lately I haven’t been very good at directing my attention. throughout the day I snap into the realization that I’ve frittered away the better part of several hours doing nothing worthwhile. this even though I’m almost entirely removed from the social media ecosystem, down to less than 15 minutes a day on Instagram. it pains me to admit that a lot of what I waste my time on is browsing resale sites like Depop or eBay for vintage flannels and secondhand items from prestige Japanese workwear brands, things I don’t really even intend to buy. otherwise, I read about menswear: Die Workwear’s blog, Heddels, r/malefashionadvice. I have degenerated into a screen-shopping consumer, mostly because I have so much dead time to fill while sitting at a desk equipped with a computer for my day job, where I find it very difficult, inexplicably, to do any creative work, even though I have ample freedom to get away with whatever I want.
during the Biden administration I made a pretty conscious effort to stop caring about current events. the ongoing genocide in Gaza notwithstanding, I didn’t feel like much of what passed for political news really mattered all that much. seeing how rapacious the second Trump administration has proven to be in just a few short months, I feel pretty vindicated for not really caring what the Democrats were up to, since all their “principled opposition” to the threat of fascism wound up being exactly what I suspected it was way back when I was 16 years old: mere theatre. kayfabe. the old bill hicks joke about the two puppets being controlled by the same guy:
which isn’t to say what’s happening now isn’t an emergency. this time around there’s definitely a stronger sense of purpose and direction that was lacking from the more chaotic start to the first Trump admin. but what to actually care about, how to best direct my attention, I’m still not sure about. and for whatever reason, the past month or two the only thing that’s kept my attention is the fucking menswear niche of the internet. I want so bad to be Committed and Engaged again, and I refuse to accept that complacency is an inevitable effect of aging.
part of the problem is that throughout the better part of my life, tech executives, advertising firms, and entertainment companies have perfected the ability to harvest people’s attention. even if I’m not spending hours watching TikTok videos, the damage to the psychic landscape both personal and collective is catastrophic. it has never been easier in the history of humanity to find ways of distracting one’s self, literally: to draw apart the self via the myriad funnels of desire and attention opened up by electronic communication technologies. if the medium is the message, and the medium is a schizophrenic slot machine built on behaviorist manipulation, then it’s no wonder I can’t keep my attention trained on anything other than the embodiments of unleashed supranational commerce: Kapital Boro jackets, Japanese imitations of the long-defunct American textile industry, and relics of past eras afloat upon the monetized nostalgia of online auction sites.
I’m loath to admit how I’ve been spending my time, but like they say in AA, the first step is admitting there’s a problem. the problem, however, isn’t an addiction to idle window-shopping: it’s in the way that my attention has been crippled by these technopolitical forces. and this is the real emergency of the present, because it must be overcome before any work can be done for imagining alternatives amidst the rapidly deteriorating world order.
each of our consciousnesses is not merely a receptacle for the givens of so-called objective reality. a common sense conception of cognition posits the mind as a kind of screen, with the world’s light being focused onto it through the lens of the eye. this is exactly backwards: consciousness is the light projected out onto the world: we are all directors, cinematographers, and editors of our personal realities, realities which coalesce into what passes for capital R Reality. this means that collective reality is far more malleable than we tend to believe, and this failure of belief is by design: those tasked with managing our attentions have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, because they benefit from it. woe to them if everyday people learned to embrace the power of our birth right. there are innumerable cosmos unrealized because we have had the boundless eternities of our souls dammed up by the technicians of the Spectacle.
I’ve been teasing this manifesto of sorts for a long time now, but for my own sake, I really ought to get my principles in order, lest I further devolve into a basic-as-fuck suburban 30-something, drinking natural wine in his selvedge denim jeans while the world sinks into hell. in the meantime, here’s some reading suggestions: