyn. At best, everyone was funereal. At worst, in tears, inconsolable. It’s impossible to overstate just how dour the world felt at that moment (and continues to feel in more surreal and horrifying ways since).
The entire city — country? world? — had been infected by a terminal disease, the prime vector of which was memes. As I made my way to the rat-maze of Penn Station to board an eight-hour Amtrak train headed for Virginia, the faces continued to flash by and I couldn’t help but think: When was the last time any of us had control of our attentions?
In “Gravity and Grace,” Simone Weil writes, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Then is the lack of attention the opposite? Does it presuppose fear and hate?
It had been a long time since my attention was mine. As the feelings of that day — of that eight-hour train ride past an America that suddenly felt very foreign — spread into the next and the next, I tried to think back to when my attention was something I could manipulate confidently. I couldn’t remember.
Was it pre-Snapchat or Instagram Stories? Before everything was filtered through a real-time performance? Pre-vlogs? Before palatable young white guys who say “bruh” with alarming frequency spun daily monologues into Sony HD cams for audiences of millions? Before every meal and outfit had to be posed, captured, and #tagged. Or pre-Grinder and pre-Tinder? When fantasies born on the crucible of YouPorn (or is it PornHub?) weren’t so easy to make real, nightly?
Was I being too hard on technology? Were we all? Technology is such an easy scapegoat. But it feels so right to point our fingers — It must have been the fake news. It must have been Facebook. It must have been Twitter. It must have been Reddit forums.
It was none of these things. It was all of these things. Whatever it was, it robbed us of our attention and, with that, our compassion. But the network never meant to harm us. Hell, it was made by a gaggle of geeks in rooms without windows in the suburbs of Geneva. That’s either the most endearing image, or the most creepy.
Regardless, down in Virginia, on a repurposed plantation: I want my attention back. The thought wouldn’t let go.
In the last year I had gotten myself addicted to the game Clash of Clans. Not purposely. I was in Myanmar on a research job and noticed all the farmers were playing it, atop their buffalo in the fields (where the 3G was strongest). I wanted to understand what compelled them to never put down their phones.
Five months into it and I was fully hooked. I had complete farmer empathy. I set a goal—some level, some league that seemed just on the edge of “enough.” Make it over that line and I’d pull the plug. What makes Clash of Clans so treacherous is that you are always building, sculpting. Five months of work is really five months of work. Each additional day of play makes it that much more difficult to abandon.
As I got closer to my goal — that mythical league on the horizon — I felt the algorithms turn on me. I sensed they knew I had a goal, and they turned that goal into an unobtainable carrot. Was I being paranoid? Maybe. The last day I played, I played for ten hours straight. Play the game slowly, a few minutes a day over months, and the algorithms are insidious. Play the game in a manic burst, and suddenly the algorithms feel laid bare. I spent only $40 over those five months, but those last ten hours were grueling. The closer I got to the goal, the more the algorithm would knock me down, set me up with what appeared to be easy wins only to have me lose. Disheartened, I’d try again, this time beating someone against whom I should have lost. Over and over this continued. It was so perfectly tuned to my most primitive set of chemical desires that it was actually beautiful — a thing of beauty. I could feel it moving beneath the screen. Its tendrils and my neurons moving with an eerie synchronicity. But of course, the lock-step relationship was weighted heavily towards the house; just as victory was once again in sight, I was back to my position ten moves and an hour prior. Where did it end?
It was ridiculous. I was ridiculous. And maybe I was just a bad player. But I couldn’t help shake that I was caught in a con, a long and shitty con.
I pulled the plug. Deleted the app. Deleted the Game Center account. The data was gone (I hoped, I haven’t checked). A weight was temporarily lifted.
In 1992 Bill McKibben “spent many months of forty hour weeks” attempting to watch twenty-four hours of television as recorded on ninety-one cable stations in Virginia (at the time, the most in the world). He wrote up his findings in the book, “The Age of Missing Information.”
“We believe that we live in the ‘age of information.’” he writes. “That there has been an information ‘explosion,’ an information ‘revolution.’ While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information.”
The medium was no longer the message, it was just an asshole.
I want my attention back.
Did I have it before Twitter became a demagogue’s pulpit? When it was just a few of us, goofing around? When to have had a thousand followers was to be a god? When the scale of things felt more … human?
Today, I could live on Twitter all day, everyday, convincing myself I was being productive. Or, at least inducing the chemicals in the mind that make me feel like I’m being productive. Read more news. Send more replies. Start more threads. Each incoming reply activating a corresponding dopamine pop. Largely pushing nothing in the world forward.
Maybe I lost my attention because I’m weak, lonely, pathetic. Maybe everyone else has total control; they can resist all the information spun by algorithms—all the delicious dopamine hits in the form of red circles. Bing!Maybe it’s just me.
But … I want my attention back.
Did I really have it before Facebook? Thinking back, the early versions of Facebook were adorable. Benign. No tagging. No timelines. Just The Wall. A way to say — Hey, what’s shaking dorm buddy? Poke. No algorithms. A human scale.
The more I thought about my attention the more I thought about the limits to human scale. How technologies inevitably amplify ourselves — the best and worst parts — in a way that is almost impossible for us to comprehend. How that scale is so easily co-opted to attenuate our attention with the worst possible diet of high-sugar, high-carb nothingness. I thought about Westworld. I thought about our loops.
Nintendo recently released their first iPhone game, Mario Run. It feels uncommonly fresh. I’m not a big gamer (Clash of Clans and Mario Run are the only two mobile titles I’ve picked up in earnest in the last, say, twenty years) but the difference between CoC and Mario couldn’t be starker. Mario is finite, bounded. The edges are clear. You pay once, and there’s no other way for Nintendo to extract money from you. No single player is a mark. There are no whales. In Mario you can not only see the end but get there. Your points max out at 9999 (clearly Nintendo didn’t think everything through). Mario Run is human scale. Clash of Clans is machine scale, network scale.
When the scale of our systems with which we interact breaches our comprehension, and control of attention is weakened en masse, the opportunity for manipulation arises. Danah Boyd maps the decade-plus arc of this sly influence:
A new form of information manipulation is unfolding in front of our eyes. It is political. It is global. And it is populist in nature. The news media is being played like a fiddle, while decentralized networks of people are leveraging the ever-evolving networked tools around them to hack the attention economy.
It’s become common to talk of the “weaponization” of attention. As in: The attention of Americans was weaponized to make facts out of falsities. I think this framing does a disservice to the crux of the problem. It’s not that our attention has been weaponized, a word that vanishes in hyperbole, but rather, mechanized. As in: Our attentions have been wrest from our control, like a flock of android starlings, or a million IP enabled toasters. We were reasonably autonomous things. Now we’re indifferently synchronous, easily manipulated.
I want my attention back.
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