Rage Against The Attention Machine

November 15th, 2021. As the prosecution delivered its closing arguments in the Kyle Rittenhouse case (where a 17-year-old took an AR-15-style rifle to Kenosha and shot three people), political commentator Matt Walsh invited his 4 million followers to rail against the suggestion that Americans lose their right to self-defence if they bring a gun to a volatile situation:

By this logic, nobody who owns a gun has a right to use it in self-defence. This is an explicit assault on our basic Second Amendment rights. That’s how this weasel has framed the entire case.

So naturally, when federal agents murdered Alex Pretti, and several high-ranking members of Trump’s administration argued that Pretti had no rightto bring a legally owned gun to a volatile situation, Walsh was 100% consistent in his defence of Americans’ First and Second Amendment rights:

An armed leftist went out with a gun to deliberately interfere with legitimate law enforcement operations, and I’m seeing some “conservatives” on this site claim that it might be ICE’s fault that the guy is now dead. Insane.

January 19th, 2026. After a letter in which Donald Trump whines about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize leaks online, political influencer Nicolas Conquer laments a mainstream media so gullible, so fraught with Trump Derangement Syndrome, that they’d believe the president of the United States would do something so unpresidential:

UNBELIEVABLE, this total lack of perspective when it comes to this so-called “letter” from Trump to Norway, miffed at not having received the Nobel. Everything in this story reeked of a hoax from a mile away. But of course, our fact-checkers and compulsive anti-Trumpists dive in headfirst.

Unfortunately, the fact checkers had their facts straight. But no problem, when Conquer realised his mistake, he remained perfectly consistent about his standards for presidential behaviour:

I acknowledge having doubted, like others, the authenticity of Trump’s letter addressed to the Norwegian Prime Minister. But after careful reading: Nothing shocks me. Nothing offends me. I fully endorse it and challenge anyone to objectively find in it any grounds for scandal.

February 6th, 2026. After a “Truth Social” post depicting the Obamas as apes goes viral on social media, Terrence K. Williams, one of Donald Trump’s African Americans, is quick to assure his 2.4 million followers that screenshots of the post were “fake news”:

FAKE NEWS ALERT! Trump didn’t post this monkey video of the Obamas. Lying Democrats. It’s not on his page. Fake screenshot.

Sadly, it turns out that the lying Democrats were telling the truth. But thankfully, when Williams realised this, he acknowledged his error, updated his views in light of new evidence, and…okay, you know where I’m going with this:

IT’S NOT RACIST! I stand with Trump. As a black man, I’m not offended by this at all. It’s a hilarious video of white and black democrats in the jungle!

We live, so we’re told, in the Information Age, an era defined by a rapid shift from traditional industries to digital alternatives.

Window shopping turned into Amazon Prime, dating turned into swiping, and information turned into content.

The problem is, while information is a service, content is a product.

Content doesn’t need to worry about hypocrisy or sincerity or morality, it doesn’t need to wait for the facts or acknowledge context or make logical sense, content just needs to make money, and it does that by hijacking as much attention as possible, as quickly as possible, before the algorithm moves us on to the next distraction.

Content is Megyn Kelly using her podcast with ~100 million monthly listeners to downplay the Trump administration’s myriad links to a convicted pedophile by arguing that Jeffrey Epstein (a 66-year-old man who sexually abused 14-year-old girls) wasn’t really a pedophile, he was just into the “barely-legal type.”

For the record, 14 years old is neither barely-legal nor, in fact, legal.

Content is gay right-wing influencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, telling ~900,000 followers that “nobody is really gay,” and that dogs miraculously stopped barking at him once he renounced his homosexuality, instead of using his unlikely platform to spark a much-needed conversation about the closeted homosexuality (and attendant homophobia) often found in right-wing circles.

Content is Fox News’ Jesse Watters telling his 2–3 million-strong audience that billionaires should make homeless people “fight like gladiators” over a $1 Happy Meal or Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade suggesting they should be given an “involuntary lethal injection, or something, just kill ’em.”

Content, more and more, is just shallow, amoral, sociopaths making millions of dollars by saying things they don’t mean. Or maybe they do mean them. It doesn’t really matter.

Because, however you feel about what they’re saying, whether your comments and reactions express delight or discomfort or disgust at their opinions, the attention machine rewards them just the same.

Content is “bread and circuses” in digital form.

A distraction designed to convince us that people who share 99% of our concerns are our enemy.

A pacifier, designed to reassure us that the things we already believe always just so happen to be correct.

A battlefield where billionaires spend millions of dollars to control what we think.

And an awful lot of people haven’t noticed that they’re losing.

In the immortal words of Stafford Beer, the purpose of a system is what it does.

Not what it claims to do, not what it aspires to do, not what it might do under more ideal circumstances, but what it does; the effect it produces in the world.

And what this system does, almost exclusively, is divide us and enrage us and funnel our attention towards the dumbest, most dishonest people on the planet, because these are the only people who can wake up every day to lieand grovel and humiliate themselves to defend their talking points without being crushed by shame and self-loathing.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about my place in this machine; about how to assess the people I pay attention to, about how to make nuance more compelling than outrage, about how to treat our collective attention with the respect it deserves.

And maybe the first step is to recognise what’s at stake.

Our attention is the most valuable thing we possess. It is one of the only things that is truly, irrevocably ours. And it has the power, when properly directed, to change the world.

That’s why corporations spend so much money trying to monetise it, grifters spend so much time trying to manipulate it, and politicians spend so much energy directing it at immigrants and aliens and anything, anything at all, but them.

Because they know that if we ever stop fighting amongst ourselves, if we ever get around to focusing our attention on them, they won’t stand a chance.

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