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Attention
A value that is calculated by multiplying medial credibility with medial awareness for one and the same meme, dividual, community or brand: the higher the attentional value, the greater the power and influence in the Internet society.
It is only when the Internet arrives with full force towards the late 1980s and early 1990s that society is endowed with an environment where holism and generalism are fostered at the expense of the academic world’s atomism and specialism. It is also only after the advent of the Internet that criticism of the individualist axiom begins to grow. The new paradigm with its new power structures requires a new mythology; a new narrative of the developing information, communication and network society in the Internet age. The informationalist paradigm is characterised by interactivity as the dominant form of communication, the cyber world as the geographical arena, attention rather than capital as the driving force socially, as well as the production, consumption and above all social reproduction of media as the main occupation (we have written about all of this extensively in The Netocrats). Informationalism is driven by the event as its metaphysical horizon, and is dominated by the conflict between the new classes, the small but wholly dominant netocracy and the considerably larger but in every respect subordinate consumtariat.
Kant is unarguably the prophet of individualism par excellence. His individual is a tragic solipsist who – precisely because of her solipsism – is free to act as a ruthless egoist. Kant’s radical subjectivism – with its emphasis on free will, dominance, abstract inner experiences and strict, soldier ethics – is built around the subject’s transcendental separation from the object, which means that the object can be deified undisturbed, to be later conquered, colonised and plundered. Individualism is a master ideology. The individual has taken over God’s place as the only thing that is certain in life according to Descartes’ basic tenet I think, therefore I am, which Kant later develops to perfection. Humanism and representationalism grow rapidly out of and presuppose individualism and atomism as metaphysical axioms. Through its prioritisation of the representation over the represented, representationalism suits exploding capitalism right down to the ground. With its actively observing subject and passively observed object – this object merely exists because the subject must have something to relate to – representationalism is a sublime expression of capitalist ideology. Society is based on strong, active, expanding subjects. Around them flock weak, passive, delimited objects, pining for the subject’s gaze and attention. These objects are to be hunted, conquered, tamed, exploited and finally discarded before the entire process is repeated with ever-new objects as targets.
Informationalism’s view of mankind can crassly be described as a mobile phone surrounded by fat and muscle. The paradigm shift is rapid; as early as December 2012 traffic on Google’s search engine to the attentionalist left-hand column – which one cannot buy into but instead must deserve one’s prominent placement in by maximizing one’s attention, that is, making oneself interesting and attractive to the Internet’s users – passed 99% for the first time, while traffic to the capitalist right-hand column dipped below 1%. This fact confirms that traditional marketing is an impossibility on the Internet; there is quite simply no such thing as functional online marketing. Increasingly desperate mass media marketing is pitted against increasingly smarter online communication, which understands and uses the new participatory dynamics evolving on the Web.
In his book Time Reborn Lee Smolin draws attention to the recurring dilemma, that scientists constantly assume that ontologically speaking existence is both mobilist and eternalist. But as we have seen that is not at all the case. Existence per se is only mobilist. Eternalism is something that our senses and our consciousness produces, but it has nothing to do with the world outside our senses and our consciousness; crassly speaking eternalism is just a phenomenological by-product. This relationalist position results in the wave (mobilism) having priority over the particle (eternalism); they are thus not ontologically equal in merit, for the wave is primary in relation to the particle, which is secondary. And yet science is constantly tempted to fall into the trap which entails assuming there is an eternalist background to the Universe, either through the mistake of mixing eternalism into mobilist physics, or, which is even worse, through assuming that eternalism is the real reality, while our mobilist Universe in that case must be a chimera. Both Newton and Einstein are Platonists who get stuck in this trap, and the same goes, for example, for the majority of contemporary string theoreticians.
What disturbs the Platonists about relationalism is that the mobilist world view sooner or later must yield to the principle of explanatory closure. The ontic flow must be eternalised in order for it to be converted into words and numbers. The principle of explanatory closure means that eternalisation is unavoidable, but the trick is of course partly to freeze eternalisation where it captures mobilist reality as well as possible, partly to most humbly realise that every eternalisation is only a clumsy digital rounding-off of a much more complex, analogous phenomenon in expansive motion. philosophy.html">Process philosophy, and in the case of syntheism process theology, is therefore the best vaccine against the taxonomic deification of the object. Only a consistently executed philosophy.html">process philosophy can immunise us against totalism’s tempting, simplifying superstitions. Syntheologically we express this as Entheos’ presence preventing us from getting stuck in Atheos or Pantheos per se, and instead continuing to direct our attention towards the real oscillation between them.
The British psychologist Susan Blackmore, author of the influential and controversial book The Meme Machine, defines memes as all things that allow themselves to be copied from one human being to another: habits, fashion trends, knowledge, songs, jokes and all other forms of packaged information. Memes are disseminated horizontally through imitation, learning and other methods. The point is that the copies are never one hundred per cent identical to the original; in the same way as genes, memes are also copied with extensive variation. Most mutations are completely unviable, while some exceptions constitute a competitive improvement in the interplay with the conditions that happen to prevail. Since the memes are often spread considerably faster than genes – mutations occur at every interaction, so too within the brains and media where the memes are located – the speed of mutation within memetics is extremely high in comparison with biological systems, where the spread occurs exclusively vertically. And just like genes, memes can be said to compete for a limited space where they are located, and thereby also fight for the chance to survive, be copied and spread further. The critical factor here is people’s attention – a very strictly limited resource.
If we stay with Christianity, it is of course indisputable that it must be regarded as an unprecedented success from a crassly Darwinian perspective. The Catholic Church’s brand has held up remarkably well through the centuries in spite of considerable difficulties connected with doctrinal oddities and clerical misbehaviour of various kinds. At the same time, the Bible must arguably be the most successful text in history if one looks at the number of copies that are spread across the world. It exists in countless variants everywhere, in more than 2,000 languages and in many of these languages in several translations. As the theologian Hugh S. Pyper writes in his essay The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics, the Bible must be a strong candidate for the title of best-suited of all texts ever if the concept survival of the fittest has any plausibility whatsoever. It colours Western culture to an extent that is impossible to overestimate; regardless of how much the Reformation, to take just one example, damaged the Church, it involved a powerful push out into the world for the Bible, whose text preaches explicity and repeatedly that it wants to be copied and spread. In this way it builds “survival machines” in the form of brains that pay attention to and relay its message. Pyper points out the ironic aspect of the energetic Bible opponent Dawkins himself having allowed his own presentation to become heavily influenced by the Bible in fact, to which he constantly refers, which makes even Dawkins himself one of many survival machines of the Bible that is so harshly criticised.
In the same way that cosmologists and quantum physicists strive for agreement on a theory of everything in physics, syntheologists are working towards constructing a social theory of everything for informationalism. What is striking about the syntheist utopia is that it cannot be formulated beforehand – since it is located in a contingent and indeterministic universe – which means that instead it must be practised before it is articulated. Therefore it is of central importance for both syntheist ethics and creative development that the ideas in a society are not kept locked away behind virtual firewalls or towers of legal papers, but that they can be exchanged in complete freedom between the active dividuals on the Internet. The syntheist utopia is thus first and foremost a society where ideas are free and are not owned by anybody, where the memes form memeplexes that wander freely from human to human, from network to network, and are transformed during these movements without being met with any resistance whatsoever anywhere, apart from the lack of attention that sifts out all memetic losers. Therefore, the digital integrity movement receives the syntheist movement’s full support as the necessary path to this state, which we consequently call utopian memetics.
The first person to take the mighty march of attentionalism seriously is the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu when he distinguishes between economic capital and cultural capital. The metaphor cultural capital proves effective and quickly becomes widely spread, but it is nonetheless unfortunate and leads one’s thoughts astray, since cultural capital is not a form of capital at all. As opposed to economic capital, cultural capital cannot be saved or stored externally, it cannot be swapped or exchanged discreetly without friction, nor can it be used as a means of social communication, which are of course precisely the qualities of economic capital that give it world dominion under capitalism. Describing attention as cultural capital is thus just as misleading as describing food production under feudalism as agricultural capital. The metaphor is historically illogical and with time becomes more and more grotesquely misleading.
Attention has of course in reality few or no links at all to capital, aside from the fact that they have both been power-generating during different historical epochs. Attention is, for example, not a structural lubricant, even if it both creates and changes power structures to a dramatic extent. Its power instead arises as a response to the Internet’s enormous information offering and the plurarchical chaos which this abundance creates. The need for curatorship, qualified information processing, is growing explosively, and the sorting of information is much more important and more valuable than the production of the same. At the very moment that information sorting becomes more important than information production, power over the society shifts from the producers of goods and services, the capitalists, to information sorting and its practitioners, the netocratic curators. We go through the paradigm shift from capitalism to attentionalism. With the advent of attentionalism, the focus of ethics shifts over from the individual’s self-realisation, the capitalist ideal, to the network-dynamical utopia, or what is termed the ethics of interactivity. What is important in existence are the nodes in the network and how these nodes can be merged as often and as much as possible in order to maximise agential existence. The power in this hectic network-building ends up with those who succeed in combining plausibility and attention in the virtual world. And even if this attention can be measured – according to the brilliantly simple but correct formula credibility multiplied by awareness yields attention – it cannot be substituted or in any other way used in transactions in the same way as capital and capitalism’s other valuable assets.
Attention is in essence a completely unique kind of value, a historically emergent phenomenon, arisen out of the acute lack of overview in the informationalist society. And it acts de facto without connection to any form of capital. The driving ambition of the attentionalist society, hardly surprisingly, is imploitation rather than capitalism’s exploitation. That which is constantly desired is a value that can be saved for the few and thereby is maximised – rather than being spread to the many, which would mean that it would thus be diluted and minimised – an option that surfaces as a historically emergent effect of attentionalism’s victory over capitalism. This explains why the netocrats are obsessed with the search for authenticity, the metaphysical reward promised by imploitation, while the informationalist underclass, the consumtariat, is characterised by its very search for exploitation and its desire to let itself be exploited, totally oblivious of the constantly ongoing but incomprehensibly symbol-laden netocractic imploitation that is transpiring in parallel, but all the while out of reach and out of sight.
The building of syntheist temples and monasteries is preceded by the early 21st century’s experimentation with temporary autonomous zones. The nation state is eroding in conjunction with, and as a result of, this ongoing paradigm shift. Since the resources for maintaining law and order are always limited, the regulatory framework of the nation state cannot be upheld during and in particular after a revolution of the magnitude that we are talking about when we talk about the Internet. We must prioritise, to a great extent we must pretend that we are upholding the old law in every respect. The ensuing anarchy turns into a plurarchy – a democracy in a real sense has never existed – which consists of an infinite number of smaller, competing and above all chaotically overlapping centres of power. The response to the plurarchy, which also constitutes its inherent opportunity and promise, is the establishment of temporary autonomous zones. These consist of everything from eco villages that are developing models for sustainable lifestyles that can later be copied and disseminated; to participatory festivals where attention is maximised through a generous sharing of resources, while capitalism is banned within the confines of the event with the purpose of deinstrumentalising and enlivening the relationships between human beings. The syntheist mission is consequently to build temples as participatory art manifestations and monasteries as revolutionary cells in the midst of the global empire’s initial and most hectic chaos.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58