5 Reasons We Must Win the War for Attention Capital

(and a few simple ways to begin)

“There are more reasons to deepen attention than simply resisting the attention economy. Those reasons have to do with the very real ways in which attention — what we pay attention to and what we do not — renders our reality in a very serious sense.”- How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy.

— Jenny Odell.

It’s been a long week for all of us.

I’m still here, writing, resting, creating, and circling many of the same roots of my life. As I move around them again in a cycle (not a backward regression), threads emerge that both challenge and deepen my understanding of things I thought I understood and, in some cases, “mastered.” You might notice that as I’ve deepened my path around these roots, I’ve included much more quoted text than I typically do in my writing. That is partly because the writing and thinking are superb and partly because I consider my essays to be, at least in part, a curation of content from a wide range of sources that can validate and support our lifestyle. But it is also because I am admittedly far from naturally integrating these concepts into my life, and I am writing to learn.

I understand that digging into our conceptions of time and attention are deep, mind-bending topics that can yield more confusion than the kind of clarity and validation I usually try to harvest for those of us living this grueling, Still Coviding lifestyle. But spending time in these dense, complex places is the key to our individual and collective healing and growth and the foundation upon which our capacity to continue RESISTING must be built.

Even the title of Chris Haye’s new book, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource , which will be released this week, speaks to the timeless and timely nature of the human challenge with attention. He begins a few thousand years back with the “Odyssey,” recalling the scene in which Odysseus had to be tied to a ship’s mast to prevent him from being drawn into an enticing song being sung by sirens, mythical creatures known for luring sailors to their demise. “The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will,” Hayes writes, “And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our lot in life.”- Vanity Fair, 1/24/25

The Still Coviding Community has primarily taken up residence in a liminal space between worlds, so most of us have already begun shifting our attention and withdrawing from/ opting out of many cultural expectations and rackets over the last five years. But as many of us come to terms with the fact that this liminal space will likely define our existence in the short and long term, creating a new shared language and approach to our time, attention/focus, and values that support how we see reality differently becomes even more critical.

To borrow the words of Jeny Odell again ( as I will throughout the essay), “Attention may be the last resource we have left to withdraw.” She wrote “How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy” in 2019, but the events since 2025 hold even more weighty reasons for her being correct.

But the question remains: why should our attention be placed on fighting to OWN our attention when there are so many existing and now new battles to wage?

Reason #1: Our attention is how we decide who has agency and form the grounds for engaging with love AND ethics.

Chris Hayes says of our 47^th President and Elon Musk,

“These are two people who understand at an almost cellular level how important attention is. I think, partly because of their own weird, broken personalities…. They’ve figured out this core truth, he adds, “that attention is the most valuable resource of our time and that you should do anything you can to get it.” – Vanity Fair.

I could stop here because juxtaposing this reason with this quote is likely enough to convince most of us that we must win this battle. But there are so many more lovely, good, and true reasons to win.

“Unlike the dams that interrupt a river’s flow, these barriers are not concrete: they are mental structures, and they can be dismantled through practices of attention. When we take an instrumental or even algorithmic view of friendship and recognition, or fortify the imagined bastion of the self against change, or even just fail to see that we affect and are affected by others (even and especially those we do not see) — then we unnaturally corral our attention to others and to the places we inhabit together. It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.”- Jenny Odell.

Reason #2: Owning our attention enables us to focus on our personal sovereignty and our purpose in life as being far more than a commodity.

“One might say the parks and libraries of the self are always about to be turned into condos. In After The Future, the Marxist theorist Franco Berardi ties the defeat of the labor movements in the 80s to the rise of the idea that we should all be entrepreneurs. In the past, he notes, economic risk was the business of the capitalist, the investor. Today, though, ‘we are all capitalists’…and therefore we all have to take risks…The essential idea is that we should all consider life as an economic venture, as a race where there are winners and losers.

The way that Berardi describes labor will sound as familiar to anyone concerned with their personal brand as it will any Uber driver, content moderator, hard-up freelancer, aspiring YouTube star, or adjunct professor who drives to three campuses in one week: In the global digital network, labor is transformed into small parcels of nervous energy picked up by the recombining machine…The workers are deprived of every individual consistency.

Strictly speaking, the workers no longer exist. Their time exists, their time is there, permanently available to connect, to produce in exchange for a temporary salary. The removal of economic security for working people dissolves those boundaries — eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will — so that we are left with 24 potentially monetizable hours that are sometimes not even restricted to our time zones or our sleep cycles.

In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing.’ It provides no return on investment; it’s simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our own time and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faux public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a freemium leisure that is a very far cry from ‘what we will.”- Jenny Odell.

Reason #3: Owning our attention enables us to more powerfully value life outside of productivity and other capitalist constructs. It can also move us closer to protecting nature, the land, and marginalized communities.

“Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new in the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation. But this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g. of ecosystems) framed as construction (e.g. of dams). 19th century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if we sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction.

…..But beyond self-care and the ability to (really) listen, the practice of doing nothing has something broader to offer us: an antidote to the rhetoric of growth. In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and the regenerative. Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way.”- Jenny Odell.

Reason #4: Owning our attention is critical to creating safety, cohesion, and strength as individuals and as a collective.

“If we’re built top-to-bottom to struggle against each other for the smallest of edges, to cooperate not in our collective interest but in the interests of a small class of employers — and we are — then we’re hardly equipped to protect ourselves from larger systemic abuses.”- Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials.

“There are many ‘systemic abuses’ to be refused at the moment, but I propose that one great place to start is the abuse of our attention. That’s because attention undergirds every other kind of meaningful refusal: it allows us to reach Thoreau’s higher perspective and forms the basis of disciplined collective attention that we see in successful strikes and boycotts whose laser-like focus withstood all attempts to disassemble them. But in today’s mediascape, it’s hard to imagine what refusal looks like on the level of attention.”

“I want to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety. I am less interested in a mass exodus from Facebook and Twitter than I am in a mass movement of attention: what happens when people regain control over their attention and begin to direct it again together.

“Today, when we are threatened not only with biological desertification but cultural desertification, we have so much to learn from the basics of ecology. A community in the thrall of the attention economy feels like an industrial farm, where our jobs are to grow straight and tall, side by side, producing faithfully without ever touching. Here, there’s no time to reach out and form horizontal networks of attention and support — nor to notice that all the non-‘productive’ life-forms have fled. Meanwhile, countless examples from history and ecological science teach us that a diverse community with a complex web of interdependencies is not only richer but more resistant to takeover. I picture the difference between a permaculture farm and a commercial corn farm that could be devastated by a single parasite.”

-Jenny Odell.

Reason #5: Owning our attention puts us in the seat of being a CREATOR, not just a CONSUMER, and invites our children to co-create this way of life with us.

This matters for endless reasons, but in the context of our times and our struggle, it balances the scales and curbs the maniacal explosion of how we are being controlled as consumers.

“Attention is the beginning of devotion”- Mary Oliver

Even if you are not creating something that other eyes can witness but practicing deep listening, being engrossed in nature, or playing, you are still inhabiting a radically different, creative space than the one the masses (ourselves included at various points in time) have been patterned, habituated to, or forced into. These creative acts also happen to be some of the most simple, impactful ways you can begin to win the war for your attention.

Start with Silence and Stillness

“Silence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.”- Gordon Hempton.

“Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom.”- Maria Popova.

ANNOUNCEMENTS:

SAVE THE DATE: Saturday, February 8, 2025, 8:30 P.M. -10 P.M. Eastern

Please join Rebekah and Kyle Stevens (Clean Air Events) for another live/ongoing conversation about applying Pandemic Math/Time/Attention or any other topic in this substack to our current season as Still Coviders. Zoom links and anonymous links for submitting questions/topics in advance will be sent out the week before the event.