Link to last week’s post: https://hexbear.net/post/8870143

This one turned into a bit of a mini-essay as it didn’t feel right to propose my tip without motivation. It also features some more personal reflections, and it’s ok if you don’t agree with all of them.

Skip to the last heading if you just want to see the tip

Attention under capitalism

Your attention does not belong to you. At least not in modern capitalist society. In a competitive market society, producers are impelled to betray all interpersonal boundaries in order, not only to convince you to buy, but to convince you to buy from them. The competitive aspect of capitalist commodity production necessitates perpetual disrespect of your autonomy and your ability to manage the ideas which occupy your mind in a given moment.

This famous painting, The Song of the Lark (1884) by Jules Breton, evokes feelings of awe and curiosity as a peasant girl stands in a field, transfixed listening to birdsong. It brings to my mind pleasant moments when I can flow according to my own rhythm, or when I pause to appreciate something in my surroundings. These moments are when I feel the most authentic, because they contain acts of spontaneous, unplanned intuition. No one instructs me to do it, nor could I have predicted it and scheduled it intentionally.

Focus is the conscious control of one’s attention. There is nothing wrong with sharing ideas or learning from others. But are you in control of what comes in and out, and when these flows happen? or are you overwhelmed by the barrage of notions competing for your inner headspace?

Advertising

Advertisement is a straightforward example of a “notional intrusion” by which capitalist society entitles itself to disrupt your focus. Perhaps you are confronted by a large billboard: an image of a woman dressed in hiking gear, looking out on a valley with a slight, confident smile. Her hiking boot is displayed prominently forward. The caption reads, Go Anywhere. Now, instead of thinking about what to eat for dinner, your thoughts spiral. What if I can’t afford those boots? Am I missing out? Could I be as cool as her? The psychology of consumerism is well-studied and practically obvious to those who experience it. Here, it is enough to note that the advertisement substitutes itself for whatever you had been thinking about prior to observing it.

The power of suggestion

The key concept I would like to emphasize is the power of suggestion. An advertisement does not merely inform about a product; it suggests a mental framing which shapes how you think and the decisions you will make.

A significant avenue for suggestion is your electronics, and particularly mobile devices like smartphones. As a rule, the poorer the user interface, the more reliance there is on “smart” features to guess what you intended to input. Auto-correct is a simple example of this, making up for the inadequacy of an on-screen keyboard. On the more advanced side are digital assistants, increasingly called AI agents as the technology leans more on machine learning to infer user intent. You might search “used books” into a Google search, and Google’s algorithm interprets both the literal query and also what you ultimately might be looking for — so, it returns results for both bookstores and flea markets, assuming that you are interested in general bargain-hunting. At least, this is the naïve description that assumes no nefarious injection of sponsored or otherwise unrequested results. The reality is more grim, as we know, because sponsored results are ubiquitous on the web today, and even locally within the Windows operating system.

‘Push’ versus ‘Pull’ paradigms

Early forms of computing stand in stark contrast with the modern era of suggestive algorithms. For decades, one interacted with a computer through a keyboard connected to a terminal. Before the user asked the computer a question, she had to decide ahead of time the question and the form to present it to the computer. This required training and consultation of the computer’s manual.

From these reflections there emerge two distinct paradigms of computing: the pull paradigm, in which the computer presents information only on request, and the push paradigm, in which the computer presents information eagerly, even without a request.

On the question of attention, the pull paradigm is clearly superior, as it respects the user’s ability to form their own questions at their own pace. Control is almost entirely held by the user. Push paradigms, on the other hand, assume that the user is unable or unskilled enough to accomplish their tasks on their own; at this point, the computer decides to step in, injecting necessarily opinionated information into the user’s session, ultimately taking away the user’s control and forcing them to consider both their own ideas and those of the computer.

Tip #2: Make your devices follow the pull paradigm

Your task is to investigate the settings on your electronic devices which allow for suggestions or other mental intrusions, and to then turn off as many of those settings as possible.

• Clear your home screen / desktop
  • This one may be confusing at first. The point is to change your interaction with your phone or computer. Instead of scanning through a gallery of programs, force yourself to manually search, by typing, the app you intend to open. This nearly eliminates the possibility of distractedly opening an app that you didn’t set out to open when you turned on your device.
  • If done correctly, your home screen should be pretty much blank, save for a clock and maybe a simple weather display.
• Turn off digital assistant suggestion features. This includes:
  • App suggestions in the app drawer or system search / spotlight
  • Suggested actions e.g. ‘call this contact’, ‘drive to work’, ‘play album’
  • Suggested websites in your browser search bar
• Turn off widgets that display live updates like news and social media feeds
• Turn off notification badges (dots/indicators overlaid on app icons)
• Turn off all ‘urgent’ notification features. If there is an option, make your notifications only appear in the notification panel. Notifications should never force their way into your screen through a banner. The idea is that you periodically check your notifications manually, and only when you are mentally prepared to do so.
• Use an ad blocker
• … and anything else you think of, as it relates to your personal workflow.