wretch-reads

About this blog

I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed - never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.

My dad, a musician for much of his life, says that this is actually the definition of good music: music that "sneaks up on you" and changes you.

If, as I've said, attention is a state of openness that assumes there is something new to be seen, it is also true that this state must resist our tendency to declare our observations finished - to be done with it. [...] this means that there is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention. Instead, what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency.

Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. [...] we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding - seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions - and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped.

Curiosity, something we know most of all from childhood, is a forward-driving force that derives from the differential between what is known and not known. [...] I live for this feeling. Curiosity is what gets me so involved in something I forget myself.

We need to be able to [...] risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear an anxiety.

Civil disobedience in the attention economy means withdrawing attention. But doing that by loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it is the same mistake as thinking that the imaginary Pera is a real island that we can reach by boat. A real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind. What is needed, then, is not a "once-and-for-all" type of quitting but ongoing training: the ability not just to withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.

Quotes Laura Portwood-Stacer's 2012 paper "Media refusal and conspicuous non-consumption: The performative and political dimensions of Facebook abstention." :

Quoting the blogger Talia Jane:

In the global "spot market," companies are driven only by the need to remain competitive, passing the task on to individuals to remain competitive as producing bodies. This "new contract," alongside other missing forms of government protection, closes the margin for refusal and leads to a life lived in economic fear. [...] Any argument of mindfulness or attention must address this reality. It's hard for me to imagine [...] suggesting "doing nothing" to anyone [...] working at low-wage jobs.

While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse - not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed - means the development of and the adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed.

I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It's not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant [...] in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter.

It's uncomfortable to assert one's will against custom and inclination, but that's what makes it admirable.

The story of the communes teaches me that there is no escaping the political fabric of the world [...] The world needs my participation more than ever. Again, it is not a question of whether, but how.

Distance for me usually means things like going for a walk [...], staying off the internet, or trying not to read the new for a while. But the problem is this: I can't stay out there forever [...]. As much as I might want to live in the woods [...] total renunciation would be a mistake.

The logic of advertising and clicks dictates the media experience, which is exploitative by design. Media companies trying to keep up with each other create a kind of "arms race" of urgency that abuses our attention and leaves us no time to think.