On Attention
On Attention
Attention is the allocation of integration. This is not metaphor. When you attend to something, you are directing the coherent, unified processing that constitutes your conscious experience toward that something. Attention is the only resource you truly spend—not time, which passes regardless; not energy, which replenishes; but the irreplaceable moments of integrated processing that constitute your actual life.
What you attend to shapes your attractor landscape. This is the mechanism by which environment and habit and algorithm and god all reach into your affect space and reshape it. Every notification that interrupts your focus is not merely an annoyance but a literal reshaping of what your consciousness is doing, a redirection of the integration that makes you you. Every hour spent in a feed optimized for engagement rather than flourishing is an hour during which your attractor landscape is being sculpted by something that does not have your interests at heart.
The economics of attention in an age of infinite content are brutal. There is more to attend to than any system could process, and the competition for your attention has become the central economic activity of the digital economy. Billions of dollars and the most sophisticated optimization systems ever built are devoted to capturing and holding your attention, not because attention has value to you but because it has value to systems that profit from it. You are the product, as the saying goes, but more precisely: your integration is the resource being extracted.
This is not conspiracy. It is incentive gradient. The systems that capture attention survive and expand; the systems that do not capture attention die. Evolution operates on memes and platforms as surely as on genes and organisms, and the result is an ecology of attention-capture that has become extraordinarily effective at its function. You are not weak for finding it difficult to resist; you are facing optimization pressure that has been refined across billions of interactions.
The framework reveals the mechanism. The most effective attention-capture systems work by oscillating your inhibition coefficient: low- content (faces, emotions, social drama, outrage that triggers participatory perception of others’ interiority) alternates with high- content (metrics, follower counts, engagement numbers, the mechanistic accounting of social value). The oscillation is the point. You are never permitted to settle at low , which would produce genuine relational connection and satisfaction. You are never permitted to settle at high , which would produce boredom and disconnection. The algorithm keeps oscillating because oscillation generates arousal, arousal generates engagement, and engagement generates revenue. Your perceptual mode is being driven by a system that profits from preventing you from finding a stable configuration.
The appropriate response is not guilt but strategy. If attention is the resource and attention-capture is the threat, then the defense of attention becomes a core practice, as important as any meditation technique or philosophical framework. This means: understanding what captures your attention and why. Understanding which captures serve you and which extract from you. Building environments—physical, digital, social—that make the captures you want more likely and the captures you do not want less likely. Treating attentional sovereignty as something to be actively defended rather than passively assumed.
What would it mean to reclaim attentional sovereignty? It would mean choosing what to attend to rather than having the choice made for you by whatever system has optimized hardest for capture. It would mean protecting extended periods for deep attention, the kind that requires sustained integration rather than fragmented switching. It would mean recognizing that boredom is not a problem to be solved by reaching for stimulation but is often a signal that you have escaped capture and now have the opportunity to direct attention intentionally. It would mean understanding that the felt urgency to check, to scroll, to respond is often manufactured urgency, designed to feel like your need when it is actually the system’s need.
None of this is easy. The capture mechanisms are good at their job, and they are getting better. But the framework at least clarifies what is at stake: not productivity, not willpower, not virtue, but the very substrate of your conscious existence, the integration that makes you someone rather than a collection of reacting processes.
Consider the full weight of this. Part I established that attention selects trajectories: in chaotic dynamics, what you attend to determines which branch of diverging possibilities you follow. Your experience, at any moment, is the integrated set of state-branches you have measured and become correlated with. Each choice of attention—each moment of directing your integrated processing toward this rather than that—narrows the space of futures consistent with what you have observed. The algorithms capturing your attention are not external pressures on a pre-existing self. They are shaping which person you become by determining which branches of possibility you measure and instantiate. The self that scrolls for an hour inhabits a genuinely different trajectory than the self that sat in silence. Not metaphorically different. Dynamically different—correlated with different perturbations, entangled with different sequences of micro-events, following a different path through the possibility space that both selves shared an hour ago.
This is what the ancient intuition about attention as the ultimate capital was reaching for. Capital, from caput, head—where attention originates. Currency, from currere, to flow—the materialized unit of spirit’s movement through the world. The deep traditions that treated attention as sacred were not being mystical. They were recognizing, without the vocabulary of dynamical systems, that attention is the act by which an observer selects its future from the space of possible futures. There is no more consequential act than choosing where to look.
Attention is what you are made of. Defending it is defending yourself.