Take Back Your Attention
The tech bros are taking over (your brain).
I have some really strong boundaries around technology in my house. I don’t talk about it much because it’s sometimes hard to explain that my convictions are not grounded in the usual gripes about “screentime,” nor are they in any way related to the circus of American politics.
Social misunderstandings are all but inevitable these days if we hope to engage in anything but shallow conversation.
Have you noticed how few personal choices remain that don’t supposedly signal to the world “which side we are on”?
Maybe we don’t want red dye in our kids’ food because we’re RFK-loving extremists? Maybe we oppose Meta because we’re punishing Zuckerberg for flipping? (He is a Republican now, right?) Must we be liberal because we want to defy Amazon’s monopoly or conservative because we think it would be cool to send spaceships to Mars?
If we are interested in human survival skills like growing food, are we alt-right preppers or liberal treehuggers? Speaking of: if we want to protect the environment, how must we feel about Silicon Valley? Does using AI (and its vast drain on energy) make us conservative? Are we traddy because we parent a nuclear family? Who do we have to vote for if we want to go to church, or send our kids to public school, or frequent a library where books might or might not be banned? Can you tell which side I’m on from the music I listen to? The television I watch? The people I follow online?
And back to the technology thing—what does my suspicion around profit-driven, brain hacking algorithms say about how I punch my ticket?
We’re all constantly policing one another’s convictions, trying to determine who is with us and who is against us.
Or at least, that’s what the loudest voices want us to think.
Maybe in our own houses and neighborhoods, we’re just being who we are. I honestly don’t know. I made bread and raised chickens before that was a political signifier of conservatism, and I taught at a university before that made me an out-of-touch liberal elite.
Like all of you (I think?), I just want to make choices without having to wonder which categories those actions and convictions put me in.
I guess all of that was just a prologue to how I’ve been thinking about technology. Something changed in me when I saw the tech bros lined up behind Trump at his inauguration. I remember predicting that the tech overlords would infiltrate the American government a full decade ago. Their power (which, arguably, has more to do with their hold on our attention than with their mass wealth) has grown beyond our ability to resist it.
The inauguration image clicked in my brain like, “It’s here. It’s happening.”
And wow, did it light a fire in me. We are being manipulated, and since we never put down our phones, we’ve allowed that manipulation to extend to every corner of our lives: our office spaces, our living rooms, and even our bedrooms.
The only way to resist it is to notice it.
Noticing the ways we are being used for profit breaks the spell.
Now, about this Substack.
I would like to create a space where we can reasonably discuss and consider our relationship to technology free from political implications… Not only because politics are divisive, but because I don’t think the American government currently deserves that kind of deference. I think we have to figure out who we are and how we’re going to live—apart from that tin can of billionaire sardines.
I’ve been working hard on some changes to this newsletter that I’ll implement in the coming weeks. I want to talk about technology, but my obsession is not about getting off TikTok or tweeting less or protesting Facebook or whatever.
It’s about “spending” our limited concentration in radically intentional ways. It’s about recovering the things that make us human: rest, waiting, slowness, silence, complexity, privacy, waiting, and attention.
Those rich goobers want us to stay passive and distracted. They want us to argue our hearts out about who’s on which side while they hijack our emotions and dilute our critical thinking.
When I taught psychology, I was struck by the power of reinforcement (as demonstrated by B.F. Skinner) to shape behavior. Turns out that random rewards (e.g., occasional hits of adrenaline or dopamine as we scroll social media) are amazingly powerful ways to perpetuate that behavior. I can almost feel that "ping" as I land on a meaningful tidbit online. Like gambling, variable reinforcement can be addictive. I do turn off my mobile phone every night, but it's easy to get stuck on there during the day!
I am 1000% with you, Lindsey. If we want to talk about personal accountability and control, our attention is the most valuable asset we have and the easiest to take control of, given that it doesn't rely on anyone else's participation. It's too convenient to funnel those genuine human concerns into a tired political binary that forces us to choose between two shitty options; those tech billionaires know we'll just keep tearing each other apart and ignoring the very real problems they've created. I'm more than ready for an attention revolution.