Ways of (Not) Seeing
and the logical conclusion of attention at all costs
"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation."
- Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967
Apparatus of Attention
Back when the fortunate among us dialled up to connect to the early internet, despite the privileged nature of our access, we mostly bought into the positive impact promised by this democratisation of the tools of production and dissemination. Remember that feeling the first time you clicked a button to instantly publish content to even a small globally disperse audience, free of content filters and recommendation algorithms? Only a tiny minority of powerful “influencers” have access to anything remotely similar to that feeling now. Even they must game the algorithms and maintain an exhausting and relentless cadence of output or risk falling from favour at the peak of algorithmic attention down into the long tail of obscurity. Technological democratisations of power exist only as fleeting windows of opportunity —if indeed they are not, in fact, entirely illusory.
What we failed to appreciate back then was that soon after this privileged position of global reach was surrendered to us, power steadily accumulated in a yet more powerful and lucrative position, within a new Apparatus of Attention. Power over attention, over what content anyone sees and when, syphons all power from the ability to publish and disseminate content with a global reach. As the forces of capital subsumed ‘newmedia’ —whose products were never the tools they provided but rather the attention and content we provided while using them— they betrayed the decentralised promise of the underlying distributed network communications technologies by configuring them to significantly amplify centralisation and concentration of power.
Empires and fortunes were built in this conquest of power over human attention. An ongoing conquest whose guiding principle remains the extraction of “attention at all costs.” Operating under this imperative and driven by shareholder-profit lead, growth obsessed capitalism, the specifics of those costs are now all too gruesomely clear.1234 Even to Congressional and Senate Judiciary Committees and governments on each side of the Atlantic —bodies of oversight that appear to aspire only to repeated oversights, consistently being the very last to know about or take action against egregious corporate crimes, even those that result in large-scale societal harms.
When the central goal of the tool you are using is not to serve your purpose, but to motivate you to spend your next moment within the tool, and your next, and your next —to hold you captive unable to look away— then such a tool functions, de facto, as advertising. While using such tools, it is the Apparatus of Attention within which you dwell. This apparatus has gradually manifested as a total re-instantiation, by stealth, of society and culture within the Advertising Industrial Complex. Itself a re-instantiation of old-advertising, built on the Apparatus of Surveillance developed by the Military Industrial Complex during the cold war and the rise of the civil rights movement.
The foundations of this new Apparatus of Attention were laid in Amazon’s early product recommendation algorithms (those who gave attention to ‘x’, also gave attention to ‘y’), and Google’s PageRank algorithm (the accumulation of attention through flows of citation). Google soon began surveilling its users to provide more personalised and ‘relevant’ ads and results. Or in other words, by watching us, Google learned how we might be successfully manipulated in order to guarantee its ad space buyers more of our attention directed towards their products and services. Zuckerberg eagerly adopted this pattern of surveillance and manipulation to maximise ‘engagement’ and supercharge the addictive nature of Facebook’s social feeds —a fitting addition to his creepy platform, forever true to its origins as a tool for stalking undergrads at Harvard.
As the noise and information competing for our attention became increasingly overwhelming, the tools attenuating this signal became ever more sophisticated, all pervasive and self-reinforcing. So began the Tyranny of the Recommendation Algorithm. Enclosed in our personalised search and ads and our personalised social media streams and content feeds, we drew ever further into ourselves, were herded into ever more tightly defined ideological frames, becoming unable or unwilling to see anything that did not slip through the algorithmic holes in our omnipresent filter profiles within the Apparatus of Attention.
Two recent additions to this Apparatus of Attention hint at the logical conclusion of the mantric “attention at all costs” imperative.
Botshit Ouroboros
The first is Generative AI. An array of tools that promise frictionless generation of original text, speech, image, music and video. As with the democratisation of publishing content to a global audience, the democratisation of production afforded by these tools is not the empowerment it may at first seem. In reality Generative AI offers only extractive methods of production while further entrenching power over attention and intensifying the concentration of capital.
Through natural language interfaces, we are beckoned to enter a text prompt. In response, Generative AI tools spit out an averaged cultural bricolage of whatever we ask for. Within premium accounts, even charging us for the service of extracting and reconstituting this output, largely from the content we ourselves laboured over while we were held within the Apparatus of Attention5, —content that has been nonconsensually digested by the AI models within their pre-training phase, a crime committed under cover of night and obfuscated by the inscrutability of generative models— it then claims authorship of this stochastically reconstituted meat slurry McNugget and calls it new. These ill-gotten gifts drop into the world like owl pellets, evidence of what was consumed visible but jumbled, depleted of meaningful nourishment and (cultural) energy.
As with social media, the Mighty Oz that is Generative AI is fundamentally a technology of misdirection and sleight-of-hand6. It attempts to dazzle us with its tricks and beckons us not to see, not to see behind the curtain, not to notice the extraction and exploitation upon which it depends.
Our attention is further milked in both the creation and consumption of this now boundless flow of generative content. From these loose multi-sensory motions flows a sewer of pre-chewed and pre-digested forgeries, a deluge that reinforces the need for filtering, for the Apparatus of Attention itself. So what if you created a novel or a movie or an album. Chances are, it will forever lay unnoticed in the infinite long tail of the curve of attention, meaning: next to no one will ever read it, watch it, or listen to it. Culture is enclosed into a Botshit-loop. Profits are increasingly diverted from those labouring to create, to those operating the Apparatus of Attention.
The all too inevitable and yet more stifling phase of the Tyranny of the Recommendation Algorithm, will commence once these generative AI tools are connected directly to the algorithms of recommendation. With no humans involved in the creation process, other than the attention harvested from us to tune the recommendations, the resulting deluge will raise bot to bot cultural consumption to the inhuman pitch of algorithmic stock trading. A rhapsody of Botshit looping on autopilot —Botshit as a Service (BaaS). A shitstorm that quickly becomes a Botshit ouroboros; a continuous effluence of capital-risk-free algorithmic content ingestion, digestion and defecation; re-runs of re-runs of re-runs, ads infinitum; the beancounter’s wet dream of a low cost, low risk, fully predicted future of eternal safe bets; a never ending cycle of cash-cow hustling, cooked books and bad taxidermy.
Following the “attention at all costs” imperative, the resulting flow of divisive attention holding content, will over time, become ever more exquisitely tuned to accentuate the worst in us; to exploit the attack surface of human tribalism, barbarism, psychological and emotional weakness, cognitive bias and bigotry.7 We are already overwhelmed with bottomless content. Soon this bottomless supply will be re-rendered on demand, fully personalised to our most base desires as plotted by the algorithms of recommendation.
Fake Digital Crowns
The second and most recent addition to the Apparatus of Attention is Apple’s Vision Pro headset; an iPad strapped to your face (spacial facial computing?), or perhaps stereo eyephones.
Much has already been made of the location of this computer worn on the face. In its starting configuration the wearer sees the now familiar icons of Apple’s home screen superimposed on the world around them. But here’s the misdirection and sleight-of-hand, it is not reality over which the wearer sees these icons hovering, but rather digital footage of it rendered at an incredibly high resolution and frequency. Despite this impressive verisimilitude, reviewers have noted the downgrade of the fidelity of one’s natural vision this entails; the less than perfect mediation of reality rendered by its screens. Yet, within the Apparatus of Attention it is the moderation of reality that matters more than the mediation of it. Which content reaches us is what matters most. Which aspects of the world reach our attention is what counts, not the resolution at which they are rendered.
The Apple Vision Pro is the technological embodiment of the spectre of Steve Jobs; a hauntological realisation of his Reality Distortion Field8, manifesting a Potemkin augmentation of reality through sheer force of mythical personality projected from beyond the grave. A day after its release, at least one well known Bleeding Edge Adopter was already reporting that reality was left feeling empty and lacking when compared with their view through the Apple Vision Pro.9
Value is extracted from labour and from the land. Whatever value these new technologies might provide, it continues to be drawn from these same old wells. A fact they do not wish us to see.
Virtual space and generative space are capitalism’s latest approaches to evading the natural spatial and material limits of the real, while further indulging the delusion that value can be extracted there (the virtual) with zero consequences here (the real). The wide open vistas (spatial, cultural and cognitive) of Generative AI and the Apple Vision Pro, will be seized and mined like a coastline paradox10 reenactment of Manifest Destiny11. Once you’ve filled all your available living space with virtual goods at one scale, you will surely be able to simply zoom in (or out), to reveal endless space below (or above) into which to pour new gizmos, or to simply switch between different stored living space configurations using the appropriate gestural command. The overwhelming supply of attention mining content has until now been confined to the infinite doom-scroll of screen space, but this over abundance is about to invade the spatial dimensions through which those wearing these devices traverse.
"The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight."
- John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972
From TikTok’s toxic AI-lens “beauty” filters12 through to the multitude of AI-lens post-fx that retouch our photo memories to better match our dreams, and now the Apple Vision Pro, the latest addition to this growing suite of AI-lenses that imperceptibly alter or remove the aspects of reality we cannot bear to see.
Our collective voyage away from the real began deep in our simian past. Our initial departure triggered by our most primitive tools. Driven by the rate of technological change, we have since hurtled toward complete detachment at an ever accelerating velocity. With the Apple Vision Pro we finally have an actual physical dial with which to take the last steps on this journey and tune out reality entirely. On the top of each headset, sits a knob forged from solid aluminium, a scaled up version of the digital crown, familiar from the side of the Apple Watch. Through the full rotation of this, the wearer can look away from reality, it can be made to fully disappear from the wearer’s view.
As Randall Munroe makes beautifully clear in the drawing above13, we have been “looking away,” busy in our inaction and our empty words, and as Greta Thunberg says, even managing “to water down the bla, bla, bla,”14 for a very, very long time15. Yet, it is a cruel irony that it is now, just as the impact of human industrial activity becomes horrifically apparent, just as looking away becomes too difficult, if not impossible, that our technologies provide the opportunity for a fully immersive detachment from the real. Technologies that bring new ways not to see the fallout from decades of rampant capitalist exploitation and extraction of value from the soils of labour and the land; the harsh realities of the Anthropocene, the climate emergency and the sixth mass extinction. This is capitalism bracing for impact, readying off-ramps, panic-rooms and prepper bunkers, bolt holes of comfort in which to hide out, veg out and order out.
While its proximity to our faces ensures our attention is held and we are unable to look away, crucially the Apple Vision Pro simultaneously tricks us into looking away from reality, even when we believe we are still seeing it. It may seem pedantic or paranoid to highlight this deception. In fact it is the fundamental function of the Apple Vision Pro. This digital crown, the knob that dials out reality, is an imposter and a liar. Whichever way the knob is dialled, reality is never in fact presented to the wearer, it is always a digital rendition. This illusion of choice and control over the level of immersion provided by this dial, from an ‘augmented reality’ to a ‘virtual reality’ serves only to hide this fact. One might argue that the reality dialling knob functions as a miniature version of the device itself (they are both fake ‘digital crowns’) and that the deception and misdirection it employs, the lie it tells, in fact only echos the function of the Apple Vision Pro itself, offering, as it does, an entirely false choice between a mediated and unmediated world.16
Look Away, Don’t Look Away
Fundamental to all processes of mediation, as we have seen, is moderation. Fundamental to the Apple Vision Pro, and indeed all of the digital devices through which we view the world, is the filtering of reality to leave only the bits we wish to see, or put another way, the bits of reality the Apparatus of Attention encourages us to look at. With the arrival of the Apple Vision Pro the Apparatus of Attention can move from distraction and misdirection to active realtime erasure of bits of reality. While the hype focuses on the content it adds, on the stuff it prevents us from looking away from, the very essence of the functionality inside this trojan horse, is erasure. It is this breach of our cognitive security that will allow the recommendation algorithms to filter not just content but reality itself. With such computing power and high fidelity displays strapped to our face, items, people, aspects of our house, our urban environment, the surrounding landscape, entire sections of society, can simply be ‘air-brushed’ from view —be it via manual configuration or algorithmic ‘interpretation’ of our desires.
Like a dumbwaiter for vision, these conscience cancelling eyephones beckon us to not see the reality of the world around us. To not see the externalities involved in the development and construction of such technological marvels, to not see the destruction of our world from the ravages of extractive capitalism, to not see those suffering in the wake of our crimes, and to not see those exploited in order to perpetuate our state of comfortable denial and insatiable consumption.
Positioning the Apple Vision Pro along the axis of our divorce from the real, it enters our world as a vanguard and harbinger, a Facehugger —the second gestational phase of H. R. Geiger’s Xenomorph17— the long chord of its battery pack wrapped tightly around our necks, its paralytic hold softening and disorienting us while incubating its progeny within, a preoperative preparing for the insertion of Musk’s Neurolink and our final severance from the real —much as the iPhone prepared us for the Apple Vision Pro, nudging the Overton Window ever inwards.
It cannot be seen as pure coincidence that just as the (Generative AI) shit starts hitting the climate emergency fan, capitalism’s new Apparatus of Attention has us ensconced inside our filter bubbles; that the recommendation algorithms are set to extend their reach from the filtering and ordering of content to creating it; that the fake digital crown of the Apparatus of Attention has breached our vision of reality, ready to erase the bits we do not wish to see; that self-driving cars will literally enable us to traverse through the real without seeing it; that we are adorned with noise cancelling earphones and now reality cancelling eyephones; that the Tyranny of the Recommendation Algorithm is set to extend its remit from tugging at our attention and manipulating our views, to fully commandeering our attention and manipulating our view.18
Generative AI attempts to persuade us that there is no meaningful difference between a statistical linguistics and human intelligence or between stochastic generativity and human creativity. The Apple Vision Pro similarly attempts to persuade us that it can seamlessly bridge the divide between digital verisimilitude and the real, that there’s no meaningful difference between the digital mirage it presents the wearer and the reality they can see with the naked eye. The purpose of this deception is that, in service of the Apparatus of Attention, they both seek to replace the real with digital simulations of it. Replicas that can be more readily attenuated and filled with content and products, unbounded by the moral and material limits that inconveniently restrict the extraction of value from the real.
The Apparatus of Attention is more than endless distraction and diversion. The inscrutably smooth surfaces of Generative AI and the Apple Vision Pro refuse to show their workings or their workers. Just as the dumbwaiter was designed to conjure prepared meals through a silent, hidden servitude, as if entirely detached from labour, the Apparatus of Attention is formed of technologies of conscience cancellation, technologies that hide exploitation and obfuscate extraction, technologies that wipe our fingerprints from the scene of the crime, that perfect our alibis, that assuage the guilt and clear our conscience in order to keep us consuming. In other words, technologies that provide new ways of seeing, that in turn, provide endless ways of not seeing —keeping us forever looking away, while never looking away.
The logical conclusion of the mantric “attention at all costs” imperative is (the absence of) attention at the cost of all. Or in other words, the cost of attention being all that matters will be the loss of everything that matters.
“The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a ‘biological’ need.” - Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, ch. 1 (1969)
Yes, Sam. The word you are searching for is “saudade.” It is the melancholic longing for the world that we feel even as we set about destroying it. It is the loss we feel as we look away, and while our attention is fully captured, reality is tuned out, just as the real is finally reduced to ruins in powering our escape into pure simulation and forgery.
“[saudade] is often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again. It is a recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events, often elusive, that cause a sense of separation from the exciting, pleasant, or joyous sensations they once caused. It derives from the Latin word for solitude.”19
Google Gemini Demo (unintentionally revealing thematically and literally —via leaked post-edit deceptions— the centrality of sleight-of-hand in generative AI)
Capitalism appears to now be “saying the quiet bit out loud”, and proudly announcing its perfecting of the practice of exploiting the human psychological-cognitive attack-surface: https://delightyourusers.com/psychology
In the book Steve Jobs, biographer Walter Isaacson states that around 1972, while Jobs was attending Reed College, Robert Friedland “taught Steve the reality distortion field.” The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Jobs's ability to convince himself, and others around him, to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. It was said to distort his co-workers' sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and to make them believe that whatever impossible task he had at hand was possible. Jobs could also use the reality distortion field to appropriate others' ideas as his own, sometimes proposing an idea back to its originator, only a week after dismissing it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
Q: “out of curiosity, when you're not wearing the headset but are looking around at the same areas you've been looking at while wearing it - how do you feel?” - @cwizprod1
A: “Like everything is lacking.” - Robert Scoble, Feb 5, 2024 https://x.com/Scobleizer/status/1754365518679867697?s=20
The paradox that the measured length of a coastline is entirely scale variant. Meaning that it grows in line with the fidelity of the measurement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastline_paradox
Manifest destiny was the 19th-century belief that American settlers were destined to expand westward across North America, and that this belief was both obvious ("manifest") and certain ("destiny"). The belief was rooted in American exceptionalism, racial supremacy and Romantic nationalism, implying the inevitable spread of the Republican form of governance. It was one of the earliest expressions of American imperialism in the United States of America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
These threads, by Memo Akten, cataloging reactions to the TikTok filters, crush me. Devastating.
https://x.com/memotv/status/1628758590033993728?s=20
https://x.com/memotv/status/1629905103724396546?s=20
Huge thanks, as ever, to my good friend Dorian Moore, for his generous and insightful input and for pointing me to this particularly apt xkcd.
The detachment of our words from our actions and the stark consequences, is one of themes Naomi Klein explores so eloquently and compellingly in her masterpiece: DoppelGänger. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/453962/doppelganger-by-klein-naomi/9780241621301
The Apple Vision Pro is the technological embodiment of Jean Baudrillard’s fourth stage of simulation. As such it functions in exactly the opposite way to the sunglasses in John Carpenter’s film, They Live. Rather than revealing and unmasking the underlying ideological imperatives directed towards us in the socio-cultural environment in which we are immersed, as the glasses in the film do, the Apple Vision Pro further disguises them. This new lens adds another layer of mediation, one that is entirely in service of reinforcing and rendering imperceptible those socio-cultural imperatives that make up our ideological framework and through which we moderate and make sense of our desires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
Despite the best efforts of Apple’s legendary industrial design prowess, the Apple Vision Pro, as would likely be true of all large computers that must be strapped over one’s face, for me at least, remains disconcertingly reminiscent of a Facehugger. A fictional parasitoid featured in the Alien movie franchise, that once attached to a victim’s face cannot be forcibly removed without fatal injury. As such, it is perhaps what it implants within us, the embryo of its progeny that will burst from within us, about which we should be most concerned.
I‘m not suggesting that the the Apparatus of Attention or the latest technologies of “looking away” are part of some carefully planned conspiracy. One that is timed to have us looking in the other direction, just as the line plotting the North Atlantic’s increase in surface temperature soars far above the messy tangle of fluctuating waves plotted for even the warmest of recent years. Rather that capitalism has a strong tendency to feed our habits and our desires, whether they are healthy for us and the planet or not.
Over the past thirty years or more we have been beset with an abundance of evidence detailing the detrimental impact of human activity upon our climate. Yet we repeatedly choose distraction over action, division over solidarity, blame over responsibility, paths of escape and ways of looking away over facing inconvenient truths. We have been shuffling in this direction for years, even as the CO2 levels and the global temperatures rose, as everything felt more fragile and uncertain, as the lion’s share of wealth flowed into the deepest of pockets leaving the rest of us working around the clock to make ends meet, and as the toxic legacy we leave for our children became ever more stark. With every choice to look away, to delay action, to slip further into denial, to continue the destructive and extractive onslaught upon our precious planet, we fall into an ever deeper embrace with our gadgets of distraction. Our intoxicating affair with these tools of procrastination compounds over time. The longer it lasts, the more the pressure to act builds and the more the pressure to act builds the more desperate we are to flee the scene of the crime. So we devise ever more beguiling, sophisticated and power hungry technologies to insulate us from our climate’s violent revenge and from facing our responsibilities.
Another unmentioned aspect of this and every other micro-electronic device, and even just electricity too is the effect that of the now all-pervasive micro-electronic radiation has on our brains, nervous systems, our bodies altogether, the bodies of the non-humans and even of trees too!
Check out the book by Arthur Firstenberg titled The Invisible Rainbow. Read the last very shocking chapter first. The book features approximately 2000 foot notes.
Really interesting. 3 things came to mind;
1. The Slavoj Zizek quote that "Ideology Is the Original Augmented Reality". For me the notion that placing a headset directly over our entire field of vision is the ultimate immersion of simulacra only highlights how nullified we've become to the fact that regardless of AR/VR headsets the majority of what enters our field of vision is manmade and artificial. Even when it's seemingly real, like a park or the "countryside", it's arguably a heavily engineered environment to meet human needs (leisure / agriculture).
2. I recall Evgeny Morozov making an observation that 'surveillance capitalism' (and the associated colonisation of attention) isn't necessarily the core ideology of Big Tech, it's just been a highly effective means for Big Tech to monetise and grow. As such the monetisation of attention is the consequence of Big Tech, rather than the cause or ambition. Which I wonder if might explain why Big Tech finds it so difficult to foresee, or even appropriately react to, most of the issues cause if "commanding attention" itself is only the biproduct of their products rather than their core expertise?
3. It feels to me that within the issue of “attention at all costs” we're essentially in battle of three different interpretation of the noun 'costs';
• an amount that has to be paid or spent to buy or obtain something (ie. how much $ BIG TECH can make)
• the effort, loss, or sacrifice necessary to achieve or obtain something (ie. the burden SOCIETY has to shoulder for that $)
• legal expenses, especially those allowed in favour of the winning party or against the losing party in a suit (ie. the benefits or risks GOVERNMENTS face in regulating, or not regulating, an entire industry)