What’s the best metaphor for attention? “If we construe the fundamental problem of the attention economy in terms of attentional labor–that as users we’re not getting sufficient value for our attentional labor, and the conditions of that labor are unacceptable–we could conceive of the necessary corrective as a sort of ‘labor union’ for the workers of the attention economy, which is to say, all of us. Or, we might construe our attentional expenditure as the payment of an ‘attentional tax,’ in which case we currently find ourselves subject to attentional taxation without representation.” James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light 📚
Mr. Beaver’s wise counsel for the age of LLMs: “But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”
Currently reading: Stand Out of Our Light by James Williams 📚
Social Inequalities of the Attention Economy
“This increasing self-regulatory burden may pose a unique challenge for those living in poverty, who, research suggests are more likely to begin from a place of willpower depletion relative to everyone else. . . . [T]he wider implications here is that these problems of self-regulation in the face of information abundance . . . carry large implications for the societal goals of justice and inequality. If the first ‘digital divide’ disenfranchised those who couldn’t access information, today’s digital divide disenfranchises those who can’t pay attention.” James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light 📚
Currently listening: new vinyl acquisition, My Favorite Things by John Coltrane 🎵
Currently reading: The Visionaries by Wolfram Eilenberger 📚
Yet trees are not ‘trees’, until so named and seen -
and never were so named, till those had been
who speech’s involuted breath unfurled,
faint echo and dim picture of the world,
but neither record nor a photograph,
being divination, judgement, and a laugh,
response of those that felt astir within
by deep monition movements that were kin
to life and death of trees, of beasts, of stars:
free captives undermining shadowy bars,
digging the foreknown from experience
and panning the vein of spirit out of sense.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia”
Finished reading: The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist 📚
Equal parts fascinating, prophetic, frustrating, provocative.