Being an Artist in the Great Attention War

How I Realized That Artists Are Basically as Bad as Big Tech

A few days ago, I was having a good conversation with a documentary filmmaker and she was talking about a film she was working on connected to indigenous Native American communities in the Midwest. She was hoping the film would find a large audience and make an impact.

To have a social impact, she said, the film would need to find a way to get some attention. We soon got to talking about the current state of the attention economy, which is reshaping the film industry.

The term “attention economy” has been thrown around a lot in recent years, especially to describe the tendency of tech companies to hook users onto their apps to monetize their attention through advertising.

One of the most prominent figures to call out Big Tech for toxic attention capitalization is Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. 

In 2013, Harris circulated an internal Google presentation decrying tech firms for leveraging our psychological weaknesses to keep users addicted to apps, websites, and phones. He likened apps to slot machines that hijacked our healthy, human social instincts such as reciprocity to keep us posting and messaging each other to the benefit of the platform.

Social media apps were being engineered to play on our dopamine systems, and platforms like Facebook were pulling one over on their users. Harris reminded us that the users were the real product and that they were being sold to the highest-bidding advertisers. Our attention had become the new raw resource of the 21st century, something to establish dominance over in online spaces, just as oil was in the industrial era of the robber barons.

Harris made some waves with his public outcry and was featured in the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” which became a sort of high-water mark for tech’s collective reckoning regarding these issues.

But that’s Silicon Valley doing Silicon Valley things. I, however, live in LA and work in the film industry. I’m an indie filmmaker, not a robber baron. And yet, I’m also vying in our current attention economy.

We’re in an interesting moment. Netflix is the only profitable streaming service and its success seems to coincide with a larger trend we’ve been living through: technology and entertainment converging on the same attention agenda.

Remember in 2017 when Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings said that the company’s biggest competitor was sleep? That was a nice joke. Now that same statement feels more domineering in a world of peak content and a thousand streaming services trying to win you over. Netflix has put up a good fight against sleep, as well as against linear television and the host of other streamers that are struggling to keep up.

Netflix’s agenda as a platform seems to align with the old agenda of Tech Giants: pull in your eyeballs and keep them there. In a world where nearly 65% of consumers are serial churners (i.e. they are canceling and resubscribing to services based on the availability of desirable content), Netflix competes fiercely for our attention. And it does so to prove its worth to shareholders every quarter. Enter social media.

The rise of social media as entertainment only intensifies Netflix’s mission. The Great Attention War is being fought on all fronts now, on social media and streaming platforms alike. According to an Accenture survey that came out this week, two-thirds of consumers consider user-generated content (social media content) to be as entertaining as traditional forms of entertainment. Content is content is content, vertical or widescreen, no budget or tentpole blockbuster.

Now I hear TV series aren’t being greenlit because they aren’t “second screen” enough, i.e. viewers aren’t able to scroll Instagram or swipe through TikTok as they watch without losing the plot. Shows are literally being designed so that you can split your attention between screens.

And in the Great Attention War, I wish I could say I’m a neutral Switzerland, but I’m not. I’m an artist trying to get you to watch my stuff. So how am I any different than Netflix with its binge-ready reality TV? How am I any different than Meta? Shit, how am I any different than Marlboro?

One classic bit of feedback to good, honest artists is that they don’t market themselves enough. “No one knows about your work! You need to get out there!”

Understandably, a lot of artists feel uncomfortable playing that game. We got into art and not into sales for a reason. And as Tristan Harris has said, vying for attention is a race to the bottom of the human brainstem. But at the same time, that’s how our world works today. Maybe the pathway to the mind and heart starts with the appeal to the brainstem.

At the end of the day, I would hope my work is more than an entertainment nicotine fix. And I’d like to find pathways to audiences that don’t abuse dopamine receptors. But quieter advertising seems less effective nowadays. It gets drowned out too easily.

Maybe we should just accept that we’re living through an era of oversaturated and overstimulating media. Every millisecond of our attention is ripe for picking, whether for a sticky ad, a sticky song, or a sticky new TV series. Everything’s sticky. 

And how should art function now? How should hard-hitting documentaries with real social causes bring in more audiences? More stickiness?

No, not me. I’m personally going to buck this trend. Maybe I’ll go offline and get off the grid, far away from the attention economy. I’ll do it to make a statement.

Yea, that’s the way. I’ll draw attention to myself by not drawing attention to myself in order to draw attention to the fact that everyone is trying to draw your attention.

We’re fucked.