The Attention Economy

Tucker Carlson, monetized distraction, the debt ceiling

your eyeballs are a commodity and markets are not moral

At one yoga class this week, the instructor started talking about “the attention economy”¹. The whole class was on the concept of distraction, and how easy it is to not only lose focus, but how the world is designed for us to completely disengage.

Our eyeballs are commodities!! They are expensive, and companies will pay big money in order to have our pupils etched onto their products. And the way that they capture our precious gaze is usually through telling some sort of story based on what markets tell them we will pay attention to.

I’ve been fascinated by three things recently -

1. Tucker Carlson

2. The debt ceiling

3. Profit-led inflation

But first - stories.

How Stories Shape Us

Tom Waits once said

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. It cheapens and degrades the human experience, when it should inspire and elevate.

And this is so true for so much of what we consume.

• Our little human brains trend towards negativity and focus on what we can lose, because the amygdala starts running the internal siren and then striatrum is like “what is going ON” and finally the insula fires up.

• Losses - and perceived losses - are stickier. So we seek them out.

The problem comes when media is designed to outrage us. And we can see this in the composition of pieces - words and narrative.

Words

There is a definite media literacy crisis in the United States. There is no space for context, no space for nuance, and absolutely no space for disagreement. Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote:

I ask people sometimes if they think bad and horrible (for a silly example) connote the same emotional state. They say yes.

If you think bad = horrible, I can see how discomfort = injury in your mind. We know language structures our world. If you only have two categories of words, you may only be able to have two categories of experiences

We are limited by language, forever and always. We can never really truly communicate what we feel because my goodness, there probably aren’t enough words in the world for that (something I wrote about a few months ago).

But part of the reason that we leave no space for context, nuance, or disagreement is because all words end up meaning the same thing, connotating the same experience. The dilution of horrible into bad means that everything bad is now the most horrible that that ever happened, actually - and if you dare to say otherwise, well.

Narratives

The limitations of the words we choose end up shaping the narratives we tell ourselves.

As Jeanette Winterson says -

We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever reality we have chosen to believe in.

And this is okay! Of course we understand ourselves through stories.

Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley’s The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience is an incredible paper that dives into the idea that fiction creates a simulative experience for readers - and we can learn better from that because it’s more fun and it helps us make sense of the big floofy world around us.

• What’s cool about this is we can simulate all these different experiences by living them through others.

• Experience the same sort of emotions, process the complexities of the world, maybe even develop some skills around how to handle problems.

Fiction is good for processing, but things get dicey when fiction attempts to become reality. When we get into that whole thing of simulacra and simulation, where it’s like “oh man what even is anything anymore”.

And that’s sort of where we are at right now.

How We Shape Our Stories

All of this ties into Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Ethics of Ambiguity” (hang with me I promise I have a point) where she writes about these five archetypes of human existence - in order of least free to most free.

1. The sub-man: This is a person who is apathetic, who sort of chooses to do nothing but follows a cookie cutter path with zero resistance - they completely reject any sort of freedoms that they have in favor of following whatever anyone else tells them to do - the ‘nothing matters’ guy.

2. The serious man: This is a person (most of people fall into this category) who gets attached to an absolute set of values - whether that be a political affiliation, a religion, etc, it becomes Who You Are as an attempt to erase all ambiguity.

3. The nihilist: They are free because they recognize the ambiguity but they get so lost in the sauce that they lose all sense of meaning. However, this is a type of failure as it’s up to us to justify the world and to exist with validation.

4. The adventurer: This person knows that meaning cannot be packaged and sold, and also knows that they can create their own values and are largely action-oriented - adapting not to the world, but to themselves.

5. The passionate man: She writes it so well - “he is the one who makes the most of his freedom, who lives not for a purpose, but for life itself, finding joy in the very act of existing."

And the reason that I am going on this long tangent about archetypes is because I think that they are 1) cool and 2) important to this larger conversation about emotion and meaning and thingsthatkeephappening.

Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson is a manufactured rage machine. Noahpinion published a great piece on the Carlson Character that Tucker plays - and Tucker is able to generate a lot of sub-men around whatever thing he is talking about because Tucker does theater and tells people what to believe. People like that. And Tucker knows that Tucker does theater!

• He kind of admits that in this video here - but what he tells listeners (hints at) is that it’s really an Us vs Them discourse (a thread that is always worrying) and that the Us needs to get it together - presumably by listening to Tucker.

As Noah highlighted, there’s market power in this type of media - and markets are not a moral compass. Luke O’Neil writes on hope and Tucker:

The night before my mom died she made us turn on Tucker Carlson while we ate dinner in her hospital room. We ate tacos in silence as Tucker was ranting about the border.

Life is big and weird, and it makes sense that The Serious Man is the archetype we tend to fall into because having a guiding set of very prescriptive values in life² makes all of this a little less big and weird. It’s when we get so attached to those values that problems start to arise.

• Where words like horrible get diluted into something that is merely bad.

• When the narratives dance more towards fiction than reality (or some sort of weird fictionalized reality).

• When markets are able to be the final dictation on what happens - market fundamentalism across all aspects of our lives.

That’s when things get weird.

How Markets Define Stories

Markets are storytellers.

That’s what the success of Tucker gets into - not only is he responding to market forces (what viewers want to see) but he is playing into the hype market at all times. The most valuable thing we have is our eyeballs. And he knows how to get them.

As Noah referenced from the Business Insider:

Three former Fox employees told the [New York] Times Carlson specifically relied on "minute-by-minute" ratings data…Carlson's stories about immigration or warnings of demographic change in the US, like the white nationalist "Great Replacement" theory, were a hit, the outlet reported.

"He is going to double down on the white nationalism because the minute-by-minutes show that the audience eats it up," another former Fox employee who worked with Carlson told the Times.

It’s about eyeballs. At any cost.³ Markets are not a moral compass.

And that’s sort of (not at all in the same twisted way, but a derivative of it) what’s going on with the debt ceiling too! And profit-led inflation. It’s all market storytelling.

The Debt Ceiling

The market is telling a story based on the reality that we might just do little cutesy default on our debt - credit default swaps are widening, meaning that investors are like “listen a lot people want to protect against the potential reality of debt implosion”.

• The debt ceiling is meant to be this tool of austerity, to protect us from spending too much

• But instead it becomes a way to craft some sort of story along party lines and dance so close to the edge that markets begin to define what lines are walkable.

All meaning gets lost because the story becomes so ill-defined. What is all this hubbub really about? Perhaps it’s so we manage our debt load, but perhaps it’s not. It’s certainly political theater. It’s certainly for eyeballs. It’s certainly distracting.

Profit-Led Inflation

The consumer goods companies are telling their own stories via markets too.

They are shaping the narrative by hiking prices to maintatin margins, despite not selling any more product (volume is flat). And this whole conversation is funky because you have people that will argue “well the firms need to raise prices because their costs went up too!” and it’s like well sure but also:

Source: The Financial Times

Even McDonalds is telling a story based on french fries!

McDonalds says that a Recession could be coming (a mild one, not supersized) and that’s partially based on people not tacking on fries to their meal- this is known as the “fry attachment rate” and it’s apparently a very important economic indicator.

And finally no one can agree on what the story of inflation should be about but I do think that maybe there is something pressure-y to Nestle, Kimberly Clark, Pepsi, Coke, McDonalds, and more all raising prices by more than 10% over the past quarter.⁴

Final Thoughts

I think that what Simone de Beauvoir is getting to with those archetypes is you have to be able to define a set of values that define you - while embracing ambiguity - but also realizing that you cannot truly be “free” unless everyone else is free too.

That’s what the passionate man is all about - being a part of the world, affirming life, taking on the weight of the world. Individuality is connected to others being able to be their own individuals too.⁵

It’s similar to this from Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

The debt to life has to be paid somehow; one has to be a hero in the best and only way that he can.

There is a poem by Devin Kelly - Sunday at the Laundromat - that is emblematic of what I am trying to say here.

I feel like the newsletter always has to have some big sweeping conclusion, but I am going to leave this one ambiguous (haha) I think - partially because I really do not want to come off as prescriptive (I don’t even know what I would prescribe!) .

But the world is designed to take our attention to wherever some market deems best. The “attention economy” is monetized distraction. So that line - “if you turn anything towards light, you might save it’s life” coupled with “it says something about the light not being able to choose its object” is a reminder of the strength of our individual power - and how we must be careful to where we let that power end up.

Thanks for reading.

Other things

There’s a “war of words” between OPEC and IEA | “Disney regrets that it has come to this” | How to Live (poem) | Only 10 Electric Vehicles Qualify for Full $7,500 US Tax Credit | Home Prices Rose in February for First Time Since June | The rise of kitchen table economics | A review and provocation: On polarization and platforms | Enter the Supersensorium

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, or financial advice.

1. I was a bit disgruntled to hear that word in the studio, but alas, everything truly is the economy!

2. Nothing wrong with this of course, but just to reiterate, the problem comes when we become unmalleable to any competing viewpoints. There is a difference between believing and detrimental devotion (a subjective difference!)

3. There is much more to say about the evilness that Tucker creates by spreading hate in this fashion

4. Read Isabella Weber!!

5. A sort of funny twist on the American Individualism narrative