A conversation about how attention was commodified, why it's so easy to steal, where industry is looking for new supplies, and whether democracy can survive this.
Good interview - well done. It helped me see a way forward for society. We'll get so sick of vacuous screen time that we'll move on to things worthwhile.
Our 35 year old son just dumped his smart phone for a dumb one - calls and texts only. His 10 month old first child helped with his decision. Comes home from work, puts the phone with his keys, and doesn't look at it until he leaves for work in the morning. Uses his laptop in a deliberate way for "valuable" stuff.
But it's currently my best option for navigation. I already own it - it does the job.
After that, my podcast app is nice (Overcast, iOS only).
Social media apps are absolutely not allowed on my phone.
I have a handful of other apps that are helpful when traveling.
I can also understand that abstinence can be the only option for dealing with an addiction. There's no shame in that, and I've kind of taken that route by not installing any social media apps.
Great interview! Two of my favorite people to read/listen to so not a surprise. Makes me want to be a lot more deliberate in where on social media I put my valuable attention. I will be concentrating on the issues raised in this interview for some time. As an 82 year old woman, my time is my own. I want to use it more wisely!
That was fucking amazing. I took a whole document full of notes but I think I'm going to just sit with it for a while before I decide what/whether to comment re: those notes. I did want to get at least this in though. Appreciate both of you.
Yeah, hard to disagree with much or any of this. The negative/outrage bias is becoming very destructive. The focus/elevation of isolated anecdotes and failures. The way this created vaccine skepticism/cynicism/pessimism has recently been similarly used to create renewable energy. For every story or post about solar and wind power and energy storage hugely reducing fossil generation and emissions, it seems like ten stories about these contributing in some way to "injustice/inequity," or "destroying" wildlife or habitat, or "raising prices," or "consuming resources," or "foreign supply chains," or "being unreliable" or "containing toxic whatever" or... Then even liberal or progressive or environmental journalists seem to pick up the attention that these themes generate and elevate them. And pretty soon politicians are even afraid to say the names of wind or solar except to attack them.
From enviros who should support wind and solar for decarbonization, I've heard literally, "The cure is worse than the disease," and the only "real solution," is some bio-based, non-capitalist, local, etc. eco-utopian nirvana, to avoid "collapse of the biosphere," though it's never clear how to get there and support ten billion humans.
As in David's concluding remarks, how do we get positive "attention" on the success of amazing renewable, sustainable tech and turn that back into support and that support back into influence where it matters?
And this has everything to do with clean energy. I don't remember your exact quote, but I know you've talked about how we CAN fix this (clean energy/climate wise), there just isn't the political will. And this topic is all about that political will.
Attenuation and filtering is the missing piece of managing attention, and our social media is essentially distracting our higher function with every nuisance signal we ought to be ignoring. Back in the 50's-60's Cybernetics and Economics were peers (-ish), but economics used computers (or jealousy of physics) to run down the math path towards business dominance while cybernetics remained within operational research, information theory, and control systems: less tied to concrete balance sheet "proofs of value." This near-sighted focus on the fast path of immediate value is, perhaps the original sin of our contemporary social arrangement. Cybernetics is all about managing information, feedback specifically, and that sounds a lot like an appropriate tool for dealing with the "Attention Economy" created by sprinkling too much economics over and into everything.
This is gap most clear when capitalism is blamed, because while there is a very clear form in the speaker's mind, capitalism has many forms (unless you count "a mathematical optimization function over particular objectives," which gets us bickering about which objectives). Deming's Capitalism isn't Friedman's, for instance, and under Deming we'd not have this behavior from our capitalistic entities (as they would care about workers, society, and the environment along with executives and capital - something that would get you tarred as a socialist today and kicked out of the board room). It is today's particular structure of DThis (Shareholder) flavor of capitalism that gives rise to this optimization behavior towards short term results (serving executives and capital) - that's not accidental but part in parcel with the multi-generational effort to roll back the administrative state's limits on capital accumulation. It isn't a coincidence that Friedman is quoted and lauded in Project 2025, they sprout from the same root. The structure of how we collectively approach business and society today, giving rise to the juicing of attention behavior dominating the discourse, was deliberately framed to yield this result (perhaps with unintentional consequences, don't want to give too much credit to a wave of thinkers who gave themselves awards for creating new and exciting forms of fraud, but as a consequence of those choices of priority - the filtering of which signals really count).
All that to say: our focus and attention can be collectively set or steered towards a different objective because it has been in the past. Which is an encouraging thought.
The trick is to get there from here without needing a society reset from an extraordinary crisis that hurts those who are vulnerable, different, or less privileged/powerful.
Very interesting to think of things in terms of attention. But I find it curious that the word "advertising" was mentioned only once. Attention is profitable because of advertising. Advertising drives consumption. Over consumption drives planetary destruction. Another thing, while Bluesky was mentioned, the Fediverse wasn't. The concept of corporate control of the internet and social media was discussed, to me that would lead to the Fediverse as a way out of the corporate advertising driven social media and internet?
Good interview - well done. It helped me see a way forward for society. We'll get so sick of vacuous screen time that we'll move on to things worthwhile.
Our 35 year old son just dumped his smart phone for a dumb one - calls and texts only. His 10 month old first child helped with his decision. Comes home from work, puts the phone with his keys, and doesn't look at it until he leaves for work in the morning. Uses his laptop in a deliberate way for "valuable" stuff.
I'm really tempted...
If my phone died, I might get a flip phone.
But it's currently my best option for navigation. I already own it - it does the job.
After that, my podcast app is nice (Overcast, iOS only).
Social media apps are absolutely not allowed on my phone.
I have a handful of other apps that are helpful when traveling.
I can also understand that abstinence can be the only option for dealing with an addiction. There's no shame in that, and I've kind of taken that route by not installing any social media apps.
Great interview! Two of my favorite people to read/listen to so not a surprise. Makes me want to be a lot more deliberate in where on social media I put my valuable attention. I will be concentrating on the issues raised in this interview for some time. As an 82 year old woman, my time is my own. I want to use it more wisely!
"We are in the jello salad period of the internet" is a phrase that would never have entered my mind but somehow makes perfect sense.
That was fucking amazing. I took a whole document full of notes but I think I'm going to just sit with it for a while before I decide what/whether to comment re: those notes. I did want to get at least this in though. Appreciate both of you.
Yeah, hard to disagree with much or any of this. The negative/outrage bias is becoming very destructive. The focus/elevation of isolated anecdotes and failures. The way this created vaccine skepticism/cynicism/pessimism has recently been similarly used to create renewable energy. For every story or post about solar and wind power and energy storage hugely reducing fossil generation and emissions, it seems like ten stories about these contributing in some way to "injustice/inequity," or "destroying" wildlife or habitat, or "raising prices," or "consuming resources," or "foreign supply chains," or "being unreliable" or "containing toxic whatever" or... Then even liberal or progressive or environmental journalists seem to pick up the attention that these themes generate and elevate them. And pretty soon politicians are even afraid to say the names of wind or solar except to attack them.
From enviros who should support wind and solar for decarbonization, I've heard literally, "The cure is worse than the disease," and the only "real solution," is some bio-based, non-capitalist, local, etc. eco-utopian nirvana, to avoid "collapse of the biosphere," though it's never clear how to get there and support ten billion humans.
As in David's concluding remarks, how do we get positive "attention" on the success of amazing renewable, sustainable tech and turn that back into support and that support back into influence where it matters?
I will say that I enjoyed the content and definitely interesting to me.
Given that I’m a paid subscriber, is this the direction the podcast is going or was this a one-off type episode as far as content is concerned?
The podcast is just "stuff I'm interested in," Chris, which is mostly clean energy but also the wider culture & society around it!
Thanks for clarifying David!
And this has everything to do with clean energy. I don't remember your exact quote, but I know you've talked about how we CAN fix this (clean energy/climate wise), there just isn't the political will. And this topic is all about that political will.
Attenuation and filtering is the missing piece of managing attention, and our social media is essentially distracting our higher function with every nuisance signal we ought to be ignoring. Back in the 50's-60's Cybernetics and Economics were peers (-ish), but economics used computers (or jealousy of physics) to run down the math path towards business dominance while cybernetics remained within operational research, information theory, and control systems: less tied to concrete balance sheet "proofs of value." This near-sighted focus on the fast path of immediate value is, perhaps the original sin of our contemporary social arrangement. Cybernetics is all about managing information, feedback specifically, and that sounds a lot like an appropriate tool for dealing with the "Attention Economy" created by sprinkling too much economics over and into everything.
This is gap most clear when capitalism is blamed, because while there is a very clear form in the speaker's mind, capitalism has many forms (unless you count "a mathematical optimization function over particular objectives," which gets us bickering about which objectives). Deming's Capitalism isn't Friedman's, for instance, and under Deming we'd not have this behavior from our capitalistic entities (as they would care about workers, society, and the environment along with executives and capital - something that would get you tarred as a socialist today and kicked out of the board room). It is today's particular structure of DThis (Shareholder) flavor of capitalism that gives rise to this optimization behavior towards short term results (serving executives and capital) - that's not accidental but part in parcel with the multi-generational effort to roll back the administrative state's limits on capital accumulation. It isn't a coincidence that Friedman is quoted and lauded in Project 2025, they sprout from the same root. The structure of how we collectively approach business and society today, giving rise to the juicing of attention behavior dominating the discourse, was deliberately framed to yield this result (perhaps with unintentional consequences, don't want to give too much credit to a wave of thinkers who gave themselves awards for creating new and exciting forms of fraud, but as a consequence of those choices of priority - the filtering of which signals really count).
All that to say: our focus and attention can be collectively set or steered towards a different objective because it has been in the past. Which is an encouraging thought.
The trick is to get there from here without needing a society reset from an extraordinary crisis that hurts those who are vulnerable, different, or less privileged/powerful.
Very interesting to think of things in terms of attention. But I find it curious that the word "advertising" was mentioned only once. Attention is profitable because of advertising. Advertising drives consumption. Over consumption drives planetary destruction. Another thing, while Bluesky was mentioned, the Fediverse wasn't. The concept of corporate control of the internet and social media was discussed, to me that would lead to the Fediverse as a way out of the corporate advertising driven social media and internet?