The Most Important Decision You'll Ever Make
Attention, platforms, and choice
Previously in Internet Book Club:
I started reading The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes almost a month ago, but the first time I picked it up I got 20 pages in and then got distracted by the internet.
It was a deeply ironic and deeply appropriate way to kick off reading a book about attention in the modern technological world. I didn’t pick the book back up until last week when I took a low-internet vacation to rural Switzerland (that’s why you haven’t seen anything from the blog for the last ten days or so!). I spent last week in the Swiss Alps staring at mountains, mostly ignoring the internet and my phone, reading voraciously and contemplating Hayes’s book on the nature of human attention.
I originally picked this book up intending to write a fairly straightforward book review post, like the ones above that you’ve seen before. But this post changed in the writing of it, and it’s turned into a mixture of book review, vacation diary, personal reflection and life advice.1
The Sirens’ Call has a very simple premise. We live in a world of infinite information. The average person reading this post has access to, without exaggeration, something like 99% of all human knowledge, at any time they want it, instantly, for free. You can look up literally any fact, get a free AI chatbot to summarize any topic, watch any person do any kind of deranged thing. Need tips on antique toy restoration? Want to check out some pictures of wolves with watermelons? Have a kink specifically for women with their legs painted yellow? The internet has anything and everything, all of the time.
We underrate how insane this is. Nothing even remotely like our current situation has existed in human history. Our brains were not built for it. And this raises an important question - if information is infinite, what’s the actual constraint that stops us from knowing everything? Chris Hayes’ answer is attention. Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon predicted this would come to pass in 1971:
In an information rich-world, the wealth of information means the dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
For most of history, people lived in states of boredom pretty much all the time.2 We had a scarcity of relevant information or stimulus and a surplus of attention and time. Information used to be costly, but now that it’s costless and infinite, the limiting factor comes from your attention. It’s not an accident that you pay attention. You are spending a finite resource when you choose to give something your awareness. Society has gotten immeasurably richer over the last few hundred years, and we’ve generated immeasurably more information, but we’re still stuck with the same amount of attention as medieval peasants.
Hayes then takes us through the types of attention. There’s the voluntary, focused attention that you typically think of when it comes to attention - leaning in to concentrate on hearing someone at a crowded party, or focusing intensely on a game of chess. That first kind of attention can be interrupted by involuntary attention, like hearing a glass break or a gunshot. And finally there’s social attention. We don’t just pay attention to the world, we’re also very concerned with the idea that people should pay attention to us.
Hayes, as a television host, knows a bit about trying to get and hold people’s attention. The getting is the easy part. There’s a relatively simple list of tricks TV uses to grab your focus, like big faces with big emotions, high volume, colorful graphics and constantly changing visuals. These tricks are well studied, they’re reliable, and they take advantage of that second type of attention, the involuntary reactions we have to new stimuli we’ve just come across. It’s much harder to hold viewer attention. Once you’ve got them to stay on your channel, how do you keep a viewer for the full hour’s length of your show? Television executives are much less certain about this. The first type of deep, focused attention is the more valuable type and there aren’t many shortcuts to getting it other than putting out a high quality product.
That’s what is so insidious about the infinite scroll of social media. Vertical video feeds hacked that very difficult question - How can we get viewers to focus deeply on our content for a long period of time? - and realized they can bypass the first kind of attention entirely. It turns out that pure distraction is the answer. Rather than allowing us to focus, apps like TikTok hold us for hours by presenting a new “Hey look at THIS” endlessly. It’s a glass shattering, every ten seconds, forever.
The social machine is also very good at hacking the third kind of attention, social attention. What if someone is saying your name somewhere? What if your post could be the one that goes viral? What if everyone was paying attention to you? Human beings crave social recognition on a deep, instinctual level and when deprived of socialization will do almost anything to get it.
Hayes thinks most of us will agree with him that the first kind of attention is the most valuable, that modern social media is undermining our ability to use it in favor of the other two kinds of attention, and that this is bad for everyone involved except the advertisers. He contrasts the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates with modern political rhetoric as a way to make this point. Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas were running for the same Senate seat, and engaged in a speaking tour across Illinois to debate the national question of slavery. These events were three hours long, and were structured to include an hour-long opening statement from the first speaker, a 1.5 hour rebuttal from the second speaker, and a half-hour conclusion from the first speaker. The debates were a sensation - every debate was in front a packed audience, they were reported on in news outlets around the country, and were the subject of national conversation. Three straight hours of nothing but concentrated lectures on one subject, often using incredibly dense and sophisticated arguments, and people loved it.
It’s impossible to imagine our current political moment sustaining anything like that. The ‘debates’ we have feature people speaking for a few minutes at most on a wide variety of subjects, and they’re mostly trying to make sure they hit all the focus-group-tested slogans and phrases they memorized before hand. The speakers can’t go 15 seconds without interrupting one another. The quintessential form of political communication has changed from long-form debate to a 30-second TV ad.3
Hayes wants you to agree with him that this has terrible, terrible effects on society writ large. The first and most valuable kind of attention is akin to a flow state. It allows us to focus intensely on something, to subsume ourselves, to concentrate deeply and uniquely with your whole being. It’s the kind of focus the audience gave Lincoln and Douglas. It’s the kind of focus you give to the climax of a TV show you’re engrossed in. It’s the kind of attention you pay when deeply analyzing a chess position in a game of chess, or in trying to figure out the right order of operations in a tricky math problem. It’s how masters operate in art or athletics - by allowing all distraction to fall aside and completely engulfing themselves in a single state of flow. It’s a whole self experience, and today it’s what many of us are searching for and not finding. Instead we’ve got the infinite scroll, which gives us endless distraction and tantalizes us with parasocial relationships but robs us of the ability to do anything deeper.
The Sirens’ Call is a very strong book on its own merits. I enjoyed it, and if you’re interested in the subject I’d recommend you buy it and read it. But I read it in a fairly unusual way - sitting in an isolated village in rural Switzerland, parked on the literal side of a mountain, deliberately ignoring social media for most of a week so I could read books and stare at the magnificent scenery around me.
Something about this experience was especially meaningful, because for the first time in a long while I spent most of my days taking in the world around me without digital interruption. I’m normally extremely online, and that doesn’t bother me. For the most part being online doesn’t drain me, it energizes me. It’s part of who I am.
But this trip was well timed, because in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder and subsequent discourse, I was feeling pretty drained. The state of country didn’t seem great. The subjects people kept talking about online were exhausting and dispiriting. Having opinions about Charlie Kirk online was an invitation for abuse, and I had the opinions and got the abuse. Getting offline last week was a blessing, and it allowed me time to ponder. I was able to read, to connect ideas, and really think about what I wanted to think about. And the most important connection I made in Mürren, staring at a mountain so big it seemed to swallow the sky, is the importance of choice.
Hayes mentions ‘The Entertainment’ from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest at points throughout the book. The Entertainment, in the novel, is a film that is so unbelievably captivating that everyone who watches it loses interest in any other aspect of life. They simply watch the film over and over, not eating or sleeping or doing anything else at all until they die. The feds keep sending people to try to research what’s on the damn thing, but give up after their fifth researcher dies watching the tape. The connection to modern social media is obvious, and Wallace was well ahead of his time in worrying about how we’d all end up addicted to mindless screen entertainment.
It’s a great inclusion, but sitting in Switzerland and thinking about attention I found myself drawn to a different David Foster Wallace work. In 2005 at Kenyon College, Wallace gave what is almost certainly the greatest graduation speech of all time, This is Water. I’d strongly recommend reading it if you never have, and I’m going to quote it extensively here because I doubt I can communicate the core ideas better than Wallace can.
Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Wallace then launches into the core of every graduation speech, trying to find the larger purpose of a college degree and a liberal arts education. He bypasses the typical answer “It teaches you how to think” as wrong - isn’t that a little insulting? How did you get into college in the first place if you didn’t already know how to think?
Instead, he lands on an answer related to attention and choice:
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master”…
I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
Our lives are filled with information, and they’re filled with choices. Upvote or downvote? Like, Subscribe, or both? Leave an angry comment or remain silent? Keep scrolling or watch Netflix? Should I order that side table on Amazon? Should I get fries with that?
But so many of the choices we make aren’t really choices when you examine them closely. They’re the result of sleepwalking through existence without realizing that you have the choice of what to pay attention to. Have you ever been on a long stretch of road and spaced out? I’ve done it, and realized after almost an hour of driving I couldn’t remember a damn thing about the last hour. It’s disconcerting, it’s a bit scary, and I think that accurately describes not just monotonous drives but much of our daily lives - going through the default motions with barely a thought as to what we’re doing, why we’re there, or what’s worth paying attention to. You can choose an side table, but why are you living in this apartment in the first place? You can choose the regular portion or the Grande Meal, but what led you to this restaurant? You can comment or not comment on that post, but why are you reading it to begin with instead of doing literally anything else?
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I’m heavily cribbing from DFW here, for which I can only offer the justification that so is every cultural commentator for the last couple of decades. And I know it’s a cliche to write a post about how you discovered some profound life advice while doing tourist stuff. But please but hang with me here. Remember that one of the lessons of This is Water is that the most banal, obvious things are often the hardest to really understand. What the hell is water? Sometimes we need to be reminded.
The economist John Maynard Keynes accurately foresaw that over time, compound growth would mean that his grandchildren’s generation would be immensely richer than his own. He thought one of the central challenges in future society would be the search for meaning. In his words, “man will be faced with his real, permanent problem - how to use his freedom… how to occupy the leisure… for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”. If you’re like me, you live in one of the richest societies in the richest time in human history. You have access to material things your forefathers could only dream of. Your challenge is whether or not you can master yourself.
I would argue this is the single most important part of being human. You get to actively choose what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what you value, and act on that decision. You, like everyone else on this planet, have a finite amount of attention to spend. You get to choose where to spend it. And I’m begging you to stop, really stop, and consider whether you’re making that choice consciously or unconsciously.
What you give your time and attention to is the most important decision you’ll ever make. In some sense it’s the only choice you really get to make.
We live in an era where platforms want to monopolize your attention, and The Sirens’ Call is a great book about that topic. Attention is a valuable resource, and social media giants want to grab it so they can effectively monetize it. But it’s possible to imagine attentional regimes geared towards different purposes. Physical newspapers are often designed to draw your eye towards stories you might not normally read, but that the editors have decided are worth promoting nonetheless. Museums are meant to capture your attention, but in a slower and more contemplative way that encourages reflection. University classrooms are often structured around lively debate, disagreement, and deep understanding.
The platform I’m on right now, Substack, is part of this trend. When you read Infinite Scroll, I don’t want to colonize every last second of your time. I don’t want my salary to depend on slapping some ads for BroTein XXL Power Powder and then trying to maximize the amount of time your eyeballs are here. Instead, I bypass the algorithmic feed and the New-New-New-New dopamine rush tactics, and rely on paid subscribers who get these posts directly to their email. I think it’s a healthier way to operate, one that encourages the first kind of deep, voluntary attention.
I hope that I provide you some value a couple of times per week, that you enjoy these posts and get something out of them. I hope the blog hits a happy middle ground that lets you understand and keep up with internet culture without having to fully drown yourself in it. And I hope that you remember you have a choice. To say something detrimental to my own bottom line, if you don’t think the blog is providing you value, you should walk away, unsubscribe. Don’t sleepwalk through life spending time on things without realizing why you’re doing it.
…That is the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.
You get to choose what you believe is important. You get to choose what you give meaning to and what you pay your attention to. It’s the most important choice you make, and you have the privilege and the burden of making it over and over, every day. Don’t take the water for granted.
In the spirit of On Consumption vs Production or Persistence Beats Talent
Hayes even argues that boredom was so omnipresent that for most of human history most cultures didn’t even have a real word/concept for boredom - it’s just how things were.
And honestly, today it’s probably just a tweet with a deceptively edited video clip rather than a TV ad.
Vacation pictures in the chat!
https://substack.com/chat/1543281
I've enjoyed a number of free-sub articles, but this one got my money.
Every day I thank my lucky stars that I deep-sixed Facebook years ago and never got on Twitter or downloaded Vine/etc.