382 — What We Need for the Attention Rebellion to Succeed

The placing of attention is the ultimate creative and moral act.

Published in

Office for the Future

19 min readFeb 9, 2024

Summary: The internet — the new immersive environment of our lives, where the next generation is being raised — is designed for scattering of attention. Even though there is a growing literature on this constant hijacking of attention, some even calling for Attention Rebellion, none of the authors give a truly compelling reason why we should be outraged by it. They refuse to claim attention as a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos. That’s what we are doing in this episode.

We trace the history of attention from premodernity (when attention was focused on the divine) to modernity (when it turned to scientific exploration of Earth and humans) to postmodernity, which finds nothing to pay attention to, because it sees nothing of real value. The crucial distinction between genuine erotic placing of attention and pseudo-erotic scattering of attention is lost. Yet the placing of attention is the ultimate creative and moral act. The unique quality of your attention is the very essence of your uniqueness. To be in love is to place attention — to see afresh, with new eyes. Evolution is the evolution of attention, which is the evolution of love.

A New Story generates new Reality

We are here in this time between worlds, we are here in this time between stories, responding to the meta-crisis, and knowing —

that crisis is an evolutionary driver,
that our crisis is a birth,
that as things fall apart, they also can fall together,
that emergency can generate emergence.
that when the vessels break, in the language of the lineage of Solomon, there is a new possibility.

The original Hebrew word for breaking is shever. It means breaking, and it means nourishment. There is promise, there is nourishment, there is possibility. When the breaking happens —

it’s either going to be a breakdown,
or something will open in our hearts, and we’ll be able to see more clearly than we ever have before, and it will become not a breakdown, but a breakthrough.

That’s the feeling of ein shalem m’lev shivura. There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.

In this moment of meta-crisis —

we don’t move to denial,
and we don’t move to a doomer position,
but we move to respond — to respond by telling a New Story of Value

We tell a New Story of Value because we know that a new story allows us to generate a new Reality.

The meta-crisis emerges from the broken plotlines, the broken structures of the old Reality. To the precise extent that the story told in modernity was accurate and beautiful, it birthed the dignities of modernity. But there were plotlines missing or broken — for example, the plotline of value.

The plotline of value got lost. We lost the thread of the Story of Value. We thought we could assume value even as we denied it. We thought we could make intrinsic value — the Good, the True and the Beautiful — an axiom even if we would undercut their roots and claim (wink-wink) that they’re really just made up.

We thought we’d get away with that. And we did, in modernity. But postmodernity called the lie out and said, “No, no, no, you are making these stories up. There is no story of value.”

And once there is no story of value, then all that’s left is separate selves lost in rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics, generating fragile, complicated systems without inherent allurement between the parts — because there is no inherent allurement between parts.

It’s all contrived.
It’s all random.
It’s all a reductive, materialist, random cosmos without telos, without purpose, without direction.

And of course, that’s not the case. Of course, that defies the inherent nature of science, but that became the dogma. That dogma was invested in the apparatuses of power and generated all the fragilities of modernity, and all the fifteen vectors of the meta-crisis that threaten us with either the death of humanity or the death of our humanity.

So, what do we need to do?

We need to reweave the plotline.
We need to retell the story.
We need to reclaim the thread.
We need to revalue value itself.

What I want to do today, my friends, is something which I think is wildly important.

It’s a change that actually does, quite literally, change everything. It adds a new dimension to the Story of Value that really opens everything up in a new way.

Our topic today is going to be attention.

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE
Eros is the placing of attention. 
The placing of attention generates Reality. 
The placing of attention is the ultimate creative act. 
The placing of attention is the ultimate moral act. 
Reality emerges from the Infinite placing attention on finitude.
Attention and devotion are joined at the hip. To be the receiver 
of well-placed attention, and to place attention well, makes life 
self-evidently Good, True, and Beautiful.
Placing attention is a First Principle and First Value of 
Cosmos. 
Evolution evolves through differentiation and integration,
which is the placing of attention. 
Evolution is the evolution of attention, which is the Evolution 
of Love.

The internet is designed to scatter attention

We are at this new moment in society, in which the act of attention hijacking is the primary movement of the new robber barons — of the new oligarchs, of the new techno-totalitarians.

The theft of attention — stolen attention, stolen focus as Johann Hari calls it in his book by that name — is the basic movement of the mainstream structures of society. It has enfolded, enwrapped, engulfed society. Not by providing it with tools — the internet is not a set of tools. That’s a mistake. The internet is an immersive environment, in which the next generation is being raised, which is based on the radical scattering of attention, to borrow a term from Nicholas Carr in his 2011 book, The Shallows.

There has been this entire leading-edge literature, and Nicholas Carr began the conversation, in his book The Shallows. And then he wrote another book called The Glass Cage. Then he wrote another book, which is a collection of his blog posts. His blog is called Rough Type. He collected his blog posts, and he put them in a book called Utopia Is Creepy. He is describing, essentially, the hijacking of attention.

Our colleagues, Tristan and Aza, at the Center for Humane Technology, have placed their attention on the robbing of attention. Much has been written about BJ Fogg and his Persuasive Technology Laboratory, which has taught generations of app designers how to hijack attention. The words used are how to maximize engagement, but engagement is a euphemism. (Euphemism is one of the core strategies of techno-totalitarianism.)

Engagement is a euphemism for addiction.

Addiction is the consistent and obsessive hijacking of attention from the discomfort or the emptiness of ordinary life. One doesn’t have — or loses — the capacity to sit through it until it gets to fullness.

We can’t hold our attention on the actual experience of life in order to access its depth, and its pleasure, and its potency, and its potentiality, and its possibility.

We get discomfited by its pain, and so we turn away our attention. And the consistent turning away of attention is called addiction.

The internet is designed to scatter attention.

It is designed to interrupt plotlines.

It is designed with multiple links in every sentence that don’t allow you to enter into the placing of attention, and the depth that emerges from the artistic act of true engagement.

That disruption of attention generates the shallows. The shallows is the opposite of depth.

Carr has written about it. And Shoshana Zuboff’s book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, addresses it in a different way. A book by Brett Frischmann, Re-Engineering Humanity (2018), addresses the same issue. Doug Rushkoff has talked about it in multiple ways. There is a veritable literature on this distraction of attention.

But if you notice, the tech plex is not paying any attention to the literature accusing it of hijacking attention. Why? Because the literature that accuses the tech plex of hijacking attention has not given any compelling reason why attention shouldn’t be hijacked.

It is not against the law. Advertisers have always sought to attract attention. True, this is an immersive environment, and true, it’s micro-targeting — as opposed to the old broadband advertising of television, and to that which emerged from the printing press, which is generalized writing. When writing becomes advertising, it is generalized broadband advertising.

It is different from the micro-targeted advertising that emerges out of the tech plex, which uses machine intelligence to develop a personality profile, a voodoo doll of you. It crafts and sculpts this voodoo doll by mining your data. It turns your dark data — all the ways that you unconsciously place your attention — into a personality profile in order to micro-target you.

It is true that it’s not the same as the old advertising, but essentially the tech plex says, “So what? Technology advances, and ways of attracting attention advance, and it’s a free market.”

Nir Eyal, a favorite son of the tech plex, a student of BJ Fogg’s at the Persuasive Technology Laboratory wrote a book called Hooked. Hooked means that the purpose of the technology is to addict you. He wrote another book called something like Indistractable, meaning, just turn it off.

Nir Eyal says, What’s the problem? We’re trying to hook you and attract your attention. You have free autonomy as an end user, turn it off.

What’s the problem, says the tech plex, with stealing attention?

They shrug it off.

Writers like Hari say, “We have to value attention.” But why?

You see, neither Zuboff, nor Hari, nor Rushkoff, nor Carr, nor Harari — and I could go through the list of people who discuss this issue — none of them assert what needs to be asserted in order to be morally outraged and astonished by the hijacking of attention.

And what is that?

We have to actually affirm that attention is a First Principle and First Value.

Before anything else, attention is a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos.

If attention is not a First Principle and First Value — not a part of the very value proposition that suffuses all of cosmos — then the hijacking of attention is not a problem.

A brief history of attention

Let’s start with attention at the human level, in the premodern world.

There is a writer named Kreiner who just wrote a book called The Wandering Mind, which is one of those books that critiques the modern loss of attention and compares it to the medieval period where the monks, for example, were very careful to guard their attention.

But why were the monks careful to guard their attention?
What were they using their attention for?
Why did the monks, and the priests, and the imams, and the different religious practitioners — why did everyone basically take attention to be a great value?

Because it was through attention that you placed your mind on the mind of God.

It was through attention that you discerned the will of God.

It was the elite who were tasked with merging with the Divine, with disclosing the will of the Divine, and with sharing that will with the masses. What they were supposed to do was to practice, to meditate, to pray, to fast, to dance, to whirling dervish, to place their full attention on the Divine in order to access the nature of Reality.

Premodernity was all about attention. It was that placing attention on the Divine —

in order to be obedient,
in order to appropriately surrender,
in order to know the Divine will,
in order to hear the Divine voice,
in order to interpret sacred texts,
in order to achieve unio mystica, mystical union with the Divine.

What happens then? Then we go to modernity.
What happens in modernity?

Attention turns away from God. God is still invited to the party, but there is a turning of attention from heaven to earth, from God to the human being.

When you look at Michelangelo’s creation scene, and you see the image of God, and you see the hands meeting — Adam is not surrendering.

Adam is filled with Eros.
He is filled with aliveness.
He is filled with dignity.
He is gorgeously formed.

We naturally place attention on his beauty, on his power and his potential.

There is a turning of attention to nature, to the natural world, to the third-person perspective — in art, and in science, and in moral philosophy. We begin to look from the third-person perspective, and we generate universal human rights, and we generate the scientific method. We generate new forms of measurement (Kepler and Galileo), which are new forms of paying attention.

It’s an active attention, which generates new gnosis.

That’s the movement of attention in modernity. The importance of attention is taken as a given because it generates science.

We turn to the human being, and we move to psychology. We look at our own inner workings and how they operate. Freud begins to dissect the human being much like one would a steam engine.

But something gets lost because —

as modernity progresses,
and as science progresses,
and as the exterior placings of attention and methodologies for placing of attention get ever more sophisticated —

interior technologies begin to break down.

Value gets lost as a plotline in cosmos.
Attention becomes but a methodology.
And along comes postmodernity, and postmodernity says,

Actually, all of these stories, including the story of science, including the stories of the Western enlightenment, including the stories of universal human rights, are really just stories. They are really just contrived. Even facts are really contrived values. Actually, the world is without a plotline. There are no First Values and First Principles, which means there is no telos, which means there is no plotline, which means there is no thread to follow.

In essence, what postmodernity is saying is that there’s really nothing to pay attention to.

When there is nothing to pay attention to

That incipient sense of there is nothing to pay attention to is exactly what Camus talks about in that famous first line in his existentialist novel, The Stranger, which I often point out. “Forget about psychology. Strangers are we, errants at the gates of our own psyche,” writes George Steiner. Camus’ opening line is, “Mother died today, or was it yesterday?”

Mother dying should grab my attention. It should arrest my attention. Mother died, but that can’t arrest my attention because it doesn’t ultimately matter. You only pay attention when it matters. And when the world is said to no longer be constructed from what matters — it is reduced to matter — then nothing matters.

Then there’s nothing to pay attention to.

Wow!

And so, the internet emerges — the first iterations in the ’70s, and in the ’80s, the ’90s, it really begins to emerge. It literally parallels postmodernity.

The internet is the exteriorization, the exterior expression of the postmodern mind.

The postmodern mind says, “There is no plotline.”
The postmodern mind would never do what Hawthorne describes in Sleepy Hollow. You’d never lean back against a tree and get lost in the depth of a plotline of reading —

get lost in the inward space of meaning,
create flow states of attention in order to disclose the depths of Reality

— because there is no depth of Reality to be disclosed.

And plotlines don’t matter, and authors don’t matter, and unique forms of attention don’t matter, which is why Kelly writes that we don’t need authorship anymore. Let’s just have all the information. It’s all exterior information.

The internet is about the scattering of attention. It’s about the interrupting of attention because there is nothing to place attention on.

The conceivers of the internet are the techno-totalitarians who speak in liberal slogans, but who are actually techno-authoritarian. That is to say, they are imposing a reductionist materialist dogma. Without having been elected, without actually having been chosen to teach, they are encoding the immersive environment with the premise that there are no plotlines, and that your attention can be stolen in every second.

Your iPhone is built to steal your attention.

Have you ever noticed that if someone is texting you, the little three dots come up? When you’re on WhatsApp, you see someone’s texting you. Why?

To steal your attention.

And it shows up as red or not red, lights up in blue or not blue, whether it’s your text message or whether it’s WhatsApp — in order to demand that you return the message.

When you get on LinkedIn, it tells you what your circle of following is. We have likes and we have views.

The entire internet is constructed to appeal not to the depth placing of attention, but to the surface vying for pseudo-erotic attention — because there is no genuine experience of the depth of attention.

Eros, or the erotic universe, is the genuine placing of attention.
The pornographic universe is the hijacking of attention, and social media is an expression of the pornographic universe.

The reason the techno-feudalists governing the attention economy ignore the objections of this new cadre of writers who are screaming, You are attention thieves! is because they don’t see anything wrong with stealing attention. You can only arouse moral astonishment and outrage if there’s been a violation of value.

When we see value violated, when we see George Floyd killed, we’re outraged at the violation of value and we storm into the street. If there hasn’t been an actual violation of value, we’re not moved.

For example, Johann Hari calls for an attention rebellion, and everyone yawns — because Johann Hari, nowhere in his entire book about the stealing of attention, ever tells us what value, what intrinsic value of Cosmos expressed at the human level is being violated by the stealing of attention. He does say we have to value attention. He says it time and time again, but he refuses to declare attention as a value.

Unless I actually affirm that attention is a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos, there is no conversation. The conversation doesn’t get off the ground.

To be in love is to place attention

Let’s do it right now, together.

Let’s now affirm, in this moment, that attention is a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos.

That’s what it is.

The God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist. God is mystery. God can’t be named. But we actually try and name the force that’s beyond and that moves through you, upon which, as Henry Miller said, you have to place all of your energy — and only that is the real business of living.

Those forces beyond that move within, that larger movement that lives in us — that’s where we have to place our attention.

That quality of placing attention actually is the quality of the Infinite turning to finitude.

It’s what William Blake meant when he said, Eternity is in love with the productions of time.

See, to be in love is to place attention. That’s what it means to be in love. It’s so beautiful. To be in love means I’m willing to bracket myself and place attention on you.

When I place attention on you, I am in devotion. My attention expresses itself as devotion.

I am turning towards you.
I am bracketing the self.
I am powerful.
I am not turning towards you because I have a utilitarian need, or an instrumental telos, or a superficial goal. I am turning towards you in love.

Isaak Luria, the interior scientist who incepted the Renaissance through the Lurianic mystery schools that live on the periphery of the Renaissance (and read Moshe Idel’s book Kabbalah in Italy, which alludes to this, although it doesn’t name it specifically), talks about this Divine act.

I am going to call Divine the Infinite Intimate. The name of God in CosmoErotic Humanism, our New Story of Value, is the Infinite Intimate. The Infinite Intimate steps back and brackets Herself in order to turn towards finitude.

That’s what love means.

The parent brackets herself to turn towards her child.

The lover brackets himself/herself to turn towards his friend, her friend, his beloved, her beloved.

The bracketing of self to place attention on other is the primary act of Eros.

It is only when you place attention, that gnosis — knowing — emerges. Every form of knowing comes from the placing of attention.

Seeing with new eyes is the essential quality of erotic Universe

I was reading last night this book by D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and other Italian Essays. It’s a collection of essays by D. H. Lawrence. He writes here, “Everything depends on the amount of true, sincere religious concentration you can bring to bear.”

D. H. Lawrence is not known for his religion — and yet he says, “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer.”

Everything is about the placing of attention.

Attention is the realization that something other than me is real and is worthy of my concentrated attention, of the placing of my heart.

The original Hebrew word for attention is sim lev — the placing of the heart, which is the placing of attention.

When we say the sexual models the erotic (which is a core principle in one of the core works of CosmoErotic Humanism, A Return to Eros), what we mean is that sex discloses the nature of Eros. But of course, there have been twelve billion years of Eros before there is any sex. Sex encapsulates, models, incarnates Eros. But we want to live erotically in every dimension of life — and to live erotically is to place attention.

To live pornographically is to have attention hijacked. The pornographic universe is about the hijacking of attention, while the erotic universe is about the placing of attention. When we say the sexual models the erotic — what is sex if not the placing of attention? That’s what it is.

Now, the pseudo-erotic placing of attention is when my attention is stolen by newness — by novelty.

Novelty attracts my attention.
That’s the beginning.
That’s an original erotic moment. But then Eros deepens, Eros discloses her true face.

When I bring my attention to bear, it’s not the new breast, or the new belly, or the new posterior, or the new shoulder, or the new bare legs that capture my attention because I’ve never seen them before (and so it’s a shiny new object). It is the pseudo-eros of novelty.

No, no, no.

Erotic attention is when I can see with new eyes, not when I see new things.

To see something new and to constantly have that newness replaced by something else new is the demarcating characteristic of the pornographic universe. But to see with new eyes, that’s the essential quality of the erotic universe.

I see you for the very first time, even though I’ve seen you a thousand times. And each time I place my attention on you, you are different. You’re physiologically different. You are neurologically different. But you’re also different from the perspective of your depth interior.

You are new.
You are emergent.

When I see you, I allow myself to fall into the rapture of radical amazement again and again, and I fall in love with you, again and again. That’s how the sexual models the erotic.

Sex is a model — not of pornography, aka the pornographic universe — but the erotic universe.

If in-depth reading is erotic, social media is pornographic.

To liberate attention is to liberate the quality of Eros, which moves towards intimacy — which is my nature.

The attention of the Infinite differentiates uniquely through me

Attention is not generic. Attention is always unique.

In the new book, First Principles and First Values (written by David J. Temple, who’s a pseudo-anonymous author), there is a set of interior science equations. These interior science equations took me about twenty years. There are eighteen interior science equations, which express the evolving First Principles and First Values of cosmos.

One of the equations is about uniqueness. I am not going to read you the entire equation, but uniqueness is the unique capacity to allure attention and the unique capacity to place attention. In other words, I am a unique quality of attention.

I am a unique capacity of attention, which means that Infinity sees uniquely through me.

To be a Unique Self means that the attention of the Infinite differentiates uniquely through me. That’s what it means to be a Unique Self.

I am Divinity’s unique prism of attention, which means that Infinity, the Infinite Intimate can only see a dimension of Reality through me.

There is all this discussion about loving God, “Who loves God?”

Let’s get real. Why would you love God? What does it mean to love God?

To love God means to let God see through your eyes.

And to be a lover is to clarify your own attention, which is to clarify your Eros, to clarify your desire, because desire is where I place my attention. Desire is the focus. That’s what desire is. Desire equals that which I value, upon which I place my attention. When I clarify my desire, I clarify my attention. To be a lover is to see with God’s eyes, meaning with clarified attention.

It’s even more. Let’s go deeper. One last step.

When I love you, for example, when I place my attention on you, a unique dimension of me shows up to you and to me that doesn’t show up with anyone else.

When I am in love with my friend, with my beloved of any kind — it’s because I see you, I placed my attention on you. Love is a perception.

I see you, number one.

But number two, I’m in love with you because you evoke — through the quality of attention you evoke for me — a dimension of me that doesn’t appear in any other way.

Isn’t that gorgeous?

Infinity generates the multiplicities of finitude, which are multiplicities of uniquenesses — meaning billions of Unique Selves, because infinity, Divinity, Infinite Divinity experiences shocking self-recognition through you.

When Infinity feels your placing of attention on Him/Her, Infinity appears in a new way that She doesn’t appear in any other way.

Reality is the Infinite placing attention on finitude, and finitude placing attention on Infinity — and both mutually generate each other.

Wow! Both create each other. It’s not a creator creates creation. Creator creates creation and creation creates creator, which is why the Zohar, the Zohar, the 13th century Book of Radiance, begins by saying bereshit bara Elohim. In the beginning God created — but the Zohar rereads that as bereshit bara Elohim ‘in the beginning we create God’.

We generate — through our attention — the disclosure, the revelation of the Infinite that appears in a way it couldn’t appear in any other way.

That’s attention.

Reclaiming attention

Attention begins with subatomic particles placing attention on each other, and it goes all through the world of matter. Attention goes through the intra-attention mechanisms of the biosphere until attention breaks out at the human level, and unique levels of human attention.

Evolution is the evolution of attention, and the evolution of attention is the Evolution of Love.

We go through all the stages of human experience until we get to postmodernity, in which we lose the thread of the plotline. We lose the thread of the evolution of attention because of the exterior technologies, with their ability to place artificial attention, surveillance, tracking, eyes on you all the time. Superficial attention, which is the opposite of a loving providence. The actual storyline of the inherent value of Reality breaks down, and the win/lose metrics takes over, and attention is stolen and hijacked.

Writers call vainly for an attention rebellion. They say we should value attention, and they scream till they’re hoarse. We should value attention, but they refuse to proclaim attention as a First Value and First Principle.

We are here to articulate the New Story of Value.
We are here to pay attention to attention, to place our attention on attention, which means to love attention, which means to affirm that attention is an expression of my personal, which is an expression of my desire.

Attention is the natural incarnation of my Eros.
Attention is my right. It can’t be stolen.