"Usefulness does not equal worth... despite what capitalism says, productivity does not equal value."
"I am opposed to the way that corporate platforms buy and sell our attention, as well as to designs and uses of technology that enshrine a narrow definition of productivity, and ignore the local, the carnal, and the poetic. I am concerned about the effects of current social media on expression, including the right not to express oneself, and its deliberately addictive features. But the villain here is not necessarily the internet or even the idea of social media. It is the invasive logic of commercial social media, and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms, and affect the ways we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live."
"Our citizenship in a bio-region means not only familiarity with the local ecology, but a commitment to stewarding it together. It's important for me to link my critique of the attention economy to the promise of bio-regional awareness, because I believe that capitalism, colonialist thinking, loneliness, and an abusive stance toward the environment all co-produce one another."
"Simple awareness is the seed of responsibility."
"I'm sort of the quintessential California atheist."
"If we think about what it means to concentrate, or pay attention at an individual level, it implies alignment. Different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert, and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things. It means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in many different directions at once, and preventing meaningful action."
"As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else. That's part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it's even more important for anyone who does have a margin, even the tiniest one, to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces. Small spaces can open up bigger spaces. If you can afford to pay a different kind of attention, you should."
"I don't know what a personal brand is, other than a reliable unchanging pattern of snap judgments. 'I like this, and I don't like this,' leave little room for ambiguity or contradiction."
"I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed, never seeing anything outside ourselves, including our own privilege."
"Eventually, to behold is to become beholden to."
"It's pretty intuitive that truly understanding something truly understanding something requires attention to its context. What I want to emphasize here is that the way this process happened for me with birds, was spatial and temporal. The relationships and processes I observed were things adjacent in space and time. For me, a sensing being, things like habitat and season helped me make sense of the species I saw, why I was seeing them, what they were doing, and why. Surprisingly, it was this experience, and not a study on how Facebook makes us depressed, that helped me put my finger on what bothers me so much about my experience of social media. The information I encounter there lacks context, both spatially and temporally.
"For example, let's take a look at my Twitter feed right now as I'm sitting inside my studio in Oakland in the summer of 2018. Pressed up against each other in neat rectangles, I see the following: an article on Al-Jazeera by a woman whose cousin was killed as school by ISIL; an article about the Rohinga Muslims fleeing Myanmar last year, an announcement that At Dosharee Zone, a joke account, is selling new T-shirts, someone arguing for congestion pricing in Santa Monica, California; someone wishing happy birthday to former NASA worker Katherine Johnson, a video of NBC announcing the death of Senator McCain, and shortly afterward cutting to people dressed as dolphins appearing to masturbate on stage; photos of Yogi Bear mascot statues dropped in a forest; a job alert for director of the landscape architecture program at Morgan State University; an article on protests as the Pope visits Dublin; a photo of yet another fire erupting, this time in the Santa Ana Mountains; someone's date visualization of his daughter's sleeping habits during her first year; a plug for someone's upcoming book about the anarchist scene in Chicago; an Apple ad for Music Lab featuring Florence Welch. Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we're assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can't help but wonder, 'What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this?' I imagine parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn't make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense. And it produces not understanding, but a dull and stupefying dread."
"Presented with information in the form of itemized bits and sensationalized headlines, each erased by new items at the top of the feed, we lose that which was spatially and temporally adjacent to that information. But this loss happens at a more general level as well. As the attention economy profits from keeping us trapped in a fearful present, we risk blindness to historical context at the same time that our attention is ripped from the physical reality of our surroundings."
"...much necessary work is ignored or devalued as caregiving, a gendered after thought to the real dynamos of the economy, when in reality, no shared life could do without it."
"It's tempting to conclude this book with a single recommendation about how to live, but I refuse to do that. That's because the pitfalls of the attention economy can't just be avoided by logging off and refusing the influence of persuasive design techniques. They also emerge at the intersection of issues of public space, environmental politics, class, and race. Consider two things in tandem: first, people in wealthier neighborhoods almost always have more access to urban parks and to park land, on top of the fact that such neighborhoods are often in the hills or by the water... Second, consider that while seemingly every kid in a restaurant is now watching bizarre, algorithmically-determined children's content on YouTube, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs both severely limited their children's use of technology at home. As Paul Lewis reported for The Guardian, Justin Rosenstein, the Facebook engineer who created the Like button, had a parental control feature set up on his phone by an assistant to keep him from downloading apps...without personal assistants to commandeer our phones, the rest of us keep on pulling to refresh [like on Twitter, a feature the creature is 'penitent' about bringing into the world], while overworked single parents juggling work and sanity find it necessary to stick iPads in front of their kids faces. In their own ways, both of these things suggest to me the frightening potential of something like gated communities of attention--privileged spaces where some, but not others, can enjoy the fruits of conemplation and the diversification of attention."
