How Big Tech is ruining your attention. It is part of how we are enslaved. Freedom is not free, you need to pay attention!!!

In 1922 President Hoover said “It is inconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility  for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial  purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.” Printer’s Ink – magazine about advertising for advertisers – recommended that “the family circle is not a public place, and advertising has no business intruding there unless invited.” But radio and television execs found it difficult to resist the profits. CBS executive Frank Arnold told: said “Here you have the advertiser’s ideal—the family group in its moments of relaxation awaiting your message. Nothing equal to this has ever been dreamed of by the advertising man.” Arnold was a man in the middle of a great shift in history – between newspapers and the nascent radio and television revolution – and onwards to computing and the internet – it was a revolution  in technologies to capture our attention. First, what is attention? This guy – William James – was the Father  of Psychology in America. He wrote about the importance of attention in 1890. Attention, he pointed out, is central to everything. He said attention is a ‘taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form,  of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought, localization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence.’ It also implies, he said, ‘withdrawal’ from some things to concentrate on others. Attention, in short, is focus. Today, psychologists have expanded: We have – Attention resources – that capacity we have to pay attention, how we pay attention, what we pay attention to, the strength we have to pay attention, and so on. And there’s a concept called Attentional capture – how we shift attention, why we shift attention, what captures our attention, at what times, and for what reasons. What’s interesting about attention is it gets to the core of a lot of issues – free will, emotion, persuasion, experience, concentration. Think about fear – if you’re walking in the woods and see a bear – your attention will be captured – by emotion, by your nervous system ramping up, by memories of what to do. Some attention is conscious and purposive  – we engage our prefrontal cortex – think, concentration, and other attention is  ‘“passive, reflexive, non-voluntary, effortless”’ – it is drawn.

We ‘pay’ attention – suggesting ‘paying’ a cost for our time. 2. And second, We can both control our attention and it can be captured – Harold Innis summed the question up neatly: “Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?”

In 1905 Colliers published a now famous report on the snake oil salesmen called “The Great American Fraud”: It’s said: ‘GULLIBLE America will spend this year some  seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud, exploited by the skillfulness of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade.’ The Collier’s reporting led to the first Food and Drugs Act in 1906, banning misleading  claims and cracking down on the con men. But admen had learned that targeting  ailments and illness and existential fears, using bright poster colors and emotive language, was key to grabbing attention. And they advertising industry flourished. James Rorty, once an adman himself, wrote a bestseller on how those trying to grab attention  had to degrade themselves in doing so. He wrote: The adman, “inevitably empties himself of human qualities. His daily traffic in half-truths and outright deceptions is subtly and cumulatively  degrading. No man can give his days to barbarous frivolity and live. And ad-men don’t live. They  become dull, resigned, hopeless. Or they become daemonic fantasts and sadists.” – James Rorty Another bestseller – Vance Packard’s 1957’s The Hidden Persuaders warned that ‘large-scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts  take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals which move us are often, in a  sense, “hidden.” The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we  realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives.’

Ethicist James William writes that: We experience the externalities of the attention  economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying”  or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate  and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for  reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want  what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom,  wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self. As James points out in his book, Stand out of  our light, technology should function like a GPS for our goals – guiding us, showing us the latest information on our interests, keeping us updated with what’s important – but imagine if our real GPS took us down wrong paths instead of to our destination – to a sale at a department store rather than to Grandmas

Paying attention to the moment can lead to surprising insights. William Blake said of attending to the moment that it can lead you  ‘“[to] see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.”’ This isn’t just romantic – it’s scientific  – in looking to understand, to study,  to find the causes of a grain of sand, a wild flower, your hand, an hour – you extrapolate outwards. Knowledge is not just endless information, it’s learning how to think – and that requires disconnecting.

Pay attention to how you’re paying attention.

Edward Bernays, John B. Watson one specialist from Propaganda second from behavioral science both work in advertisement. I am trying for some time to understand how they are able to create that world for the naïve. Just like Huxley wrote:
“There seems to be a general movement in the direction of this kind of ultimate revolution this method of control by which people can be made to enjoy a state of affairs which by any decent standard they ought not to enjoy this I mean the enjoyment of servitude well they listen this process as I say has gone on for over the years and I become more and more interested in”