Atttention Is All You Have

When you are scrolling endlessly, engaging in what the youth calls “brain rot,” does anybody benefit, or is it just a delightful waste of time? Descending deeper and deeper into the bottomless feed, hours are frittered away that might have been invested into exercising, reading, writing, or otherwise in the creation of something longer lasting than a string of single comments or a shortform video. I sometimes try to cope with my own social media use by telling myself that the people I follow are world-famous economists, writers, and officials. 

“This is just a part of an information diet in the twenty-first century,” I tell myself. “I read the Financial Times too,” I assure myself, as I haggle with the reality of my dopamine-addicted phone fixation.

Despite the interesting and informationally dense content of some of the posts I scroll through, I cannot free myself from the lingering feeling that all I’m really achieving is the sensation of responsibly grazing information in an overripe media landscape. The verisimilitude of learning. Truthfully, I doubt the nutritional value of such meager morsels. Reading tweets by my favorite economists might be more educational than memes, but much more is likely learned in 20 minutes on Substack or an hour of closely reading fifty pages of a book, than from 100’s of tweets. 

So it is all just a waste of time, right? Well, yeah, a waste of my time. When you spend time on that phone of yours, it’s not just your time that is being spent. On the other side of that one-way mirror in your palm, you are engaging many other interested parties. Apple (or whichever phone vendor intermediates your data traffic) and your social media feed are carefully monitoring your activity.

[THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION IN THIS MATTER!]

Apps use your attention to attenuate the algorithm of your feed, so that they can keep your attention. We are induced to offer up our attention in exchange for entertainment. That attention, measured in time spent on- and attention paid to- their service, is resold to companies wishing to advertise to us. On the one hand, this is a great trade for users, who essentially pay nothing for the entertainment of smartphone apps. It works much like basic TV, paid for by advertisers, but with perfectly tailored media and product marketing. Never in human history have we had so many flavors to choose from at the content buffet, nor have our servers ever been so attentive.

The aptly named ‘feed’ that we consume might even serve us something we never thought we would seek. I have lately, for instance, watched over an hour of short videos depicting an elderly carpenter who builds traditional wooden homes with hand tools in Japan. I don’t speak Japanese, have never worked with wood in my life, and would never have thought to actively search for this, yet I watched every second of it. I gotta hand it to the algorithm for knowing something about my tastes that I did not know about myself.

The obvious trade off here is that we spend our time, which would almost certainly have been better spent elsewhere, watching a small screen eighteen inches (46 cm) from our faces. Viewing this content strikes me as a poor substitute for other activities for two main reasons: 

1. Curated online content isolates us socially and polarizes us politically, and

2. We could be engaging in more valuable economic activity with our finite time.

Socially and Culturally Isolating, Politically Polarizing

The social isolation of social media is obvious to anybody who looks up from their phone to see that everybody in the room is also on their phone. Couples alone at dinner are transported to separate worlds. Through the magic of smartphone technology we are alone even in company. But I also worry that having unique feeds can impoverish us culturally. If you and I spent 100 hours online adrift in entirely different information streams, it might reduce the cultural capital we can exchange in relating to one another.

Outrage seems to be weighted over other emotions in the formulation of what content transmits most virally. Our brains are particularly receptive to it and so it is little wonder that optimizing social media algorithms feeds pick up on this. Between tailored feeds and a preponderance of rage bait online, politically likeminded users then find themselves pissed off and channeled into isolated tracks of content affirming and amplifying their views. This makes them easy pickings for grifters whose checks are earned in proportion to levels of online engagement.

Not the Best Use of Our Time

Whatever an app markets itself to be, we can usually bet that their ground-level purpose is to capture and retain our attention. Social media apps ostensibly exist to connect us online with new and existing communities. Dating apps promise to help us find romantic partners. Apps like Duolingo purport to teach us new languages. But perhaps they are merely intoxicating us with a simulation of the feeling of progress toward self actualization.

The sensation of engaging with the lives of our friends, or of ‘putting ourselves out there’ into the dating pool by using a carefully selected sample of our best photos and quips, or growing intellectually by learning to communicate with people from other countries and cultures, all without physically engaging with another human being. Even if these apps are helping us to make some progress on ourselves, every collective day spent online is another day not given to the formation of real memories of conversations and pages read or written. 

For the app developers, the value of this life lived online translates into better understanding our desired feed material, viewing paid advertisements, and generating demographic data for future, better targeted ads. Those of us who create content may also be generating mountains of useful data for training future generative AI models, who have an insatiable appetite for natural language, audio, video, and image data. Using Waze and Google Maps generates data that trains self-driving car Waymo, posting on Facebook and Instagram gives human language and image data to train Meta’s LLM Llama, Grok is trained on tweets, and so on. 

“Human beings are called to be co-workers in the work of creation, not merely passive consumers of content generated by artificial technology. Our dignity lies in our ability to reflect, choose freely, love unconditionally and enter into authentic relationships with others. Artificial intelligence has certainly opened up new horizons for creativity, but it also raises serious concerns about its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, and capacity for wonder and contemplation.” - Pope Leo XIV

It is important to remind ourselves that we could just put the phone down. As we get hooked to the dopamine drip of social media slot machines, there is slim comfort in the idea that it generates value for tech firms. Yet as I write this, I feel that it should also be possible to benefit from my phone without losing myself in it. Even though I think that some millennial and Gen X nostalgia for the boredom of our pre-internet youth is as fallacious as any other nostalgia, I do think that there is justifiable alarm here. From banning TikTok (albeit for the benefit of other social media feeds) to banning phones in schools, much thought is being put into “what to do” about phones.

But this is, of course, not just about social media apps on phones. In my view, it is about a life that is increasingly lived in digital spaces. There are broader questions for us to confront here. Are we in a toxic relationship with algorithms that are too good at recommending content to us? Should everything we say in the public square of the internet be captured as inputs for generative AI models to be trained on? What are human beings supposed to do with our time? This is especially relevant in the shadow of AI automation, which promises us ever more leisure time and whose specter looms large over the not-too-distant future. 

In the U.S., there are surely economic benefits to having hundreds of millions of active users on platforms. The biggest companies by market cap in the U.S. are tech firms that sell the software and hardware that undergirds our online world. They will doubtless enjoy their continued online activity. For a consumer economy, it is pretty sweet that so many people essentially spend multiple hours everyday wandering the halls of e-commerce in an infinite digital mall. Individually, however, people spending their time on ‘the apps’ forgo the opportunity to develop skills, get more sleep, and to engage in other economically valuable activities. Globally, the average person spends over 800 hours per year on social media. 

“When the historians find us we’ll be in our homes
Plugged into our hubs
Skin and bones
A frozen smile on every face
As the stories replay
This must have been a wonderful place”
- Father John Misty

Clearly, people struggle to manage their time responsibly when they have to work. One wonders how people will spend their time in the future imagined by Sam Altman and others, in which AI does all our work for us. I’m reminded of the anecdotes from late spring of 2020, when millions of Americans who were no longer able to work due to covid lockdowns picked up their old hobbies and artistic endeavors, or worked out, or started small businesses. There might be a future in which we benefit from our economy while transcending the need to push paper or wear aprons or to toil in the fields of endless engagement farms.

As labor automation from AI picks up, one of the great economic questions of this century may well be whether the economic cost of being chronically online outweighs the economic cost of “bullshit jobs.” As your productive value cedes to automation, might attention one day become your last marketable skill? And if we were to become obsolete as attention laborers, could being put out to pasture be a catharsis?

Do we dare to imagine that attention itself will be automated someday? Dario Amodei talks about a country of geniuses in a data center. What about a planet of consumers in a data center? Could you generate a population of AIs trained to represent demographics and think like different market segments in a simulated media environment? They could evaluate marketing campaigns and make simulated purchasing decisions with finite simulated monetary resources. Maybe some of them would generatively write post modern critiques about their consumer society on simulated blog spaces. 

Would the automation of ad consumption liberate humans from the tedium of being subjects of market research, or should we shudder at the moral implications of creating synthetic beings whose entire purpose is to view commercials? At least, I think that we can aspire to more consciously participate in the world and its mysteries now and in the future.