How the Arts Can Thwart the Attention Bandits

Speaker A: 00:00:41

From the center for the Study of Art and Community. This is Change the Story, Change the World. You may be noticing lately that there's a lot of attention being paid to the subject of attention.

More precisely your attention, your attention that is being bought and sold almost always without your knowledge and certainly without your permission.

Some are saying, myself included, that there's more at stake here than how you spend your time, that what happens when one's attention is literally captured can have a big impact on what people think and believe and how they behave, and most importantly, their autonomy in the world.

So we're going to explore all that in this episode, with a particular focus on what this means for artists, for people involved in the imagination business.

That said, we're going to begin this episode with what else A Little Story, Part 1 Fletcher's Excellent Adventure the protagonist in this saga is a guy named Fletcher and Fletcher works as as an electrician in a mid sized city in the Midwest.

He and his wife Fran have two kids, Margie and Devin, who are seven and nine respectively, and they all live in a three bedroom rambler that Fran and Fletcher bought when they were first married. Like most folks, they've had their ups and downs, but all in all they've had a good life and are reasonably optimistic about the future.

is story takes place in early: 2025

Speaker B: 00:02:34

Hey, it was one of those weekend days when, I don't know, winter seems to be taking a pause. But you know, nowhere, nowhere ready to go. It's a cloudy, no wind, no rain in the picture sort of chilly sweater day.

There was not a lot going on, but there were a few items on that eternal ever growing to do list of life that were definitely demanding attention.

So well, after frittering away my morning with a slow rise, a long drawn out perusal of the Clarion Gazette, a long meandering walk, I figured it was time for me to drop on down to the beige big box over by the high school and begin picking away at the lowest hanging fruit. On that to do list. It's only seven things.

Shoe glue, a 32 ounce bottle of Bragg's vinegar, a ream of printer paper, a three pack of D'Addario phosphor bronze guitar strings, a USB one to USB three computer cord, some three way LED light bulbs, and a six pack of men's briefs in multiple colors. Given this short list, I figure this will not be a complicated deal.

A simple drive over park, slip in, find a stuff slip out back in time for Lunch operation. Or so I thought. Anyway, I grab my keys and while at a yell to Fran, I am taken off and set forth on down the road.

As I approach those beckoning I see you coming Automatic doors at the Big Bucks I'm jazz no traffic, easy park list in hand. Like I said, I'm all set for an easy peasy in and out precision strike through the doors.

A guy in a purple vest greets me with a smile, open hand and a statement that becomes a question. Welcome, he says. Big box as whatever you need and more. How can I help?

Well, after shaking his hands, I look down on my list and pick the obvious stumper. Shoe glue, I say. He smiles and with no hesitation barks out aisle 36 road G near the end, bottom left. Will you need a cart?

I shake my head, charge off in the direction he's pointing. But before I get more than a few feet, I hear his almost gleeful shout. Sir. Sir.

I stop and even before I complete my pivot, his voice booms out, on your way, sir. You will encounter a lovely display of long stemmed red roses and box chocolates.

Just in case it has slipped your mind that Valentine's Day is just earth around the corner.

I mumble thanks and turn in the direction of aisle 36 just as the three foot tall orange and purple numbers you know 31, 32, 33 on the lollipop isle marker start telling me that I am closing in on my destination. A crackling sound seems to split the air above me. Attention shoppers. Attention.

Another blitzkrieg sale item is being offered in the men's department for the next three minutes. At the sound of the buzzer, our in house signature Best Man's Classic Briefs will be available at 50% off on aisle five, row 13.

So be there or be square. Starting now. At 10. 9. I look down at my wrinkly list. Wow. Just what I need. I do a 180 and motivate back down the aisle numbers.

Just as the buzzer sound my way, I notice a bunch of other folks moving fast in the same direction.

As I approach row five, I see a crowd forming around a table with six packs of men's briefs in various colors piled in a huge mound that seems to be shrinking fast. There's a frenzy as everyone seems to be grabbing multiple packs and instinctively I find my size and follow suit.

Less than a minute later, as the buzzer echoes above me, the pile is gone. Standing there clutching three six packs, I'm almost shaking. Strangely, I feel both triumphant and ridiculous. Then, as I begin to walk away.

A very pretty young woman in a bright yellow tight fitting dress and a big red sash that screams Bargains baby in all caps walks up and hands me a bright red card with yellow printing. It says 60% off in all caps. Her smile is, I don't know, almost insane area. She literally shouts, it's your lucky day.

Speaker A: 00:07:46

You have 10 minutes to apply this to any Bill walkie brand cordless tools on offer in our hardware section. Don't dawdle.

Speaker B: 00:07:55

I'm gobsmack.

Five minutes ago I was calmly en route to a rendezvous with shoe glue and now I am clutching 18 pairs of new underwear and actually contemplating another detour into the beguiling land of cordless drills and sanders that I have been coveting but don't really need. How did they know? I take a deep breath. I pull out my list and say to myself now Fletch, that's not what you came here for, man.

And head back in the direction of the shoe glue. Halfway down there, I see a lady clutching four packs of men's underwear.

She smiles at me with my own hoard of briefs and starts to chuckle, which is hard cuz she's also chewing. Over her shoulder I see a big orange sign with what looks like a smiling pizza with the words Pizza Bice. So right, so easy, so delicious.

Now in six scrumptious new flavors. As my underwear compatriot turns to go, she points to a lady in a chef hat handing out free samples and says they're really good and disappears.

I realize I'm hungry and reach over and grab a bright red pizza bite. It's good, the pizza lady says. Go ahead, have another. I it's indulge myself as she points to a display table on her right there. Only $4.95 on sale.

Without thinking, I grab one and clumsily add it to my underwear stash. A few aisles down, I find an errant shopping cart and pile my stuff in. As I do, I notice a weird kind of sign attached to the handle.

But it's more than a sign. It's actually a pink screen with flashing white letters asking me in all caps, what do you need? With a touchpad keyboard underneath. Wow. I'm thinking.

Welcome to the digital age. I figure, what the heck, type out shoe glue just to test it. Aisle 36, row G pops up immediately. Okay, I think. Not bad.

But then almost as quickly, the store coordinates dissolve and a little movie with music showing a beautiful white family playing in the park on a sunny day is extolling the virtues of a new revolutionary kind of walking shoe with replaceable soles that, in the words of a grisly old shoemaker who somehow also wind wandering around in that park, could last a lifetime. When the movie ends, a new message in blue and red blinks on.

Try them at our shoe department aisle 24 Roquet and receive a free pair of Champion plus athletic socks. Your choice of colors. I am again taken aback. I have no interest in these miracle shoes that I don't for a minute believe could last forever.

Or free socks or even the Pizza bites I'm staring at in my cart. But holy cow, I'm thinking. This is intense. I came here for a few things, you know, in and out and I feel like Alice, a wonderland.

It seems like every turn I turn my head, someone or something is trying to send me down a new rabbit hole and there is nothing wonderful about it. So at this point I realize I need to get my stuff and get out of this crazy labyrinth of a Big Box asap.

And amazingly, once I set my mind to it, I do manage to escape with my 18 pairs of briefs, a box of Pizza Bites and other things on my list, minus the shoe glue which I found out they stopped carrying three weeks prior. Ok, but even with my resolve, it wasn't easy.

During my 25 minutes rushing from department to department, I had to resist three more attention shopper buzzer beater assaults and then at checkout, a final Big Box credit card sign up opportunity that would have reduced the total cost of my purchases by 75% and entitle me to a whole host of exclusive benefits like discount gym memberships and a free oil change.

To add insult to injury, when I got back to my car, there was a flyer under my wiper inviting me to a gathering of MAGA Patriots sponsored by who else? Pizza Bites.

On the way home, I bought a tube of shoe glue at the local hardware store where the guy gave me some pointers and I also got a free little bag of popcorn. It was great.

Speaker A: 00:13:20

Part 2 the Attention Bandits

Now, as I'm sure you've surmised, Fletcher, Big Box Pizza Bites and the Bargain's Baby lady are all made up. I'm also sure most of you have been to stores and malls where the pressure to buy is of course intense because that's why they're there.

But probably nothing like Fletcher's Big Box experience. Or maybe you have and in the hustle bustle of modern life, just didn't notice.

Wait, you might be asking how could anyone go through something like the Big Box gauntlet and not know what was going on. True that. But what if it wasn't at a gigantic flashy technicolor circus of a store like Big Box?

What if it was something much less obvious, Something that is so much a part of your life that all those attention grabbing pokes and pressures just seem like part of the woodwork?

What if it wasn't the Big Box or the mall trying to take you for a ride, but the small box with a computer inside that has your attention 24/7 sitting right now in your back pocket or your purse? As I said, this episode is about attention.

Attention shoppers, attention spans, attention deficit, sure, but more specifically, what you pay attention to or not. Or even more precisely, what some folks out there are paying for your attention and what you're not getting actually what you are losing in return.

And how over the past couple of decades, that finite and very powerful resource, attention that we all have and take for granted, has become the most valuable commodity in the world. Now, if you're a listener to this show, you know that pretty much all of our episodes are conversations. The reason for this is obvious.

There is a synergy to a conversation that often transcends the tyranny of one dimensional thinking and sometimes opens the door for new and interesting perspectives to emerg in real time. That said, from time to time, something grabs me and pushes me into another type of conversation. This is. This is one of them.

The Spark is a new book by Chris Hayes tonight on all in the MSNBC journalist. It's called the Sirens Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. I read it and this is something I don't do very often.

I dove into it again.

Now, I don't know if this ever happens to you, but from time to time, when something grabs me, an idea, a story, even a song lyric, I end up in a kind of relationship with it. Well, actually with whoever made it. And I enter into a different kind of conversation back and forth in my head.

So that's what happened to me with Mr. Hayes. So what follows first is my summary of the book's central thesis.

Specifically Hayes's reading of the evolution of the attention industry and his warnings about the danger of its commodification. And then a reaction to his thoughts about how we can respond to those dangers.

The Siren's Call begins by drawing a historical parallel between labor in the industrial age and attention in the modern era.

He explains that in the 19th and 20th century, labor became commodified people's work, their physical effort and their time were transformed into economic resources that could be bought and sold.

This shift led to, as we all know, major social upheavals as people grappled with questions of autonomy, decision making, and agency over their own work, over their own beings.

Now, Hayes argues, the same process has accelerated in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but this time it's our attention, not just our labor, that has been commodified. Nearly everything we do, think and feel is influenced by what captures our attention.

And attention itself has become a scarce and highly valuable resource.

Originally, you know, businesses needed to attract attention to their products to convince people to buy them, whether or not it was a hamburger or a new gadget. But Hays suggests that today attention has become the product itself. His prime example is Amazon, which isn't just a store with a vast inventory.

Instead, it's an attention driven distribution system. Amazon works relentlessly to hold our focus just long enough for you to click buy. The product itself is almost secondary.

What matters is the ability to capture and convert your attention into a transaction. At the heart of Hay's argument is the idea that our senses, our core focusing capacities, are under a big box kind of constant assault.

Every moment we're bombarded with attempts to grab our attention and direct it toward a specific action, whether it's making a purchase, voting a certain way, adopting particular values, or forming opinions about people around us. This influence is so pervasive that it shapes not only our individual behaviors, but also the broader structure of society.

Now Hayes urges us to recognize this reality and consider how much our attention is being manipulated, how much of it we willingly give away, and how it ultimately impacts our thoughts and decisions. He frames this struggle through the metaphor of the sirens from the Odyssey, whose alluring calls were impossible to resist without conscious effort.

More concretely, he compares it to the blaring sirens of emergency vehicles designed to instantly capture attention and demand a response.

Unlike something we can simply ignore or turn off, these attention capturing forces tap directly into our brains, hijacking our focus before we even have time to consciously process what's happening. I think Hayes central thesis here is clear and compelling.

In a world where attention is the most valuable and contested resource, we must become more aware of how it's being taken from us and decide, both as individuals and as a society, what we want to do about it. To push back against the attention economy, Hays suggests a few practical solutions.

He encourages simple, intentional changes, like reading physical books or newspapers, or downgrading your phone from smart to flip he also introduces the idea of attention farmers markets, spaces where people can engage with information on their own terms without interference from tech company algorithms.

On a larger scale, he advocates for regulation similar to labor laws, potentially including screen time limits and tighter restrictions on how companies can compete for our attention. Now, as I said, I don't fundamentally disagree with Chris Hayes on what's happening here. His analysis of the attention economy is sharp and accurate.

But given the enormous power and influence wielded by the proliferating attention sucking mechanisms he so effectively describes, these responses seem, I don't know, a bit tepid. More importantly, I also think he overlooks what I see as a deeper underlying concern here.

Beyond the head turning power of the siren's call, there's something much more elemental at play for both Odysseus and our contemporary society. Something more powerful and valuable than even our attention.

This is our capacity to conjure and design and test a journey from where we are to to what might happen next in our mind's eye. It's the nexus of all possible futures. And it's called our imagination. Consider this.

If attention merchants are trying to manipulate our thoughts, behaviors and decisions, they're not just making us glance toward the siren's call. What they're really after is the space that follows that momentary gap between our instinctive reactions and conscious cognition.

In that void, they implant fear, desire, ideology, pizza bites, or whatever benefits them. These intrusions are more than an effort to manipulate. In essence, they're not just capturing attention, they're hacking our imaginations.

Herein lies what I think is the more profound dilemma. The landscape of human imaginations in the 21st century, particularly our digitally saturated end of the pool, is extremely vulnerable.

This is because our society not only neglects the most powerful aspect of what it is to be human, we squander it. It's true. In the modern era, we have a real failure of imagination.

We fail to nurture its strength, its breadth, and most importantly, its central role in shaping human human experience. And guess what? When people haven't developed their imaginative facilities, they become more susceptible to external forces shaping their worldview.

For them, attention hackers and predators understand this well and take full advantage. They know that the attention they are harvesting is the unattended, unlocked back door to the imagination. And as I said, this is the real danger.

When imagination is co opted. When the stories we tell ourselves about how the world works and our place in it are dictated by others, we lose more than our focus.

We lose the capacity to forge and tell our own stories. Part three the antidote.

Now, given all that, you might be surprised to know that while I am concerned about the attention pirates and their plunder, I am also hopeful. This is because there is an antidote that we all have. The imagination isn't just a passive recipient of influence. It's a muscle.

And like any muscle, it can be strengthened. The stronger it is, the more agency we have in determining what happens to our thoughts, our beliefs, our decisions.

Those who train their imaginations, artists, storytellers, inventors, creators, makers of every type, develop an intuitive resistance to having their minds hijacked. They're not immune, but they're more aware. And they know how to take control of their own narratives instead of surrendering to someone else's.

This is where art comes in. Not as some peripheral niche activity, but as a fundamental force. Art making is an act of imagination made manifest.

It's about turning ideas, ephemeral, intangible thoughts into something real, something others can experience. And it requires focus, discipline, and a deep engagement with one's own creative faculties.

Artists, whether consciously or not, practice a form of attention discipline. They learn to enter into a state of deep focus, to follow an idea, and to engage in the process of making.

In doing so, they develop a resistance to the shallow, scattershot attention hacks and seductions that demands constant, mindless engagement. When you're immersed in creating something, a song, a painting, a sculpture, what, even an amazing new wonder drug, you're not just focusing.

You're in a state of flow, a place where external distractions lose their grip. That is real agency. That's power. And yet our education system barely acknowledges this.

We all know it was designed to prepare people for labor in an industrial economy, to create workers rather than imaginative thinkers. But we're no longer in an industrial age. We don't need more people trained to follow orders.

We need people who can think, adapt, create, and solve problems in entirely new ways. This isn't about turning everyone into an artist.

It's about recognizing that imagination is as essential as logic, as critical as literacy and numeracy. It's about understanding that creativity isn't a luxury. It's a survival skill. The forces trying to capture our attention aren't slowing down.

They're getting better, more sophisticated, more invasive. The only way to counter them is to cultivate the one thing they seek to control. Our ability to imagine a different reality. Hayes is right.

Our attention is under siege. But my response to him would be, we have a counter agent, a universally available superpower, and it's been with us all along.

The imagination isn't just a refuge, it's a tool for resistance and reframing what happens next for both pushing back and pushing forward. And the more we learn to wield it, the less power the attention merchants will have over us.

As I said at the beginning, this was not going to be a typical Change the Story back and forth conversation, but rather a report on Chris Hay's important exploration of a growing and dangerous force in our midst and the role that creative change agents, our friends, our fellow travelers can play in in mitigating its negative impact.

My intention was to stir up some good trouble, particularly in the growing space where attention bandits and anti democracy zealots seem to be joining forces and wreaking havoc.

To that end, we've also compiled a list of Change the Story episode links in our show Notes of episodes that feature artists and communities who are hard at work stirring that good, troubled pot. So take a look and tune in. And please don't forget to Click on the GoFundMe link also in our show notes and consider making a contribution.

As always, thank you to all of you who've tuned in.

We really appreciate both your listening and for those of you who've shared your thoughts and suggestions, your contributions to the continuing Change the Story Story Change the Story Change the World is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hands of the Maestro Judy Munson.

Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOC235. So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word. And once again, please know that this episode has been 100% human.