In the 21st century, power no longer resides solely in territory, capital or technology. It now resides in a rarer, more intimate and infinitely contested resource: human attention.
Attention is not simply a psychological disposition; it is a biological function. Neuroscience defines it as the process by which the brain selects, prioritizes and maintains its concentration on a tiny fraction of available information. At any given moment, we are immersed in a stream of signals. We can choose to ignore them all, to be bored, to meditate, to reflect, to create – this is “mental idleness”. We can also choose a voluntary, “descending” or “deliberate” attention, which enables us to read and learn in a lasting way. Finally, we can give in to “upward” or “reflex” attention, and let ourselves be drawn in by spectacular information, a shock, a novelty, a threat or an emotion.
And since it’s much easier to let our attention be drawn in than to hold it or move away from it, of these three states of attention (mental idleness, deliberate attention and reflexive attention) it should come as no surprise that the third is gaining the upper hand.
Neuroscience explains this by the way attention is captured by the brain: the amygdala instantly detects threats and favors anxiety-provoking content; and the dopaminergic system reinforces compulsive checking behaviors. Whereas the prefrontal cortex – the seat of critical judgment – can only be activated by continuous, deliberate attention and brain idleness, both of which require the strength to escape immediate dopaminergic rewards.
From time immemorial, the powers that be have deduced how to capture attention: the orators of Antiquity mastered the art of rhetoric to sweep crowds away; religions have built monuments, organized rites and proposed narratives designed to arouse devotion; political regimes have mobilized spectacle to direct the gaze and the mind. Then came the press, advertising, billboards, radio and television, all of which extended the means of attracting reflexive, bottom-up attention; rarely deliberate, except for training for a job, which society needs. By doing everything to reduce the time left for boredom, because nothing is more dangerous for a power than the mental idleness of its subjects.
Social networks have industrialized this hierarchy: designed to maximize engagement, they favor stimuli that activate reflexive, bottom-up attention, to the detriment of vital reflection and boredom. And thousands of engineers are working to optimize these mechanisms, exploiting human cognitive vulnerabilities to prolong the time spent in front of a screen and to deduce purchasing actions.
Artificial intelligence is now brutally accelerating these dynamics: generative systems make it possible to create, on a large scale and at very low cost, messages tailored to each individual’s psychological profile, paving the way for cognitive manipulation that is faster, finer and harder to detect.
These technologies multiply solicitations, reducing the time available for boredom, reflection and deep learning. Gradually, mental idleness and deliberate attention are giving way everywhere to reactive, fragmented attention, dominated by urgency and emotion.
The stakes are high. Attention determines what societies perceive, what they ignore, and ultimately what they decide. It conditions the quality of political, economic and strategic choices. It shapes our ability to detect weak signals, anticipate crises and act with lucidity. To learn, to imagine, to create.
And to attract attention, all means are good: each power tries to saturate the informational space with controversy and emotion, to erase certain subjects, censor perceptions, prevent attention from focusing on a truth, and more than that, make it impossible to form a balanced collective judgment. It is to the press’s credit that it fights this.
As long ago as 1971, Herbert Simon observed that “the amount of attention available to each person is less than the amount of information that demands it”. In other words, attention has become a scarce commodity, and where there is scarcity, there is room for a market. As a result, its price is on the rise.
Today, more than ever, political and commercial spheres clash on the same global infrastructure: digital platforms.
The United States relies on dominant private platforms, whose algorithms aim to attract as much attention as possible, without it yet being clear whether they serve political power or are used by it. China has built a totally coherent ecosystem, controlled by the Communist Party, also made up of platforms and social networks, tightly controlling domestic attention while projecting its power abroad. Europe, lacking major platforms and autonomous social networks, tries to control those of others without dominating them. Still other countries, such as Russia, do their utmost to attract attention and manipulate opinion with fake news.
The rest of the world is assailed by all this bottom-up information from everywhere, with no hierarchy and no means of verifying its authenticity.
It’s easy to see a worst-case scenario taking shape, in which everyone loses all capacity for mental idleness and deliberate attention, becoming nothing more than a spectator gorged on reflex information, giving power to those – private American companies and Chinese dictators – who know best how to capture attention and prevent people from thinking. Only those individuals and nations capable of enhancing their cognitive capacities and turning them into instruments of freedom will escape this totalitarianism of attention. There is very little time left to put the means in place, in schools, universities and businesses, to ensure that everyone has access to the scarcest resource of all: the critical mind.
Image: La Condition humaine by René Magritte, painted in 1933.