The attention economy is devouring politics

Social scientists need to understand how. As do we all.

When Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes talked recently about Chris’s new book, The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, my friend John Sides took polite exception. His criticism doesn’t seem to be available online (it was in the newsletter for Good Authority) but his broad claim was that we should not pay too much attention to attention. Even if Trump and other Republicans are good at getting eyeballs, they may not win enough votes, and might even alienate people. Attracting attention may end up being a bad idea.

Good Authority is a political science publication* and John was making a case for the established wisdoms of political science. It was a good case, and one which, I am pretty sure that Chris would largely agree with (he says some pretty similar things in the book). But in the interests of good argument, I’d like to keep the dialectic going, counter-claiming that standard political science could greatly benefit from engaging with the ideas that Chris and Ezra batted around in their conversation, and that are discussed in greater depth in Chris’s book. Both podcast and book highlight problems that political scientists are bad at understanding. When political scientists think about attention, they usually rely on survey analysis and similar static means of capturing what citizens say about their attitudes. They do not, with occasional exceptions think much about the flows involved in the relationship between attention, technology and bandwidth [update - see another important exception at the end].

From this (admittedly weird) perspective, The Siren’s Call almost seems to represent the product of an alternative historical timeline in which social science had taken a different direction in the 1960s and 1970s. What if political scientists had paid less attention to the the place where survey analysis hits ‘let’s measure the traits’ social psychology, and more attention to the work of Herbert Simon, who was, after all, a political scientist as much as he was anything?**

In that imagined continuum, it might be that many people would be writing books like Chris’s, because many of the important ideas and novel ideas the book contains would be common wisdom, the accepted vernacular of sophisticated commentators. But that’s not the world we live in. Borges has an essay on Kafka, in which he talks about how writers create their own precursors, pulling the bits from past writers that seemed strange and didn’t quite cohere, into a historical narrative into an alternative history where they suddenly make sense. That’s what The Siren’s Call does. It takes not just Simon, but Marx, Durkheim, Postman and others and fits them together into a coherent explanation of why we are all flailing in a world where there seems to be much more than we can possibly absorb, and we feel as though we are drowning.

In short, it’s a good book, and much more than a good book. It less closely resembles the standard policy argument book you’ll see in multitudes than classics of applied sociology such as Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. You want to read it for the argument, but also for the many moments in which the argument is applied in astute and unexpected ways to make empirical incongruities snap together. There are, as with any book, weaknesses (it does not satisfactorily solve the final chapter problem of providing solutions for the vast problems that it identifies), but they are greatly outnumbered by the strengths. I learned an enormous amount while reading this book - and it is all about topics that I thought I already knew pretty well!

I could go on, but this is an essay, not a review. The key point is that The Siren’s Call considers politics from the perspective of system bandwidth and technology, and shows how much we miss if we leave those out of our expectations. Here, as already mentioned, Chris builds on the work of Herbert Simon, and in particular a lecture on attention that Simon gave many decades ago at Johns Hopkins University, the institution where I work. Simon argued that we were in a world where available information was increasing hand over fist. That seems, superficially, like a very good thing. Who doesn’t want more information about the world? But, as Chris summarizes it:

the information age must also be the attention age. The two are inseparable because information consumes attention. The more information is, the more competition there is for attention, which is by definition scarce.

Too Much Information is indeed a problem. Simon spends a lot of time describing the means through which humans deal with this problem (bureaucratic hierarchies as attention filters and simplifiers), and expresses the hope that AI (as it seemed back then) could take a lot of the burden off human decision makers attention if it worked out, automating a lot of decision making in cheaper and more effective ways.*** But as Simon acknowledges, an information processing system will only help mitigate the problem if it absorbs more information than it produces.

Chris is interested in the political economy that this creates. When attention becomes valuable, what demands does this create for means to economize on attention? How do businesses, political entrepreneurs and others address this demand? And when they have done so successfully, what incentives do they have?

The book is worth buying simply for its four page account of Google. Google begins by providing an absolutely incredible service that mitigates the attention bandwidth problem, using the PageRank algorithm and tweaks upon it to guide people to the particular items of information that they are likely looking for, amidst a vast wilderness heaped high with irrelevance and nonsense. But once Google has succeeded in doing this, it has also succeeded in capturing people’s attention - and it increasingly gives into the temptation to abuse its power by piling on the sponsored links, ads and information summaries that pull your attention away from what you want to find out about, encourage you to click through in ways that profit Google. As Chris summarizes the problem:

Any product or service that effectively captures our attention is susceptible to this dynamic: if it’s good at conserving our attention and sustaining our focus, then it’s also a good place to try to wrench away our attention for other purposes, which means it will eventually be a vector for spam.

The result is the Internet we see today, in which nearly every purported escape from the ceaseless demands for your attention threatens to become a chokepoint that will be used to burden you with more. The exit doors lead in.

There is a lot more in the book that I’m not going to summarize, explaining how alienating this is, how we become addicted to those dopamine hits and other such phenomena. The more specific question I want to ask is this. When the attention economy transforms society into a massive thirst trap, what happens to politics?

Chris’s book does talk about how the new economy enables needy grotesques like Trump and Musk to pursue their endless need for attention. But, like John, Chris suggests that this doesn’t necessarily mean that they will succeed in getting votes. Instead, it treats their pathologies as symptomatic of a wider transformation that is happening in politics, economy and society.

You could build on Chris’s arguments to incorporate more specific arguments about when attention seeking will help politicians win and hold office, and when it won’t. That is the ordinary agenda of political science, but it seems to me to miss much, perhaps most, of what is important about what is changing as the political system increasingly becomes a subsystem of the attention economy.

And that last is why I do think we need to be paying more attention to attention. The kinds of enduring structures of politics that social scientists pay attention to are at the least under enormous stress, and very likely in the midst of dramatic changes. If there is a useful and relevant political science literature on the processes through which random social media memes are becoming the basis for dramatic changes in U.S. governmental structures and policies, I’d love to see it. I don’t think it currently exists. Nor do the current internal structures of academic research make it easy to build up.

That means that social scientists are not in a position even to begin to explain some of the most important changes that are happening right now. Nor, for that matter, are others. Two of these changes:

The first is already hinted at: how transformations in the attention economy affect the kinds of issues that emerge to shape political debate. This is the kind of question that political science has been notoriously bad at answering (there have been sort-of stabs at incorporating this, such as William Riker’s theory of ‘heresthetics’ but they haven’t really taken). It seems at the least extremely likely that changes in the technology and bandwidth of information affect the issue space, and arguments over it. But how? We don’t know.

The second is perhaps even more fundamental. How might the attention economy remake the underlying structures of democracy? If there is a political scientist who predicted how Musk could effectively leverage his position to eliminate US-AID despite the legal and political barriers, I don’t know who she or he is. It certainly wasn’t me. As far as I can see, political scientists don’t even know how to think about these questions - but they are enormously urgent. Perhaps they, and we can hope that we will return to some kind of equilibrium, but this is far from certain, and it will in any event be a quite different equilibrium to the one of several weeks ago.

This is why I think that The Siren’s Call is a very important book. We don’t have good ways of thinking about how the attention economy is reshaping society and politics. This book provides some of the analysis that can help ground us, and help us to ask more and better targeted questions, and maybe find answers to them too. That ‘us’ does not just mean social scientists, but everyone who is trying to figure out how to deal both with the information onslaught and with the consequences of that information onslaught for the systems that we depend on, at the one and same time.

I think that the useful explanations of the world that is taking shape around us are going to look like The Siren’s Call. Some may draw on cybernetic theory rather than the ideas of Herbert Simon,**** or on other notions and frameworks altogether, but understanding the relationship between information systems and society is the great challenge of our time. I’m glad to see a book take up the challenge.

Update: in retrospect, I absolutely should have acknowledged that there is a tradition in political science that builds in attention in the ways that I want - Jones and Baumgartner’s ideas about policy making as a process of punctuated equilibria.

* I should acknowledge that I’m connected to all the parties here - not only was I was a colleague of John’s and worked for years with him at Good Authority’s predecessor, but Chris and Ezra are both comrades-in-arms from the old blogosphere, where working journalists, moonlighting academics and free-standing intellectuals were all in common argument.

** The “as much as he was anything” is admittedly doing a whole lot of work here: economics (where he won his Nobel), statistics, cognitive science, psychology, computer science and public administration could, and do, also lay claim to him. Herbert Simon is best classified as the original and sole member of the genus Herbert Simon.

*** Together with others, I’ll have more to say about AI and Herbert Simon later this week.

**** The differences are real, but not enormous - it isn’t too difficult to transpose Simon’s and Chris’s arguments about attention into management cybernetics’ ideas about information, or vice-versa.