Another widget for the distraction economy

Is this good?

Among the downsides of the ludicrous salaries in the financial sector is that they entice people away from doing something useful. At least one financier I know has a degree in chemical engineering, meaning that instead of moving money around he could be improving Britain’s biowarfare capabilities in preparation for World War Three.

I jest – probably. In any case, if finance didn’t exist it’s likely such people would be contributing to that other modern beast: the ‘attention economy’ promoted by the new tech barons. People who might have made good scientists are instead trying to get you to stare at their ‘platform’ for as long as possible, mostly so they can serve you ads.

Much of this, of course, isn’t that new. Since the advent of consumer media people have been trying to get you to watch things so that they can sell your attention to marketers who want to try to sell you things.

Twitter, Facebook and Google might employ fancy things like algorithms and be averse to paying people for content, but they aren’t so different from newspapers, TV or any of the other media whose business models they’ve wrecked. For as long as we could make money for it, people have caught and sold attention.

An older distraction in front of the new kind. Credit: Juan Pablo Serrano Arenas

I say this as somebody who’s made most of his money trying to get someone’s attention. Most of my employers have sold subscriptions and events, but eyeballs have been the ultimate target.

There would surely have been better uses of my time, in a cosmic sense. I don’t think the world lost a cure for Covid through my absence, but I might have designed a nice bridge somewhere.

It is possible that my work has been a net negative, as the alleged downsides of new media show. Social media has been blamed for cutting attention spans, facilitating harassment and encouraging suicide, to pluck just three of the medium’s evils out of the air.

Such problems have bled into old media too. Bari Weiss, a New York Times hack who left the paper last year after she became frustrated with the narrow political outlook of her colleagues, argued that, “Twitter is not on the masthead of the New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor.”

I suspect the best method of limiting social media’s influence over politics is simply to ignore it. Stop quoting it. Stop responding to it. Stop looking at it. The trouble is that many politicos are addicted to the immediacy of it, the thrill of an interactive 24-hour news cycle. They can’t stop.

I almost couldn’t either. Part of my reason for opening this Substack was that I missed the enjoyment of firing opinions into the void. I hope that this newsletter offers space for more sober reflection, but it is scratching the same itch.

As such, it’s hard to shake the sense that all this is bad in a fundamental way. Not just social media, or the news, or entertainment, but the entire attention – or rather distraction – economy. Millions of people are devoted to stealing your focus away from something: your job, your family, your friends, your life.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a lot of life-enhancing content online. Such as a 45 minute documentary on the world’s most useful airport. Or cracking new alternative rock singles. Or even a well-written Substack available every Wednesday around lunchtime, other pressures permitting.

But honestly a lot of this stuff is bad, and we should feel bad. We should stop producing endless reams of junk content for people to scroll through. And perhaps you should consider unsubscribing.