Barbels on a Braai
Breaking the news - My English Traits - Chapter 66
WARNING: Some readers may find the following opinions distressing.
After, “I love what you’ve done with your hair” the most mendacious sentence in the English language must be, “Here is the news.”
For people of more or less my skin colour, of more or less my cultural inheritance and of more or less my age, which is to say the generation of late-blooming, whitish Western baby-boomers more or less like Jerry Seinfeld who grew up knowing most of the words and at least two of the three chords of Blowin’ in the Wind, the news that made headlines in the newspapers or on TV was generally understood to be the most important and significant news of the day.
We took it for granted.
I took it for granted until it was my job to choose them.
We all know now that “the” news is a choice — a carefully curated selection of those byte-size memes of information the broadcaster wants us to know, digest and incorporate into our understanding of the world and its ways today, tomorrow and hopefully forever.
It’s the apparently innocuous definite article that lulls us into believing the information we are about to receive was decided upon by some innocent version of natural selection, like cream rising to the top and the dregs subsiding to the bottom.
The truth could not be further from the truth.
I know. I was there. I watched them doing it every hour before the hour at the SABC in the darkest days of apartheid.
In the absence of a plane crash, an earthquake, the assassination of a famous politician or the outbreak of a war, we chose stories that demonized the blood-thirsty, baby-eating communists who were trying to overthrow the post-colonial regimes of Rhodesia, Mozambique and Angola and replace them with governments elected by the people themselves; stories that illustrated the goodwill and kindly hearts of the American, British and European countries and companies who gave vocal and commercial support to “the only democracy in Africa”; and, it goes without saying, stories that glorified the all-white Springboks.
It was as easy as shooting barbels in a barrel.
We know a lot more now than we did in those non-digital days before the enlightenment of the internet. But the principle hasn’t changed. It has simply become more sophisticated by some thousands of degrees. And for a transparently obvious reason:
In countries which not only allow but actively encourage people with the intelligence of barbels to choose their governments, the economy that matters the most these days is the one that trades thrills for attention. And since attention has become one of the scarcest and most valuable commodities on earth, it’s hardly surprising that the thrills required to command and exploit it are becoming more graphic, more obscene, more vividly horrifying, and more ethically, morally and viscerally brutalizing by the week, the day, the hour and the minute.
James Carville, the strategist who shaped Bill Clinton’s successful campaign to unseat incumbent George H. W. Bush in the 1992 U.S. presidential election, famously declared, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
He may have been right in 1992.
Today it’s the attention economy, stupid.
The concept and the phrase have been around for a while. I remember it being bandied about by advertising planners in Joburg, London and New York in the mid-nineties when manufacturers of toothpastes, margarine and deodorants were struggling to understand why so few consumers appeared to be as excited as they were by their brand-new, breakthrough non-eroding, non-drip and non-toxic formulations.
The planners told the suits that nobody cared since nobody paid attention to anything these days. The suits told the clients that the fault lay, not with the obvious brilliance of their R&D innovations or the even more brilliant commercials they had spent a fortune to make, but at the door of their media buyers who clearly didn’t understand the trading arrangements of the attention economy. The agencies urged their clients to double, triple or quadruple their advertising spend. They did. Those who could afford it placed their advertising everywhere and all the time. And it worked.
Circa 1997 a new philosophy of advertising was born:
Never mind the finesse of the insights, the quality of the brief, the creativity of the advertising or the relevance of a product or service in people’s actual lives. Just say it loudly enough, often enough and everywhere enough, and soon enough you’ll turn a vast populace of “don’t cares” into habitual adherents. They called it ubiquity to make it sound like an actual strategy.
In Africa in the late nineties Coca-Cola positioned itself as a tastier alternative to water. They flooded the continent with giant billboards, posters and stickers on anything and everything a sticker could stick to.
Water didn’t have a budget to defend itself with. Coke won.
Which is how the attention economy works:
The winners aren’t the ones with the most compelling, interesting and persuasive messages. They are those with enough clout to distract us from paying attention to anything else.
If it works for washing powders, 4x4s, and any given brand of beer, it works even more effectively to shape our opinions — social, ethical and political.
When I did what I do and I looked it up, I was more than somewhat surprised to discover that the Attention Economy, together with its implications for the future of our species, was named, described and understood several decades before the phones in our pockets were demanding that we needed to know — instantly, urgently and this very second — that the Radiohead song Thom York was most proud of was “That’s Why I Started”, as per my pocket-buzzed experience of seventeen seconds ago.
(What kind of algorithm told my phone to tell me this with such hair-raising urgency right here and right now? Who wrote the algorithm for that? And when, where and how did it discover that I was a passionate admirer of Radiohead’s song-writing and I still think they’re supremely cool but I haven’t actually listened to them deliberately for about six years?
(Or is that precisely why? And who profits from prompting me with this? And how much do they profit by?
(And why now, and what else and wtf unless information itself has finally been quantumized into a randomly interchangeable system of waves and particles that behaves just as unpredictably as we do in those increasingly rare moments when we are able to fool ourselves into thinking we have individual agency to disobey the imperative of all living matter to profit from the fallibility and gullibility of less capable others?)
I could switch off my notifications, of course. But like most of my generation, I have a profound fear of switching off the world by accident.
Nor, when I got round to delving deeper, could I escape the irony that the Attention Economy was named and described — not only before Spotify, Google, i-Phones, Twitter, Facebook and the internet itself — but in 1971, the very year I was bundled into the back of a green SADF military Bedford truck and sent to one of the most information-impoverished places on the planet where, in the absence of telephones, radio, newspapers and a postal service, the only available scraps of information, useful or not, had to be decoded in the footprints of kudu, the call of the lilac-breasted roller, and the clicks of magazines being loaded into R1 rifles from somewhere up there on the Greefswald plateau.
In that same fateful year Herbert A. Simon predicted the problem thus:
In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
Even more presciently:
He noted that many designers of information systems incorrectly represented their design problem as information scarcity rather than attention scarcity, and as a result, they built systems that excelled at providing more and more information to people, when what was really needed were systems that excelled at filtering out unimportant or irrelevant information.
Wikipedia
My excited italics.
In the absence of such a system, and in a world in which the price of knowing anything risks knowing much more than we ever wanted to know in a lifetime, we’re obliged to curate our sources of information as carefully as we can.
Or find someone we trust to do it for us.
I’m not picking on the BBC simply because the world's largest broadcast news company also happens to speak the only language I understand. I’m unpicking it, as inoffensively as I possibly can, because the formerly demure Auntie Beeb appears in the past few months and weeks to have discovered that her audience is just as prurient as she herself has always been, hinting at the indelicacies of the world with eyes cast down under fluttering lashes in demure pretence that they don’t exist, their greed for the goriest details betrayed these days only by the tell-tale swallowing of their salivating throats.
In the face of competition that has so shamelessly been trading the most bestial thrills of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children in return for blood-chilling clicks and eyeballs, she’s slowly rolling down her flesh-coloured nylon stockings for us to see the goose-bumps.
It’s not a good look.
Watch (she suggests as neutrally as possible so as not to raise false hopes of seeing people actually being burned alive): Plane turns into fireball as it lands.
BBC website - 02/01/2024
No, nothing gets the nerves quivering and the sweet rush of blood pumping through your tingling veins quite like the throbbing alert of Breaking News: those clashing cymbals accompanying a crescendo of drums; the aposematic pairing of black and yellow; the startling red — the thrill of the buzz of the vibrating phone in your bag or your pocket that seems simultaneously to anticipate and replicate the buzz in your electric heart.
You feel it before you see it, the adrenal kick of expectation colliding with the thrill of the blinking red, the doomsday black, the racing green.
What just happened? Who invaded whom? What exploded? What was it that fell out of the sky and plummeted into the sea? How many died? Who were they? Did I know any of them? How close is this to me? How, what and why will this grotesque new twist of fate change my world forever?
You look, you hear, you see and you listen.
The primal, fight-or-flight reactions of the sympathetic nervous system will respond first. Shock, horror, anger, fear, disgust and despair modulating all the way down to surprise, disappointment, annoyance, wtf and cbb. Very occasionally they will be joy, relief or hope, but these ones tend not to glue us to the screen.
The mundane thoughts will follow. Will I be obliged to change my travel plans? How will it affect the price of eggs or the rentability of my property? Will it damage my business, threaten my leisure or unsettle my state of mind? Is my pension safe?
Beneath them, in the depths of our unconscious like sharks circling to feed on the bloody misfortune of a weaker species, darker and deeper possibilities will hover toward the surface of these quotidian concerns.
We will think them unthinkable as soon as we think them. We’ll do our best to push them back into the Cimmerian shade of their dark and dirty urgings:
How will I gain from this? What selfish advantage might accrue from the imminent revelation of this new catastrophe? How will I benefit from the tragedy of others?
No. Stop thinking about it. But, yes, maybe, what if…
Some viewers might find this distressing, she says.
Fear and hope suddenly combine in a toxic mixture of prurient anticipation. We expect to be as disgusted by our disgust just as much as we hope to be horrified by the horror. We pretend to resist. But the bolder the warning, the sharper the appetite for gratification.
But why?
How else can we explain the heart-pounding thrill of breaking news unless it’s because we secretly hope and believe the world might be changing to our personal advantage? Unless because every great disaster, as terrifying and horrifying as it appears at first to the moral proprieties of our sober senses, promises to blast a hole in the secure wall of our comfortingly claustrophobic certainties through which gaping new vista our prurient and greedy eyes crave to see ourselves and the world anew, reshaped and remade with possibilities we dared not hitherto imagine?
Hence the prurience. Hence the elevated beat of the heart. Hence the appetite to consume and digest the stomach-churning worst of the worst.
You click.
No luck this time. It’s only babies with charred faces and broken limbs being pulled from the rubble of Khan Younis.
Oh.
How disappointing.
Then, blended in this sauce of fear, horror and disgust, there’s the sweet sentimentality that laces the arsenic of the BBC’s programming with “human” stories drawn from every country on the planet. Always and invariably they will be about the disabled, the marginalized and the impoverished. Always and invariably they will be singing, dancing or praying for dignity in the face of the unspeakable cruelties of their oppressors, characterized always as those mean, undemocratic mother-fuckers who willfully refuse to acknowledge the manifold blessings of the free market.
There’s a Wizard of Oz giving her directions from behind a curtain somewhere back there in the shadows. Its algorithms are doing a brilliant job of pretending their masters actually care.
And all the while we are the barbels roasting to juicy compliance on its braai.
I’m not sure what the end-game of this deliberate, oh-so polite and refined English obscurantism is. It’s far too much for my attention to filter the meaningful out of the mendacious. But I’m very afraid it might be this:
To create a fire, one needs only three ingredients: tinder, a spark, and a fan for the flames. In fact, anyone who has ever built a fire learns quickly that without the last ingredient, the other two are rendered useless. The fire that consumed Germany in the 1930s was no different. In this analogy, the tinder is the historic prejudices of Europe that many Germans happened to share, the spark Hitler himself, and the fan for the flames, the propaganda machine.
https://www.mbs.net/uploaded/NewImages/Academics/Center_for_Academic_Writing
Or this:
The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Whatever it is, they’re doing a good job of fanning the flames that are freaking out my idea of existence. And maybe yours.
Then again, and a little more hopefully:
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
The Stoics