Tag Archives: attention

“This is the story of Donald Trump’s life”

Posted on by

Reading The Sirens’ Call by Chris Hayes for the Telegraph, 15 February 2025

It seems to me, and might seem to you, as though headlines have always ticked across the bottom of our TV screens during news broadcasts. Strange, how quickly technological innovations lose their novelty. In fact, this one is only 23-and-a-half years old: the “ticker” was reserved for sports scores until the day in 2001 when two hijacked passenger jets were flown into New York’s World Trade Center. Fox News gave its ticker over to the news service that day, and MSNBC and CNN quickly followed. Cable channels, you might say, quickly and seamlessly went from addressing their viewers’ anxieties to stoking them.

That’s Chris Hayes’s view, and he should know: the political commentator and TV news anchor hosts a weekday current affairs show on MSNBC. The Sirens’ Call, his new book, is first of all an insider’s take on the persuasion game. Hayes is a hard worker, and a bit of a showman. When he started, he imagined his regular TV appearances would bring him some acclaim. “And so,” he writes, “the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention.” This experience is now common. Thanks to the black mirrors in our pockets, we’re now all stars of our own reality TV show.

To explain how he and the rest of smartphone-wielding humanity ended up in this peculiar pickle – “akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism” – Hayes sketches out three kinds of attention. There’s the conscious attention we bring to something: to a book, say, or a film, or a painting. Then there’s the involuntary attention we pay to environmental novelties (a passing wasp, a sudden breeze, an unexpected puddle). The more vigilant we are, the more easily even minor stimuli can snare our attention.

This second kind is the governing principle of advertising, an industry that over the last two decades has metastasised into something vast and insidious: call it “the attention economy”. Everything is an advertisement now, especially the news. The ticker and its evolved cousins, the infinitely-scrolling feed (think X) and the autoplaying video-stream (think TikTok) exist to maintain your hypervigilance. You can, like Hayes, write a book so engaging that it earns the user’s conscious focus over several hours. If you want to make money, though – with due respect to Scribe’s sales department – you’re better off snaring the user’s involuntary attention over and over again with a procession of conspiracy theories and cat videos.

The third form of attention in Hayes’s typology is social attention: that capacity for involuntary attention that we reserve for events relating specifically to ourselves. Psychologists dub this the “cocktail-party effect”, from our unerring ability to catch the sound of our own name uttered from across a crowded and noisy room. Social attention is extraordinarily pregnant with meaning. Indeed, without a steady diet of social attention, we suffer both mentally and physically. Why do we post anything on social media? Because we want others to see us. “But,” says Hayes, “there’s a catch… we want to be recognised as human by another human, as a subject by another subject, in order for it to truly be recognition. But We Who Post can never quite achieve that.”

In feeding ourselves with the social attention of strangers, we have been creating synthetic versions of our most fundamental desire, and perfecting machines for the manufacture of empty calories. “This is the story of Donald Trump’s life,” Hayes explains, by way of example: “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.” Elon Musk gets even harsher treatment. “What does the world’s richest man want that he cannot have?” Hayes wonders. “What will he pay the biggest premium for? He can buy whatever he desires. There is no luxury past his grasp.” The answer, as Musk’s financially disastrous purchase of Twitter demonstrates all too clearly, and “to a pathological degree, with an unsteady obsessiveness that’s thrown his fortune into question, is recognition. He wants to be recognised, to be seen in a deep and human sense. Musk spent $44 billion to buy himself what poor pathetic Willy Loman [in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman] couldn’t have. Yet it can’t be purchased at any sum.”

We’re not short of books about how our digital helpmates are ushering in the End of Days. German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer’s How to Stay Smart in a Smart World (2022) gets under the hood of systems that ape human wisdom just well enough to disarm us, but not nearly well enough to deliver happiness or social justice.The US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt took some flak for over-egging his arguments in The Anxious Generation (2024), but the studies he cites are solid enough and their statistics amount to a litany of depression, self-harm and suicide among young (and predominantly female) users of social media. In Unwired (2023), Gaia Bernstein, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, explains how we can (and should) sue GAMA (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple) for our children’s lost childhood.

Among a crowded field, Hayes singles out Johann Hari’s 2022 book Stolen Focus for praise, though this doesn’t reflect well on Hayes himself, whose solutions to our digital predicament are weak beer compared to Hari’s. Hari, like Gigerenzer and Bernstein, had bold ideas about civil resistence. He used his final pages to construct a bare-bones social protest movement.

Hayes, by contrast, “fervently hopes” that the markets will somehow self-correct, so that newspapers, in particular, will win back their market share, ushering in an analogue, pre–attention age means of directing attention in place of the current attention-age version. “I think (and fervently hope) we will see increasing growth in businesses, technologies, and models of consumption that seek to evade or upend the punishing and exhausting reality of the endless attention commodification we’re living through,” Hayes says. But what evidence has he, that such a surprising reversal in our cultural fortunes is imminent? The spread of farmers’ markets in US cities and the resurgence of vinyl in record stores. I’d love to believe him, but if I were an investor I’d show him the door.

With so many other writers making analogous points with a near-revolutionary force, The Siren’s Call says more about Hayes than it does about our crisis. He’s the very picture of an intelligent, engaged liberal, and I came away admiring him. I also worried that history will be no kinder to his type than it was to the Russian liberals of 1917.

 

Creative. Interactive. Wrong.

Posted on by
Reply

People are by far the easiest animals to train. Whenever you try to get some bit of technology to work better, you can be sure that you are also training yourself. Steadily, day by day, we are changing our behaviours to better fit with the limitations of our digital environment. Whole books have been written about this, but we keep making the same mistakes. On 6 November 2014, at Human Interactive, a day-long conference on human-machine interaction at Goldsmith’s College in London, Rodolphe Gelin, the research director of robot-makers Aldebaran, screened a video starring Nao, the company’s charming educational robot. It took a while before someone in the audience (not me) spotted the film’s obvious flaw: how come the mother is sweating away in the kitchen while the robot is enjoying quality time with her child?

We still obsess over the “labour-saving” capacities of our machines, still hanker after more always-elusive “free time”, but we never think to rethink the value of labour itself. This is the risk we run: that we will save ourselves from the very labour that makes our lives worthwhile.

Organised by William Latham and Frederic Fol Leymarie, Human Interactive was calculated (quite deliberately, I expect) to stir unease.

Beyond the jolly, anecdotal presentations about the computer games industry from Creative Assembly’s Guy Davidson and game designer Jed Ashforth, there emerged a rather unflattering vision of how humans best interact with machines. The biophysicist Michael Sternberg, for instance, is harnessing the wisdom of crowds to gamify and thereby solve difficult problems in systems biology and bioinformatics. For Sternberg’s purposes, people are effectively interchangeable components in a kind of meat parallel-processing system. Individually, we do have some merit: we are good at recognising and classifying patterns. Thisat least makes us better than pigeons, but only at the things that pigeons are good at already.

Sternberg would be mortified to see his work described in such terms – but this is the point: human projects, fed through the digital mill, emerge with their humanity stripped away. It’s up to people at the receiving end of the milling process to put the humanity back in. I wasn’t sure, listening to Nilli Lavie’s presentation on attention, to what human benefit her studies would be put. The UCL neuroscientist’s key point is well taken – that people perform best when they are neither overloaded with information, nor deprived of sufficient stimulus. But what did she mean by her claim that wandering attention loses the US economy around two billion dollars a year? Were American minds to be perfectly focused, all the year round, would that usher in some sort of actuarial New Jerusalem? Or would it merely extinguish all American dreaming? Without a space for minds to wander in, where would a new idea – any new idea – actually come from?

Not that ideas will save us. Ideas, in fact, got us into this mess in the first place, by reminding us that the world as-is is less than it could be. We are very good at dreaming up scenarios that we are not currently experiencing. We are all too capable of imagining elusive “perfect” experiences. Digital media feed these yearnings. There is something magical about a balanced spreadsheet, a glitchless virtual surface, the beauty of a symmetrical avatar under perfect, unreal light.

Henrietta Bowden-Jones, founder and director of the National Problem Gambling Clinic, is painfully aware of how digital media encourage our obessive and addictive behaviours. Games are hardly the new tobacco — at least, not yet — but psychologists are being hired to make them ever-more addictive; Bowden-Jones’s impressively understated presentation suggested that games may soon generate behavioral and social problems as acute as those thrown up by on-line gambling.

The day after the conference, Goldsmith’s College hosted Creative Machine, a week-long exhibition of machine creativity. In a church abutting the campus, robots sketched human skulls, balanced pendulums, and noodled around with evolutionary algorithms.I expected still more alienation, a surfeit of anxiety. In fact, Creative Machine left me feeling strangely reassured.

Those of us who play with computers, or know a little about science, harbour what amounts to a religious conviction: that that somewhere deep down, at the bottom of this messy reality, there is an order at work. Call it mathematics, or physics, or reason. Whichever way you cut it, we believe there’s a law. But this just isn’t true. Put a computer to work in the real world, and it messes up. More exciting still, it messes up in just the ways we would. Félix Luque Sánchez’s simple robots on rails shuttle backwards and forwards in a brave and ultimately futile attempt to balance a pendulum. Anyone who’s ever tried to balance a book on their head will recognise themselves in every move, every acceleration, every hesitation – every failure.

10805494_10152350803875426_1779780952_n

Even a robot who knows what it’s doing will get entangled. Patrick Tresset has programmed a robot called Paul with the rules of life drawing and draughtsmanship. Paul, presented with a still-life, follows these rules unthinkingly – and yet every picture it churns out is unique, shaped by tiny, unrepeatable fluctations in its environment (a snaggy biro, a heavy-footed passer-by, a cloud crossing the sun…).

10805029_10152350804285426_1153907029_n

If an emblem were needed for this show, then Cécile Babiole provides it. She has run the phrase “NE DOIS PAS COPIER” (literally: “one shouldn’t copy”) through a 3-D copier, over and over again, playing a familiar game of generational loss. And it’s the strangest thing: as they decay, her printed plastic letters take on organic form, become weeds, become coral, become limbs and organs. They lose their original meaning, only to acquire others. They do not become nothing, the way an over-photocopied picture becomes nothing. They become rich and strange.

10751565_10152350804335426_1659828360_n

Maths, rationality and science are magnificent tools with which to investigate the world. But we commit a massive and dangerous category error when we assume the world is built out of maths and reason.

With a conference to beat us, and an exhibition to entice us, Latham and Fol Leymarie have led us, without us ever really noticing, to a view of new kind of digital future. A future of approximations and mistakes and acts of bricolage. It is not a human future, particularly. But it is a future that accommodates us, and we should probably be grateful.