human beings create paradigms. We don't do that by the ways we vote. We do that by the ways we live. And we live according to what we perceive as reality. And that's a function of the paradigm...

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There is a lot of talk about paradigms, and I'm one of the worst offenders. But it is a good word, with a very useful and powerful meaning.

Paradigm is a word for the invisible background assumptions that make up so much of our perceptions. Here are some distinguishing features of paradigms (and I think some of this comes from Ted Nelson, and some from Thomas Kuhn):

• A paradigm is reflected in the misleading continuity of Everyday.
• A paradigm is pervasive, compelling, integrated, invisible, unifying, immersive; sometimes called "consensus reality" or the "order of things" or "organizing principles."
• It determines which ideas and ideals make sense.
• It is the common sensibility, the ordinary way of perceiving, the zeitgeist ("spirit of the times").
• A paradigm can crash.
• Unsustainability precedes paradigm-crash. When this happens, the parts cannot be unwound for a clean reduction. Remapping, refactoring, reform, restructuring, are impossible. People may know a situation is untenable, in great detail, with total accuracy. But that offers no solution.
• A paradigm can shift; can be shifted; can start or end; can be displaced by another paradigm; or can be a sub-paradigm.
• Paradigms are created by human beings.

In other words: things are already like they are when we get here.

Or it seems so...

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The main feature of our culture is commerce as the context for all activity. To us, everything has its price; and if you can't pay it, you go without, even if it's life-saving medicine.

When the commercial value of aggregated attention exceeded that of data, this hit the corporate media in the corporate wallet: across the board, if they wanted to remain viable, they switched to spectacle as their stock-in-trade. Since there are only a few corporations left in the field, this took very little time.

As the Internet-generated audience markets outpaced information markets it no longer mattered whether a politician's conduct was inspiring or repugnant, as long as it grabbed attention. In this new market, both inspiring and disgusting behavior enhance market-share.

The paradigm shift (for that's what it was) from Information to Attention is why and how the forty-fifth President of the United States of America got into office.

I discuss the 45th Chief Executive here for two purposes. First, he is not the disease, he is a symptom, at best, but a great example of the impact of shifting paradigms from Information Age to Attention Age. Second, the condition he represents has taken root in our cultural environment.

His campaigns stand like bookends before and after the change. Before, a wide reputation for shady business deals and a history of spectacular failures, along with blatant misogyny and racism and xenophobia, kept the candidate out of serious consideration and ended the campaign before it got started.

After the shift, what had been information-market poison was attention-market hot sauce.

In this new world name-recognition gets more votes than infamy drives away. The candidate had very high attention-market value, and derived as much power from detractors as supporters, as long as they pronounced his name often enough.

Every media channel made sure that would happen. The first words spoken on every broadcast across the ideological spectrum were his first and last names. This daily, top-of-the-hour, front-page-above-the-fold repetition never stopped while he remained in office. It has not stopped for his entire first term, to date.

The candidate attracted attention like a bad train-wreck. The public was treated to open incitements to violence and spectacular displays of belligerent bigotry on the campaign trail. A major media channel showed an empty lectern in a corner of the screen, just in case he might stop by to make yet another terrifying pronouncement about reinstating torture (as if it had been stopped), or waves of invading gangs of rapists coming over the border from Mexico (as if this were ever remotely possible).

The candidate had been recorded boasting gleefully in the crudest terms about grabbing women's genitals with impunity, and bragged about the size of his own, before thousands of eager supporters. This would have been the death-knell of any political campaign in history, but now it was innocuous "locker-room banter."

It wasn't presented as locker-room banter. It became locker-room banter. It only boosted media audience ratings and advertising revenues along with the candidate's chances. And the people who rallied to his side included the same self-proclaimed pious religionists who had thunderously decried concupiscence from their evangelical pulpits, for generations.

Credible allegations of sexual assault reported by more than a dozen women even further enhanced the candidate's market-share in the only market that matters during today's political campaigns. He had left a trail of reprehensible and probably felonious behavior (and non-disclosure agreements) with women, employees, tenants, religious and ethnic minorities, business partners, subcontractors and so on and on.

The candidate's similarity to televangelists was thus cemented, as he joined the ranks of tremulously confessing preachers-gone-astray-with-ladies-not-their-spouses; but no smallest quiver of lip or anguished tear would ever contort this face. He came pre-redeemed and breathlessly anointed even while given up for lost. A hail-mary for the white-christian agenda.

There was a lot of speculation, and considerable evidence, that the election had been rigged in various ways, from voting machine hacking to systematic official voter suppression. However, the outcome of that election makes so much sense in the light of that unexpected and still-unrecognized paradigm shift that none of those shenanigans would have made any difference. The 45th President probably could have made it even if the election had been transparently honest.

In the end this episode reflects the state of a leading world power ("a," not "the") with shocking clarity. The United States of America now stood in complete and official denial of human agency in now-obvious climate collapse, and human membership in the Biosphere; and began a systematic dismantling of any and all agencies and regulations that had been put in place over generations to protect humanity and mitigate at least some of the environmental destruction.

If the nation had dedicated itself to hastening the Last Extinction with every means at its disposal, it could hardly have behaved more efficiently toward that, um, end. At this writing it is still driving hell-for-leather toward total destruction of all life, everywhere in the known Universe.

This is the way paradigm shifts work: the same man with the same dreadful reputation and even the same inexplicable hair was dismissed as a buffoon in the Information Age. And made President in the Attention Age.

As noted above: human beings create paradigms. We don't do that by the ways we vote. We do that by the ways we live. And we live according to what we perceive as reality.

And as noted above, that's a function of the paradigm...

Authors Website: https://attentionage.com

Authors Bio:

I'm an old Pogo fan. For some unknown reason I persist in outrage at Feudalism, as if human beings can do much better than this. Our old ways of life are obsolete and are killing us. Will the human race wake up in time? Stay tuned...