Our attention is valuable, finite, and currently being squandered

This is an attention economy that benefits from our distraction

Notes from a politically charged moment in history: it is a Monday in 2025, the sun has set, the heat of the day has given way to a biting but impersistent cold. I am writing this piece to make sense of the way the world has gone awry, except it has not. I am writing without looking up the news further to what I have already been receiving all day. There is an exhaustion and anger in my body that has nothing to do with the work of my day. I have been considering that fact that perhaps I do not know enough to make an argument about something I have been thinking about for too long, but this waterfall of words has arrived and demands to be archived.

Every time something desperately horrible has happened on a global scale, bringing civilian populations to their knees for reasons beyond their ken and control, every time a nation-state has chosen itself, its power, its economic trajectory, or its corporations over the material lives and well-being of its people, inflicting on them— us— depravations and conditions of unimaginable pain, suffering and degradation, we have said: it cannot get worse than this. And then it does.

We hinge our hopes of fixing these conditions on a group of people whose BUSINESS is to MAINTAIN THE STATUS QUO. The people in charge of governments do not see themselves as servants of the people; they look at the entire mass of humanity and see a labour force that can be compelled by the artificial structures of the economy. We are compelled; noncompliance within capitalism takes forms of depravation that often cannot be withstood (think incarceration, institutionalisation, homelessness, social isolation, among other things), or require significant capital as protection in the first place.

Recognising the conditions in which we continue to do any form of labour, with varying degrees of permanent control over our time and resources, is a heavy, devastating burden to bear; and recognition comes whether we want it to or not. Every form of success capitalism can promise us is only another layer of luxury to which our mind slowly loses sensitivity. The most expensive things that money can buy are often materially not worth much: their value is human-assigned, manmade, and ultimately only a part of the collective imagination of this world—which means: if enough people stopped thinking of luxury products as both valuable and enriching (as in the literal process of adding richness to oneself), these items would lose worth. But most people—the absolute majority—labour under conditions of capitalism without earning enough to survive. There are peoples the nation-state system has already written off; peoples already mortgaged to the endless growth of an unsustainable economic model that is built on the blood and bones of indigenous, global south, colonised communities.

I do not use any of these words lightly. I am prone to exaggeration when I speak but I have sat down with pen and paper (before typing this out) today with every intention of being truthful to my understanding of the world as it is, and to identify why it is that the unimaginable keeps happening over and over again. I hold myself responsible to find an answer that resounds with what I am learning of the ways in which the people I wish to remain in community with have suffered, and equally, I hold myself accountable for the times and privilege with which I can afford to switch off from the world and rest enough to move in alignment with what compels me to labour, rather than to labour from a position of continuous precarity.

I hope there are other writings in which I can add flesh to whom I consider my community, and what my imagination seeks for in a different world, a world in the coming future that I ache to inhabit. But for now: this is a moment in history where at least four wars are going on simultaneously in the world and we are being distracted on a scale so impressive we don’t even realise.

The people who benefit from the current status quo and the coercive prevailing economic system have trained, compelled, flagellated, and rewarded some generations of us to literally sing and dance as we walk to our death, and some others to watch the spectacle as we follow them.

Thesis: This is an attention economy that benefits from our distraction.

Thought stream 1: The age of information/misinformation disinformation is meant to provide us with a continuous, constantly expanding pool of facts, counterfacts, opinions, theories and on increasing occasion, outright lies, not merely to confuse our understanding of the world and the intentions of the people who possess the capital to mould it as they please, but to expend the energy we need to actually, seriously organise against them squabbling with each other over the correct version of the truth and validating the truth. There are institutionalised, verified processes of validation that cost resources, time and labour often difficult to access, and the vast swathes of algorithmically controlled information processing that are chucked into the mainstream resources most people actually can access (including social media) exist to keep us rooting and scuffling endlessly. As things go, we need an archive of Truths validated and remembered well before the truth is changed by those who write the histories of the times.

Thought stream 2: Short form content/entertainment/escapist media – that specifically manufactures itself as content creation is creating an age of inattention. We are bombarded with enough dopamine-hogging content to keep up dulled to the sharp edges of the capitalist system. This does not mean we do not suffer. Only that we cope by drowning out the ache. We are kept chronically distracted such that we also lose the ability to engage in activities that require sustained focus and effort, especially when they are not monetarily compensated or oriented towards the production of goods and services within capitalism.

Thought stream 3: The process of reducing our attention span is also linked to our desensitisation towards the people of the world. We are bombarded with montages of immense suffering of peoples across the globe and immediately pivoted towards online shopping portals, shown live streams of explosions in wartime and genocide, then sent pictures of puppies sniffing flowers. A single track of emotion, thought, and concentrated analysis unframed by capitalist endeavour is not allowed to sustain. We are given the option of treating the suffering of others as something from which we can escape.

We owe them our attention. The model of globalised neoliberalism that has outsourced all its exploitative labour, and committed acts of traditional war, ecoterrorism and economic precarity to maintain the status quo has once again placed the burden of backbreaking production on the populations of the global south. If we have clothes, electronics, plastics from sweatshops in South and East Asia, crops grown and picked on farms and plantations across South America, fossil fuels mined across the Middle East, the raw materials of our lives imported into the so-called ‘First World’ for cheap because the labour, blood and sweat that wrought these items was repaid in less than survival wages, then we owe it to these peoples to turn our gazes towards them when they suffer immensely, and even die. We have to look at the conditions in which labouring peoples construct our material lives if we are ever to realise how wrong these conditions are, how foundational the lies are on which our understanding of this world has been built, and how horrible the stakes continue to be for a vast majority of us who will never have any true sovereignty over our lives.

Thought stream 4: And this brings me to the reason I’ve been seething all day. Not only are we distracted from the everyday slavery of a majority of the people, but also we are kept entertained and stupid enough to miss the geopolitical threads weaving a shroud for us. Question: Why do SEVERAL national digital newspapers in India need to report on a video of a couple of Indians dancing in Oxford going viral on Instagram? (A further line of thought on why this spectacle seems to arouse some kind of national pride has been shelved for the purposes of not letting this write-up lose all coherence and track.) Why is the literal news reporting on entertainment, when there are at least four wars going on in the world?

The news/journalism was supposed to be an objective report of the world as it is at any moment in time, and when it failed to be objective, when the truth of the world at any moment in time has been manipulated with mis- and dis-information, we have entered a roundabout process of fact-checking and validating information from different sources against each other to see what lines up with what we already think and know of the world, thereby not aligning ourselves with what could be Truths, and reinforcing, instead, manufactured versions of the truth that pillar the status quo. Media sources are also competing with content/entertainment for our attention, and lucratively, participating in content creation and entertainment to keep their audiences. This means they follow the pattern that works so well on social media: yes, first Israel, then America bombed Iran, but here’s a link to a viral dance video in some of the most iconic locales at Oxford University; every click counts towards site access/ad revenues/whatever free market policy digital spaces now subscribe to. Then: the suffering of people can be tuned in to from time to time; Israeli starvation of Gazan civilians and denial of aid in the aftermath of a 75-year history of ethnic cleansing, neocolonialism, and the last two years of carpet-bombing and destroying the infrastructure of a people (healthcare, food production sites, education) can be brought to the forefront when a public figure of influence draws attention to the situation (eyes on the Madleen while shootouts happen at aid camps).

Even as news sources online and social media mutate and takes on shapes that equally overstimulate and fatigue us, we squander our attention in places it does not need to go. An influencer’s ASMR morning mocha, or face shed, or day-in-the-life or next bit of brain rot humour IS NOT ART AND DOES NOT REQUIRE OUR ATTENTION. Newspapers and magazines exalting celebrity-ship of those who do not make art that compels emotion, moves us toward the idea of a better world, and seeks to expand the mind rather than shrink the circumference of our ideas do not require our attention.

Attention, like our lives, is a valuable and finite resource. Expanding it, sharpening its focus, concentrating its intensity on something that has value beyond capitalism, and using it to engage with the Real world, the world of trees and grass and flowers and birds and tiny and big animals and sky and ocean, has been my learning this year. I cannot unsee what I have seen, unrealise what I have realised, now that I do not need to be entertained all the time.

To be clear— I am not commenting on regulating art-making. Internet spaces have democratised access to discourse and information, world-shattering, world-changing, world-rewriting information, and platformed the art of peoples across the world. I am concerned, only, that the current spectacle of entertainment we now call content creation diverts our attention from the political threads that bind us to our circumstances. America has bombed Iran— ostensibly to wreck a nascent nuclear program— and this has raised the price of oil in the market. Just week ago, American allies in OPEC has reported concerns about the falling prices of oil barrels, and cautioned against oversupply further reducing prices. There is a connection here that I do not have enough information to piece together. If I continued to engage with short form content, I’d probably not have the attention span to make that connection anyway.

Some final thoughts: The process of divesting from things that box my imagination from expanding beyond what we considered impossible, and expanding my attention such that it lands on the parts of the world that are slowly being darkened from view, is slow, laborious, boring, and infinitely more satisfying than participating in a world-making that only accidentally stays its hand from crushing me. From time to time I trade in these efforts for a sweet dose of escapism, but the recognition comes and reckoning comes, and we are in an era when the people who run the nation-state in its current form no longer hide their manipulation of the Truths well. I am hopeful first, that my life will be slower, though no less filled with work for my hands and my mind that fulfil me as much as they keep me alive. And I am certain, next, that I need to imagine a different world, in which capital accumulation is a senseless pursuit, and in which I can worship what is human in all of us.

Peace.