“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.”
—Attributed to Nikola Tesla (1942)
What is attention that we imagine it can be paid like a form of currency, be made to wander wastefully in an errant flow, or be managed as a scarce resource? Our language for describing attention ranges from assuming it is a limited commodity to seeing it as something more like a straying child that should be subjected to discipline against the temptations of distraction. Recent literature emphasizes our shrinking attention span as if we have fallen from the grace of a golden era in which long periods of individual focus were unbroken by click-bait and multi-tasking activities. Did our hominid ancestors really sit for long hours in contemplation rather than multi-task at grooming, feeding, and fending off predators? A question for another essay . . .
But what these statements have in common is a shared belief that attention seems to originate from a source point of individual perception and remain confined to that interior space. We imagine that our attention is bounded by the consciousness in which it occurs.
This common understanding of attention—as of most human behavior—is that it is a (more-or-less) self-willed and directed action by an autonomous being. We consider attention to be unidirectional perception in which the person paying attention is the sole agent and site of activity. I look at something. I attend to it. Such conceptions are fundamental to the idea of a dualistic (mind/body, self/other, knowing/world) philosophical tradition. The additional issue of whether attention is one thing with specific properties or many different aspects or varieties of thought is not addressed in such views.
A long history underpins this dualistic dogma. Consider the seventeenth-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s description of attention as “a determination of the soul to know something in preference to other things.” Building on this formulation we could say that a human subject or a bot (an AI system trained on motion or other signals) can aim its discerning sensors (ears, eyes, nose) towards a point of interest and attend to the provocation of stimuli. From sensation to perception to cognition, the cycle of uptake and processing—with its filters (social, cultural, personal) and drives (hunger, sex, power)—follows as a matter of automatic activity. Or so it seems. This is certainly the way philosopher/psychologist William James defined attention in 1890: “It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state.”
These statements and the attitudes they reflect take the subject-object distinction as a given, one that is not changed by activity. Each element of the system—viewer and viewed—remains intact. Even those researchers who note that attention registers on people being observed, that it creates a sensation of being watched, looked at, or noticed, consider that the force remains largely unidirectional. The idea that attention might be absorbed by an object or that a human might be altered by being the object of attention, particularly collective or mediated attention, is not even raised.
For a radical reversal, imagine that attention generates a field where energy flows are aggregated and exchanged among zones in constant flux, all affecting each other across local and non-local modes of communication (glances, comments, gestures, but also wires, optical fibers, airwaves, other signals in the electromagnetic spectrum). Just as our bodies give off heat and odors that merge in a common space, so attention fields might as well. In addition, conceive of attention as a force with agency that is not merely reciprocal but consuming because it has to feed on something. Consider the forces that produce fame and how they inflate but also absorb their objects. How can the sociopsychological and physiological dimensions of this phenomenon be understood? Then think of attention as using up energy in its production. Neither autonomous nor controlled, its dynamics resemble an atmospheric phenomenon in which attention storms, perturbations in the field, surges, vortices, chills, heat waves, and violent spikes all occur. Science fiction? Or speculative realism? Recent studies in cell biology suggest the latter.
One limitation of modern studies in social sciences—psychology, sociology, and politics—has been that they are constrained by mechanistic models of identity and rational thinking about communication and media. For instance, research into attention often measures the capacity to perform certain prescribed tasks under controlled conditions with carefully monitored variables. Terms like “information processing” and “feature integration” chart the trajectory of research in the field, which is always focused on individuals. Such empirical studies cannot account for the complexity of what physicist Karen Barad characterizes as “intra-action,” the fundamentally non-dualistic character of the physical world in which dynamics of among-ness prevail. Barad’s work revives a holism that has its own traditions, particularly in ancient and indigenous philosophies, but which also finds expression in the work in the present scientific community. These concepts do not need to be re-invented, but they have rarely been seen as relevant to the descriptive analysis of social processes.
Physiologically oriented studies of attention have generally focused on the brain and the activity of neurons in cycles of firing and recovery. Recently, research on the activity of microtubules and electromagnetic forces has demonstrated that neurons are only part of the process and that a susceptibility to energy fields links brain activity to the larger continuum of the universe. The rate and scale of transactions measured suggests a quantum field since the exchanges exceed what is possible within classical physics. But even as such studies track the electromagnetic energy generated by various modes of attention, they continue to treat it as an isolated phenomenon within a single individual. Some recent work in the analysis of crowds has identified collective oscillations as an emergent phenomenon, but this research remains limited to physical motions, not psychic fields or mental conditions. Some promising projects have examined “vibes” and the possibility of chemical signals as a communicative exchange and residue in groups. This work suggests possible future research into aggregate consciousness. Finally, work that links consciousness and physical processes based on the premise of underlying fields as the foundation of matter suggests a basis for communication across the full spectrum of matter from the micro to the macro level. Two prominent figures in this field, Tam Hunt and Jonathan Schooler, describe resonant waves and their effects. They refer to this phenomenon as a “general resonance theory of consciousness” and while rooted in physiological analysis, it situates the study of neural processes within a continuum of living and non-living structures. Their work provides a scientific foundation for the concept of predatory attention being developed here.
Some of this work goes back to that of Jacques Benveniste, the French immunologist responsible for identifying the signals emitted by molecules, demonstrating each chemical structure releases a unique electromagnetic energy signature. Benveniste’s work on what he called “the memory of water”—the capacity of water to retain a trace of these signatures even when the molecules that originally expended them were gone—has been celebrated, denigrated, and revisited across a full spectrum from quacks and mystics to biologists and psychologists. But it remains crucial to linking resonance theory to human consciousness—individual and aggregate—because it provides the scientific evidence for conceiving of social groups as a medium. Some of biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s concepts of morphic resonance and communication of information among non-local populations of species suggest the existence of similar fields.
Some of this speculation moves towards engagement with quantum vitalism, but ideas about zero-point energy have established that a constant vibratory condition exists in the universe, and provides a medium in which molecules communicate locally and non-locally. Extending these speculations to the concept of the noosphere as an emerging layer of planetary consciousness that sustains signal-free quantum communication strains credibility for some, but not all, researchers, and provides another model of how aggregation occurs. Taken together, these contributions provide a legitimate framework for approaching the study of attention as a cumulative field of biologically-based electromagnetic vibration and emergent fields of energy. In other words, as Nikola Tesla almost a century ago, vibration is the foundation of the universe.
However, energy fields that can be observed in the aggregate of attention in conversations, gatherings, or networks remain less commonly studied in spite of the fact that social groups are organic living systems whose every transaction produces energy in some form (physical, emotional, electrical, nutritional, and so on). Research on fungal networks, atmospheric systems, and planetary forces has prompted a new materialist approach rooted in dynamic systems and ecological models of relations. These ideas also have a history. Writing about the power of fascination between and among individuals in 1533, Cornelius Agrippa described a “subtile vapor” exerting its force. Conceptually, Agrippa’s vapor was a precursor to bioelectrical signaling. Now this line of inquiry could be traced through studies that were set aside as quackery, such as Franz Anton Mesmer’s work on animal magnetism, and continued in parapsychology labs, such as the renowned Rhine Research Center at Duke University. But some of these positions have been revived and revisited through new approaches to bioelectricity and epigenetics. Resonance theory provides a foundation for a revised understanding of attention.
If we conceive of attention in human beings as a flow of energy, then we can see it as a dynamic force generated and exchanged across entities and systems held in the aggregation of individual and collective participation. By reimagining the entire field of social relations, attention gets reconceived as a medium for transmitting affect, emotionally charged energy through the social field. Human beings are a medium through their existence as bioelectric fields and their capacities to create, hold, and distribute charge. They do not work in isolation but in aggregate and through the technological systems whose own electromagnetism participates in generating transmission fields. Nothing about this is magical thinking—just facts of physics. Electromagnetic fields are generated by data transmission and increase in intensity when activity in the system increases. Consider how attention consumes us. In our current climate, this has become aggressively predatory. No energy field is generated without feeding from a source—photons from the sun are a major driver of organic life. Even if no energy is ever lost, it is constantly being redistributed in a zero-sum game of give-and-take, consumption and depletion. The principles of attention fields are consistent with these facts of the physical world and research in biology that suggests “the body’s communication system might be a complex network of resonance and frequency.” The exchange and absorption of photons seems to play a crucial role in this process.
To grasp the importance of this revised approach, consider these questions in relation to current culture: How is it possible for a single individual to command so much attention that it destabilizes the entire global political order? Through what mechanisms and means of aggregation do the forces align? A simple instrumental approach that suggests that “media” are responsible (in the sense of “accountable” as well as “causal”) ignores the phenomenological complexity of social relations as forces. Commanding attention should be considered a form of predation, a vector driven by a devouring appetite for mind control and influence through perceptual and neuronal pathways of which we are only somewhat aware. The “media” of contemporary communications are only the techno hardware. The wetware of human activity and cognitive processing and the embodied software of human social relations are also a component of the attention environment in a fundamentally physical mode.
At an individual level, we are players in a plenum. As soon as we recognize our attention is part of a system linked to other loci of attention, we can understand how the force fields amplify. They intersect in ways that multiply the dynamics of exchange. The already active system of consumption escalates exponentially. The force field of aggregate attention consumes its objects with predatory engagement even as the field itself is consumed. In other words, we are used up by the claims made on our attention, but we also feed the system. Our energy drives the consuming mechanisms.
As the agency of attention becomes outsized, its potent energies increase as an effect of the transaction rate that directs the collective activity. Human beings are not unique to this phenomenon. It is evident in the collective life of insect colonies, the networked communication of fungi, the exchange systems of forest ecologies, the murmuration of bird flocks, and the fine-tuned capacities of animal species that receive and transmit information through a social group. But the amplification of attention through media systems of broadcast, satellite, Wi-Fi, and other techno-infrastructural means has generated a gargantuan attention field. Attending to its forces is crucial for studies in cultural behavior and the power of affective fields of attention. This cannot be done within traditional media or communication studies because it needs to include the more recent findings (outlined above) that link neuroscience, quantum physics, and electromagnetic energy studies.
Imagine, for a moment, mapping those flows and forces. Think of the earth and its lines of magnetic activity, wind patterns, tides, thermal zones and movements. Add to this the attention sphere with its intensities and vectors of activity. Concentrations cluster, nodes develop, zones emerge and disperse in constantly varying patterns. Then consider the consuming power of a demagogue who comes to power through individual command of attention in news cycles. How is the affective force of that process sustained? The attentive engagement flows outward, even as the connection, once established, becomes a two-way exchange. Attention flows, creating a collective psychic heat pump of addictive memes and hypnotizing claims, just as in thermal dynamics.
To understand how the agency of attention is predatory, realize that it consumes both its objects and its subjects. If attentions starts as a simple attractor—someone, something—it can quickly escalate into an addictive condition or dissipate. But attention occupies the psyche once it invades. The degrees of engagement begin with simple consumption (“paying” attention), then move through invasion (something “got” my attention) to alignment (we all “turned” our attention) and addiction/predation (“consumed” by attention). These degrees are not hard-and-fast stages but rather facets of the way attention works in a dynamic of exchange.
These are bold assertions. How can they be demonstrated and defended against skeptical dismissals from pragmatic and mechanistic realists? Famous examples of the predatory force of attention demonstrate the destructive power of its consuming actions—Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley. Obviously, not all celebrities are victims of their fame. But all famous figures emerged from a (back)ground, became distinct and distinguished through the dynamics of attention exchange that becomes a feedback loop taking as much as it gives. These figures became enormous through the attention paid, even as their interior lives were colonized in the process, occupied by the constant force of eyes, cameras, microphones, and spotlights on stages that grew larger and more commanding until they took up all massive amounts of space in the collective psyche. And how quickly they become eclipsed.
Most recently, the Trump phenomenon demonstrates the way the accumulation of attention becomes a social force—a type of predation on the body politic in which influence devours the source on which it feeds. Through these dynamics, an individual can command a massive field of volatile energy—as Trump demonstrates in his now nearly total domination of news feeds at a global scale. The predatory features of attention find their opportunity for action within the omnivorous appetite of influence. The hunger of the crowd for the object of its attention is limitless, ruled by protocols of social physics that are not yet fully articulated here but emerge from recognition of the volatility, instability, and potency of their effects. Not the influencer but the activity of influence is what consumes the participants. They become consumed in the process of absorption, returning the investment of attention to the system, which in turn increases in energy and demands more attention to sustain itself. Huge as they are, as transactional beings and as focal points in a massive network of attention exchange, the central figures are themselves colonized by the process. In a vulnerable individual, this can be fatal, but in a socio-pathological one, the focal object inflates, feeding from an increasingly insatiable need.
Never before in the history of humankind have the simultaneous and asynchronous attention fields functioned at the current scale and rate of transmission exchange that aligns into a massive swarm of focused attention. The swarm is driven by a need for its object even as the object depends upon the force field of attention. But it is the alignment that sustains an authoritarian regime, one in which the arbitrary and uncontrolled actions of a single figure are effected. The psycho-physiological porousness of human beings makes us susceptible to and dependent on exchange. In the force fields of attention, the individuated identity is absorbed into the larger collective, and once the force of alignment begins, it gains momentum, becoming its own driver.
In the standard, classical theories of crowd behavior, this phenomenon is described as a submission to conformity, which it certainly is. The resonance theory of attention adds an explanation of the forces that produce these effects; it does not contradict the classical models. Attention in aggregate is a devouring force that overwhelms individual agency even as it feeds on participation. The monumental scale to which such fields can arise is amplified transactionally—and as the exponential increase in exchanges is facilitated by mediated systems of exchange, networks that produce derivatives of these exchanges at nano-speeds where the instability and potency of affective energies surpasses those of any rational moderation or constraints. We are in the era of hyper-mediated systems of exchange that absorb attention into forces that are capable of phantasmic effects—the bringing into being of the very conditions they imagine—through the agency of aggregation.
Imagine the buzz. Consider the noise. Visualize the massive activity of exchange—moment to moment within the nano-seconds of exchanges, physical, signal based—and then expand that visualization to the global scale. The over-stimulated attention economies and ecologies are addicted to the process of consumption. How to stop it? For the upward cycle of transactions to be stopped would require quieting the systems, lowering their exchange rates, diminishing the processing speeds and capacities for rapid distribution and re-distribution across the networks of attention. But instead, the monopoly of attention produces the conditions for this authoritarian predation.
The crash is inevitable. Momentum at this rate of increase cannot be sustained. But the interim damage to the fragile social order is enormous—out of control and misconceived. The forces that generate and are generated by attention are affective, and cannot be analyzed or understood as if they were mechanistic systems that could be subject to rational controls. To alter the course of these agential forces will require first recognizing their affective character and the conditions of dynamic codependence within which they work so effectively. The description of attention as predation is not a metaphor, but a diagnosis of the actual conditions of psycho-socio-cultural currents. Influence has no limit to its appetite and the addiction to alignment is fed on consensual delusion. The waves get synchronized, and a form of mass hypnosis sets in.
The theoretical framework sketched here is not at odds with the standard social psychology models or their description and analysis of crowd behavior. But they stop short of including neuro-physiological dimensions. The neuroscientists describe the workings of an individual consciousness but with few exceptions do not extend their insights to the aggregation of resonance as a psycho-social phenomenon. Recent work, cited above, on the way that physical patterns form in very large crowds provides a foundation for adding a dimension—that of the atmospheric collective of aggregated consciousness (in which a measure of unconsciousness is fully present as well, since motivations, drives, and desires often arise from unacknowledged and even inaccessible aspects of the individual psyche).
A concept of attention as a dynamic force is an essential tool for reconsidering the way authoritarian regimes emerge through predatory consumption and alignment. The key component of this theoretical position is the realization that affect is the single strongest driver of human behavior and that breaking cycles of alignment will depend on the production of attractors that can fracture the consolidation of attention around what is now a single node embodied in an individual human being whose power grows daily through his predatory absorption of attention.
If we needed a test case on which to map the way attention forces arise and perform, what occurred on Thursday, June 27, 2024 in the debate between then-incumbent President Biden and then-former President Trump would provide an excellent focus for research, if one were prepared to measure the rate, intensity, and spread of messaging about the event from its inception to its disastrous fallout. A project for another time, the incident has had extensive consequences that are still unfolding. Authoritarianism works through alignment. Alignment is driven by affect and instrumentalized through attention. Attention consumes its participants—subjects and objects alike—and in its current ravenous high scale dynamic, becomes predatory. The monopoly will only be broken by distributing attention across multiple attractors (the terms and values of which remain to be determined) that operate through an appeal to affect.
