Communicative capitalism’s micro-enjoyments fragment attention into de-activating anxiety

Evidence

For reasons I will explore more fully in subsequent posts, I have spent the last year in a state of de-activation. I was thrown back into the privatised connectivity of the OedIpod, with its constant stream of low-level anxiety and compulsive micro-enjoyments. I couldn’t write, except in a mechanical way; what I produced seemed stillborn, stilted. My main mood-altering drug of choice, music, didn’t work. I binged on boxsets. I enjoyed time with my wife and son, but there was a fugitive quality to this enjoyment: my fingers always itched to reach for my smartphone. There was always something I should already have done that I hadn’t — the urgencies piling up, like a flashing red light constantly blinking in my peripheral vision, never letting me settle. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1824

Categorization

• XREF: Pays off ch105’s claims about fragmented attention being functional for capital and cyberspatial alerts destroying absorbed drift, and ch112’s claim that smartphone touch operates as cold digital relay. — connects to: Capitalist cyberspace has normalized precariousness, competitiveness, and casual aggression — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 772; Self-commodification in the attention economy creates an escalating spiral of exposure and attack — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror…, 207; Social media’s engineered feedback loops convert normal social comparison into compulsive anxiety — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1485 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Social media’s engineered feedback loops convert normal social comparison into compulsive anxiety #corroborates (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1485
• Attention-economy distractions accumulate to erode autonomy and selfhood #corroborates (0.80) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 403
• Emotions function as thermometers of the attentional ecosystem between persons #expands (0.78) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 266
• Digital capitalism profits from unpaid pleasurable user activity. #expands (0.75) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 197
• Self-commodification in the attention economy creates an escalating spiral of exposure and attack #complicates (0.72) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 207
• Anxiety activates citizens’ political consciousness while enthusiasm engages their hearts #contradicts (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1745