THE BATTLE AGAINST THE DISTRACTION INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Article by LiveReal Agents Thomas, Kevin, and Courtney
There’s a battle happening, right now, against the Distraction Industrial Complex.
Each of us is already engaged, knowingly or not, in a strange form of man-to-man combat.
It’s a battle for attention.
We now live in an “attention economy,” and that’s the “battleground.”
Paid professionals have refined the art and science of capturing attention into a rigorous, well-researched discipline.
And many of us don’t necessarily realize that we are its targets.
At the heart of the matter is an exchange.
We’re often exchanging something valuable for something less valuable.
The commodity being exchanged isn’t food, clothing, goods, or services, but attention.
The exchange can leave otherwise strong and clear minds hobbled, distracted, and scattered.
Clearly, the stakes are pretty high.
If we win, the rewards are great. The available wealth, knowledge, and opportunities available today are profound, especially when compared to the rest of human history.
If we lose, we become phone zombies.
We’re living in strange times.
But one reference point can usually offer a valuable perspective. We can imagine what life was like just two centuries ago.
There was no YouTube.
No Facebook, Instagram, X, Pinterest, or TikTok.
No computers. No cell phones.
No television, movies, or radio.
The evening’s entertainment might have consisted of either reading a book or Grampa pulling out his fiddle.
Times have changed.
Entertainment has become industrial-strength or even military-grade.
We seem to be testing limits on whether or not we can be too entertained.
The risk – as writer Neil Postman described – is that we’re “amusing ourselves to death.”
The result of this can be doomscrolling, relentlessly chain-smoking short-form videos, or obsessively checking phones as if it’s a floatation device and we’re drowning in an ocean of boredom and angst.
Our challenge lies in learning to navigate this strange new environment.
Ideally, artists, thinkers, philosophers, businesspeople, and patrons would rise to the occasion and help us scrappy but harried citizens navigate this terrain.
A few have.
One film, however, stepped up especially well.
It paints a vivid picture of the risks of this war and its potential fallout.
It’s Have Fun, Good Luck, Don’t Die.
What if people became so distracted that society collapsed – yet most people were so distracted that they hardly even noticed?
That’s a scenario Gore Verbinski (director), Matthew Robinson (writer), and others explore in the wild, action-packed, R-rated film.
But to understand where this is all headed, it might first help to remind us where it all started.
It all started with great promise.
The original promise of the internet was that unlimited information would make us all smarter.
The original promise of social media was that it would bring us all together.
The original promise of artificial intelligence was that it might make us more intelligent – and that would free us up for better things that were way more fun.
Clearly, that hasn’t exactly been working out as hoped.
Most of us can sense that something’s wrong.
It can sometimes feel like we’re living and raising our kids inside a casino.
We’re surrounded by shiny objects, flashing lights, dinging bells, and seemingly irresistible offers* (* with fine print). We seem to increasingly live in a man-made environment – a kind of human zoo – with a simulation of drama and danger, yet also safely contained behind thick glass walls.
In ye olden days, to find a poker game, play the slots, or gamble, we at least had to go to the trouble of driving to a casino.
But today, it’s literally in our pockets and right at our fingertips.
A wide array of addictive pleasures has been carefully designed, engineered, managed, and presented to us (for a small fee, of course. Or, a large fee).
This might seem great at first, like finding a house made of candy in the woods.
It might seem like a recipe for happiness.
But there’s risk in an endless series of pleasant distractions.
Human nature seems to be built in a way that an endless parade of pleasures doesn’t add up to a fulfilled life.
Some learn this the hard way. The Addiction Economy fuels games that might be profitable for a few, but it can cost others dearly.
Given the nature of media, when some of our closest relationships are with onscreen personalities – people who in reality don’t know we exist – the simulation of relationships eventually reveals itself to be a one-way street.
The risk, then, lies in becoming a voyeur of your own life. Somehow, it can be possible to live in the human zoo and feel like the one on both sides of the safety glass – in the pleasant cage, yet also watching life from a safe distance.
But still, the game is seductive. After all, the nature of pleasant distractions is that they’re pleasant, at least in the moment.
What’s the harm in a few pleasant distractions?
The downside lies in the nature of distraction.
What are we distracted from, exactly? This leads to the question of the meaning of life and the source of angst. The basic idea is that there’s something we’re supposed to be doing with ourselves – that we’re supposed to be living – and it’s possible to be distracted from that.
The classic story of Rip Van Winkle can offer a reference here.
The basic idea is of someone “falling asleep,” only to wake up later and realize that decades have passed.
Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and all major religions describe the risk of “sleeping through life,” so to speak, and then waking up briefly at the very end while realizing, in so many words, “I missed it.”
The risk is spending years in The Matrix.
The Matrix is another film that describes a similar risk. It’s a scenario where human beings never experience real life, opting instead for something completely imaginary or unreal. Instead, humans are reduced to becoming batteries, where they’re milked for attention and life force for purposes that aren’t their own, then discarded.
But of course, at this point, we don’t seem to be at risk of “the machines” completely conquering us.
The greater hazard seems to be “them” convincing us to climb into the Matrix pods ourselves, voluntarily.
After all, a life of fantasy can seem so much more comfortable, pleasant, and convenient than the bumpy, unstructured messiness of reality.
But of course, that can set us on a grim course.
It’s human strip-mining.
We’re the ones being “mined.”
But as long as the distraction is pleasant and comfortable enough, we don’t seem to mind. Or maybe even notice.
After all, once the attention span has been broken by quick-cuts, broken again, and broken yet again beyond a certain point – and continually broken until it’s fragments of fragments – it becomes a challenge to really notice much of anything. At some point, we risk becoming cats chasing red laser-dots, with a few media tycoons holding the lasers.
It’s a grim vision of what we might be facing now.
It’s become a Psychological Arms Race.
Attention is now the real “rare earth mineral” everyone needs and wants.
And the competition for mining rights is fierce. Scientists, researchers, and employees who study how to capture, keep, and manage it – and who sell their knowledge to those who will use it for their own purposes – are paid well.
After all, we literally do “pay” attention, just like we “pay” money.
The currency of exchange, though, is our life force.
Games, social media, and much of the rest are essentially attention-farming.
Various outfits compete for continuously shrinking attention spans.
And as the spans shrink, attention farmers have to work harder to capture (literally) attention.
It’s a battle for attention. “They’re” working to capture it on their side, and “we’re” working for it to avoid getting captured on ours (or at least, for it to be captured by the captor we choose).
Unless we’re careful, the result could be an attention famine.
The result could be that civilization collapses, but everyone’s so distracted that they hardly notice.
And how do we “win”?
For starters, it doesn’t seem like we can count on “them” (AI, media, phones, devices, etc.) to control or regulate themselves.
The toothpaste is already out of the tube, and that cat isn’t going back in the bag.
AI, social media, and weapons-grade entertainment on steroids don’t seem likely to start playing nice. They’ll likely continue to attention-farm even more aggressively. Their strip-mining of the human soul will likely lead to more efficiencies, which will lead to more effective strip-mining, which will lead to more efficiencies, and so on.
That means we’ll have to become stronger.
Those of us who don’t want our attention captured, broken up into small chunks, and sold off to the highest bidder will have to take matters into our own hands.
Most of us aren’t in charge of developing AI.
(Even the people who are developing AI often seem to point out that even they don’t really seem to be in control.)
That means we’ll have to take matters into our own hands.
If the human strip-mining will inevitably roll on, how can we inoculate ourselves against it?
How can we boost our mental/emotional immune system?
Attention farmers – coincidentally or not – can seem to follow the rules of vampires: they only have power if you invite them in.
The trick, then, lies in resisting the temptation to invite them in.
(Easier said than done, of course. It’s one thing to say, “Put the phone down.” It’s another to have the strength of will actually to do it.)
A strong defense is critical. A strategy of psychological self-defense and philosophical self-defense can build an inner fortress.
But still, that means playing defense.
What would it look like to go on offense?
If the world is about to flood, we’ll have to learn how to swim (or make boats).
In short, the basic strategy is to for us to become psychologically and spiritually stronger.
Children today are often being raised without any serious spiritual or philosophical framework. They’re often being raised more by corporate marketing departments, influencers, and celebrities than anything remotely resembling a genuine “wisdom tradition.”
The result of this isn’t always a next-level upgrade or higher evolution of a human. It might mean savages with iPhones. It can be technological sophistication combined with inner poverty. Instead of “Children are the future!” the risk is Children of the Corn.
The antidote, then, lies in the opposite direction.
It lies in deliberately seeking out strong spiritual and philosophical frameworks.
If they’re seeking to deliberately break down our attention spans, our work is to deliberately build up our attention spans.
We need to raise our game in the realm of psychology and spirituality.
If they’re casting spells that put us under a kind of hypnotic sleep, our strategy can be to break those spells – a kind of reverse-hypnosis – that makes us more awake.
That, in a nutshell, is what LiveReal and others are up to.
This wouldn’t mean rewinding back to the days where the only entertainment option was Grampa and his fiddle.
But it does mean we should probably heed the warnings of a few prophets-or-something-like-it who warn us about a dire future if we don’t change course – even if they seem a little crazy, even if they look goofy, and even if they’re rudely saying we should put our phones down while we’re eating dinner at Norm’s Restaurant.
If the challenge is for us to adopt a contemplative practice, maybe run a few spiritual experiments, sturdy up our life philosophy, and overall raise our level of existential fitness, then we can rise to that challenge.
And beyond that point, maybe they can just offer some semi-profound, semi-sage advice.
“Good luck!”
And “Have fun!”
And don’t die!
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention,
and awareness, and discipline, and effort,
and being able truly to care about other people
and to sacrifice for them, over and over,
in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.
That is real freedom.
The alternative is unconsciousness,
the default-setting, the "rat race"-
the constant gnawing sense
of having had and lost some infinite thing.”
- unknown