Attention for attention

In a 2019 interview, Steve Bannon, a former strategist for the Trump administration, explained what he meant by a strategy that has become known as “flooding the zone.” According to Bannon, it is not the Democrats but the media who are the real opposition that must be fought. “Flooding the zone” thus refers to strategically overwhelming the media and public debate with so much information, noise, and incidents that critical thinking and focus become increasingly difficult. This is exactly what Trump has done since the beginning of his second term: he makes extreme statements that then cause a public uproar, such as wanting to annex Greenland or Canada. Since returning to the White House, Trump has staged an unpredictable and overwhelming show of controversial statements and threats, by which he and his team have managed to capture attention almost continuously. And while everyone becomes disoriented by this performance, this president and his team are rapidly dismantling American democracy.

The effectiveness of “flooding the zone” reveals a fundamental vulnerability: our political attention is easily manipulated. This vulnerability is not accidental but embedded in how we usually understand politics: as a series of developments around recognizable institutions and figures. We consider politics to be what politicians in The Hague are doing, and what the media package and present in the form of news items and opinion pieces. Politics has become a kind of soap opera with actors who gradually come and go. Politics as product: a collection of events and figures we can form opinions about, interpret, comment on, and share. We are vulnerable to a flood of troubling news because we ourselves are not players in the show that demands all of our attention.

The implicit understanding of politics as a series of developments to be followed through the news, and the vulnerability that results from this, cannot be separated from the role that information and “content” play in our lives today. In works such as Psychopolitics, The Transparency Society, and Infocracy, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we live in a time in which information no longer forms the basis for knowledge or political debate, but has degenerated into an endless stream of images, data, and opinions that, in their fleeting succession, leave behind no meaningful insights or understanding. This stream of information—whether TikTok clips, news articles, or comments—exists, according to Han, primarily in order to be shared and circulated. A kind of natural selection takes place, where the fastest and most shocking content survives, proliferating across more and more screens, while the nuanced withers away. Daily exposure to a chain of stimuli that never seems to stop—where every meme and every article is immediately followed by the next—leads to a lack of precisely what is essential for critical thought and insight: silence, time, and concentration.

Han’s analysis of “infocracy” shows that the “flooding the zone” strategy did not emerge from nowhere, but amounts to strategically exploiting an already existing situation. We are already overwhelmed, and someone like Trump merely has to turn the faucet a little further. Even without deliberate flood tactics, today’s digital world leads us to slowly paralyze and exhaust ourselves. Increasingly, people turn away from the news because they can no longer endure the moral outrage and the feeling of helplessness. When each new incident is immediately drowned out by the next, we lose the ability to process events or to relate to them in a lasting way. What remains is a vague unease and a sense of permanent crisis—precisely the conditions in which authoritarian leaders thrive.

The understanding of politics as a collection of specific developments goes hand in hand with the logic of the digital world in which they are staged as spectacle. Our idea of what politics is follows from the way politics is presented to us. The medium is not neutral. Online platforms unconsciously shape some of our most fundamental ideas about the world and ourselves, including our understanding of politics, because almost everything now reaches us through those platforms. For this reason, things like “positive news” stand no chance against the despair and helplessness we feel in the face of “normal” news. The attempt to discover some positive political development “out in the wild” with which we might tame our worries still implies an understanding of politics as a collection of bite-sized news items, and thus does nothing to address the vulnerability of our attention. If we need a concrete political development to which we can grant our hope and attention, then we are indeed defenseless against a tactic that floods us with shocking events. What if there were literally no hopeful political developments at all? What if everything pointed to crisis? Would that mean there is no hope left?

The current state of political saturation, however, also presents an opportunity to realize that politics was never about events, information, and specific incidents—but about paying attention to an ever-renewed question: how to live together? Politics is not necessarily about states, sovereignty, constitutions, and law, but about something much more general, and therefore something that could be approached in many more different ways. Attention to community, to others, to the neighbor, the fellow citizen, or the (non-human) co-inhabitant of the Earth, and the possibility of shaping our shared existence here and now—this forms the core of political life. True politics is a form of attention, not of consumption. Although it easily slips away from us, this political attention is visible everywhere. Your friends who want to act but don’t know how, the “Free Palestine” graffiti under the bridge, protests in the street, or the old man independently picking up trash: all these things reflect the attentiveness of political life. It is this attentiveness that deserves our attention.

This may sound idealistic, but idealism is precisely what we need more than ever. Indeed, it is inseparable from politics as an unanswered question: idealism is the implicit assumption that, by focusing our attention on this question, we really can make the world better for ourselves and each other, even though we don’t know exactly what is possible. Politics, in fact, is nothing other than this idealistic attention itself. The current “political” climate, by contrast, is marked precisely by an absence of idealism. In an essay in The Guardian, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor stress that the fascism of today differs from that of the 1930s and 1940s in that the latter still allowed for a happy ending within its ideological story. The atom bomb, climate change, and the negative effects of social media were not yet in play, and it was easier to imagine an ideal world in which everything turned out well—at least for a certain group. Now it is different. Today’s “end times” fascists have no ideal vision of the future to offer, no acknowledgement of the great problems of our time that could be successfully addressed. What the billionaires backing Trump and the large group of working-class people voting for him have in common, according to Klein and Taylor, is that they have all given up on our shared world: they no longer dare to be idealistic.

Today it is no longer about left or right, conservative or progressive, anarchist or autocratic. It now concerns, on the one hand, a hopeful and idealistic attention to the future, and on the other hand, a blind survival instinct driven by fatalism. Allies are not those who vote for the same party, but those who have not yet given up, those who still dare to be truly political. Restoring hope to those who have lost it is therefore of the greatest importance, but this can only happen effectively if we fundamentally change how we deal with our attention. We must focus on politics as an open question, not as a fixed reality presented in the form of news items or opinion pieces. To avoid succumbing to despair, we must unabashedly and idealistically focus our attention on attention itself—on the fact that, in all despair, hope still resides, that our fear is itself a sign that many of us want to act and care about what is happening. Within this lies the power on which all politics is built, and through which we can always change and reclaim it. The only truly political development, inherently hopeful, is attention itself