M2D #2: Attention Please! (Part 2)
The New Memo About the 'Social Dilemma' and 'Humane Technology'
Picking up where Part 1 left off, this monthly exploration of gaps between stories and realities, returns to the ‘Social Dilemma’ and ‘Humane Technology’. Naming both the problem and the cure, these stories may illustrate what I call the Age of Meta-Vampirism in which the solutions are the problem. At least, so goes the argument in what I call the New Memo.
The New Memo on the ‘Social Dilemma’
To anyone who “got the memo” circa 2020, it’s old news by now that:
The Big Tech vampires are drinking our lifeblood.
The attention economy is a kleptocracy in which the new scarce economic resource is stolen, rather than traded or gifted.
We must protect ourselves from the bloodsuckers by developing new habits, limiting screen time, using the Dark Mode in various apps, and supporting #humanetech as an antidote to the vampiric default.
Over the past year, bits and pieces of a New Memo started to pop up on my radar screen. According to some versions of this memo, the Old Memo about the ‘Social Dilemma’ is bullshit; it is produced by vampires purporting to protect us from the vampires that preceded them. Other versions of the New Memo deliver gentler critiques and explorations of the hypothesis that the-social-dilemma-as-a-diagnosis and humane-technology-as-a-remedy may not tell the full story about our predicament.
Nobody has access to the full and uncontested version of the New Memo, but I’ll share what I know and welcome comments from anyone who can help fill in the blanks.
The Medium Is the Message
I started writing this essay with only vague intuitions about the shape of the meta-vampirism thesis. I wasn’t sure where I would find the most fruitful confirmations or challenges to my thesis. A few days later, I saw this tweet from Andrew McLuhan, the third-generation exponent of Marshall McLuhan's historic contributions to the study of media.
In response to my question about relevant sources, Andrew suggested starting with the first chapter of Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, where the following paragraph caught my attention:
If the formative power in the media are the media themselves, that raises a host of large matters that can only be mentioned here, although they deserve volumes. Namely, that technological media are staples or natural resources, exactly as are cold and cotton and oil. Anybody will concede that society whose economy is dependent upon one or two major staples like cotton or grain, or lumber, or fish, or cattle is going to have some obvious social patterns of organization as a result. Stress on a few major staples creates extreme instability in the economy but great endurance in the population. The pathos and humor of the American South are embedded in such an economy of limited staples. For a society configured by reliance on a few commodities accepts them as a social bond quite as much as the metropolis does the press. Cotton and oil, like radio and TV, become “fixed charges” on the entire psychic life of the community. And this pervasive fact creates the unique cultural flavor of any society. It pays through the nose and all its other senses for each staple that shapes its life.
If we did expand this paragraph into volumes, would one of the volumes provide a framework for regulating social media as a public utility? And should we run from ‘humane technology’ because, by comparison, it only provides a Band-Aid for the gushing wound that won’t heal without a decisive regulatory fix? Even if that’s what Marshall McLuhan meant, I doubt that’s the main reason Andrew McLuhan urges running from ‘humane technology’.
Before I returned to Understanding Media, my suspicions about humane tech were purely intuitive, unsupported by any evidence. After 26 years of experience in corporate PR, I had developed a sense about the narrative matrix that systematically humanizes the inhuman, whether it's legal persons known as corporations or technologies creating a “more connected world”. More than I recoil from the openly inhuman, I recoil from inhumanity hiding behind a human mask. It would be better, part of me feels, to see the inhumanity of the beast.
Naming the Problem
Even when we notice the crimes against our attention, it's often at the cost of accepting a description of the crime that favors the recidivist criminals. When the “attention economy” emerged as a frame for the critique of Big Tech vampires, I eagerly joined the ranks of observers celebrating the naming of the problem.
The redescription of the problem felt like a step in the right direction because it introduced a superior theory of value compared to the earlier conception of the information economy. However, in Your Attention Is Not a Resource (The Convivial Society, April 1, 2021),
explains how the new name of the problem became part of the problem. Drawing on the work of Ivan Illich, Sacasas suggests that the unquestioned acceptance of the new name reinforced self-defeating…“…institutional certainties anchored at a depth that even rabble-rousing cannot reach.”
And
“Chief among these certainties was the presumption of scarcity.”
The “attention economy” seemed a superior theory compared to the “information economy” because the former aligned neatly with scarcity-based presuppositions of respectable economic theory. However, by accepting and even celebrating the new theory, we unwittingly accepted and encouraged the commodification of attention. As Sacasas puts it, “to think of attention as a resource is already to invite the possibility that it may be extracted.”
By contrast to the presupposition of scarcity, Sacasas proposes what feels like a radical possibility: “We have as much attention as we need” and “refusing the assumption of scarcity can be surprisingly liberating.”1
Further, in The Pathologies of the Attention Economy (September 26, 2022), Sacasas describes the fuller psychopolitical horror show that we help normalize by accepting the “attention economy" as the name of the problem. Here's the three-point summary:
We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention.
The interests served by this environment in turn pathologize the resultant inattention.
These same interests devise and enforce new techniques to discipline the inattentive subject.
The Problem: A Piece of Manipulative Filmmaking
As my research continued, I found a more full-throated indictment of the vampire slayers offering humane technology as a remedy for the systematically normalized theft of attention. In Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers (Librarian Shipwreck), the author anchors his indictment in a critique of the 2020 film that popularized the ‘Social Dilamma’ as a diagnostic label for our predicament.
The Social Dilemma is a redemption tour that allows a bunch of remorseful Silicon Valley insiders to rebrand themselves as critics.
The Social Dilemma is a piece of manipulative filmmaking on par with the social media platforms it critiques. While presenting itself as a clear-eyed expose of Silicon Valley, the film is ultimately a redemption tour for a gaggle of supposedly reformed techies wrapped in an account that is so desperate to appeal to “both sides” that it is unwilling to speak hard truths.
Then, the Librarian Shipwreck highlights the harder truths absent from the film:
The film is designed to scare you, but it then works to direct that fear into a few banal personal lifestyle tweaks, while convincing you that Silicon Valley really does mean well. It is important to view The Social Dilemma not as a genuine warning, or as a push for a genuine solution, but as part of a desperate move by Silicon Valley to rehabilitate itself so that any push for reform and regulation can be captured and defanged by “critics” of its own choosing.
Insofar as “humane technology” means anything, it stands for platforms and devices that are designed to be a little less intrusive, that are designed to try to help you be your best self (whatever that means), that try to inform you instead of misinform you, and that make it so that you can think nice thoughts about the people who designed these products. The purpose of “humane technology” isn’t to stop you from being “the product,” it’s to make sure that you’re a happy product.
The people in this film blame “surveillance capitalism” for warping the liberatory potential of Internet connected technologies, and many people would respond to this by pushing back on Zuboff’s neologism to point out that “surveillance capitalism” is really just “capitalism” and that therefore the problem is really that capitalism is warping the liberatory potential of Internet connected technologies.
The Solutions Are the Problem
The central argument in the New Memo seems consistent with a theme of my first serialized book: Naming the Problem: The Quest for Redemption from Falsehood. Through a transcontextual perspective, I observe that, in our confrontations with problems we struggle to name, the problems may represent a more manageable threat compared with the pandemic of pseudo-solutions. We can often survive the problem, but the bullshit is deadly.
Bullshit only increases with the spikes in anxiety about attention vampirism. The anxiety is spiking because the problem is becoming harder to deny, creating the ideal climate for bullshit merchants who "feel the pain" of people struggling with information overload.
Sure, it's good news that fewer and fewer people still expect to find relief through denial. They can’t deny the diminishing efficacy of sweeping the problem under the rug and kicking the can down the road. The rug is now buried in dirt, and we have reached the end of the road. By now, we all know that we have a problem we can't adequately diagnose or treat at scale.
This realization creates a chink in our epistemic armor, now more easily pierced by hopeful messages from vampires eager to protect us from other vampires. Disguised as vampire slayers, the people and organizations behind the messages assure us that they have diagnosed the problem, and if we step into their sales funnels, we will come out transformed and relieved of our anxiety, reliably shielded from the vampires out there.
In the first week of the new year, I heard this pitch and I felt nauseated. The pitch didn't just feel like bullshit; it was smooth, high-quality bullshit. Judging by the enthusiastic comments from nearly 1,000 participants in the webinar, they responded to the BS the way a starved man responds to an all-you-can-eat buffet.
This was just another example of a problem perpetuated by the false belief that the problem is diagnosed and treatable. Naming the problem behind such problems is an endurance sport. It's a war, not a battle. To prevail in this war, we need to live to fight another day. With that goal in mind, I offer you two "solutions":
Just say no to solutions.
Remember the basic principle of first doing no harm.
However, in the first chapter of my book, I also argue that we can't respond to the pandemic of pseudo-solutions with legalistic indictments of each pseudo-solution (See section on “The Impossible Indictment”). False/failed messiahs are usually cloaked in plausible deniability.
Humbly United by Shared Ignorance
The search for the name of the problem requires us to ask: "Whose problem are we trying to name? Sure, I may lose the attention of anyone still reading by saying that we're talking about everybody's problem. But this is true.
Everybody grapples with the problem of governing our attention amid a vampiric onslaught that seeks to profit from the systematic misallocation of our attention. Powered by AI and perverse institutional incentives, attention vampires don't discriminate. They steal our lifeblood routinely.
The theft doesn’t just happen when we plug into what Marshall McLuhan called "extensions". Vampirism doesn't limit itself to our media. Read books like Psycho-politics by Byung-Chul Han or Governing the Soul by Nikolas Rose, and you won't need to read further to understand the scale, epidemiology, and hypercomplex dimensions of the problem.
These and countless other sources make it clear that the problem is internal at least as much as it is external. The question is whether we have either the tools of language or political technologies to build a consensus about the name of the problem. Without the right name, many people see no choice but to embrace the promise of a messianic redemption from the Social Dilemma in the form of a $2,000 rearrangement of their personal tech stack.
As an independent consultant to startups over the past six years, I’ve heard varying renditions of "end-of-the-road" and "under-the-rug" metaphors. They came from clients and partners talking about problems such as:
Obsolete accounting standards.
Lack of regulatory and legislative remedies for the 'Social Dilemma'.
Underinvestment in transportation infrastructure.
The need to do something about the mental health crisis.
The need to improve fraud detection.
The need to protect crypto from the government, or conversely, to protect the world from crypto.
The need to promote Responsible AI, or conversely, to quell the hysteria around AI.
If these problems appear undiminished, it seems logical to wonder if they persist at least in part because we didn't name them properly. If the names of these problems provided a high-fidelity reflection of their reality, perhaps investment wouldn’t continue to flow into technologies that automate the attention kleptocracy. Perhaps, we would have a clearer consensus about what matters. Perhaps capital would flow into healthy alternatives to the lethally polluted Big Tech media ecology.
It's tempting to think that our problems simply need better PR, more precise names, or more awareness-building campaigns with colored ribbons and wristbands. But this, too, is bullshit. Very tempting bullshit. And it's deadly. Naming the problem is an art form irreducible to campaigns, listicles, reform agendas, or even names.
Intellectually, we may know that the only thing more counterproductive than not looking for the name of the problem is following the person who claims to have found it. However, for this knowledge to take root in our psyche, we can try these two "solutions":
Learn to say "I don't know" and feel OK about not knowing.
Learn to accept, and perhaps even love, our shared ignorance about what matters most.
The Problem with Solutions: The Final Class
As the problem of attention vampirism becomes harder to deny, the supply of pseudo-solutions will continue to increase. Through this Substack, I participate in the naming of this problem and the creation of defenses against predatory snake oil merchants. In fact, my livelihood now depends on my participation in this marketplace. But the only solution I offer here is the use of my platform to spread the news that:
There are no solutions, and
The idea of solutions is part of the problem.
From this moving essay (The New Yorker - January 3, 2023) about a beloved philosopher's final class, one message stands out in my mind: Nobody ever has the "last word". This phrase serves as a good example of bad language that misrepresents reality.
I have been thinking a lot about the potential and pitfalls of dialogue, and I believe that one of the clearest pitfalls comes in the form of expected outcomes and conclusions. Under the illusion of continuity (explained in this Ted Talk), our past selves seek to control our present moment, especially when we share the moment with interlocutors we don't trust.
When the need for control leads us to reach for the last word, our yearnings for connection and shared understanding become the latest additions to the dustbin of projects seeking final solutions. The banality of these projects points to a feature of the human psyche that will bear any burden and oppose any foe in order to deny the central message of Richard P. Bernstein's final class:
If philosophy proves anything, it's that things are never fixed, dialogue never ends, and nobody has the last word.
We deny this reality because it reveals a reality we fear even more: the tangle of absurdities and irreconcilibilities at the heart of human experience. Denial seems like an inescapable choice.
Bernstein asked his students to read from Hannah Arendt:
“When a man is faced with the alternative of betraying and thus murdering his friends or of sending his wife and children, for whom he is in every sense responsible, to their death; when even suicide would mean the immediate murder of his own family—how is he to decide?”
What black-and-white moral principle, or what answer from ChatGPT, would provide an adequate response to this man's predicament? Who can speak the last word here?
The Gordian Knot at the heart of human experience doesn't often manifest itself in such dramatic confrontations with impossible choices in the absence of a barely adequate guiding truth. In fact, we barely notice most of these day-to-day confrontations. But they do happen every day. They are banal.
To metabolize these confrontations, we can either turn to final solutions, or we can turn to each other. We know where final solutions lead us. But, through dialogue, we can live a truth that, at least, lets us live to fight another day for a shared and sustainable understanding of our world.
As with most of the radical possibilities I explore through M2 Dialogue, it's important not to reduce this possibility to an empirical claim. I think of these possibilities as invitations to experiment.