Updates
Since my report on The State of Dialogue in M2D #1, I've been thinking about:
Every time I think about what matters, my attention turns to the State of Attention, which I discuss in Part 2 of this essay. Here, in Part 1, I preface my latest observations with an argument in defense of “attention seeking”.
In Defense of Attention Seeking
With this essay, I am asking for your attention. But that doesn't mean that I'm confessing to what our culture regards as the sin of attention-seeking.
I am expressing my desire for your attention, but this statement of the obvious doesn’t only apply to this essay. It applies to every piece of content ever published. The publishers always want your attention.
Even beyond what we call social media, we seek attention every day in our physical environment. There's nothing inherently sinful about attention-seeking as an aspect of our social lives, just as there's nothing inherently sinful about seeking money, sex, food, shelter, connection, belonging, purpose, self-actualization or self-transcendence. Across the layers of Maslow's Pyramid and beyond, we all seek our lifeblood. In one form or another, we seek satisfaction.
This striving necessarily encompasses both healthy behaviors, through which we earn our lifeblood, and unhealthy behaviors, through which we steal our lifeblood. I use this distinction as a standard separating healthy, non-vampiric communications from unhealthy, vampiric bids for attention.
With this post, I'd like to earn your attention for the second part of this monthly essay, which is scheduled for publication tomorrow. Part 2 revisits the ‘Social Dilemma’ and the idea of ‘Humane Technology’ as a case study in reductionist solutionism. Specifically, I explore the hypothesis that this diagnosis and recommended remedy illustrate what I call the Age of Meta-Vampirism in which the solution is an aspect of the problem.
I'm drawing attention to this inquiry because it matters to all of us, and it arguably matters more than at least most of our “trending stories” and rankings of risks that exclude the mother of all risks, which Alfred North Whitehead described as “ignorance of ignorance”.1
This civilizational deficit of self-knowledge feeds the epistemic root of the meta-crisis. The growing weight of second-order ignorance reinforces the compulsion to reenact ineffective and unsustainable responses to catastrophic risks. This repetition compulsion is now playing out in relation to what we call the attention economy, and I strongly believe it warrants more of our attention than it currently receives.
Why Am I Screaming My Message?
In fact, I'm not just asking you to pay attention to this inquiry into the causes and consequences of this problem. I am screaming for your attention. To spare my vocal chords, I simply raised the volume on this message with a screenshot from Don't Look Up, a film about amusing ourselves to death.
I am screaming because I believe that the benefits of the scream outweigh the costs of self-censorship. Through this Substack, I removed the self-imposed straight-jacket of an authorly persona that prefers to whisper — or quip about — vital truths. As an attention seeker, I'm no wunderkind virtuoso, but I know that performers in the Society of Spectacle shouldn't limit themselves to a narrow repertoire. There's a time to whisper and a time to howl in the wilderness. There's a time to celebrate life and a time to acknowledge that, in our culture of 'connected isolation', Dialogue is dying.
So, I felt the need to raise the volume on this message. This choice may have alienated some people, but it may also be a reason that you are still reading.
Who Are You?
The question, of course, is who are "you"? You started out as an abstract reader whom I imagined as I wrote this essay, but now you are a flesh-and-blood human being whose attention is still with me. You somehow discovered this essay through my media, guided by the confluence of life and algorithm. And I hope you find some value in Part 2 tomorrow. If you do feel any resistance to the vibe of this message, feel free to return to it when the moment feels right.
Arguments from Authority
For anyone who hasn't yet thought about the absurdly indiscriminate shame around attention-seeking, I offer arguments from three authorities.
First, in Attention Seeking, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips argues that:
Attention-seeking is one of the best things we can do.
Second, in Speech and Reality, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy helps us broaden the scope of this inquiry beyond attention-seeking into an examination of why we express ourselves at all, using speech as a response to our reality. He writes:
"Without this effort, we would go to pieces by either too much inner, unuttered desire, or too many impressions made upon us by our environment, too many petrified formulas fettering us from the past, or too much restless curiosity about the future."
And
"Anarchy, decay, war, revolution are four forms of social death. Because they are death in its social disguise, and because man is in constant search for life, these social perils, in their variety, compel us to speak our minds."
Third, in the Gospel of Thomas, we read:
If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
In theory, nobody needs permission for self-expression, from these or any other sources. But "attention-seeking" remains drowned in shame with hardly any concern about the pandemic of self-censorship.
In my view, the problem isn't that there are now so many Substacks seeking attention, but that there are still so many people on advertising-driven media limiting their self-expression to statements indistinguishable from AI-generated text: e.g., "Congrats on the new position!"
Part 2 of this essay is scheduled for publication tomorrow at 1 p.m.
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“Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.”