Chapter 1 The Sirens’ Call
The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens’ call. (Location 88)
“My experience,” as William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology in 1890, “is what I agree to attend to.”[8] Increasingly it feels as if our experience is something we don’t fully agree to, and the ubiquity of that sensation represents a kind of rupture. Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured. Our inner lives have been transformed in utterly unprecedented fashion. That’s true in just about every country and culture on earth. (Location 91)
I feel the instinct, almost physical, to look at the little attention box sitting in my pocket. I let it pass with a small amount of effort. But it pulses there like Gollum’s ring. (Location 98)
James was rather obsessed with the question of free will, whether we in fact had it and how it worked. To him, “effort of attention”—deciding where to direct our thoughts—was “the essential phenomenon of will.”[9] It was one and the same. No wonder I feel alienated from myself when the attention box in my pocket compels me seemingly against my own volition. (Location 103)
That’s basically the world we’ve built for our minds. (Location 111)
The combination of our deepest biological instincts and the iterative genius of global capitalism means we are subject to an endless process of experimentation, whereby some of the largest corporations in the history of humanity spend billions to find out what we crave and how much of that they can sell us. From inside our own being, attention is what constitutes our very self, but from the perspective of entities outside of us, attention is like gold in a stream, oil in a rock. (Location 113)
The very experience of what we call modernity is the experience of a world whose pace of life, scope of information, and sources of stimulus with a claim on our attention are always increasing. At each point up this curve, the ascent induces vertigo. (Location 190)
The debate over our digital lives, at least as it’s been reflected in the discourse, basically comes down to this: Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books or cigarettes? (Location 226)
What I want to argue here is that the scale of transformation we’re experiencing is far more vast and more intimate than even the most panicked critics have understood. In other words: the problem with the main thrust of the current critiques of the attention economy and the scourge of social media is that (with some notable exceptions) they don’t actually go far enough. (Location 229)
My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource—our attention—is also the very thing that makes us human. Unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds. (Location 236)
The battle to control what we pay attention to at any given instant structures everything from our inner life (who and what we listen to, how and when we are present to those we love) to our collective public lives (which pressing matters of social concern are debated and legislated, which are neglected; which deaths are loudly mourned, which ones are quietly forgotten). Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention. (Location 255)
If I put a picnic table in my backyard and my neighbor steals my idea by putting a picnic table in his own backyard, that doesn’t change my experience very much. But if my neighbor steals my picnic table, well, then, he’s made my life a lot worse. The brilliant legal scholar Lawrence Lessig uses that example to illustrate the difference between intellectual property and physical property, but it’s also a good way to think about the difference between information and attention.[31] Information is the idea of the picnic table; attention is the actual picnic table. (Location 274)
I’m going to discuss the relationship between information and attention a lot more over the course of this book, but for our purposes here at the start, the axiom I want to drive home is that information is infinite and attention is limited. And value derives from scarcity, which is why attention is so valuable. (Location 279)
As global incomes rise, and the variety of consumer choices expands accordingly, attentional competition becomes ever more ferocious. We’re seeing the relative emphasis between these two models shift rapidly. In so many instances, the ability to grab the attention of the consumer is more important than the actual product or service offered. (Location 298)
The TV age spawned dire warnings, from Marshall McLuhan to Neil Postman, that the broad narcotic effect of the new device was making the public stupider, duller, and less capable of self-governance. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” Postman wrote. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”[39] (Location 355)
Unlike, say, oil, a chemical compound buried in the earth, attention cannot be separated from who we are and what it means to be alive. In fact, attention is the most fundamental human need. The newborn of our species is utterly helpless. It can survive only with attention—that is, if some other human attends to it. That attention will not itself sustain an infant, but it is the necessary precondition to all care. If you neglect a child, it will perish. We are built and formed by attention; destroyed by neglect. This is our shared and inescapable human fate. Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human. (Location 361)
After a lot of trial and error, I now view audience attention as something like the wind that powers a sailboat. It’s a real phenomenon, independent of the boat, and you can successfully sail only if you harness it. You don’t turn the boat into the wind, but you also don’t simply allow the wind to set your course. You figure out where you want to go (in the case of my show, what I think is important for people to know), you identify which way the wind is blowing, and then, using your skills and the tools of the boat, you tack back and forth to manage to arrive at your destination using that wind power. (Location 413)
This rearrangement of social and economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, I’m going to argue, a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism and the creation of wage labor as the central form of human toil. Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism. What had previously been regarded as human effort was converted into a commodity with a price. People had always “worked” in one way or the other, but that work was now embedded in a complicated system that converted the work into a market good. This transition from “work” to “labor” was, for many, both punishing and strange. The worker, Karl Marx observed in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”[43] (Location 420)
Indeed, in order to extract labor from a person, you need to compensate them through wages or coerce them into it or use violence—such as the overseer’s whip—to force it out of them. All these methods have been used. But the extraction of our attention happens in a different way. People can be forced to work in all kinds of cruel and oppressive ways, but they cannot be forced to do it purely through the manipulation of their preconscious faculties. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to dig a ditch, you know you are being coerced. If someone fires a gun in the air, your attention will instantly shift to the sound even before you can fully grasp what’s happening. Attention can be extracted from us at the purely sensory level, before our conscious will even gets to weigh in. In fact, this is how a siren functions. (Location 436)
Public discourse is now a war of all against all for attention. Commerce is a war for attention. Social life is a war for attention. Parenting is a war for attention. And we are all feeling battle weary. (Location 448)
Chapter 2 The Slot Machine and Uncle Sam
Attention exists to solve a problem, and the problem is information. (Location 453)
Information is theoretically infinite, while attention is constrained. This is why information is cheap and attention is expensive. (Location 464)
James felt it useful to present his own definition, one that probably hasn’t been surpassed since: attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”[4] (Location 474)
A few years ago, a group of scientists from across a number of cognition-related fields coauthored an article cheekily titled “No One Knows What Attention Is,” in which they argued, using contemporary empirical findings and cutting-edge research on visual attention, that the concept itself was at once incoherent and theoretically useless: “one of the most misleading and misused terms in the cognitive sciences.”[6] (Location 482)
This is the form of attention James describes in that famous passage, and it’s the first of three central aspects of attention. This first aspect of attention is what psychologists call voluntary attention. Voluntary attention is what happens when you sit down to read a novel, or take a test, or have a deep after-hours conversation with your partner. You focus, you listen, you train your flashlight of thought on something or someone. In our cocktail party example, you are engaged in voluntary attention when you lean in to hear what your interlocutor is saying. This form of attention works through negation, as opposed to amplification. What we’re actually doing in our brains is suppressing everything other than what we’re focused on. This is the “withdrawal” that James describes, and it’s a necessary process that effectuates voluntary attention. (Location 499)
The key finding, replicated again and again, is that higher perceptual loads make us more susceptible to a kind of tunnel vision.[9] The reason the experimental subjects don’t see the guy in the gorilla suit is because of how difficult the task is and how much visual stimulus there is to process. Scientists call this inattentional blindness.[10] (Location 516)
Like the wail of the siren, this is an example of the second of three aspects of attention, which psychologists call involuntary attention. And like voluntary attention, the basic dynamics here are so familiar and intuitive that it can seem at first to hardly merit much inspection. We experience this all the time: a loud noise or bright light or other perceptual signal grabs our attention and interrupts our focus. (Location 525)
the deep paradox at the heart of attention is that even as we create this tunnel of thought, our mind is also simultaneously doing a lot of processing of items outside of our focus. And it can wrench our conscious attention from the object of our intentional focus toward some other stimulus, like the loud clattering of a serving tray and the shattering of glass. (Location 532)
Our brains must set the threshold of focus high but not too high, a kind of Goldilocks porousness of focus that normally holds but can also be penetrated at an instant. (Location 537)
Now, you might say this is an example of the second aspect of attention, involuntary attention, and at one level, sure. Like the shattering of the glasses a few moments before, what happened here was that something outside your cone of focus drew your attention without your willing it so. But overhearing your own name in another conversation is orders of magnitude more complex and astonishing as a feat of perception, so much so that I think it belongs in its own category. Because think about it: How did your brain know your name was being invoked if it wasn’t tracking the conversation? Speech recognition requires a high level of cognitive processing: the sounds enter the ear, they are then evaluated and turned into words, and the words are grouped into phrases from which the meaning can be extracted. (Location 561)
In his excellent collection of essays on attention, the esteemed British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes that attention is in fact the prime driver of human socialization. “We seek attention without quite understanding what the attention is that we seek and what it is in ourselves we need attending to. It is out of this complexity that people get together, to find out what is possible (sociability depends on attention-seeking).”[21] (Location 610)
Human babies are helpless, dependent for many years on their elders for sustenance, protection and education. This fact has contributed greatly both to humankind’s extraordinary social abilities and to its unique social problems. Lone mothers could hardly forage enough food for their offspring and themselves with needy children in tow. Raising children required constant help from other family members and neighbours. It takes a tribe to raise a human.[23] (Location 625)
What we need to survive is more than mere attention: we need care. But attention is a necessary precondition for care. In this way, we are creatures whose very survival depends on attention. We perish in neglect. As part of that inescapable inheritance, we will forever be invested in other people paying attention to us. We are creatures that pay attention to things in our environment, yes, but also to other people. In turn we seek their attention on us. (Location 630)
There are three main aspects of attention, the basic dynamics of which are on display in the cocktail party examples above. First there is voluntary attention: the intentional choosing of focus, the spotlight of the mind being pointed toward something, illuminating it while keeping everything outside its glow in the relative dark. Then there is involuntary attention, constantly operating in parallel to conscious attention, monitoring our environment for threats and disruptions, pushing and pulling away from conscious focus, sometimes expanding to grab our mind fully. And finally there is social attention, the fact that we can be the object of others’ attention, and the inescapable truth that being the object of others’ attention is the foundational experience of having human bonds. (Location 637)
We also pay attention to others, and those forms of social attention, the reciprocity of exchanging attention with other humans, are the covalent bonds of human socialization. We think of other people and other people think of us, and a whole life passes around this very loop of thought. (Location 642)
First you need to grab attention: you need people to tune in to your show, or stop flipping the channels when they see it on their screen, or load the video link when a clip passes by their feeds. And once you have their attention, you need to hold it. (Location 648)
a core insight that unlocks a fundamental truth about the entire experience of the attention age: It is easier to grab attention than to hold it. This may seem almost trivially true on its face, but it has profound and far-reaching implications. (Location 668)
The distinction between grabbing and holding attention maps onto the first two aspects of attention—involuntary attention and voluntary attention. (Location 671)
Our evolutionary biology creates some fundamental and universal aspects to human appetites. Sugar contains about four calories per gram, meaning it is to nutrition what gasoline is to fuel—about as efficient a method of delivering energy as exists. It’s not surprising that humans, like other animals, have a sweet tooth. (Location 731)
Sugar, Moss says, provides us with that “deep biological satisfaction of doing something vital for our survival.” (Location 736)
Yes, of course, Coca-Cola is sold and enjoyed all over the world. Global industrial food empires have figured out the irresistible combination of sugar, salt, and fat to move trillions of dollars across continents, cultures, and cuisines. But food is much more than a simple chemical algorithm in which well-resourced food engineers hack our brain wiring to deliver different tastes in the right combination. Food is life, the vector of socialization and culture and affection and in-group bonding. It’s an intimate sense memory. It’s an expression of tradition, history, and identity. And because of how complicated our appetites are, the sheer variety of things humans across the world find delicious is mind-boggling. (Location 748)
Ask the question “What will humans pay attention to?” and you also end up with two answers. One answer, akin to our craving for sugar, grows out of the deepest biological circuitry of attention: the involuntary, compulsory processes that are rooted in our evolutionary inheritance. Even a sea slug, which has one of the most basic nervous systems on earth and no consciousness to speak of, will respond to the sudden presence of threat stimuli.[36] That system of compulsory, preconscious attention provides the lowest common denominator for those seeking to extract our attention from us. It’s the attentional equivalent of fast food, and you can find it anywhere from a casino floor to Times Square to your iPhone. The world’s largest corporations, brightest minds, and most powerful entities expend staggering resources seeking to compel us to look at and listen to what they want us to. The junk food isn’t just what we put in our bodies; it’s increasingly what we feed our minds. We end up snacking until our very souls feel overfull and queasy. (Location 764)
the most successful forms of attention capture of our age almost entirely circumvent the problem of holding voluntary attention, opting instead for an increasingly effective form of iteratively grabbing our attention over and over again. I call this the slot machine model because it takes its basic approach from one of the earliest and most successful attention machines in history. It’s come to dominate our entire world’s attention economy, the way soft drinks and fast food have colonized the entire world’s cuisine. (Location 830)
Slot machines hold our attention by grabbing it for just a little bit while we wait for the spinning to stop, and then repeating that same brief but intense process over and over. The model is simple: Each play lasts only a few seconds. Bright lights and novel stimuli compel our attention. A moment of suspense is followed by resolution. A mystery in miniature is revealed, perhaps satisfyingly, perhaps unsatisfyingly, but right there to be repeated. (Location 846)
In Addiction by Design, cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll describes the relationships of slot addicts to machines. Contrary to what one might assume, it’s not necessarily the gambling—the possibility of winning money—that keeps them there. It is, rather, the unique attentional trance the machine’s gameplay induces. Mollie, one of the players she interviews, says that at first she was attuned to winning, but she pretty quickly realized it was impossible to beat the house. “Today,” she says, “when I win—and I do win, from time to time—I just put it back in the machines. The thing people never understand is that I’m not playing to win.” The reason Mollie plays is “to keep playing—to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.” Mollie describes the machine zone this way: “It’s like being in the eye of a storm.” She continues: “Your vision is clear on the machine in front of you but the whole world is spinning around you, and you can’t really hear anything. You aren’t really there—you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.”[45] (Location 850)
The slot machine model is now the ascendant model, arguably the dominant one, of the attention age. Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok all rely on this approach. It is, I think, not an accident that the main perceptual structure of the most popular social media platforms, “the feed,” moves like a slot machine—scrolling vertically, endlessly. These apps retain our attention via a structured form of constant stimulus, continuous interruption, never having to do much to hold our attention. Little slot machines we hold in our pocket, available at any instant. They’ve managed to hold our attention for enormous periods of time just by grabbing it over and over and over again. (Location 878)
The slot machine model allows the most powerful and profitable companies in the entire world to entirely dissolve the problem that, for a century, Hollywood executives and big publishing houses and Broadway producers have all attempted to solve: What will hold people’s attention? They don’t have to have an answer. They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention, and then repeat those. Over time this process, thanks to machine learning and the efficiencies of genuinely competitive markets, will get better and better, finding what grabs your attention at a given moment and giving you nothing but that. (Location 888)
Grim… muy buena explicación de la situación. Reel sobre el modelo de las tragamonedas en el diseño de las aplicaciones de RRSS.
Ad tech works by aggregating enormous amounts of personal data about our social identities—pasta enthusiast, volleyball player, science fiction fan—and then using that data to grab our attention. (Location 926)
That’s just the ad-tech side, where we are constantly being served ads attempting to compel our attention. But think of how central this is to social media platform design. Each platform has notifications for “mentions” when someone is talking about us or to us. It has engineered the cocktail party effect into its very code. In fact, being tagged and brought into a thread is the key driver for engagement in many platforms. (Location 931)
This feature, being tagged/named/mentioned, also drives the kind of compulsive, late-into-the-night arguing in increasingly unhinged terms that is the lifeblood of many social media platforms and represents an enormous attentional win for the company hosting the exchange. If you are a consistent and enthusiastic poster like I am, you know the distinct physical release of endorphins when you look down at a device and see that there are a bunch of mentions you haven’t checked yet. (Location 941)
Chapter 3 The Root of Evil
Why are we not satisfied with peaceful silence? In 2014, psychologists at the University of Virginia set about to investigate this question. Subjects were asked to simply sit alone in a room doing nothing for periods between six to fifteen minutes and were later asked about their experiences. They hated it. The researchers then tested just how much they hated it: “Would they rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all?” the authors asked. In one study participants were given the “opportunity to experience negative stimulation (an electric shock) if they so desired.” And guess what? “Many participants elected to receive negative stimulation over no stimulation—especially men: 67% of men (12 of 18) gave themselves at least one shock during the thinking period.” In fact, one participant spent basically the entire time shocking himself, administering 190 shocks in a desperate bid to avoid being alone with his own thoughts.[1] (Location 957)
Pascal was a math prodigy turned philosopher and zealous Christian convert, and much of his writing is taken up with Christian apologetics. His primary concern is the status of men’s souls, and he wants to understand why men are tempted to undertake the hazards of war and conquest and all manner of dangerous and indeed sinful activity rather than simply enjoy what they have. The root of it, he proposes, is an aspect of the human condition upon which so much today depends: the restlessness of our minds, the craving for diversion. “Hence it comes that men so much love noise and stir; hence it comes that the prison is so horrible a punishment; hence it comes that the pleasure of solitude is a thing incomprehensible. And it is in fact the greatest source of happiness in the condition of kings, that men try incessantly to divert them, and to procure for them all kinds of pleasures.”[3] This craving, he contends, emanates from a kind of spiritual angst about our own mortality, “the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort us when we think of it closely.”[4] When we are alone with our thoughts, we naturally begin to contemplate our own death, and it’s intolerable. (Location 975)
The mental processes of attention exist to screen information because there is too much of it, but what happens when there is too little? We are finicky creatures, and there’s a tenuous equilibrium where we have just enough to occupy our minds, but not too little and not too much. When there’s too much, we describe ourselves as distracted or overwhelmed; when there’s too little to pay attention to, we’re bored and restless. (Location 993)
The more we have to amuse ourselves, the more easily we are bored, which is why addiction is our go-to analogy for our contemporary relationship to screens and phones. In the same way an addict needs greater and greater quantities of a drug to get the same high, and then eventually, simply to avoid feeling desperately sick, there seems to be a similar process with our need for things to pay attention to. (Location 1014)
For nearly all of human existence on planet Earth we were hunter-gatherers. And while it may be tempting to think of agriculture first, and then civilization, as delivering humans from a life of ceaseless toil and fear, it turns out that by many measurements, the life of hunter-gatherers was, in its own way, pretty chill. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins first offered this argument in his essay “The Original Affluent Society” in 1968. “A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.”[6] (Location 1021)
The Cofán, like many other peoples who live outside of industrial capitalism, spend a lot of time doing what we would call nothing. As Cepek recounts, “I think folks in our society simply have a hard time ‘doing nothing,’ as strange as that might sound. I’m not talking about ‘watching TV’ as doing nothing; I’m talking about just sitting there on a floor, in a chair, in a hammock and looking and thinking. And [the Cofán] seem to enjoy it, or at least not actively avoid it.”[12] (Location 1051)
Boredom, it seems, is the by-product of a specific civilizational arrangement. It’s true, as I argued in the last chapter, that certain aspects of our attention are biophysical, and as such universal. The loud sudden noise of an approaching avalanche will grab the focus of any hearing human of any culture. The same goes for a charging predator. But while some of the key facets of attention are universal, boredom is not. The experience of boredom is contingent. It is culturally, socially, and institutionally produced. (Location 1069)
whatever the net improvements industrial capitalism conferred, it’s inarguable that it introduced a new form of mental tyranny for the millions who moved from fields to factories. Drudgery existed well before industrial capitalism—harvesting wheat, chopping wood, shoveling stables, and on and on. But preindustrial life moved in more seasonal rhythms and featured more variety in tasks—sowing in the spring, reaping in the fall, hunkering down in the winter. Whereas in the factory, the worker found himself now doing the same single thing day in and day out, no matter the season, all day and all year long. Karl Marx identified this transformation as the root of alienation: the division of labor reduced men to a single dimension. “For as soon as the division of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape,” he wrote. Marx’s dream was to create a society in which it would be “possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”[17] (Location 1093)
Designed by Silicon Valley engineer Aza Raskin, the infinite scroll changed the way the web worked.[31] Once upon a time, you would arrive at the end of a web page. If you wanted to read more you had to click somewhere, akin to turning a page. But Raskin got rid of this tiny little bit of attentional friction. Now, on X or Facebook, you can just gently edge your thumb down on your phone and keep going. Raskin came to realize, like the creator of The Entertainment in Wallace’s book, that he had, perhaps unwittingly, created a kind of weapon, and he had an Oppenheimer-like reckoning with what he had wrought. Aza calculated the total number of hours that his little invention had induced in people’s usage and reckoned that “the combined total of 200,000 more human lifetimes—every moment from birth to death—is now spent scrolling through a screen.”[32] “Just completely gone,” Aza told author Johann Hari. “It’s like their entire life—poof.” (Location 1160)
As a rough scheme, we might characterize the different states of mind we experience as rough matches between how much there is to pay attention to: too little, too much, and just enough. Boredom is the state where there is not enough that’s interesting to pay attention to. Distraction is the state of having too much to pay attention to: constant interruption, a sense of being overwhelmed and outmatched. The Goldilocks zone of just the right amount to pay attention to, we can call focus or, in the famous coinage of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow. It is a deeply pleasurable experience of having our attentional capabilities perfectly stretched: a task or source of entertainment that requires our focus and attention but doesn’t overwhelm us. A state, in Csikszentmihalyi’s words, of “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”[35] This is what many of us are always searching for, and more often than not, not finding. (Location 1183)
This is probably the single most common complaint of our age, the inability to focus, the shrinking attention span, the sense of constant distraction. We flee from any moment of time in which our minds might be empty, but in so doing find the reward we seek—to be absorbed, to have our attention fully occupied—harder and harder and harder to find. (Location 1196)
Wright argues that the Buddha’s basic insight about the mind and our vexed relationship to it is one of the most profound and enduring frameworks for understanding human consciousness ever devised. And in the era of constant distraction, when we feel our constant attachment to our devices or the likes on Instagram or just the numbing agent of the phone screen, understanding our lot as a battle against attachment seems truer than ever. (Location 1238)
Daydreaming is a central experience of being alive, and also a casualty of the attention age. It’s a state of being that the era of infinite jest disdains. In his book on digital distraction, Johann Hari writes about his experience taking a months-long sabbatical from his phone and the internet; he finds that he fairly quickly rediscovers the joys of simply letting the mind wander. Instead of listening to a podcast on a long walk, he writes, “I let my thoughts float…from looking at the little crabs on the beach, to memories of my childhood, to ideas for books I might write years from now, to the shapes of the men sunning themselves in Speedos. My consciousness drifted like the boats I could see bobbing on the horizon.”[45] Jenny Odell’s brilliant book about “resisting the attention economy” is literally called How to Do Nothing. She writes that “to do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there.”[46] (Location 1265)
Ironically enough, having an intellectual project to work on (like this book itself) serves as my own antidote to mental restlessness. It’s a place to put my attention when the world is quiet, or I am alone in my own chamber. It provides, in its own strange way, the kind of comfort I derived from thinking of baseball stats or comic book characters in the idle hours of my childhood. It provides a framework for structured daydreaming, mind-wandering with a purpose. (Location 1274)
The specific kind of mental restlessness we label boredom is the product of industrial modernity. (Location 1280)
la tesis del capítulo.
Sartre famously wrote (somewhat jokingly) that “hell is other people,” [47] but Other People is also the way out of the king’s paradox. Our minds crave things to pay attention to, but above all else we crave connection with other humans. The way out of the trap is to put our attention on other people. What really makes the attention age different from previous eras is that the attention merchants have figured that out, too. (Location 1292)
Chapter 4 Social Attention
The human infant is born in a state of complete helplessness. It can’t walk; it can’t crawl. It can’t even roll over. It can neither feed itself nor communicate its needs. But a newborn does have one singular trick: it can cry. (Location 1299)
The cry is the original human siren call, (Location 1302)
To be a parent, particularly the parent of an infant, is to have one’s attention always divided. This is the evolutionary bargain we have struck. To get our big heads and brains and to walk upright, our species gives birth to helpless creatures who demand attention. We cannot recall what it feels like to be the object of that attention, though older siblings can remember what it’s like to watch our own parents’ attention being colonized by a newborn sibling. (Location 1312)
Mandela refused and proceeded to go on hunger strike. The jailer offered Mandela a solution: he could wear long pants and eat in peace if he agreed to enter solitary confinement. Mandela took the deal but quickly came to regret it. “For the next few weeks, I was completely and utterly isolated,” he wrote. “I had never been in isolation before, and every hour seemed like a year…. The mind begins to turn in on itself, and one desperately wants something outside of oneself on which to fix one’s attention. I have known men who took half-a-dozen lashes in preference to being locked up alone.” (Location 1364)
“Physical pain protects the individual from physical dangers. Social pain, also known as loneliness, evolved for a similar reason: because it protected the individual from the danger of remaining isolated. Our forebears depended on social bonds for safety and for the successful replication of their genes in the form of offspring who themselves survived long enough to reproduce. Feelings of loneliness told them when those protective bonds were endangered or deficient.” (Location 1380)
To take just one illustrative example, the very notion of a “bedroom,” a separate place where different family members can sleep in privacy, is at the earliest a seventeenth-century invention. Most people in most places throughout human history have shared a single space for eating, sleeping, and socializing. (Location 1389)
In one oft-cited study the negative health effects of persistent loneliness were roughly the same as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. (Location 1419)
When I use the term “social attention,” I’m referring to any instance in which the object of our attention is another person as opposed to, say, the natural world, or a piece of entertainment, or a task in front of us. (Location 1430)
We have evolved such a powerful and specific set of tools for focusing on others and perceiving their focus on us that social attention is in its own category, qualitatively different from other forms of attention. (Location 1436)
Social attention is like sunlight for a plant: we need it to live. It warms and nourishes us. We stretch toward its presence; we shrivel in its absence. (Location 1446)
Social attention can also be directed at people we know and have relationships with, but who are absent. We use the broad term “gossip” to describe talking about people who aren’t there, and think of it as either unseemly or trivial, but there’s a good case to be made that it’s a central human activity. Legendary British anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues it’s the foundational activity of all human socialization. “Without gossip, there would be no society,” he writes. “Gossip is what makes human society as we know it possible.” (Location 1502)
Dunbar’s contention is that gossip plays the role in human life that the practice of grooming does among primates. In grooming, apes cultivate relationships and alliances, and bond to each other. Crucially, grooming is a physical, tactile means of paying social attention: one ape intensely focuses on another for a sustained period. And the social networks and group alliances maintained through the practice are an embodiment of the phrase “paying attention.” We pay for a good with money, and we pay for our relationships with our attention. (Location 1507)
Let me restate the argument so far. My contention is that social attention is a distinct category of attention, one with a hardwired biological substrate that comes from our evolutionary inheritance. It is so vital we will go mad without it. (Location 1537)
Consider the specific and very strange but increasingly central aspect of social attention: social attention from strangers—in other words, being known by people we do not ourselves know. The desire for this form of social attention varies enormously from person to person and over time, but it is a distinctly human desire. (Location 1553)
We are conditioned to care about kin, to take life’s meaning from the relationships with those we know and love. But the psychological experience of fame, like a virus invading a cell, takes all the mechanisms for human relations and puts them to work seeking more fame. (Location 1597)
It’s perhaps a little bit of a strange admission to say that it took until my midthirties to truly understand the potency of the gaze. There’s a reason it’s been the subject of so much inquiry and theorizing; it is probably the most common form of social attention we encounter. (Location 1643)
The human ability to recognize faces is one of our most developed attributes, evolved over millennia to distinguish between friend and foe, kin and stranger. (Location 1656)
The social media combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting our friends to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways. (Location 1685)
I’ve thought about these words for years, ever since I first encountered them reading the play as a teenager. What struck me then and still strikes me now is that Linda Loman isn’t even asking for her sons to love their father, or swear devotion to him, or care for him. She seeks the meagerest form of social connection for her husband: attention. Just pay attention to this man so he can be a human, and not an animal, not left to die for nothing. This is what drives her husband as well, a desire to be known and noticed, a desire for attention to be paid. (Location 1718)
The attention Loman seeks is thin gruel, pathetic even. Because like the older sibling fighting for their place in a family that now includes a newborn child equipped with a cry that makes grown-ups come running, what Loman or anybody wants is more than mere attention. We crave attention as a means to an end, but when starved we take it as an end in and of itself. So what is it we actually want? (Location 1760)
In his lectures, Kojève takes up Hegel’s famous meditation on the master-slave relationship, recasting it in terms of what Kojève sees as the fundamental human drive: the desire for recognition from other humans. “Man can appear on earth only within a herd,” Kojève writes. “That is why the human reality can only be social.”[47] Recognition is our animating desire, and what we want above all else is to be seen—fully and truly—as human by other humans, for other subjects to recognize our own subjectivity. So strong is this drive for recognition that humans will risk death in pursuit of it: “Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his nonbiological Desire.” (Location 1771)
Puede decirse realmente que no es biológico?
For as Kojève recounts, the master desires recognition from the slave, but because he does not recognize the slave’s humanity, he cannot have it. “And this is what is insufficient—what is tragic—in his situation,” Kojève writes. “For he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him.”[50] We can only experience the existential satisfaction of recognition from those who we ourselves truly recognize. We can only have our own personhood affirmed by other people we grasp deeply as persons themselves. (Location 1789)
This is the story of Donald Trump’s life: wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can’t quite understand the difference, even though deep in his psyche there’s a howling vortex that fame can never fill. (Location 1806)
The core of alienation is a subjective experience of something that should be part of us seeming foreign or alien to us. It’s a sense of dis-integration, the opposite of wholeness. It’s a sensation that ebbs and flows but persists, looming and ubiquitous. The idea is a very old one. (Location 1880)
it was Marx who first elevated the concept of Entfremdung to something more broadly applicable as a sociological critique of capitalism. Entfremdung is an estrangement, in this case from oneself, and for Marx it was the defining experience of workers under capitalism. (Location 1887)
Let’s imagine an independent craftsman, say a cobbler, doing his work before industrialization. He has his shop, and he makes his shoes with care and pride. He is present and intentional at each step of the process used to take raw leather and turn it into a shoe. He also has the satisfaction of a kind of telos to his work; he gets to oversee an arc of progression from raw materials to finished product. In the end, he has produced an object that he has authorship of. It is his. And then he can sell it, taking money in exchange for the good. Now compare that experience to someone working in a shoe factory. The factory worker does not have any control whatsoever of the process by which the shoe is made. He applies relatively little technique or craft to the product. He can’t control the timeline, and he does not have a progressive set of tasks that change over time as the shoe goes from raw materials to finished product. Instead, he mans a machine that does the same thing—stamping an insole, for instance—over and over, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. What was once the craftsman’s own—his technique and ability, his object—is now the capitalist’s. The laborer is a mere means to an end. (Location 1890)
The development of industrial capitalism turns labor into a commodity. The artisanal shoemaker’s work and technique may vary from cobbler to cobbler, but the goal of efficient industrial production is to reduce the variation between any given unit of wage labor and make it identical with every other unit of wage labor. Stick anyone on the line stamping soles and they should do basically the same as any other worker on the line. (Location 1908)
Curioso entonces que el imaginario soviético sea tan homogéneo.
This process of standardization is what Marx calls the commodification of labor. A commodity is any resource that has what economists call “substantial fungibility,” where each instance is indistinguishable from another. (Location 1911)
Definición de commodity
It is this de-individuation and, indeed, dehumanization that Marx identifies in his theory of alienation. Each shoe made by our cobbler is distinct to him, whereas each hour of labor on the assembly line stamping soles onto shoes can be done by anyone. The result of all of this at a subjective psychological level is, Marx says, alienation. (Location 1916)
Teoría Marxista sobre la alineación.
What’s most useful about Marx’s account for what we’re discussing here is how it identifies the root of alienation in a set of technological and economic changes that utterly transform one’s inner life and experience of the world. (Location 1944)
Human work has always existed, but wage labor is a creation of industrial capitalism. Human attention has always existed, but “clicks,” “content,” “engagement,” and “eyeballs” are creations of attention capitalism. And to be reduced to a wage or an eyeball is to find oneself alienated from some part of oneself. (Location 1946)
The incentive for The Sun was to maximize reach even if it came at the cost of the trustworthiness of its product. After all, the paper wasn’t really the product, the audience was, and Day needed to find as large an audience as possible to make the math for his new enterprise pencil out. (Location 1967)
this basic model—give away the product or charge a nominal cost and make your profit by selling the audience to advertisers—became the dominant business model for most media over the next two centuries: print, radio, TV, and social media. (Location 1976)
If the product being sold was the audience’s attention, it was a strange product indeed. You can inspect a shipment of crude oil, even dip your finger in the product itself, but you can’t do the same with the audience’s attention. You can’t be present in the moment when they see your ad. Or maybe they never see your ad because even though they get the magazine they don’t actually read it. Or maybe they’re distracted at the very moment it crosses their visual field, or maybe the newspaper never actually makes it into their hands and goes straight into the garbage, even though it gets counted in the circulation statistics. (Location 1989)
As Tim Hwang, a tech philosopher who’s worked everywhere from Google to Substack to Harvard, observes, “Earlier generations of advertisers bought and sold attention, but never at the speed, scale, and level of granularity characteristic of today’s programmatic advertising marketplaces. What is different about the present-day online advertising system is the extent to which it has enabled the bundling of a multitude of tiny moments of attention into discrete, liquid assets that can then be bought and sold frictionlessly in a global marketplace.” (Location 2024)
Sure, our eyeballs, a few fleeting moments of our focus on a car ad, are a commodity, priced into a market where various players negotiate the price while buying and selling. But in the attention age, where this commodification grows ever more totalizing, where the capture of our attention approaches a dehumanizing completion, we risk disposing of the “physical, psychological, and moral entity” of our very selves entirely. There is simply no way to detach attention as a market good from our subjective experience of it as the constitutive feature of our conscious life, what it means to be an “I” sitting inside a human body moving through the world. (Location 2086)
The defining experience of the attention age is a specific kind of alienation. It’s a feeling that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will. This comes from the sophisticated development of attention markets, which have figured out ways to extract and commodify more and more of our attention, more and more efficiently. But our attention isn’t like other commodities, it’s a fictitious commodity: a market good with a price but also something inseparable from our very humanity. The alienation we feel is born of the tension between attention as a market commodity and attention as the substance of our lives. (Location 2100)
There are a certain number of humans, with a certain number of waking hours and a fixed amount of attention to capture. When attention capitalists want to increase the supply, they have no means of creating it; they must instead find new ways to take it from us. And boy do they try. Over the past fifteen years, particularly since the advent of the smartphone, those who want to mine and sell our attention have worked ceaselessly to increase the supply of the commodity. The first, most crucial means of doing this was massively extending the times in which our attention could be captured, which is above all else what the smartphone did. (Location 2114)
From the perspective of price, the basic market gravity of attention markets has followed the trajectory you might expect. As the harvesting of attention grows in scale and efficiency, the price of each eyeball declines. You can now reach far more people at a cheaper price than you could a hundred years ago. But like the worker who finds their body ground up in an assembly line for a pittance, the thing being cheapened in a market sense isn’t a widget, or oil, or corn, it’s the thing most precious to us: what our mind rests upon, what it considers and where it goes, how we talk to ourselves, and what objects we grasp in the light of consciousness. Over time, the commodified logic of the attention market drives the price of this resource down, which is to say it cheapens the very substance of our life. (Location 2163)
This dynamic of people watching coverage and complaining that the coverage is excessive would be a signature aspect of the Trump years, a particular kind of alienating experience in which audiences rebelled against outlets that were giving them what, according to the numbers, they were demanding. Because what grabs our attention—the sirens—and what we as conscious creatures actually want to view or spend our time on are always at war. Competition incentivizes those in the attention business to find ingenious ways to pluck the wax from our ears and set us loose toward the voices. (Location 2233)
One of the great lessons of being a reporter, especially when you start out, is that most stories are more muddled and complicated, even banal, than they might first seem in the more sensational presentation of, say, a single source. And yet the attention economy incentivizes too-good-to-check content, because that content—what used to be called tabloid and is now called clickbait—is what compels attention. (Location 2280)
Why does our experience of digitally connected modernity feel the way it does? My answer is that it’s an outgrowth of the way our attention has been commodified. Attention is a strange kind of commodity, a “fictitious commodity,” in Polanyi’s words. And the process of its commodification, similar to, say, wage labor, transforms an ineffable subjective experience of the world into a “mere” commodity with a price. As with Marx’s account of wage labor, this results in alienation, the feeling that something integral has been taken from us against our will. Further, I’m arguing that the nature of attention capitalism over time will lead to ever more alienating forms of attention extraction. When competition for attention increases, it will drive competitors toward ever more insidious means of extracting that attention, taking advantage of the fact that attention, through the wail of the siren, can be compelled, and attempting to exploit our faculties for involuntary attention. This experience produces a kind of vertigo, a sense of dislocation. (Location 2291)
Attention-age alienation also has at its core an enduring sensation of isolation and social alienation. This is driven by how attention technologies have developed to individuate exactly what we pay attention to, such that mass culture—the electricity of collective attention—becomes more and more difficult to sustain. The ecstatic joy of collective attention is the joy of the theater or the stadium concert or attending a basketball game in a packed arena. It’s not just that you have something to put your attention on, but also that you are embedded in a social world in which the power of the focused attention itself feels otherworldly. Most people can remember their first concert, and what’s so sublime about it is precisely this distinct and elevated sense of attention: you’re focused on the band or performer onstage, and you can feel everyone else around you focusing just as intensely, binding everyone together. It’s like an industrial solar energy farm, with thousands of panels all reflecting the light to a single point. This is the core power of religious ritual, too. For much of human history, religious observation, rite, ritual, and devotion have been the central focus of collective attention and shared spectacle. It is the original form of “paying attention together.” As Émile Durkheim famously observed, a central part of religious practice is the collective observation of rituals. These rituals bind communities together, cement belief, and produce a sense of fellowship.[38] For the first 99 percent of our time on this planet, the only way we could experience ritual or spectacle or athletic competition was in person, with others. Now, most of our attention is focused on a screen in front of us in solitude. (Location 2310)
But if the written word stood out as a particular and distinct form of solitary attention for several centuries, what has become clear over the last century, at least, is that the implacable logic of attention capitalism drives each medium, each form of attention capture, to be as portable as a newspaper. With each new technology, and with each new development, the experience of shared spectacle is replaced with isolated attention. What was once collective experience becomes solitary. (Location 2338)
I know I sound wistful and nostalgic and more than a little Luddite-y with this shtick. And I don’t want to slip toward that too much. Because there’s another part of this story, which is that the “watching together” model was also what gave rise to what we might call “broadcast culture,” broadly shared cultural references for tens of millions of people who are all paying attention to the same thing. It’s not like that kind of culture is inherently superior to narrowcast culture, and indeed for huge swaths of Americans—people of color, queer folks, immigrant families—the near total lack of representation was itself alienating in a different direction. (Location 2393)
the move from movie screen to TV screen to tablet and iPhone is what facilitates the move from mass culture to ever more balkanized subcultures. (Location 2401)
The logical conclusion of this process of individuation is “the feed,” the bespoke algorithmic experience of an app like TikTok, which doesn’t show the exact same content to any two of its one billion users across the world. (Location 2402)
What distinguishes TikTok is how the algorithm basically takes over completely. You can choose to follow individual people if you want, but if you simply open the app it will start feeding you videos, and based on how long you watch, it will learn what you like and, with truly uncanny specificity, deliver your tastes, likes and dislikes. (Location 2408)
The development of digital technology like this has made spectacle increasingly privatized and solitary. I think it’s hard not to conclude that there is a relationship between the rise of solitude in modern life and this process of ever more specific individuation of our attention. The central source of our diversion in the attention age has grown intensely more atomized even over the course of my life. And this competitive process, like the processes that push attention merchants to compel our attention against our will to extract it, selects for a form of attention—solitary—that is alienating. (Location 2416)
one way of defining culture is simply what everyone pays attention to, and what they pay attention to together. In the US, the Super Bowl attracts more viewers than any other single event. If you were asked to show a single representative piece of American culture to, say, an alien or foreign visitor who had zero interaction with any other aspect of American culture, that would probably be the best place to start. In this sense, the wall-to-wall coverage of Elizabeth’s death and funeral was a perfectly fitting expression for the essence of what the monarchy is in the attention age: simply something to pay attention to together. It binds its viewers in spectacle. The postmodern monarchy is “content,” to use the corporate term of the age. (Location 2429)
A viral meme is our current form of “paying attention together,” but it’s attenuated in this crucial way. The collective rush of watching an opera or concert or singing together at mass has been decomposed into a two-part process, each solitary. I view and then I share. I view and then I share. Then we laugh together but apart. (Location 2438)
What makes Google so valuable as a for-profit enterprise is that in conserving your attention, it captures your attention. You go to Google to screen out irrelevant information and to reliably focus on the output of Google’s information processing system. This gives Google exclusive access to the most precious resource, which is your attention. And since they have your attention, they can then sell your attention to interested parties. (Location 2703)
Digital theorist Shoshana Zuboff calls this model, which provides the backbone for much of the modern internet, “surveillance capitalism.” She argues that “Google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in much the same way that a century ago General Motors invented and perfected managerial capitalism.” (Location 2723)
As Google has become bigger and bigger, its core product has gotten worse and worse. There are several reasons for that, some of which have to do with precisely the manipulation of results they worried about in their S-1. Indeed, “SEO,” or search engine optimization, is now a multibillion-dollar industry on its own, and precisely because the attention of a searcher is so valuable, there is a massive financial incentive to figure out how to hack searches to get what you want in front of the user. (Location 2741)
In fact, I’d argue that spam, broadly understood, is the defining problem of the attention age, what smokestack pollution and smog-filled skies were to the industrial revolution. (Location 2759)
This is a kind of law of physics in the attention age: you can never defeat spam; you can only manage it. And that’s because spam will exist wherever attention collects, the same way weeds will grow wherever there are the right conditions to grow crops: they thrive in the same soil. (Location 2766)
Finn Brunton, the author of a fascinating history of spam, defines spam as “the use of information technology infrastructure to exploit existing aggregations of human attention.” (Location 2768)
Depending on various estimates, somewhere between 50 and 90 percent of all daily email traffic in the entire world is spam.[39] (Location 2821)
They waste our time for their benefit. When you understand it like that, spam isn’t a side problem or trivial problem; it is the problem of our time. Spam is all the things we don’t want to pay attention to that want our attention. Spam arises from the tension between the two foundational facts of the attention age: information is infinite, attention is finite. Or in more economic terms, the marginal cost of soliciting attention approaches zero, while the cost to us personally of having our attention taken rises as the value of attention as a resource rises. It costs the spammer nothing to distract us. It costs a lot to be distracted. (Location 2871)
What of attention? Is the amount of the resource truly fixed, or will it also prove far more capacious in response to the sheer unremitting force of capitalist innovation? I think we all feel daily the ways in which attention capitalism extracts more of the resource than once appeared possible, by fracking our minds, in the memorable phrasing of attention theorist D. Graham Burnett. (Location 2937)
We are, as humans, serial processors, we can focus—that is, truly focus—on only one thing at a time, and sooner or later all systems that aim to improve our performance in any cognitive act run up against that limit. (Location 2947)
Simon’s early gestures toward the concept of an attention economy were built up from the insight that information consumes attention and attention is a limited resource. All economics is ultimately a study of how scarce resources are rationed. But Goldhaber’s key addition to this framework is to demonstrate that attention isn’t just some finite resource within us that can be drawn down. No, attention is a resource that can be moved around: exchanged, gifted, and traded. (Location 2961)
If I want your attention for any reason, I might begin by asking you for information, such as who you are and what you do, not necessarily because that is of great interest to me, but because it is a good way to get your attention. Children ask countless questions with this motive often patently obvious, and adults are not necessarily any different…. So what really matters in every conversation is the exchange of attention—an exchange that normally must be kept more or less equal if one party or the other isn’t likely to lose interest. (Location 2970)
If a speaker at a conference asks someone to stand up in the audience to acknowledge her contributions to the talk the speaker is giving, that speaker is using the attention he has captured to then distribute it elsewhere. “A key truth is that if you have the attention of an audience, you can then pass that on to someone else,” Goldhaber says, and “the fact that attention can be passed on from someone who has it to someone else, and on and on, is of course a vital feature if there is to be anything resembling an economy.” (Location 2976)
Why does the internet have interesting content? Why is it a place that as far back as my first online connection at age fourteen in 1993 I could lose hours surfing through? Because people, for zero monetary compensation, will spend tremendous time and effort making things that they want others to see—posting to Usenet newsgroups and writing blogs and chatting in chat rooms and making silly one-page joke pages. All this creativity and humor and knowledge, all of it being done, at some level, in the pursuit of attention, all of it part of a largely noncommercial attention gift economy, where people traded their attention back and forth. (Location 2991)
No matter how persuasive and effective you are, none of it matters if no one’s listening. (Location 3237)
Y esto explica el valor de la atención en la política y economía en la actualidad.
The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary. (Location 3249)
Before the digital age there was the TV age, which itself represented a revolution in how attention was regulated in public discourse. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, published in 1985, Neil Postman argues that for its first 150 years the US was a culture of readers and writers, and that the print medium—in the form of pamphlets, broadsheets, newspapers, and written speeches and sermons—structured not only public discourse but also modes of thought and the institutions of democracy itself. According to Postman, TV destroyed all that, replacing our written culture with a culture of images that was, in a very literal sense, meaningless. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he writes. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.” (Location 3252)
in competitive attention markets, amusement will outcompete information, and spectacle will outcompete arguments. The more easily something attracts our attention, the lower its cognitive load, the less friction there is for us to be drawn to it. Why read a book when you can watch a movie? Why read a newspaper when you can play a video game? (Location 3277)
Saunders’s critique runs deeper than the insidious triviality and loudness of major TV news, both before and after 9/11. He’s making the case that forms of discourse shape our conceptual architecture, that the sophistication of our thinking is determined to a large degree by the sophistication of the language we hear used to describe our world. (Location 3301)
Unlike love or recognition, attention is value neutral. It can be positive or negative; it can be the basis for adoration or revulsion. Trump cares deeply about being admired, sure, but he’s such a broken person, his psychological needs so bottomless, that he’ll take attention in whatever form he can get. He’ll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you’re thinking about him. Being willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion is really Donald Trump’s one simple trick for hacking attention-age public discourse. (Location 3361)