Chris Hiece was Nation“Washington’s editor from 2007 to 2011. He started writing for Chicago readerthen In these times. He went with Nation to msnbc and became the master All in Chris Heiswho won Amy. His new book is Sirenov’s call: As attention became the most disappearing resource in the world. This interview was edited and abbreviated – read the full transcript there.
John Winer: I have a friend who refuses to watch Trump on TV. Why not? “Because,” he says, “your attention is the most valuable thing you have. In your new book you describe your own struggle to pay attention to what is most valuable – especially in the morning when you sit on the couch …
Chris Heis: “The morning I’m sitting on the couch with my precious younger daughter. She’s six years old, and her cute soft breath on my cheek when she cuddles with the book, asking me to read her before going to school. Her attention is unruly and pure. In this There is nothing better and I still feel the instinct, almost physical to look at the sits in my pocket.
JW: And what do you call the “the only most distracted device in history”?
Ch: This is definitely a smartphone. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Steve Jobs is a useful marker of the beginning of this age.
JW: Initially, this was called the “era of information” because the information is now endless. But you say that there is a more important element here. What is this?
Ch: This is a mistake to understand information as the central aspect of this form of economic relations. Yes, the information is endless. There are tons of information. This is easy to repeat. A resource that is restricted in the era of information is actually attention.
JW: The information is endless, the attention is limited.
Ch: And the information is cheap, and the attention is expensive. And this is precisely because attention can only be in one place at a time. If anyone attracts your attention, they have and you no longer do.
JW: The fact that we are really interested in is a politician – as people who compete for power attract the attention of potential fans. How can we progress to draw the attention of potential fans and then how can we pay attention? Please tell me the answer.
Ch: Attracting is art, not science. And attention exists in two different spheres with us. There are things that will be reliably drawing attention: loud and unpleasant, obscene, prudent and Lurid. We know these categories. Donald Trump is all these things. If you compete with everyone against everyone else, these are the things that will reliably draw attention.
But at the same time, one of the strange things is what people will pay attention to is that it is infinitely diverse. There are people who will watch the operas, there are people who will play incomprehensible television shows, there are people who will sit and look at the sculpture for an hour or listen to the symphony for two hours. I will watch video cleaning the carpets on the Internet – what I didn’t even know what existed until recently.
JW: Wait, a minute, a video cleaning video?
Ch: Oh, the person they are so good. It is like 15 or 20 minutes of taking the incredibly dirty rug and cleaned it.
JW: Good.
Ch: It is incredibly relaxing and satisfied. The fact is that there are certain formulas to attract and attract attention. We are all aware of the ice in journalism, and we know about the conflict, and we know about narrative arcs and characters, everything we have learned to get attention. But there is innovation here. People make steep new things. And it turns out that human ingenuity is still retaining the ability to push past what we considered the border what people would pay attention to.
JW: Of course, Trump is a political figure that has most fully used new age rules. The first, he got into the columns gossip on the page six NEW YORK POSTThen he became the leading reality -the television, then became a candidate. But attracting all the attention in the world does not seem to make him a happy man. Is it only he? Or is it something you call “social attention”?
Ch: I think it’s both. I think he came across this understanding of the import of attention from something deeply broken and irreparable sad in it: a voracious desire to be recognized; Honestly, be loved. And one of the sick tricks that social attention is played, especially on the Internet, is that it gives us a synthetic form of what we are most looking for people. What we really want as a person is recognition. This recognition is the basis for all relationships that matter in our lives: relationships with friends, with lovers, with the people we work with – it is necessary to strengthen, but this is not enough. The experience of attention from strangers, especially in social conditions on the Internet, gives us the taste of this recognition, but can never fulfill this taste, and creates such a documentary commitment that seeks more and more. And you see it with Trump by one hundred percent.
JW: Even without Trump, life at the age of attention, you say: “More disturbing, more depressed, more isolated; we have less friends, we see them less, we seek to read deeply, the political sphere is more polarized, the information atmosphere is more polluted.” But there should be some way out. You say there are ways to recover what you call “our collective control over our mind.” If our attention is the most valuable thing we have, then we approach the main question, which is more difficult to answer, what we can think: what do we want to pay attention to? That’s what you thought a lot about. You wrote about this book, a truly convincing and wonderful book. What is your answer?
Ch: There are versatile things: I want to draw attention to my wife, my children, to my family, my parents, whom I was very lucky to have with us. I want to pay attention to my friends, I want to pay attention to my hobbies and efforts and projects. I want to pay attention to growing my intellectual activities, such as reading and writing books and possibly working on the other things I want to develop. I want to recover the guitar.
And I want to pay attention to my work. When I work on my work, I feel honor and privileged. I think this is an important job and I want to do maximum work with it.
And at all these points I don’t want to feel that this feeling that pulls out is distracted against my will, this is a strange sense of shame, regret, a peculiar foggy memory that you just did with the last 20 minutes your life. I think we all experience it by different degrees.
JW: You say: “We are very likely to see the market growth for alternative products, such as the natural food market, for organic farming, for the neighborhood market.” Tell us a little more about it.
Ch: The nutritional analogy here is really interesting because there is a parallel process in which the global industrialization of food and food sales has created a return reaction. It started with the people who were rejecting and returning to the ground, and organic farms started and natural food stores were launched. And all this was some fringe and strange and hippie. But these critics have grown in their abilities, because more and more people came to the same as industrial kitchen processes. Our alternative food culture, food ecosystem and food economy were built from this original uprising. And I think we will have the same with our digital culture.
Previously, we had much more non -profit spaces on the Internet. All of them were transferred to trading spaces: platforms. But in fact, the Internet, which I first came to love, was largely a non -profit internet. It was an internet in which people could connect with each other through open protocols that contributed in a joint setting. This does not mean that there was no trade on the Internet; There were tones. But the main communication networks did not belong to anyone.
And the fact that it was built once earlier means that it can really be built again, just as in physical life we constantly moved between public and private spaces, between commercial spaces and non -profit spaces. Even in hyper-capitalist American society we have non-profit spaces.
And then I think we will start seeing much more violent attention and platforms.
JW: What will it look like adjusting the market for our attention?
Ch: One place we see is with children, with attempts to regulate age minimums for children online. This is a challenged policy. To the left there are people who believe that this is a bad idea, especially from the -y young adolescents who have access to information about human sexuality forms that are not heterorial – for people who affect and trans. And I fully understand these problems. I don’t think they’re funny.
But the principle that we do not have to monetize the attention of minors, it seems obviously I definitely. The question is how we implement it. This does not care: “Well, the only way to get information when I’m trans or diva and I start learning about myself through the platforms”, which is a legitimate argument. But it speaks of the poverty of these non -profit alternatives that we really have to create – in fact, to restore because they once existed.
JW: You finish your book by saying that we need something like the company’s slogan for an eight -hour day for the economy. What was this slogan?
Ch: It was: “Eight hours, eight hours of work, eight hours for what we will be.” And I think “what we will” “are so deep. It’s so beautiful. “What we will be.” What do we want to do with our life on the third day when we don’t sleep and we don’t work?
