by
Yves Citton
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As a consequence of this individualization of behaviours, we use chemistry to compel our children's attention (as well as our own), at all costs, to bend to the--unprecedented, completely artificial and terribly invasive--needs of a Janus-faced capitalism, which simultaneously advocates relentless productive discipline and limitless consumerist hedonism. So, it is in the broad framework of a vast (in)attention economy that ADHDs must be situated--rather than in the overly narrow framework of the subject-object relation or family dynamic. If we are our children are suffering from something, it is firstly from the very specific socio-economic illness that is 'mental capitalism'. [...]
[...] The 'Great Society' dreamed up by Friedrich Hayek is admirably 'liberal' in that it endeavours to provide as many means of happiness as possible to the individuals that make it up, while leaving everyone free to provide their own definition of happiness [...] But attention cannot be reduced to a simple question of means. You cannot claim to be holding an axiologically neutral discourse (separated from any subjective value) on attention, for the good reason that attentional processes are inextricably linked to our processes of valorization. [...] attention is individuating between it is rooted in a circular dynamic--in a circle that may be vicious or virtuous: I valorize what I pay attention to and I pay attention to what I valorize. As soon as the means-resource conditions the end aimed at through it, it is no longer possible to claim--as does our economic ideology--that it is maximizing the means while leaving everyone free to choose their own ends. Making do with an economic vocabulary in the study of attentional dynamics therefore prevents us from posing the essential question: how--which is to say, inevitably, in which direction, to what ends--are we to direct the attention which gives direction to what we become?
so good
It would be terribly reductive--even if partially true--to characterize such enthralments in terms of an opposition between 'them' (the media, journalist,s the powerful, rulers, elites, the establishment) and 'us' (the poor little ignorant people, shamefully manipulated by Machiavellian politicians, big bosses of multinational firms, spin doctors and storytellers). Media enthralments result from an echosystem in which we are all implicated [...] Even if we are led to find its deplorable and degrading effects deeply repulsive, this echosystem can only be conjugated in the first-person plural: whether we like it or not it constitutes 'our' environment, 'our milieu' [...]--we are what and who we are because we live in the 'middle' of it. We don't merely live in it: to a large extent, 'we' are it. And just like our atmosphere or climate, however unbreathable or overheated they may be, our media echosystem--with all its nuances, standardized sectors and no-go zones--is necessarily communal. Here as well, there is no plan(et) B.
very DFW and also reminds me of my closing para for viewer in the high castle
[...] If our behaviour is always (a little) irrational, this is because our actions are always (a little) constrained (for lack of means or lack of time), a constraint which prevents us from collecting enough information to be certain about what we are doing. It is precisely here that we can gauge the unrealism of the neoliberal paradigm which, blinded by its 'liberal' ideology, systematically fails to take into account the consequences of the multiple forms of constraint which 'irrationalize' our behaviour--beginning with the most important among them: information deficiency.
[...] with the reduction to zero of the marginal costs for the transmission of digital goods we are in the midst of the emergence of something absolutely novel with profoundly revolutionary implications. But, on the one hand, the costs of production of the material goods necessary for the existence and circulation among us of cultural goods are far from evaporating, remaining ecologically unsustainable at their current levels. While, on the other hand, and above all, when attention phenomena are taken into account, we find competition returning at the time of reception of cultural goods. This was certainly Herbert Simon's central message in 1969:
In an information-rich world, most of the cost of information is the cost incurred by the recipient. [...] Human beings, like contemporary computers, are essentially serial deices. They can attend to only one thing at a time. This is just another way of saying that attention is scarce.
We touch concretely here on the mechanism by which the attention economy is rooted in a CIRCULAR SELF-REINFORCING DYNAMIC: attention attracts attention. Attention accumulated in the past and the present supports the future accumulation of attention. It is because millions of tourist have come to see the Mona Lisa that millions of tourists rush to see the Mona Lisa. [...]
So an ATTENTION ARMS RACE is set up: the more a market society becomes mediatized, the more it must dedicate a significant proportion of its activity to the production of demand, investing ever greater resources into the machinery of attention attraction. Like military arms races, this attention arms race is in itself a tragic waste, thanks to a sub-optimal organization of inter-human relations. [...]
fb/etc investing in making the product more addictive, and making it possible to show more ads (extract more ad-watching time from the viewer) in order to ensure revenue growth
If orthodox economic science, neoliberals and capitalism's apologists really wanted to promote 'free and unskewed competition', they would start by putting an end to (or drastically taxing) advertising activities, where the unequal powers with respect to the propagation of costly signals constitutes a 'market distortion' that is much more sinister than any of the interventions for which the state is berated. [...]
This same asymmetry can be found at the global level of GEOPOLITICAL ATTENTION EXPLOITATION: 'the most advanced--Western--cultures export information massively and import huge amounts of live attention for it, while the cultures of other regions export very modest amounts of information and accordingly earn little attention for it'. [...]
[...] the phenomena of alignment, convergence, synchronization and concentration of attention brought about by PageRank would remain innocent enough if the attention economy wasn't completely overdetermined by the quest for financial profit that has now been elevated to a condition of survival.
[...] the PRINCIPLE OF COMMODIFICATION which seeks to submit attentional flows to needs and desires that will maximize financial returns. If, as an attention condenser, PageRank exemplifies the extraordinary power of the digitalization of our minds, as a capitalist enterprise, Google exemplifies the most harmful control that it is possible to imagine the vectoralist class exercising over our collective attention. [...]