Theoretically, AI could serve as a source of limitless (cognitive) attention, to be used as each sees fit. But it’s hard to see the potential in systems which we’ve only known as exploitative.
Fascinating piece. It is actually liberating to reimagine my relationship with ChatGPT as a limited way of controlling the attentional algorithm. I use ChatGPT in that way all the time and I love using it and other tools to find key thematic quotes in texts organize my own thinking about a text and more. Realizing that that could be the beginning of a optimistic vision of externalized attention gives me a modicum of hope.
Another idea this post had me thinking about was the relationship between the idea of individual memory/attention and corporate/state memory attention. Your parable of Otto does show what it might look like if corporations controlled our memory. A real life example of state control of memory is the way that "official history" has shaped our collective memories. States have long had interests in entering a particular version of the past into the official record and that feels like a real life way that the technology of writing has been used to limit what we can and can't remember.
Finally, you have me thinking about the relationship between state control of writing as an instrument of political power (which I know you have written about before) and capital control of attention as a means of economic production. With the rise of attentional politicians like Trump and Mamdani, I'd be curious to hear how the economic and political fit together in your view.
Thanks for this, Jonah. I'm all about trying to give a modicum of hope! You have a lot of great questions here, and I do plan to write about these eventually, but one thing pops to mind that I'm curious to hear your take on.
I always imagined that the paradigmatic tyrant of the surveillance capitalist era would be one who attended, constantly, to us: knew what we did, tracked what we planned, intervened before we even attempted to act, etc.
With Trump, in fact, it seems that we are instead forced to attend constantly *to him*: he is a tyrannical object of attention. He temporarily (one hopes) kneecaps traditional systems of knowledge production, policy creation, and institutional rationality, and makes them all dependent instead on his personal whims—so that, to have any idea as to what the fuck is going to happen, you need to carefully watch HIM, only HIM, and it is exhausting and nauseating. The first round of tariffs were exactly this. The market was irrelevant—it was not informational in any meaningful sense. Only watching Trump told anyone what could or couldn't or was about to or wasn't about to happen. And in this way he makes himself the supreme object of attention in his regime.
This is I suppose a version of the cult of personality—but it feels different, insofar as it is not static, not pre-memorial memorializing, but dynamic, adaptive, vibe-y, native to a networked ecology, post-literate rather than pre-literate or textual. It presupposes a certain amount of externalized attention, of functional external attention infrastructure, to operate: to truly be the tyrannical object of attention, you need to be able to govern through feed, through social media posts, etc.
Not sure if this reply makes sense, but honestly, part of what brought me to substack in the first place was an attempt to figure out what is happening in the world right now. Making sense of Trump as a phenomenon seems like only one piece (though a very important piece) of that.
I don't see Trump so much as a tyrannical object of attention because its hard to make sense of what he is doing in normal subject/object ways. Rather he seems like a kind of culmination of Debord's society of the spectacle. A politics in which we are all forced into totally passive consumers of a schizophrenic stream of images that don't have any logical relationship to each other. Last week, Ezra Klein pointed out that we all just kind of moved on from the question of whether Iran's nuclear program was destroyed. That was a subplot that's just run its course and we're on to the next thing.
Trump isn't really a source of information because the future is more and more disconnected from the past. It's becoming harder and harder to know what could be coming next on any grounds. I feel like I am still trying to work this out, but I have come to see Trumpian politics not as a political manifestation of what Jameson's cultural logic of late capitalism. It is crazy that writers in the 60s (Debord and Baudrillard in particular) predicted so much of what is happening today. Trump can't really be understood as individual actor with motivations and goals. He feels like an expression of a deeper cultural phenomenon, like as if the tiktok algorithm is governing. Does your theory technologized and externalized attention allow for free floating, agentless attenion?
Fascinating piece. It is actually liberating to reimagine my relationship with ChatGPT as a limited way of controlling the attentional algorithm. I use ChatGPT in that way all the time and I love using it and other tools to find key thematic quotes in texts organize my own thinking about a text and more. Realizing that that could be the beginning of a optimistic vision of externalized attention gives me a modicum of hope.
Another idea this post had me thinking about was the relationship between the idea of individual memory/attention and corporate/state memory attention. Your parable of Otto does show what it might look like if corporations controlled our memory. A real life example of state control of memory is the way that "official history" has shaped our collective memories. States have long had interests in entering a particular version of the past into the official record and that feels like a real life way that the technology of writing has been used to limit what we can and can't remember.
Finally, you have me thinking about the relationship between state control of writing as an instrument of political power (which I know you have written about before) and capital control of attention as a means of economic production. With the rise of attentional politicians like Trump and Mamdani, I'd be curious to hear how the economic and political fit together in your view.
Thanks for this, Jonah. I'm all about trying to give a modicum of hope! You have a lot of great questions here, and I do plan to write about these eventually, but one thing pops to mind that I'm curious to hear your take on.
I always imagined that the paradigmatic tyrant of the surveillance capitalist era would be one who attended, constantly, to us: knew what we did, tracked what we planned, intervened before we even attempted to act, etc.
With Trump, in fact, it seems that we are instead forced to attend constantly *to him*: he is a tyrannical object of attention. He temporarily (one hopes) kneecaps traditional systems of knowledge production, policy creation, and institutional rationality, and makes them all dependent instead on his personal whims—so that, to have any idea as to what the fuck is going to happen, you need to carefully watch HIM, only HIM, and it is exhausting and nauseating. The first round of tariffs were exactly this. The market was irrelevant—it was not informational in any meaningful sense. Only watching Trump told anyone what could or couldn't or was about to or wasn't about to happen. And in this way he makes himself the supreme object of attention in his regime.
This is I suppose a version of the cult of personality—but it feels different, insofar as it is not static, not pre-memorial memorializing, but dynamic, adaptive, vibe-y, native to a networked ecology, post-literate rather than pre-literate or textual. It presupposes a certain amount of externalized attention, of functional external attention infrastructure, to operate: to truly be the tyrannical object of attention, you need to be able to govern through feed, through social media posts, etc.
Not sure if this reply makes sense, but honestly, part of what brought me to substack in the first place was an attempt to figure out what is happening in the world right now. Making sense of Trump as a phenomenon seems like only one piece (though a very important piece) of that.
I don't see Trump so much as a tyrannical object of attention because its hard to make sense of what he is doing in normal subject/object ways. Rather he seems like a kind of culmination of Debord's society of the spectacle. A politics in which we are all forced into totally passive consumers of a schizophrenic stream of images that don't have any logical relationship to each other. Last week, Ezra Klein pointed out that we all just kind of moved on from the question of whether Iran's nuclear program was destroyed. That was a subplot that's just run its course and we're on to the next thing.
Trump isn't really a source of information because the future is more and more disconnected from the past. It's becoming harder and harder to know what could be coming next on any grounds. I feel like I am still trying to work this out, but I have come to see Trumpian politics not as a political manifestation of what Jameson's cultural logic of late capitalism. It is crazy that writers in the 60s (Debord and Baudrillard in particular) predicted so much of what is happening today. Trump can't really be understood as individual actor with motivations and goals. He feels like an expression of a deeper cultural phenomenon, like as if the tiktok algorithm is governing. Does your theory technologized and externalized attention allow for free floating, agentless attenion?