Attention Requires Intention
“Enlightenment is in fact already inherent in our experience, if only we can recognize it.” -Daniel P. Brown
How we attend shapes what we see.
I wrote a feature for Areo Magazine in 2019 called Attention Requires Intention. This was when the attention crisis was still mostly discussed as a systems problem—regulate the platforms, change the incentives, and wait for someone else to fix it.
The piece argues that the harder work is individual, and distinguishes technical intentions—which change how we use technology—from philosophical intentions, which change how we think and feel about it. The first without the second is a losing game. Technology is not an object; it's a faculty. The way we use technology is not different from who we are, insofar as we know who we are our how we use technology.
The article was shared 30 times and Cal Newport and Matthew Crawford both had kind things to say about it.
These days, there are three things in the piece I'd now put differently:
"The attention economy" is too shallow a framing—it sounds like a business model you could regulate away, when what we're dealing with is closer to what Paul Kingsnorth calls the Machine, a force that adopts many scapegoats but hardly ever gets identified.
The problem isn't what we attend to; it's how we attend at all. Iain McGilchrist gave me the vocabulary I was missing: the Machine isn't merely exploiting our attention, it's the left hemisphere's mode of attending—explicit, fragmented, quantified, and competitive—externalized as infrastructure and amplified at civilizational scale, teaching us a way of attending that is machinic rather than human.
And the most difficult part is that a flow state is not the same thing as a pure experience: scrolling is a flow state, and so is love, and so is deep work, and from the inside they can feel the same. That discernment is not something you do once and then get on with your life. It's the whole practice.
I still stand by the notion that technology is not an object, but rather a faculty. Everything above follows from taking that seriously.
All of this material now informs a workshop I facilitate called Intentional Attention.