Attention as the coin of the realm

There is general consensus that attention has now become a dominant commodity and driver within the new economy and, sadly, the Trump is its master. An op-ed over the weekend in the Times argued, plausibly, that on balance the failure of Democrats to meaningfully challenge him for dominating the news cycle is a large part of what dooms us to semi-relevance and failure.

But Trump also serves as the primary exemplar of the fact that attention-seekers are fucking assholes, on average. We can't help but to hate them because they crowd out airspace that might otherwise be filled with interesting, compelling, worthy things.

So each of us has to cultivate habits of self-management to titrate exposure to all the sources of noise outside of ourselves to figure out what we want, even as we also figure out a way to ask for enough attention from the outside world to sell our respective wares and flourish. We all need some attention, we just don't want to hog it. At least, most of us don't.

Nb. On the bike ride to work I got to thinking about my conversational style and how it maps onto this whole theme. Not infrequently I walk away from conversations (for example with Sarah Lu at Alan Haig's parents' service this weekend) feeling that I learned less about the person I had been talking to than I should have because I reflexively wedged in my own experiences, tangential to what we had been talking about. For example her child (daughter?) is at McGill and I jumped in with how I had been close to Montreal this summer while in Lake Placid. Who gives a fuck? Where did that come from? We should have transitioned to talking about what her child is studying. As we can see from my hedging I am not even sure of her child's gender. Not good. 

This tendency must come from feeling like I am always competing for airtime/attention. But most likely what happens is the person I was talking to walks away thinking, at some level, "what a jerk."

I really do need to go back and watch Egoyan's early movies and revisit how he thematizes the performance of the self.