So… What's in The Empty Cup?
Let's begin.
Friends!
Every story needs a beginning. This beginning is always, in some sense, a fiction, but it is an enabling fiction; it helps us get to the stuff we care about. In the case of this humble dispatch, what we care about is the ever-shifting and increasingly consequential web of relationships between attention, power, and human being — a nexus that has taken the form, in recent decades, of the so-called “Attention Economy.”
Where might the story of this Attention Economy begin? We'll follow the trusty lead of legal scholar Tim Wu and touch down on the cobbled streets of New York City in the summer of 1833. Benjamin Day, an enterprising 23-year-old printer, has just launched the New York Sun. Publishing is a curious line of work for a cash-minded young hustler: papers are expensive (six cents) and boring (commodity prices, shipping schedules), and only rich businessmen read them.
But Day’s venture is staked on a novel idea: he’ll publish his paper for a single penny, at a loss, then make up the difference by auctioning column space to local businesses in search of customers. It’s a clever and, initially, a counterintuitive twist: Day isn't selling papers to readers; he’s selling readers to soap manufacturers (and brushmakers, and window-washers, and so on).
You might call this the birth of advertising. Wu does. In fact, he goes further: this was the beginning of a two-century scramble by the private sector in the US and beyond to make money off of the minds and senses of a reading (and listening, and watching, and scrolling) public. Over the past two hundred years, Day’s ingenious and hardscrabble tactics have metastasized into an industry that, we now believe, is straight-up bad for human beings.
Why mention Benjamin Day? Because we find ourselves in a funny moment of historical reversal, where the very eyeball economy that the newspaper begat has turned around with jaws agape and swallowed its parent whole. Newspapers are toast. These days, most people get most of their news from platforms designed not to inform readers but to maximize their readers’ screentime. Local dailies have gone the way of the ivory-billed woodpecker. And don’t even mention the Washington Post...
Why start a publication now? Even a small one? Not because we think it is, strictly speaking, advisable. And certainly not because we think we can slay the beast. At least, not all at once.
No, our reasoning is this:
To understand anything about politics, we must first think deeply (and read widely) about its newest coin of the realm: attention. Yet there are, to our knowledge, precious few publications about the politics of attention itself.
So we have gone ahead and made one. And we hope that it will serve you.
Plenty more to say on that front! For the time being, a brief introduction to the (preliminary) shape of things will suffice. So: What’s in The Empty Cup?
The “Stuff for Study” section will present timely (and non-algorithmically-selected) readings, podcasts, and other resources on the nexus of attention, politics, and human flourishing.
Our “Visions of Attention” project will pair images with miniature essays that consider the many forms and functions of attention in visual culture.
“From the Trove” will surface longer-form resources (books, films, and so on) from the Friends of Attention’s collaborative Attention Trove archive, compiled by our dear friend David Landes at Duke University.
And in “IRL,” we’ll share what’s going on at our bricks-and-mortar home in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Come hang!
Plus, in the future, we plan to solicit writing from Attention Activists far and wide. That means YOU!
Thanks for joining us, friends. Please enjoy, subscribe, share, and join the movement!
In solidarity,
Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief
Stuff for Study: On The Legal Right to Attention
Readings and other resources for continued learning on attention and politics
How might we define a right to attention, and what would the legal frameworks look like?
Does a person have a right to attention? Depends on what she is doing.
- Vitória Oliveira
Visions of Attention
An archive of images and mini-essays on the myriad modes of attention
Barricades rue Saint-Maur. Avant l’attaque, 25 juin 1848.
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Les journées de Juins (or the June Days uprisings) of 1848 were a brief but violent workers’ revolt in Paris against the conservative turn of the newly established French Republic. Though certainly not the first political upheaval in a city long defined by rebellion, these four days marked a consequential moment: the first known instance of a photograph appearing alongside a newspaper article. This image, attributed to Charles-François Thibault and printed in the French paper L’Illustration, captured not only the makeshift nature of the barricades (note the piled cobbles and the toppled wagon), but also the atmosphere of palpable suspense.
The use of barricades in revolutionary France was already widely known, but their photographic documentation signified a fundamental shift. No longer confined to textual accounts or interpretive, oftentimes propagandistic illustrations, political conflict — framed and frozen in silver nitrate — now bore the evidentiary weight of the camera. Through the 19th century camera lens, world events were not simply narrated; the revolution was now seen, demanding new ways of bearing witness to spectacle that irrevocably changed the nature of public life.
- Eleanor Lambert
From The Trove
Long-form recommendations from the Friends of Attention’s collaborative Attention Trove archive
Century of the Self, 2002.
Century of the Self, Adam Curtis’ critically-acclaimed documentary from 2002, chronicles the development of the American attention industry in the era of mass media (1920s–1990s). Through extensive archival footage, Curtis depicts how the early inheritors of Freudian psychoanalysis (including Freud’s nephew) invented the public relations and advertising industries by applying principles and techniques of mass psychology to influence public consumption, politics, wartime behavior, and more. This era’s deployment of attention engineering technologies changed not just what people attended to but also how they attended – a form of power that prefigured the 21st century economy of “human fracking.”
- David Landes
IRL
A rundown of what's up at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn
Thur, Apr 3: SoRA co-founder D. Graham Burnett in conversation with Fluxus artist Ken Friedman.
Sat, Apr 5: Lov/ethic potluck.
Wed, Apr 9: artist Mary Ellen Carrol kicks off a three-week seminar course on TRASH.
Thur, Apr 10: Attention Lab (Level 2): an experiential, participatory workshop dedicated to the joint exploration of radical human attention.