Attention! Attention! Feminism in the Attention Economy
I began my online life as a mummy blogger. In around 2007 after a request for a set of encyclopedias for Christmas prompted my incredulous mother to buy me my first computer, I went to the bookshop looking for an idiot proof guide on how to use the internet. What I found instead was a large, black and yellow striped how-to entitled Blogging for Dummies. I took it home and, frowning at the instructions, managed somehow to set myself up for free on blogspot.
I began writing. About my life mostly, which at the time revolved almost entirely around caring for small children, but about politics too, specifically women’s politics. A single mother living in a tiny Welsh village and dependent on state benefits, my world was shrunk small, but behind the screen it became magnified. I was astounded by the internet: the fact that anyone with a connection could access this vast wealth of information, could publish and potentially disseminate their ideas to thousands upon thousands of people was, I remember, a complete revelation. How could I have been so late to the party?! This was the most disruptive technology since the wheel! The greatest leveller of our time! Straight away I could see how it might serve as a useful political tool, ushering in a new era of networking and organisation. Here was an opportunity to share ideas and bring together activists from across the globe, to thrash out our theories and hone our strategies in conversations that could span continents. Here was an opportunity for connection.
It has been all of those things and much more besides, far beyond my own or anyone’s prediction. But in a near two decades of writing and talking about politics on the internet, never has the human propensity to take a good thing and wring it out to distortion and dysfunctionality loomed so large and dangerous as it does now.
The concept of personal branding, of lifestyle branding, of humans marketing an idealised, externalised representation of themselves online to a specific target audience is something we might better associate with such areas as fashion, “wellness”, beauty and self-help. Take a scroll through Instagram and you will find it teeming with highly edited and seemingly impossibly gorgeous young women reminding you with a hashtag to be grateful as they tell you what to buy, wear, ingest, and smear on your face. While perhaps common knowledge that many of these photographs and videos are doctored, the carefully curated displays of gratuitous glamour and never-ending fun a misrepresentation of a more mundane reality, the most successful of these influencers have nevertheless become very rich indeed. Advertising revenue, brand deals, sponsored content and affiliate marketing all serve to make living in a fake and filtered parallel universe an extremely lucrative business.
Yet this concept of the self as product has seeped into all areas of our online lives, invading too the crowded political space. In what is a cacophony of noise and opinions, content creators must find a way to make themselves heard; to develop a USP, a niche. Easy enough on the internet where just as photoshop can render you instantly more Instagrammable with a smaller waist, longer legs, or shinier hair, a few chosen posts on X can turn timid personalities bombastic, lend an authoritative air to the clueless, or glue a warm and altruistic veneer onto the rabidly self-interested. The point is that in the ether, anyone can be who they want to be. Externalised representations can be tweaked and tinkered with until the line between activist and influencer becomes impossible to draw and the political stage is filled with image conscious avatars seen only from certain angles, their carefully crafted personas acting out a performance tailored deliberately towards target demographics. In such an environment feminism can become easily less concerned with the hard task of dismantling systems of male domination than with the business of appearing sufficiently, charismatically kick ass. The politics of change become lost to the politics of fandom. It is easier to swim in the shallow end.
Welcome to the attention economy. Where we are all of us, to an extent, living virtual lives in which clicks, likes and shares determine not only the worth of individuals, but of ideas. An economy in which engagement is the sole priority not only for the platforms whose goal is to keep users on the site as long as possible, but for individual users whose aim is to increase their own market share. Where once the internet was a universe of possibilities for the politics of resistance to flourish, the attention economy seeks to smother them in a blanket of populism, fakery and celebrity.
Where clicks have become currency, collaborative endeavour and solidarity have been easily undermined. Would be allies are set in competition with each other, jostling in a race for followers, retweets, exposure and clout: an inevitable race to the bottom, where what is true and meaningful often generates far less value than that which is simply able to draw a clamour. And so are created the perfect conditions for clickbait, hyperbole and extremism in which everything must be turned up to eleven or else drowned out in the chaos. Here there can be no such thing as a minor infraction or misguided actor, no sense of proportion, no two suffering sides. A cautious measure drives no traffic and so vaccine mandates, for example, once an imposition worth debating, are now akin to apartheid! Immigration necessary to fill dire gaps in the labour market is symptomatic of a “white genocide!” Traumatized women with the temerity to ask that their rape counsellor be female want to reenact Jim Crow! A man in makeup is equivalent to blackface! Anyone who dares suggest these comparisons might be offensive - that they appropriate and downplay the kind of human suffering none of us can today imagine – becomes an atrocity denier.
Driving the whole train in the same inexorable direction is the added incentive of monetization. Where incomes and opportunities are dependent on having the hottest, newest, most attention grabbing take, there can be no time to lose ensuring that what is posted is in any objective sense true, much less reasonable. Research, nuance, and even the most basic of fact checking begin to fall by the wayside, the result being a sea of misinformation that floods the zone until no one is able to navigate a steady path through the shit.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 the deliberate skew of algorithms has turned his renamed X into a culture war machine. For Musk, a wannabe global influencer and devotee of great replacement theory, a man whose politics are not only right wing in the extreme but rather fantastical, involving spacecraft and superhero fantasies of strong men swooping in to save Western civilization, it has followed that X accounts sympathetic to his views, or at least seen to be fighting his side of the culture war, have been artificially bolstered with increased exposure and inflated likes and retweets from robot followers, while accounts that attempt to counter the narrative are strangled. So is created a bizarre alternate reality that fails to reflect but seeks to reshape the real world: a reality that sees many competitors in the attention economy pulled along by the nose in the race for clicks and clout, increasingly radicalized by their own desire for power and popularity.
This hijacking of the attention economy has been particularly disastrous for the gender critical movement, which has been largely wrenched from its roots as a feminist project set up by left wing women actually critical of gender and co-opted by the right as a convenient wedge issue; a trojan horse with which to attack the progressive left. When an issue that, as Hadley Freeman quite rightly pointed out in The Times, “left the door wide open for Trump and Elon Musk, who only had to say ‘men are not women’ to look like the sane ones in the room” is seized upon so opportunistically, a pipeline is then dug between the perfectly reasonable belief that male people are not female and that to act as though they are in all circumstances has a negative effect on women and other oppressed groups, to those who would wish to overturn the victories of all our social justice movements, attacking not only women’s rights, but the rights of all minorities. In a reward of exposure and influence, and high on a false sense of their own popularity, many women have been swept along, collapsing gender criticism into a mess of femonationalism, conservatism, and gender affirmation that serve to bolster those same systems of power feminism has always sought to tear down.
In her book, Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world, Naomi Klein charts the trajectory of her namesake, Naomi Wolf (a woman with whom she is terminally confused) from liberal feminist media darling and author of the bestselling Beauty Myth to conspiracy toting, gun blasting member of the alt right. What on earth happened? A half joked, mathematical formula is even offered in explanation as to what might have driven Wolf and others like her over the precipice: “narcissism (grandiosity), plus social media addiction, plus midlife crisis, divided by public shaming, equals rightwing meltdown”. Easy enough to snigger, to be smug. Except that I find myself surrounded by Wolfs, by women who might once have described themselves as left-wing, or at least as liberal, and certainly as feminist, who became prepared to throw their weight behind some of the most misogynistic men on the planet so long as they would acknowledge that women were female. By women willing, in other words, to turn a blind eye to an amount of pussy grabbing, so long as the grabbers are clear on who the pussy havers are. And by women who, in the process, have become mouthpieces for the radical right, lost to conspiracy and intent on demonizing Muslims and immigrants, attacking all forms of progressivism as if that in itself were the root of all societal ills.
One view has it that they are just lost: homeless, alienated and abandoned by a left that hates them, drawn helplessly by the injustice of it all along the pipeline and into the arms of the far right. A generous and possibly patronizing notion when a more unpalatable truth is that in the attention economy, they are simply making their fortunes. That far from being lost, they are – as Klein says of Wolf – found. That they have tweaked and tinkered with their principles until their externalised selves hit on more attention, influence and opportunity than ever before dreamed of. That the politics and personas they have chosen to adopt are little more than a product of virtual market forces and that, in the end, clout chasing, popularity seeking, and clicks baby clicks will be what drive us ever forward towards a new fascist reality.
*This piece has taken a lot of inspiration from the work of Naomi Klein, and in particular some of the ideas contained in her books, No Logo and Doppelganger. Despite what are seemingly intractable differences of opinion on some issues it is only right that I credit her.*
Nicely done! The single issue types just got no room to ingenue their way past this one.
Nice takeaways, thank you: 'the attention economy' 'it's easier to swim in the shallow end'