Under the Gaze of Hyperattention
Cancel culture, crowds and the crisis of sense-making
On March 15th 2011, Jason Russell became convinced he was the saviour of humanity. As befitting such a title, he stripped down to his underwear, strode out into the blazing San Diego heat and started screaming at passing cars while masturbating. In the week leading up to this episode a video his charity had created had gone viral. The #Kony2012 campaign had been designed to draw media attention to the villainous Ugandan cult leader in the hope of bringing him to justice. And while they had proclaimed they wanted to “make him famous”, Jason and his team at the charity Invisible Children thought maybe a few thousand people might see it, but by the end of the week, it had been viewed by almost a hundred million.
After it went viral there was a brief craze in which idealistic teens had started putting #Kony2012 stickers on lampposts across the world and uploading fan videos demanding change, but frustrated at the inaction the public quickly grew bored at the campaign and the eye of collective attention shifted to the people behind it — and Lo, it was displeased. Shortly after the campaign had peaked, Vice magazine ran an article which exposed Jason as Christian which it described as “especially troubling”. Furthermore, it claimed that his charity had taken funds from right-wing groups, some of whom were said to have connections to anti-gay organisations in Uganda. This reoriented the collective gaze from Kony to Jason, which led to his entire life and character being dissected by a million minds.
Russell’s family later said that “While that attention was great for raising awareness about Joseph Kony, it also brought a lot of attention to Jason — and, because of how personal the film is, many of the attacks against it were also very personal, and Jason took them very hard…. it’s hard to understand the sudden transition from relative anonymity to worldwide attention — both raves and ridicules, in a matter of days.” After his recovery, Russell said. “It was so chaotic. It was so exciting because it felt like the world was for us, and then at the same time it was heartbreaking and felt almost like a nightmare because it felt like the world was against us.” That morning he said something “clicked” and “my mind turned against me”.
Under the gaze of hyperattention lives are destroyed and minds shattered by the menacing eye of mass judgement and collective scrutiny. Social media profiles are scanned and dissected, wrongdoing magnified. Every aspect of the victims lives, every decision or life choice, every contradiction and slip-up perceived or imagined are deconstructed and judged. Our hearts are weighed against the feather in real-time in a grotesque, gamified mockery of cosmic justice. And unlike the Judgement of Osiris, very few who are subject to the gaze of hyperattention are found worthy.
In recent weeks, the conversation around the subject of “cancel culture” has peaked in intensity, but frustratingly much of the analysis has framed it in Manichean terms. The term is typically applied to a certain type of progressive activism in which individuals are economically or socially punished for displeased them with what they frame as problematic content. In response, they subject their target to the type of torment that Jason Russell experienced above for explicitly political ends. However this is a selective interpretation of a far more general phenomenon.
The same behaviour also applies to conservative activists in their obsessive crowd-sourced quest to cast some perceived opponent as a paedophile, or embroiled in some sordid, global sex-trade. When we commonly speak of “cancel culture” we are not referring to a drag-queen is bullied off the internet and subjected to death threats for reading books to children, yet the underlying dynamics are the same; harnessing collective attention for malign ends, often in an attempt to glorify one’s self.
This slippery definition and tendency to frame it in partisan terms obscure appreciation of a more fundamental problem; never before could collective attention be able to be concentrated and focussed on a single individual on a global, instantaneous and interconnected scale. And never before have people had vast repositories of information about themselves available to the world to be studied and pulled apart. These have created the perfect conditions for eruptions of persecution characteristic of crowd psychology. Only today primordial energy of the crowd is globalised and hyperconnected, erupting in daily fits of collective intimidation. Elias Canetti’s in his 1960 work Crowds and Power described this elemental force in the human psyche.
“The crowd is the same everywhere, in all periods and cultures; it remains essentially the same amongst men of the most diverse origins, education and language. Once in being, it spreads with utmost violence. Few can resist its contagion; it always wants to go on growing and there are no inherent limits to growth. It can arise whenever people are together and it suddenness and and spontaneity are uncanny. It is multiple, but cohesive. It is composed of large numbers of people, but one never knows exactly how many… It seeks an enemy.”
Canetti’s analysis also identifies that social institution and organised religions emerged in order to tame and subdue such instincts. But that;
“Since the French Revolution, these eruptions have taken on a form which we feel to be modern. To an impressive degree, the crowd has freed itself from the substance of traditional religion and this has perhaps made it easier for us to see it in its nakedness, in what one might call its biological state, without the transcendental theories and goals which used to be inculcated in it. The history of the last 150 years has culminated in a spate of such eruptions; they have engulfed even wars, for all wars are now mass wars. The crowd is no longer content with pious promises and conditionals. It wants to experience for itself the strongest possible feeling of its own animal force and passion and, as means to this end, it will use whatever social pretexts and demands offer themselves.”
Today’s online discourse is not dominated by the eruptions of a single crowd; but multiple – interlocked with one another and dedicated to each another’s intellectual extinction. “War” Canetti tells us “offers the crowd the hope of definite duration of life, and this is a considerable factor in its popularity.” He encapsulates the mix of self-righteousness, ruthlessness and hypocrisy of the crowd at war in a story of the escalating conflict between two Brazillian tribes; the Pishauko and the Taulipang, as relayed by a member of the victorious Taulipang. Friendly at first, the murder of a Taulipang woman escalated quickly into a war between the two, who each imagined the other wanted their total destruction. The story ends in a frenzy of primal violence, with Pishauko children being thrown alive into fires.
“The sixteen men who set out brought no booty home; their victory in no way enriched them. They did not leave a single woman or child alive. Their goal was the annihilation of the hostile pack so that nothing, literally nothing of it should remain. They describe their own actions with relish; it was the others who were, and remained, murderers”
Today’s wars between crowds are not fought with the arrows and machetes, yet are in many ways just as visceral and viscous. Digital media for the first allows the mind of the crowd to transcend its physical limitations which create for individuals — sitting alone on twitter at 3am — the illusion that we are perhaps not part of the crowd. Physical crowds burn-out once satiated or have achieved a goal; virtual crowds are fed new stimulation from the informational expanse daily. and continue on with the same energy, interlocked with one another in endless and escalating quarrels. Fought primarily in the realm of social media, the primary weapon is to command the gaze of hyperattention to destroy the intended enemy with shaming and psychological terror.
Here lies the central dynamic of what we see on the surface level as “cancel culture” and similar phenomena. Individuals look to command the gaze by looking for media that – framed the correct way - attracts the collective attention of the desired intellectual enclave in the hope to achieve a measure of fame and validation within it. In our desperation for recognition and belonging in one crowd, we create the incendiary fuel that powers the hatred of the other.
Canetti draws a distinction between hunting packs and war packs; essentially a many-to-one vs a many-to-many relationship between members of competing crowds. These conflicts begin as a pack hunting a target but often escalate into war as another crowd comes to the defence. These conflicts often begin when a member of the pack wants to make a name for his or herself by portraying a target as a member of a rival crowd. A screenshot is made. A quote copied. Often emotive words and drawn upon to frame the mosaic of media; “white supremacist”, “paedophile”, “fascist” and so on. The words used are not necessarily descriptive in any meaningful sense — all that matters is the emotional content of the words are transplanted onto the target. In this sense, crowds’ use of language is similar to how it was used in Soviet Union as described by dissident Andrei Sinyavsky, where words became;
“Estranged from normal human discourse. It is a word divorced from its original meaning. It is an emasculated language with which words do not denote things but symbols and conventions, accepted by the state [crowd] but often without any relation to reality.”
If the originator of the hunting pack made the sloganistic incantations correctly, slowly it will begin to draw the eyes of more and more individuals as the intended emotional response takes root. And as other minds descend, so the gaze expands to different social media profiles. The more intense the gaze, the deeper it will penetrate into every facet of the target’s life and the process repeats in recursive cycles. Often, however, as with Jason Russell, those whose hunger to command the gaze falter, and can find it staring straight back at them. When it inevitably catches the attention of the opposing crowd, the hunting pack escalates into a war pack as the gaze is again reflected back.
Fame-Seeking and Interlocking Crowds
Even though deep down we know well the potential consequence of attracting the punishing force of collective attention, we gamble that the adoration we get from one crowd will outweigh the coming persecution from the other. Indeed, this is another characteristic of the crowd outlined by Canetti;
“One of the most striking traits of the inner life of a crowd is the feeling of being persecuted, a peculiar angry sensitiveness and irritability directed against those it has once and forever nominated as enemies. These can behave in any manner, harsh or conciliatory, cold or sympathetic, severe or mild-whatever they do will be interpreted as springing from an unshakable malevolence, a premeditated intention to destroy the crowd, openly or by stealth.”
The desire to draw the attention of a crowd is also driven by our rapidly globalising and urbanising world which has created epidemics of loneliness and generations that hunger for social recognition and belonging, often amidst a crisis of personal identity. Once again, Canetti identified the urbanisation of the Industrial Age as a powering force behind the growth of crowds in the 19th and 20th centuries and the stresses that put on existing social structures; what he called “closed crowds”.
“Such institutions might have proved adequate if the number of human beings had remained the same, but more and more people filled the towns and the accelerating increase in the growth of populations during the last few centuries continually provided fresh incitements to the formation of new and larger crowds. And nothing, not even the most experienced and subtle leadership, could have prevented them forming in such conditions.”
While some who want to attract the gaze simply desire belonging, others hunger for outright fame. Canetti writes of fame that it is “not fastidious about the lips that that spread it” and those who seek it are fine courting infamy with an opposing crowd, yet are often naive with the consequences. As Leo Braudy writes in his exhaustive history of fame; The Frenzy of Reknown, the nature of fame has also evolved alongside the shifting definition of what is considered an achievement and that “from its beginnings, fame has promised many a solitary eminence the chance to be separated from the crowds but watched by them, while one’s own gaze looks towards the stars.” But he also notes that Fame was forever a poison chalice. That “the desire for transcendence through personal glory that leads not to freedoms but to a new and more secure entrapment.”
He identifies the origins of modern, global fame with Charles Lindbergh, the American Aviator who gained worldwide attention by flying non-stop from New York to Paris in an airplane he built himself. Embedded in the vibrant age of mechanical print, Lindbergh became the first Time magazine “Man of the Year” in 1928. While enjoying the adulation, Braudy writes that “once committed to the public gaze, he discovered that it was difficult to control where and when that gaze chose to shine”. The public hungered to know more about every facet of his character and for more information about his personal life. This courting of the public gaze proved to be a fatal decision. In 1932, his infant son was kidnapped, ransomed and murdered.
In Lindbergh, Braudy finds the moral parable of 20th-century fame; to be at the centre of the gaze of attention brings enormous opportunities and rewards, but it is a Faustian gamble. Braudy writes prophetically that.
“as the world grows more complex, fame promises liberation from powerless anonymity.” but also that “it is clear that particularly since World War II the increasing number and sophistication of the ways information is brought to us have enormously expanded the ways of being known. In the process, the concept of fame has been grotesquely distended and the line between public achievement and private pathology grows dimmer as the claims grow more bizarre”
Braudy wrote in the age of high-television, long before the internet came to have its central function in society and social consciousness. Private pathologies today continually erupt into the world of social media; that great wet-market of the mind. Here we get the perfect cocktail of personal pathologies and a craving for social attention erupting into a war between crowds. To draw the gaze of hyperattention to oneself is to be plucked from obscurity. Just by crafting the right set of words — the right set of magic incantations on the screen — we imagine we can attract the universal adoration that in the past was the preserve of movie stars and kings. Warhol famously argued that in the future we’d all be famous for fifteen minutes, but didn’t see that in the hyperconnected age time is compressed — accelerated — and the old maxim that if a hero lives long enough they become a villain becomes collapsed from decades to hours or minutes. To stay in the gaze of the crowd is to constantly be on the hunt.
Thus we have the daily dynamics of people being thrust up from the crowd to be glorified as heroes to some and denounced as villains. Social media becomes a perverse gamified reality show where we collectively move the gaze of hyperattention from one individual to another to fuel our collective dopamine addictions. In hungering recognition in the crowd, we form packs that scour social media footprints for evidence of impure hearts so people can be destroyed and forever ostracized for our own personal glory. Each day it moves from account to account drawn by the collective impulses of our shared undermind; like a vast Ouija board driven by our society’s collective inner demons.
What we perceive as political polarisation or “fake news” is the shared delirium and overwhelming noise of the warring crowds, which have eclipsed our collective rational capabilities and eroded our ability to make sense of the world. In waging the conflict across the whole of culture, every institution has seen trust in it diminish as it has been consumed in the flood of the crowd. This is particularly noticeable in the world of the media, where journalism has been eclipsed by social media systems that are optimised for the behaviour of the crowd rather than as a mechanism for determining truths. The consequences of this short-circuiting or hijacking of collective mass attention has been the construction of all-encompassing belief systems who suffer from collective reality dysmorphia.
Walled Cities of the Mind
It is no coincidence that it was only after the post-war boom and the dawning era of unprecedented affluence did so too did the “post-modern” era begin. Simply put, the material affluence afforded by fossil fuels meant our belief systems and cosmologies no longer needed to be attuned to existential survival. Our technological society afforded us the luxury of not having to care so much about the correspondence of knowledge, language, and truth so long as the taps kept running and the lights turned on. The philosophy of the era reflects this.
In the 1980s, philosopher Richard Rorty thought that if we were to dispense with the idea that there are no timeless truths we can take comfort instead in “a renewed sense of community” in which the burden of truth-seeking is lifted and communities can essentially believe in whatever binds them together. In his terms, in place of truth, there is solidarity. Preoccupied as he was with the primacy of language in creating reality, he argued that “to say that truth is not out there is simply to say that where there are no sentences there is no truth.” Although it is perhaps more succinctly captured in his quip “Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.”
Philosopher Karen L Carr, responding to this in The Banalization of Nihilism writes that.
“All we need, Rorty says, are the beliefs and practices of our community; since they are all we have, there is, it would seem, no basis on which to assess them. Any attempts to do so is dismissed as the bad-faith effort to assume a God’s eye view.”
In abandoning truth, we also abandoned any hope of appealing to something beyond what a community believes. She concludes with a sense of irony that the flight from dogma began by Neitzsche and others in the late 19th century should come full circle;
“What this suggests is that the banalization of nihilism ultimately culminates in nihilism’s opposite: dogmatism — the relentless insistence upon one’s own position, one’s own point of view, immune to any sort of criticism of rational scrutiny. When we fully and happily dispatch with truth, what we gain is not pluralism, not toleration, but rather the absolutization of the dominant power structures of the culture to which we belong.”
In the decades since Carr identified this, we have seen an acceleration of precisely these sorts of belief systems powered by the primal instincts of group psychology; growing social movements that cannot be reasoned with as they possess their own constellation of facts that reinforce one another but do not necessarily align to the contours of nature. When truths are degraded in such a manner to mere social convention, nothing is eternal. What was “dogma” yesterday can shift with the tides of fashion and drift from correspondence to the world beyond. If they believe this we must believe that; all until the point that it is inconvenient.
Recent discussions around the use of masks, the necessity of social gathering or the efficacy of drugs during the Covid-19 pandemic illustrates how truth can so quickly morph for the political needs of the moment. Such mentally gymnastics of course raises contradictions which become a primary focus of creative energies and opportunities for attention within a crowd, as collectively its members concoct elaborate reasons why truth can be so redefined for convenience. Crowds did not evolve as a means for seeking truth for it does not occur to them as important; indeed it is an obstacle to the primary aim of the elimination of the enemy. Each day the hunting pack seeks out an enemy by painting a distorted view of them, by using images and words for emotional content rather than descriptive quality, the view of the world possessed by the crowd becomes even more distorted.
The crowd collectively assembles collections of conceptual and audio-visual bric-a-brac that need only be thematically consistent, not necessarily logically so, as criticising inconsistencies and faults in internal reasoning are subject to the most harsh and punishing social consequences; the blazing glare of hyperattention. This energy leads to making its pre-existing beliefs even more strongly held by seeking evidence of their substance and virtue. Intellectual innovation emerges in large part in trying to build up layer upon layer of defence around them. An internal dialectic that draws from its own shallow “argument pools” is augmented with new material dredged from the web and woven together with self-referential hyperlinks. Emergent symbolism of memes articulate these shared worldviews with the subtly and multilayered complexity of religious art. When truth morphs to the tactical needs of the moment and the crowd shifts its beliefs en-masse, somehow accompanied with the same religious intensity.
Mediated through the screen, minds swarm the maelstrom looking for new material to strengthen their hive walls. Charts, videos, screencaps, infographics, quotes; plastered together so tightly that the light of the outside world cannot penetrate. Often the only exposure they have to rival ideas is distended and warped form; their arguments and reasoning presented cartoonishly to conform to the enclave’s own internal prejudices. Indeed, thanks to the dynamics of social media and the need for in-group validation, there may be benefits from holding views at odds with reality if it gives us more influence or access to bigger social networks. The safety-in-numbers aspect of crowd psychology was characterised by Canetti as a besieged city which has “enemies before its walls and enemies within them.”
The more collective energy and attention we channel into this poisonous dynamic, the more we nurture movements and worldviews further detached from any empirical basis. The more journalists, politicians, corporations, scientists and others in positions of authority lend validation to the beliefs of the crowd — any crowd — the more we collectively as a society and a species drift further and further from accurate representations of reality.
We are at a junction in history in which our impact on the material world has never been greater, yet our collective ability to understand it is diminishing as a perverse side-effect of the ubiquity of information. We lumber through a scrapyard of fallen cosmologies attempting to make sense of a world we are fast destroying, unable to clearly see the existential threats that lay before us. As our species continues to urbanise and the feedback loop continues it is essential to reattune our sense-making systems to the contours and rhythms of the world beyond our heads, and not submit to the polarising dynamics and intellectual fever of the crowd.
