People (like the economist Ashley Hodgson) have long been talking about 'the attention economy.' When I first heard about it, it sounded liberatory and utopian: with the advent of the internet, the theory went, people would be paid as a kind of tribute for work they'd chosen to do, kind of like how you leave coins for a busker.
Nowadays, the attention economy has more dystopian overtones. A friend of mine from college worked for years for a company that built super-computers to calculate the value of bits of space on the internet and bid against other super-computers in instantaneous, online options. Apparently that kind of thing is going on all the time, humming along in vast rows of air-conditioned calculation.
And more than that: basically everyone in the developed world now, from big tech companies to online sex workers, is trying to get your attention. (Me too, sort of.) OK, they may not be aiming at your attention in particular, but, in general, the more attention the better.
Of course, that was always sort of the case. Vendors in markets from time immemorial have shouted at passers-by to try to get them to buy their goods. Then there was advertising, which obviously didn't start with the internet. Getting someone's attention has always been the first step to getting some of their money.
As with other aspects of life, in some ways what the internet has done is simply speed everything up and expand it to a global scale. But social media especially has also introduced a new form of currency in the form of likes, followers, and so on. In the world of the bird app, or of the codex of visages, it's the man with many followers who's king.
And online publications like Quillette and Vox have, obviously, gained influence (and income) by gaining re-tweets rather than by selling collections of the articles in the form of glossy magazines. This has led to one of those little features of online life that runs up against the norms of anybody with a liberal education from more than 10 years go: people refusing to share links to a piece they then condemn.
The reason that seems so weird is that there used to be a strong norm in intellectual life that you didn't hide books or articles or try to stop their circulation. Imagine if I'd said to my fellow students 15 or 20 years ago 'I've read this book I strongly disagreed with but which has been influential; I therefore won't name it, and in fact I've withdrawn it from the library and hid it under a bush so that it won't circulate further.' They would have thought I was bonkers, not to mention that I was curtailing open debate and infringing on their own freedom to read what they saw fit.
I do think all these points still hold today for those who refuse to link to pieces they hate; but I can also see where they're coming from. They're right that clicks help websites, in a way that lending someone a book didn't help Penguin or Anthony Kenny. They're anxiously aware of the importance of attention in the new ecosystem we now live in - and they're keen to deny its oxygen to their enemies.
All of this might, to some extent, help explain the recent vogue for de-platformings - that is, preventing people from hearing someone speak on campus because you don't like them or what they have to say. This kind of thing is yet another phenomenon that even people as young as this blogger tend to find pretty peculiar - it's another thing that, I think, most of my fellow undergraduates in the first few years of the millennium would have seen as obviously not the way to behave.
One way of looking at what's going on with de-platformings is to think about what the de-platformers think they're doing. One of the things they think they're doing, I would submit, is akin to not linking to a Quillette article. They see their campuses like their chirrup or mug-scroll feeds, and they don't want them to contribute to funnelling more attention towards Christina Sommers (or whoever).
I remember hearing one of the bullies who tried to shut down Sommers' talk at Lewis & Clark Law School saying something like 'You already know what she's going to say from YouTube.' Again, she's still wrong to act in the repressive way she did - Sommers still had a right to speak, and the students to hear her - but I think I now understand a bit more about why that student was acting as she was.
Back in the day, Bjorn Lomborg (or whoever) coming to speak was interesting partly because you got something you didn't get from reading his articles or books. Nowadays, you can easily access recordings of public intellectuals online. But the mention of YouTube, I think, also suggests that the student was thinking of Sommers' appearance very much in internet terms. She didn't see the talk as a source of ideas or as an experience - she saw it as a kind of bid in a game whose point is to amass the most attention-chips. She saw it as she might have viewed a fellow student sharing a Sommers YouTube talk on social media.
Christina Sommers giving a talk, Bruce Gilley publishing an article - back in the last millennium the obviously correct reaction to such things would have seemed, to most sane individuals, even those who disagreed with them, not much. Maybe they would have gone along and asked a critical question; maybe they would have written a letter to the student paper. Other people paying attention to such things didn't seem much of a threat.
On the online world, though, especially on social media, life is a high-stakes (OK, low-stakes, but it feels high-stakes) battle for attention. Attention accruing to your ideological rival empowers them and thus seems to threaten your own views and values. This economy of attention has become a kind of vortex, not only sucking previously rather somnolent groups like classicists into it, but also exerting its sucking effect on what's left of the offline world. The online economy of attention is sucking at our universities like a horrific hair-cutting 'solution'; and it's sucking at our will to let people explore ideas.
