Critical Ignoring
January 24, 2025 Donald Trump Craig Mod Mark Zuckerberg Shou Zi Chew Elon Musk Jenny Odell Rob Wijnberg Alain de Botton Attention
I can’t do this for four more years.
I watched the Trump inauguration while cleaning my kitchen. It made for great ambient television; the shuffling of the audience, the strange music and finally the absurdity of it all. Seeing all the people in attendance who had repeatedly been threatened or belittled by the man only to show up and sit through the event as though any of it was normal.
Then came the speech, the airing of grievances and the insistence on a divine mission. I started having regrets for tuning in. There was no benefit to watching any this, I realized, it was all empty calories, a show of vintage Trumpian spectacle. I felt neither more informed nor in any way enlightened.
I’m no political analyst, and starting with my first piece about Trump here, I have been writing as a coping mechanism. My posts grappled with what I was seeing: One man‘s reality-bending ability to normalize the abnormal, to say what was previously unsayable, and to move the political discourse, America, and with it (seemingly) the entire world to the hard right.
I’m under no illusion that my posts changed anybody’s mind—that’s not what I’m doing here, and my readership is too arbitrary to make such an impact. But writing about Trump and the forces at play felt like the little thing I could do against the hyper-normalization; it felt good—if only for my own sanity—to point to what should have been clear for everyone to see. And yet facts didn’t matter: He was duly reelected.
The first days after the inauguration were a flurry of activity. So many executive orders, a barrage of stunts: Renaming the Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America”. Talks about annexing Greenland and retaking the Panama Canal). Then the truly dark stuff, the dehumanization of migrants and Musk’s Hitler salute. It was as shocking as it was hard to look away.
Ihr müsst euch eure Aufmerksamkeit und eure Wut und Verzweiflung gut einteilen in den nächsten Jahren, sonst werdet ihr aufgerieben. Keine Betroffenen übersehen oder zurücklassen, aber auch keine kopflose Dauererregung, die nur auslaugt (und das auch soll).
— Natascha Strobl (@nataschastrobl.bsky.social) 2025-01-21T06:45:04.549Z
On Bluesky I read an appeal from the political scientist Natascha Strobl, who recommended being careful when it comes to spending your anger and desperation. “It’ll grind you down (…) and that’s the point.”
It made me wonder: Is there a way to opt out of the barrage of Trump-related information? Is it possible to retreat from the news cycle and close this particular pandora’s box? To keep myself from succumbing to cynicism and despondency?
On his podcast this week, Ezra Klein talked about how we got here. For him, Trump’s remarkable sticking power has to do, first and foremost, with attention.
I do think that Donald Trump understands that attention is the new money; attention is the fundamental substance of power—in America and as he conceives of American politics.
He also pointed out that the most prominent places in the audience were reserved not for members of his own party, not for the governors of the states which make up the U.S.; but instead for the “Attentional oligarchs”—the CEOs of companies that hold much of our attention and that mediate how we see the world: Elon Musk of X, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Shou Zi Chew of TikTok (and too a lesser extend Sundar Pichai of Google).
I believe that the wider culture wars, the constant mechanisms to keep large swaths of the population both mad and upset is, for the most part, a business. Keeping our attention locked in is how platforms make money: Making people mad to keep them glued to their screens increases ad impressions and earning. It’s a relatively simple business proposition—with the side-effect of replacing all discourse with indignation.
This isn’t a particularly new insight: I have known this mechanism for years, especially after reading the books on news by Rob Wijnberg and Alain de Botton. Both works have held up remarkably well: The authors criticized that news are a constant drumbeat of shallow information. That they don’t replace deep analysis. And ironically, that they keep us hooked by hurting our feelings in specific and predictable ways.
Craig Mod has previously written a lot about attention; about why it matters to consciously maintain and nurture it; about keeping it in check in the face of the many distractions that exist in the world. His insights aren’t about politics per se, but rather about the mechanics of attention, which includes apps and news publications.
All the way back in 2019 he wrote about “Attention monsters”:
These suboptimal contracts are at their most exaggeratedly worst in what I call “attention monsters.” That is, any app / service / publication whose business is predicated on keeping a consumer engaged and re-engaged for the benefit of the organization (often to the detriment of the mental and physical health of the user), dozens if not hundreds or thousands of times a day.
Later in the article, he describe the same thing as “Something — anything — to increase engagement time in service to ad revenue.”
I understand that politics aren’t apps, that outrage isn’t the same end point as ad revenue. But these things become connected when outrage feeds engagement, ad revenue, and polarization alike. When keeping people mad and grievances high leads not only to making money but also serves to push them to the right and often vote against their own best interest. Attention is, indeed the key to it all.
Just as I was writing this, I found a link to a paper titled “Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens”1. It’s a relatively short piece, and argues that the “overabundant and attention-grabbing” can “lead people to doubt the very existed of ‘truth’ or a shared reality.”
The authors write how negative and outrage-bating messages get shared more often; and how the attention oligarchs, as Ezra Klein would call them, can exploit this bias to their advantage. They propose looking away:
Critical ignoring (Wineburg, 2021) is a type of deliberate ignorance that entails selectively filtering and blocking out information in order to control one’s information environment and reduce one’s exposure to false and low-quality information. This competence complements conventional critical-thinking and information-literacy skills, such as finding reliable information online, by specifying how to avoid information that is misleading, distractive, and potentially harmful.
I think it’s important not to think of critical ignoring as a way to close ones eyes from reality, but instead as a way of redirecting attention to where it matters.
I keep coming back to Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing from 2019, where the somewhat provocative title really translated into an appeal to do something else instead of wasting our attention on social media and the news cycle. Critical ignoring isn’t even so much about wanting to look away from the unfolding horrors of a second Trump presidency. Like quitting X, it’s about directing my attention elsewhere, towards things I can change and that have a measurable impact on my own life. It’s much more worthwhile to spend my attention on raising my son, spending time with my partner, reading or looking at art, interacting with friends, riding the trails.
What keeps bringing me back to the news cycle isn’t even so much that I care about the events on the other side of the world but the feeling of missing out on world events, on the things everyone talks about, even if they—for the most part—have little bearing on our lives.
It’s hard to break with the habit, hard to do nothing. But it also feels like there no way I can keep doing this for four more years.
“Critical Ignoring”, of course, is a great example of Terminification, the quest to give any scientific theory a catchy label in order to get cited.↩︎