The Thing About Lighting Rods

In the Attention Age, whatever captures attention owns you. Even if you ignore it you're robbed. Paying attention, on the other hand, is a pure gift.

(This also appears here)

This election morning-after, I was online with a conference in Africa, and spent the first few minutes hearing expressions of sympathy about the US elections. Africans have a somewhat broader range of expereience than Americans in this regard. I apologized for the outcome without having heard what it was; nobody spelled it out for me. My inbox, when I got to it, was full of inconsolable grief.

The thing about lightning rods... if you are a lightning bolt, they are ready for you. Whatever's left is "sound and fury, signifying nothing." ¹

The media are seething with explanations of just how things took such an unprecedented, unexpected (by them) turn. This is not surprising: the threadbare pretense of having a clue in the first place is never more than mediocre nowadays. So we're hearing variations on the blinding sunlight, the treacherous women/minorities/third-parties/uneducated voters, the plethora of pernicious prevarications. But: it was not misogyny, rac-, sex-, gender-, able- or rising Fasc-ism, much less a carney-barker with a rep for stiffing employees, that befell America and the world last night. All that may be visible and loud. But the causes run much deeper.

The change that really matters happened quite some time ago. The short version is a bit dense: a technological innovation led to a paradigm-level change within the predominant cultural structure of competition. After the change, a new age-naming commodity emerged to displaced the previous one. The technological innovation was an internet that would go super-critical, that is, the density of connections reached the stage of forming giant hubs (e.g., Great Googlymoogly). The displaced commodity was Information. The new one is Attention, the key to surveillance, and also a new kind of unpaid labor, "content." Bait for targeted marketing, or to be technical, the carrier-wave for surveillance-capital extraction.

More simply, when the internet reached global scale, information was soon outpaced by spectacle. When the internet reached a critical mass of connections, attention-capture became the Engine of Commerce.

I place this sea-change around 2014, and today Science magazine seems to shed new light on my conjecture in an article about one Kate Starbird, PhD, entitled "The Rumor Clinic" ². It contains a perfect before-and-after illustration of the paradigm shift from information to attention:

Starbird initially expected her research to tell a positive story: how rumors spread by some users are quickly fact checked and corrected by others. "I'd sort of seen that in the early data, where we would see rumors and misinformation, but they were quickly corrected," Starbird says. "They weren't causing a lot of damage, as far as we could tell." It was the idea of a self-correcting crowd, a kind of Wikipedia in the wild.

But her first few studies quickly disabused her of this notion. "We could really see, especially between 2013 and 2015 (emphasis mine-- pb), that rumors and misinformation were becoming a larger and larger part of the discourse online during these crisis events," she says. Rumors were rarely being corrected-- and when they were, the correction usually came too late and reached far fewer people than the original, false information. A rumor that the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag attack by Navy SEALs, for instance, circulated on Twitter (now X) ³ for days. Social media algorithms, designed to keep people's attention, often advantaged the sensational. "And it turns out that falsehoods and conspiracy theories tend to be more sensational than the truth," Starbird says.

What caught my eye at first was Starbird's name in a Science magazine article. I had only become aware of this individual reading the "Twitter Files" from Matt Taibbi ⁴ and others, focused on apparent government abuse of Constitutional speech protections, originating with the Department of Homeland Security. What next struck me was the remark that "media algorithms, designed to keep people's attention, often advantaged the sensational." That's a prominent feature of the Attention Age.

What the "Twitter Files" revealed, being the raw internal communications opened to public scrutiny by its new owner, was seized upon by the House Republicans. They formed a committee on the "weaponization" of government, and subpoenaed persons like Starbird, to "grill" them, as such committees are wont to do, in leu of actually investigating anything. This has to do with the perpetual campaign system, which is their very lucrative full time job.

At issue was not so much the Constitutional implications of Homeland Security funding and directing suppression of "social" media accounts through a complex chain of shell-organizations (including Starbird's at Washington University), aka "content moderation." What had the committee Republicans' hair in fire was a perceived massive, longstanding partisan disinformation campaign against "conservatives" by the Democrats, "weaponizing" federal agencies and tax dollars.

The Dems on the other hand zeroed in almost exclusively on the reporters. Their shoot-the-messenger performance was a spectacular disgrace. Instead of reading the damming documents they "grilled" the reporters, as might be expected of the extensively documented "damned" in this instance. A senior Party official implicated in the infamous Clinton "Russian Email Hack" bullied the journalists relentlessly; unanswerable binary questions about profiting from the sordid story were lobbed, allowing no response; one Democrat even threatened jail. The Repubs seemed to be investigating the Constitutional questions, but were not averse to this display of operatic indignant self-righteousness across the aisle.

At about this point an inference may leap out at you, that the underlying causes of our epic confusion went unnoticed while the "security" state, smelling the Enemy Within, went howling off after a will-o'-the-wisp that would be known later as "Russiagate."

The foreign-interference story, long debunked as a false-flag operation but still repeated by the highest officials and most mainstream outlets, would not have had legs back in the bygone Info Age. But it doesn't function as information in the new paradigm, it's Shock and Awe, and it makes tons of money for both politicians and media. As to "content," it's more true than ever that no publicity is bad publicity. In our net-fragmented individual culture-bubbles there is a separate iteration for every market, and the markets have been reduced algorithmically to individual markets-of-one. Truth is similarly distributed, one to a customer. It takes forever to update.

This is, again, a toxic byproduct, a surplus, a side effect. It is not "dis" information, or "mis" information, it's un-information. Just copies blurred by replicative fade (a term I've loved, only heard in a StarTrek episode involving clone-people, beautiflly enunciated by Gates McFadden as "Dr. Crusher"; try saying it fast). The Internet was supposed to have the opposite effect, the cure for the childhood game of "telephone" or "pass it on," in which the message gets so garbled at the end of the line that everybody collapses in helpless laughter. We hoped the global network would turn all the lights on, and anyone could see everything. But that ended when the "service providers" switched from unlocking Universal Access to All Knowledge, to extractive attention-mining, content moderation and outright political herding.

We may think we're repeating the same story, but it's not so: everybody has a separate version of some long-faded original. They are not connected to anything real, they are the lifeless husks of might-have-been. Your copy of The Truth is yours alone. And yet there's a whole industry now, backed by billions of dollars in public money, dedicated to tracking down an insidious Foreign Interference in Our Democracy. If somebody actually finds any, it will end a lot of rising careers. If there's any such animal, it won't be where they're looking.

In the Attention paradigm Truth just doesn't sell, and what exists in our attention can have neurobiological effects whether it's real or not. Metaphorical lighting rods no longer merely attract controversy, they absorb it harmlessly. Our politics isn't relevant anymore. We're not in the Information Age anymore. Everything is broken.

And the Other Side didn't break it: it doesn't work for Them either. Because eventually, attention-hijack infects the hijacker. Apparently there are a lot of people still in full cry after Russian Trolls with a mystical ability to steer millions of voters this way and that with "social" media posts that have very few followers.

With the dawn of a new technological Age, global adoption of a new artifact produced a change like driving a car into deep water: suddenly, completely different unwritten rules apply. The controls are now irrelevant, as the water rises over the windows. When the car is still sinking, it's pointless and self-destructive to attack the driver for not stomping on the brakes again harder, or for breaking the window, or just screaming out their last breath.

For children, paying attention may still be a moral act. ⁵Maybe, if we're very lucky, our kids in the back seat will be rolling the windows down and cutting our seatbelts.

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¹ To paraphrase Spike Mulligan and Peter Sellers (The Goon Show): "Is that Shakespeare?" "No, stupid, it's Macbeth."

² The Rumor Clinic: at the Center for an Informed Public, Kate Starbird tracks falsehoods and counters them in real time, by Kai Kupferschmidt (see also A field's dilemmas: Misinformation research has exploded. But scientists are still grappling with fundamental challenges) Copyright 2024 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science, VOL 386 ISSUE 6721 November 01, 2024

³ Boston Marathon false-flag rumor click here

⁴ stack.com/@taibbi

⁵ Iain McGilchrist, "Attention as a Moral Act" Series: click here and this includes one on imagination with Pheobe Tickell, for later: .youtube.com/watch?v=7c9vyj_0zSs