Attention as a contested ethical and political resource: Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt on the inner origins of freedom

The impact of new technologies on the public sphere of democratic societies has prompted a debate on emerging new forms of manipulation of the public opinion. In particular, social media, as grand technologies of attention, play an increasing role in shaping the processes of political representation and deliberation. Populist movements and authoritarian leaders have been particularly effective at exploiting these systems, causing concern for the welfare of democratic discourse, as it gets internally restructured by the rules of a new “attention economy”. Several decades before, both Simone Weil and Hannah Arendt explored the concept of attention and its political implications. Weil presented attention as a “non-acting action”, an elevated kind of individual agency that is detached from the mechanisms of social idolatry and eludes the prejudices and reactions of the multitude. Arendt argued that a “thinking attention” combines will and intellect into the capacity of judgment, which is crucial to overcome the threat of thoughtlessness and resist the “banality of evil”. Despite some relevant conceptual differences, both their perspectives consistently illustrate how it is through the suspension and manipulation of individual attention that totalitarian regimes enact two crucial mechanisms of domination: “uprootedness” and “unreality”. Because of their focus on the connection between attention and power, I suggest that Weil’s and Arendt’s analyses have relevant interpretive and normative implications for current debates: (i) Their concepts of uprootedness and unreality provide an interpretive framework that highlights how contemporary populist discourse exploits the correlation between individualized attention and collective identification, although through new means of viral communication and epistemic segmentation; (ii) Their distinct accounts of attention suggest two complementary normative requirements of democratic citizenship: first, a Weilian requirement of detachment from mechanisms of attention manipulation, to be supported by shielding the citizens from false information and personal data exploitation; second, an Arendtian requirement of attentive judgment, to be met by providing the citizens with adequate moral evaluation skills in environments where the grounds of deliberation are digitally mediated. Protecting and nurturing attention as a scarce but vital resource of citizenship is increasingly essential to preserve the conditions of democratic rule.