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- Author: Chris Hayes
- Full Title: The Sirens Call
- Category: #books
- To exist online now, which is, for most people, to exist at all, is to be, at every waking moment, seeing yourself through the eyes of others.
- For those of us who are extremely online, this kind of twenty-first-century Loman figure is a recognizable type. Sometimes they are called “Reply Guys,” popping up in a reply to every single tweet or post to offer their take or try to draft off the attention of the person they’re following. They emit a kind of forced ingratiating desperation that forms the background refrigerator hum of a lot of online spaces. And while the Reply Guy is an extreme example, the very structure of social media is designed to turn us all into Reply Guys. In fact Gen Z has a slang term to describe the cloying need for attention that so permeates online spaces: thirst. A thirst trap is a sexy picture someone posts in order to invite comments telling them how good they look. To be thirsty is to be overly, palpably trying to get people to look at you.
- All of culture from art to music to writing now requires a kind of relentless self-promotion, as digital culture critic Rebecca Jennings observes, “in the form of cheap trend-following, ever-changing posting strategies, and the nagging feeling that what you are really doing with your time is marketing, not art. Under the tyranny of algorithmic media distribution, artists, authors—anyone whose work concerns itself with what it means to be human—now have to be entrepreneurs, too.”[43]
- This desire for social attention, the grasping compulsive nature of it, has been the source of moral opprobrium for millennia. The Stoics and the Buddha both counseled against desiring those things outside oneself, because they made one suffer, and the attention of others was at the top of the list. Epictetus tells his students to basically mind their own business, to avoid the plight of Willy Loman. “And who exactly are these people that you want to be admired by?”[44] Epictetus asks his students. “We can’t control the impressions others form about us, and the effort to do so only debases our character.”[45] The only true way to be content is to kill desire for those things outside oneself, particularly the attention of others. “God laid down this law, saying: if you want some good, get it from yourself.”[46]
- 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.
- It articulates the paradox of what we might call the Star and the Fan. The Star seeks recognition from the Fan, but the Fan is a stranger, who cannot be known by the Star. Because the Star cannot recognize the Fan, the Fan’s recognition of the Star doesn’t satisfy the core existential desire. There is no way to bridge the inherent asymmetry of the relationship, short of actual friendship and correspondence, but that, of course, cannot be undertaken at the same scale. And so the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention.
- Social attention from strangers is the psychological equivalent of empty calories, and the tantalizing opportunity of the buffet of social attention that our phones now provide can lead us to gorge. Starvation for many in the modern context is less of a threat than abundance. Cheap processed foods have democratized the ability to overeat, leading to spiking obesity rates around the world—even as there are hundreds of millions who still face the possibility of starvation. We are as a human race “stuffed and starved,” in the memorable phrase of author Raj Patel.[51] And so it is with social attention: we are stuffed with it and starved of it all at once. There are millions still isolated, alone, literally dying from lack of social attention, and yet at the very same time the possibility of too much social attention has now been democratized, possible to achieve for more people than ever before.
- What does the world’s richest man want that he cannot have? What will he pay the biggest premium for? He can buy whatever he desires. There is no luxury past his grasp. But what he wants above all else, to a pathological degree, with an unsteady obsessiveness that’s thrown his fortune into question, is recognition. He wants to be recognized, to be seen in a deep and human sense. It’s what Willy Loman wanted and it’s what ended up killing him. Musk spent $44 billion to buy himself what poor pathetic Willy Loman couldn’t have. Yet it can’t be purchased at any sum. He tried to buy the recognition of others, but all he got was their attention. And even that will fade soon enough.
- To the extent that digital attention is commodified, it is standardized and measured and there is no room for variance in qualitative measures. That is the point of commodification: to replace qualitative judgments with quantitative ones. Every pork belly, ounce of gold, and barrel of crude is the same as every other one. But is every ten seconds spent looking at a screen the same as every other ten seconds looking at a screen? It seems…unlikely. If you think about it for more than a few seconds, it seems obviously untrue. There’s the mindless, tranced scrolling you do through TikTok or Instagram stories, and then there’s the intense, obsessive focus you bring to bear on, say, a video of your eight-year-old hitting a clutch layup in the fourth quarter of his basketball game, or the last few seconds of the climactic finale of a show you love.
- That said, most of the segmentation and differential pricing in the contemporary ad-tech market has to do with whose attention is being purchased—the young, the affluent, and so on—as opposed to the quality of the attention being captured. For the logic of commodification to hold, and the market mechanics it creates to function, the interchangeability of attention is nonnegotiable. And so the conceit of much of the universe of ad tech, the market-based technological infrastructure that undergirds an enormous portion of the internet, is that every second in front of someone’s eyeballs is equal to every other second in front of someone’s eyeballs. It’s all a commodity that can be packaged and sold in nanosecond-long auctions to advertisers who want your attention.