Picking up where I left off in the introduction to Readings on Resistance, I offer you a brief reflection on the first source for this series: a brief lecture titled Distance, Attention, and Being: Thinking About Media.
After listening to this lecture and digging into several of the cited sources, here’s the message I’d like to share with my subscribers: In our resistance to the colonization of the human psyche, we won’t get very far unless we begin with a re-examination of our devotion to devices.
To begin, professor David McDonald raises a question we’ve learned to ask more often than we used to, but still not often enough. And the problem with this question isn’t so much that it’s frequently unasked, but that it’s so tragically unheard.
If love is attention, what does it mean that we are paying so much attention to our devices?
The question is plainly worded, but whether the person raising the question screams it from mountaintops or whispers it into our ears, it often fails to penetrate our defenses. In cultures that programmatically obscure the meaning of love, we cannot hear this question. In economies that treat attention as a scarce economic resource, we regard the question as a footnote to what truly matters: our desire to consume and to collapse distance.
This is a desire for oblivion, for unconsciousness. Unless we recognize this desire for what it is, we can neither write nor think nor relate to each other as fully human. However, when we do recognize this desire, we learn something uncanny about ourselves, as I suggested at the end of my own initial response.
A year ago, I would’ve responded to this question differently because I had a different relationship with my devices. Of course, my relationship with them changes imperceptibly with every interaction, but over the span of a year and with the benefit of hindsight, the cumulative change becomes unmistakable.
Today, I feel strangely comfortable with paying so much attention to my devices. This comfort seems strange to me because it runs counter to most of what I write and read about our relationship with technology. The theory is that we should all be reducing our dependency on our devices. The reality is that we are normalizing total dependency on our silicon-based companions.
If attention is the beginning of devotion, what does it mean that we are paying so much attention to our devices? I think it partly means that we’re consumed in a pandemic of idol worship.
Idol worship, in my view, is the opposite of a defense against the enclosure of the human psyche. It represents a total capitulation which, through an occlusion of awareness, the worshipers celebrate as a total victory.
Here, we arrive at a view of the problem about which more has been written and said than can possibly be consumed, and I see no point in adding to this well-intended over-production. Instead, I’ll return to Sigmund Freud’s argument that “every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.”
On my path to salvation, professor McDonald’s lecture heartened me not only with its insights into seminal texts but also with its correction of the inciting question: It seems so obvious to us that we are paying much attention to our devices that it’s hard for us to notice that we are, in fact, being occupied by them. This is an essential distinction, and paying attention, not only to our devices but also to each other, is where the resistance to this occupation begins.
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About the Author
My name is Lev Janashvili, and I am the publisher of five blogs focused on five horizons of possibility.
LJ-Pro (levjanashvili.substack.com) is my professional blog in search of alternatives to the perverse incentives of the attention economy.
MISM (mism.substack.com) is dedicated to understanding media.
M2D (m2dialogue.substack.com) studies the subtle art of maintaining balance at the intersection of matter and metaphor.
DaaS (daas.substack.com) explores dialogue as a path to becoming fully human.
BS”D (bsdm.substack.com) studies fruitful responses to fractal falsehood.
I bring to this work more than 50 years of life experience, not counting my experience in any past lives. The most relevant skills I continually develop are the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. My math skills are an area of development, probably in my future lives. If you’d like to hire me in this lifetime, start by subscribing to LJ-Pro.