Now I'm the salaryman

I.

He who controls spice, controls the universe.
—Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

Spice is the most precious resource in Frank Herbert's Dune. It's a necessity for inter-planetary space travel. The empire would fall into small, fragmented and isolated worlds without it. If you can control spice, you control everything.

We have a similar, yet even more precious resource in our world, attention. A commodified resource harvested at scale. No, it's not visible or concrete in the same sense as spice is in Dune, but it very much exists. There is a war for attention, and we, the original owners of this resource, are on the losing side.

For long, harvesting attention at scale was near impossible. The harvesters had no access to the origin of the resource itself. Attention was distributed within the sensory fields of humans sparsely spread across the planet. In Dune however, spice is only available on the planet Arrakis. Control Arrakis, you control the spice. Control the source, you control the resource.

Yet our planet's harvesters found a way to control the source, a device that sits in our pockets, a computer in your house. They also solved the other missing piece: understanding the biological mechanisms that shape your actions, mostly dopamine. And with these new devices perfectly attuned to capture your attention, the war tilted in favor of these mass harvesters.

Once you succeed in harvesting attention at scale, you can do anything you desire. If you want, you can become the ruler of the most powerful economy on the planet, no matter your background. The exchange rate for attention-to-power seems quite favorable.

Alternatively, you might realize that every business on Earth depends on attention, else it would be cut off from their customers, just like without spice you are cut off from the inter-planetary economy. And so you could become a merchant of attention. Exploit attention by selling it to the highest bidder and become one of the most valuable companies on the planet, valued in trillions (Meta, parent of Facebook, Alphabet, parent of Google). Or maybe sell the devices themselves that enable attention harvesting (Apple, Samsung).

II.

While living in Tokyo, I made it a habit to observe people whenever I took the train. I don't know why, other than the fact that people looked so captivatingly beautiful. Not in the sense of when you see a strikingly beautiful person, but in some odd way of the beauty in normal people doing mundane things. There was something beautiful in mundane mannerisms, or their facial shapes, or clothes, or voices. My favorites were those who slept sitting in a half-upright position with their head bobbing back and forth, lingering in a state of sleeping and not-sleeping. Until they knew, as if deep inside their bones, that they had arrived at their stop.

But doing so, I made a somewhat sad observation. Nearly everyone from students to salarymen in their suits who were not sleeping from exhaustion were glued to their phones. Just as harvesting spice is destroying Arrakis, so is harvesting attention damaging our minds, and our ability to live a fuller life. Every moment of boredom is immediately capitalized and exploited.

The only ones doing what I was doing, that is intensely observing their surroundings, were children and babies. At times I felt a connection to them, like we were the only ones doing the same thing; intensely looking at others, completely awed by the natural beauty of their surroundings. Babies still maintain this natural curiosity in the mundane (mundane to most, not to them). And they seem to be the only ones not yet fully accessible by attention harvesting devices. (though I've seen far too many cases contrary to this)

You've probably seen it as well, riding in a bus. Noticing a baby next to you staring deep into your soul, eyes wide open without blinking, out of pure awe and curiosity in seeing something beautiful and completely new. In that moment, whatever they are looking at is probably the most amazing thing they've seen in their life. Now imagine if we could maintain that form of attention even after growing up.

III.

Luckily though, we seem to have some level of autonomy over our lives. At least for now. But a world where our minds are completely controlled by attention harvesters, and exploited for the highest return on investment, doesn't seem like an impossibility. Again, the mechanism to control our minds is relatively simple; it takes an input into the sensory fields, performs some operations in a somewhat predictable manner, then produces an output, often an action. So far our minds are adaptive enough that the harvesting machines cannot keep up, though doomscrolling algorithms are slowly solving this issue as well, learning from your preferences and continuously surfacing just the right input to make you want more.

If you lose control over your attentional space, you become an entity that operates based on mental schemas implanted by attention harvesters compelling you to act. A machine without any humanity left.

So it seems that the most effective, and perhaps the only, way to combat this is to take control over your physical attentional space. Control over personal physical space becomes the last defense, just as control over Arrakis is the focal point for the great holy war in Dune.

We ought to have better ways of fighting against the industrial harvesters of attention. Perhaps some level of moral outcry is necessary towards attention harvesting devices that invade our physical environments. In Japan, I rode in a taxi which had monitors right in front of my face, playing ads nonstop for the whole ride. There are advertisement trucks roaming Tokyo streets playing loud sounds. Nearly all the onsens (public baths) have massive screens playing TV shows, even in the saunas.

Schopenhauer wrote a fittingly passionate rant about how the crack of a whip in public invades an individual's attentional space and disrupts good thought.

But to pass from genus to species, the truly infernal cracking of whips in the narrow resounding streets of a town must be denounced as the most unwarrantable and disgraceful of all noises. It deprives life of all peace and sensibility.

Nothing gives me so clear a grasp of the stupidity and thoughtlessness of mankind as the tolerance of the cracking of whips. This sudden, sharp crack which paralyses the brain, destroys all meditation, and murders thought, must cause pain to any one who has anything like an idea in his head.¹

In Dune, the natives of the planet Arrakis had faith. Their beliefs, though artificially planted, gave them power to fight against the overpowering great houses with better technology and resources to harvest spice.

Perhaps we ought to have a faith that cultivates and protects our attention. Holy sites which we could enter, giving space for our attention to flourish. There could be community-driven rituals, like that of Sunday church. Where you enter a calm and meditative space. You don't talk, devices are forbidden. Just a serene space that lets your mind wander. You could walk around, and think. Or sit on the floor and meditate, or even take a nap.

IV.

On Teshima Island, Japan, I found one such place, the Teshima Art Museum. Once you enter, photos, phones and talking are not allowed. You walk around this expansive open space, where the flat concrete ground is polished to feel smooth to walk over. Above you is an odd flat dome-like single-piece ceiling with two circular cutouts.

It's airy and cool, despite the +34 °C weather outside. It's quiet, despite the 40 or so people inside of it.

The space has this pull into a meditative state. It could be the physical space, or the people, all of whom seemed to be in a similarly attentive state; perhaps it was contagious. I spent nearly 4 hours in that odd space. I walked around, I thought a lot, and I observed. I lay on my back and looked through the cutouts at the clouds. I lay on my stomach, observing these odd holes in the ground where droplets emerged.

I vividly remember the shape and glassy texture of these droplets as they glided over the smooth concrete floor, maintaining their glassy round structure due to the surface tension with the concrete that was treated with a water-repellent. Once enough droplets had come out, they would suddenly cascade into other droplets forming larger pools. I remember being completely captivated by this simple motion of something so simple as water droplets on a concrete floor.

In that space, attention harvesters had no power. Though only for a slight moment, I had full control over my attention. And it led me to experience intense beauty in what might on the surface seem completely mundane.

V.

I originally wrote the core of this essay while still in Japan, and now notice I lack full context. I had no real responsibilities, wandering around Japan with endless time on my hands to let the environment awe me. But I've since returned to Finland, begun a corporate job with equally long hours as those salarymen sleeping in the morning and evening trains in Japan. And I realize that I've had fewer such experiences of pure forms of attention. The casual flow of life and responsibility pulls on you in ways that make you feel like you cannot afford such moments.

Now I'm the salaryman.

I'm busy, glued to my devices, and rarely experience those moments of attention. Looking back on my time of wander and wonder, my conviction is even stronger. I need to find my way back to the spaces where attention harvesters cannot reach, where your attention is sacred, and where you're pulled into that state from which pure attention can emerge. I need to find my way back to seeing beauty in a water droplet.

Notes

1. On Noise from Essays of A. Schopenhauer ↳