Attention Breeds Action

For better or for worse.

I followed a lady who has a substack about doing something that is risky and also (she believed definitely, I believed possibly) rewarding. One day the risk manifested: not fully unfurled, but enough that the people around her in real life (her actual relationships) had a very bad night, and her parasocial, one way, non-reciprocal relationships had a very interesting one, as she posted through it. I unfollowed her, instinctively; whether the instinct was disgust towards weakness, or protective towards weakness, you're free to judge. A couple of weeks later, she crossed my mind, and I checked her writing again to see if the problem had receded or if she was still in its grip: an instinct that you're free to judge as caring or rubbernecking. She had apparently lost quite a few followers that night; she had posted an apology the next day, saying, yes, what we thought had happened had indeed happened. The comments were full of "glad you're okay" and "oh my god you can't do that again" but one type of comment said something like, "The raw, full-spectrum humanity you're unveiling right now is the type of thing I subscribed to Substack authors for.”

I recognize that the commenter intended to be supportive and kind. If the commenter was someone that the author had a real, two-way relationship with, a relationship that wasn’t fully mediated by the author’s ability to occasionally, briefly arrest audience attention, I think it would have, like, actually been supportive and kind. But in this context—and I know this sounds insane—the very real and natural human compassion fills me with revulsion, because it feels to me like a human being used as a mask for a vampire egregore drooling for human pain. I love Substack, as I’ve said before, but any form of social media makes money from the attention we get regardless of whether that attention is good for us.

We give people disproportionate attention for being open about terrible things in their lives. When we do this, we’re rewarding honesty, yes. But when we see “Huh, I get rewarded for being honest about terrible things happening,” it’s not like the only dial we can move in response to that is just “increasing honesty.” We can also make terrible things happen to us more.

Below this paywall, there are far fewer readers, and it’s harder for text there to reproduce and spread.