How the attention economy is sucking our will to platform

 

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read this book I strongly disagreed with but which has been influential; I therefore won't name it, and in fact I've withdrawn it from the library and hid it under a bush so that it won't circulate further.'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. 

Harsh but unfair

 

I remember reading once, in a book on Athenian law (perhaps this one) that anthropologists had observed that in societies where criminals were less likely to be apprehended, penalties were harsher. It made sense; after all, modern developed countries, with their highly developed surveillance technology, have (by historical standards) strikingly lenient punishment regimes; pre-modern ones, by contrast, which had zero or only rudimentary policing, had more of a tendency to turn to the gallows, the guillotine - or the gulp of hemlock.

The observation came back to me recently in connection with the current vogue for 'cancelling.' The frequency of this phenomenon has been questioned, but what seems to concern many people isn't necessarily how widespread it is, but how harsh the punishments can be. A disabled grandfather is sacked for sharing a comedy sketch. A researcher loses his job for re-tweeting a study about the effectiveness of peaceful compared with violent protest. And all the while, not-especially-controversial views and tame jokes elicit the kind of fury that used to be reserved for blood feuds. 

Given the many instances of such 'cancellations' that have occurred, it might seems strange that a good few people continue to insist that the whole phenomenon is made up. But there might be a way of explaining both why they think that and why some of these same people engage in such disproportionately harsh punishings of individuals who violates their norms. 

The reason they think the free speech crisis isn't really a crisis is partly because they see people saying things they dislike all the time. That's been one of the effects of the explosion of social media: whereas twenty years ago you wouldn't often be exposed to views from outside your thought-world, and you'd have to put in some work to have your views broadcast, now it's easy to post things and even easier to see things others have posted. 

If you have narrow parameters for what ideas are acceptable, it follows that you're likely to see quite a lot of what are to you unacceptable ideas. Twitter must be terrifying - all those people saying things you think are terrible! What's more, most of them are getting away scot free.

The temptation, then, is to make an example of anyone you are in a positions to punish, pour décourager les autres. This is what ancient societies were up to as well. It makes sense, especially if you consider the point of view of the potential criminal. 

You can look at risk as the combination of how likely a bad thing is to happen, and how bad it will be if it does. You may not be that likely to fall of the cliff if you go right up to the edge, but if you slip you'll die, so why risk it? If you're in a society without a functioning police force, the chance you'll be apprehended for doing something bad is pretty low. One way for the state to increase the risk you face (and hence deter you from wrongdoing), is to increase the penalty you risk facing. You think you probably won't get caught, but if you do...

The temptation to make an example of someone might be especially great when there are artificial barriers in the way of punishing other people who are up to the activity you dislike. For example, if a lot of the people saying things you find unacceptable are represented by anonymous Twitter accounts. Or if there's been a state amnesty saying you can't punish any of the members of a tyrannical junta.

That last thing, of course, is what happened in Athens after the murderous regime of the so-called Thirty Tyrants. Once the democracy had been restored, there seems to have been an agreement not to prosecute anyone involved with the Thirty, except for the Thirty themselves (some of whom had already been killed in the process of restoring the democracy). (What exactly the amnesty required is, like most things in ancient history, a little bit controversial).

In 399, only four years after the Thirty had been toppled, the philosopher Socrates, who had links to some of the Thirty (including Critias, one of the more extreme members), was executed on a vote of a popular jury. Why? It's complicated; there were lots of factors that led to that outcome, including the way he went about defending himself (if that was even what he was up to) in court. 

But one possibility is that his prosecutors indicted him on a charge of inventing new gods and corrupting the youth precisely because they couldn't prosecute him for what they were really angry at him for - the actions of the Thirty. And they also couldn't prosecute many of the people who they knew had collaborated with the Thirty. Nor could they prosecute Critias and others who were already dead. But Socrates was there, still going about his business asking irritating questions in public...

Note that the theory, if it's right, explains not only the excessiveness of the punishings but also the way they have of mistaking their object. At least, it looks an awful lot like all of the guilt for something is being loaded onto the back of one, unfortunate person who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. That, of course, is another phenomenon that's familiar to anthropologists: scapegoating. 

One way to stop this sort of thing, as you might guess, is to get better at apprehending wrong-doers. But it's very questionable in cases like the ones mentioned above (sharing comedy sketches and so on) whether anyone's done anything wrong at all. Another way is to reduce narrow-minded people's exposure to views they find distasteful. 

Doing that by force would be wrong (people should be free to go on social media, of course), but it might be advisable, considering the kinds of moral risks involved, for some people to think twice about the amount of time they spend online. In other words, if you can't deal with different ideas, it might be best just to stay off Twitter. Otherwise you might find yourself with a cup of hemlock in your hand - handing it to an innocent person. 

In praise of prose

Near the end of his mammoth 6-volume Oxford History of Western Music (which, I must confess, I haven't read all the way through), Richard Taruskin suggests that musical notation may now have outlived its usefulness. Notation emerged in order to preserve and transmit music, to enable other people to play something far beyond the context it was originally composed in. But when I can upload my latest composition straight onto YouTube (be warned), why bother writing it down?

A few years ago, the top Facebook execs apparently decided that prose was going the way of musical notation, if not necessarily the dodo. Their thinking was similar to Taruskin's. Now that we can just speak into a camera and upload the video onto the world-wide web (as they're calling it), why would anyone go to the trouble of writing their thoughts down? 

The huge shift to video on social media that the tech execs anticipated hasn't quite materialized (at least not yet). There are a lot more videos online, and YouTube has become a venue for spoken commentary and argumentation (what the Greeks would have called rhetoric) from ordinary citizens in a way that was never quite possible in the world of TV, with its relatively few channels overseen by hierarchical corporations. And yet, people are also still writing a lot of prose.

I think that's a good thing. The written word, you see, still has its advantages.

The main one is that it allows both writer and reader to take things at their own pace. That means you can wait till you're really sure of what you're saying to write it down. You can look up everything you can find bearing for or against your argument and include it in a footnote. You can even change your mind and write a completely different sentence to the one you thought you'd be writing. And your reader can go back and puzzle out what you've written if they don't quite get it the first time round. They can pause for a while to ponder what you've said before moving on to the next paragraph.

Writing also has some plus points when compared to conversation. Now, I'm aware we're all intensely aware of the joys of in-the-flesh interaction at the moment, after weeks if not months of lockdown. In-person conversation has its plus points too (not least of which is that we seem to find it inherently enjoyable). But we're also all aware, I think, that there are things we choose not to say to people's faces. Often that's a very good thing. Often it's a result of an apparently natural tendency to want to be kind to each other. At other times it can be a result of hierarchy or outright intimidation. That means it can often be easier to state what we really think in the privacy of our own rooms (or, at least,  behind the partial screen of a laptop screen).

Of course, many people are retreating to their rooms to voice their thoughts - they're just doing so into a camera rather than on a page. They're obviously free to do so - I'll defend their right to that to the death, even if Voltaire might not really. But what shift to video there has been has brought with it its own issues. We're rarely intimidated in front of someone talking to us on YouTube in the way we might be in real life, and (as comment sections attest) we usually feel free to reply in ways we wouldn't in person (sometimes even to a pathological degree). But videos do transmit things about a person - like passion and attractiveness - in a way that often distracts us from the tough but necessary work of evaluating claims on their merits. Since the types of charisma that videos transmit aren't equably distributed, it can also exacerbate various forms of privilege.

All that, obviously, is why I've written this entry.