The War on Attention

I’m done consuming chess content

We are here for the drama. We are marketing drama.

Jan Henric Buettner

Trying to stay informed about this game I love is making me use my phone in ways I dislike, and I have to step off the bandwagon to regain balance and presence.

Hostile devices and algorithms create ‘attention capture’, which is very pernicious. It is all the more dangerous because it looks so innocuous on the surface. I see so many people addicted to short-form mindless content - they can’t be happy about it. Youngsters on the train scroll ticktock without spending more than a few seconds on a video before swiping to the next, again and again, for dozens of minutes. This is not an isolated sighting.

Unfortunately, a segment of the chess world is entering this war for attention to harvest profits. This is incredibly lucrative for content creators and justifies the inflow of VC money. The sad thing is that this is the polar opposite of the spirit of the game of chess: deep, slow, beautiful. Chess has been taken over as entertainment, then packaged as a distraction, and finally weaponised as an addiction.

I want to define the problem in greater detail, highlight the apparent issues and the less obvious long-term consequences, and explore how we can fight back.

The “Mindless Grasping Impulse”

Attention stealing is now such a popular topic that long-form articles are written weekly describing its causes and consequences. I’ll start with something you may or may not have felt yourself before:

The second way it plays out, though, is the ‘mindless grasping impulse’, when we pick up our phones for no particular reason whatsoever. As we get used to reaching for our phones all the time, for all manner of reasons, this impulse becomes a force of habit. When I reached for my phone in the post office, I did so with nothing specific in mind that I am checking. It’s simply that my mind would rather fixate on something than the alternative: just being present for a moment, with no stimulation, no task, to fixate my attention on.

Dan Nixon

I’d like to link three important recent articles discussing the problem in great detail:

• Chris Hayes in the Atlantic: You’re Being Alienated From Your Own Attention

• Tej Parikh: The Human Mind is in a Recession

• Ted Gioia: The State of the Culture, 2024

The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity.

The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds, and must be repeated.

It’s a huge business, and will soon be larger than arts and entertainment combined. Everything is getting turned into TikTok—an aptly named platform for a business based on stimuli that must be repeated after only a few ticks of the clock.

Ted Gioia

Player care

A recent tweet by Hugh Schecker (who works in football player care) explained the current trend for player social media engagement.

Fast forward to today, and the majority of players value one thing above nearly anything else - privacy. Potentially to do with the toxification of social media (and society more generally), but also I think because it's one of the last controllables they have in their life.

One elite player that I know proudly states that he's delighted nobody publicly knows how many kids he's got, their names or ages. Players rarely post candid or behind-the-scenes footage of them away from work - if they even control their social accounts at all.

A key reason for that is the drive for the 24/7 media environment - previously Sky Sports News, but more recenently the TikTok & Instagram 'meme & banter' pages that take any little fact or tidbit of information and flog it to death. I remember a player that I worked with was a keen musician - he played the guitar and sang - but it was always something that he did privately. A staff member posted a video of him doing that one time and within days the club was flooded with requests for him to play as part of a media feature, interview - it became all he was known for. He stopped playing shortly after as he didn't enjoy it any more.

There's no doubt that being in the spotlight is part & parcel of being a professional athlete - but now it seems to be more contractual than they actually want to be open and share. A few continue - and often suffer from it - but in a world where abuse is at an all time high, security concerns are heightened and the world is polarized - I see the trend progressing further away from real engagement rather than towards it

I know we are very far from this in the chess world, but as chess players, I beg you to see several moves ahead! It is easy to imagine a future where players value privacy as “one of the controllable things in their lives.” I also predict that we will see greater protection for overexposed juniors in the current media landscape.

Content creators should also worry about personal care. Viewers form parasocial relationships, thinking they ‘know’ the streamers because they have watched so much of their thoughts and lives. Trolls will post hateful comments; one critical comment has more weight than hundreds of positive ones. I hope they have the appropriate support to deal with these issues, which will only worsen with time.

Will someone think of the children?

I wish it were a joke, but the impact of social media and phones on teenagers’ development and well-being is no laughing matter. If you are a parent, phone policy is now one of the top criteria for school choice. Unfortunately, we do not know the long-term consequences of social media addiction, and these may take decades to unfold. However, we already have data showing harmful consequences on emotional well-being and attention. For further reading, I recommend Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation.

I think the answer is government regulation. If a corporation is left unchecked, it will spill toxic waste for profit next to your house. Algorithms spilling toxic addiction in your pocket have to be stopped all the same.

Can chess be packaged as Formula One?

The players commendably have been put at the centre of the ‘Freestyle’ chess tour, but the spectators have somehow been sidelined. It has always been a peculiarity of the chess world to rely on private sponsorship, and we will be able to compare and contrast the way VC money behaves and whether this brings stability or brittleness to the chess ecosystem. I do not know how it will work - the Play Magnus Group went public for 21 NOK per share and got taken over for 13 NOR per share, and they ran a very polished Champion Chess Tour for years and could not make it work. It is a genuine question to wonder if the only way to make this work is by manufacturing the drama (as the stakeholders themselves revealed) and not having the patience to let the ecosystem bloom. “Grow the game” is a meaningless catchphrase, meaning “grow the profits” and nothing else. This isn’t a win-win symbiosis between the viewers and the product because they leverage the attention-stealing ecosystem that attacks our well-being. I love chess because of the incredibly rewarding depth of the experience of playing, something players of all levels feel. But we are all on the slippery slope that brings us from chess being packaged into news onto manufactured entertainment.

The problem with chess content.

The situation has slowly escalated with every drama or scandal. Like the proverbial boiling frog, the constant tug-of-war for attention has reached unbearable proportions. Drama has momentum as every actor and creator gives their take or reaction.

Every feed on YouTube, X, or Reddit Chess is overwhelmed by the drama content promoted by the algorithm. Thankfully, I have never really used TikTok, which seems to be the most addictive app and algorithm.

Beauty comes from a deep appreciation of patterns and complexity. For the average player, this often comes from a stronger player walking you through the ins and outs of a position. That beautiful walk ended up being a sprint through an alleyway lined up with ads.

The Youtube Algorithm

Let’s look at the last four thumbnails and videos of two YouTube channels, Levy Rozman and Daniel King.

Levy has two large thumbnails of Magnus, and we can easily see that they drew 50% more viewers than the other two. It’s even hinted he won the game that he lost (clearly trying to ‘trick’ the viewer into thinking Magnus won), and the more exclamation marks, the better. Shamefully, the final thumbnail does not even have Vincent on it.

Danny's ‘puzzle of the week’ video has much fewer views. I understand that people want to be entertained rather than educated. However, tremendous pressure on the content creator to abandon the less successful format pushes most of the content toward more clickbait.

I have nothing against putting players or Magnus at the centre of the narrative. I have a problem with the delivery system and its packaging: the algorithms have unintended long-term consequences.

My Blog fatigue

Unfortunately, the advent of chatGPT has been polluting the blog landscape on lichess, much to my annoyance. The physiology articles I have written, for example on nutrition and Heart Rate Variability require a lot of research, and I have seen content “creators” using chatGPT to write articles on such subjects with a predictable low quality output. And now the Youtube thumbnail fight has also come to lichess, more elaborate clickbaity thumbnails. We even have engagement bait by a titled player writing, “The French Defense isn’t playable”, which generates a lot of drama engagement.

We also have a GM who wrote about the ethics of cheating … using chatGPT!! People can do what they want, but it saddens me to see slop, low-value content diluting the great content of so many of my great fellow bloggers.

This is when you say: “Hey Benji, you complain about content, yet you create content yourself”. Time to repost the famous comic strip by Matt Bors:

I’m trying to publish evergreen content on Substack, where people directly subscribe. (or on lichess, where you can follow the creators you like). I love the premise: you subscribe, I write, and you get an email. Simple! Twitter has nuked any engagement for small accounts such as mine, so there is no longer any point in engaging with this hellish platform.

Reclaim your attention

I don’t know how to win the war on attention, but I can guide you in winning several battles. Again, if you are not concerned, that is fantastic. But I see such an incredible number of friends, colleagues and strangers addicted to phones in various ways. I have a friend who is constantly listening to podcasts and long-form content on self-improvement and wellness, to the point where he continually has someone else’s voice in his head, to the cost of great confusion and tiredness. The loop is self-reinforcing: the more addicted to self-help content, the more we seek further similar content.

What I learned on Retreat

Most of us don't have the luxury of spending one week without our phones unless it is intentional. I jumped at the occasion to do so during a week-long retreat last year.

My initial thinking about retreats was the following: the outside world, with all its frustrations and annoyances, is taken away, and then there must be a state of comfort because we removed the world’s annoyance. This state of comfort allows us to do inner work and come back better equipped to tackle the outside world’s annoyances. Some similarly see retreats as cop-outs because they have to deal with the real world, and going on retreat is, therefore, for weak people.

How wrong this turned out to be!

I went for a week at a zen retreat in a beautiful location in the mountains of the Black Forest in Germany.

The Zedo at Sonnenhof. I was sitting on the left side, near the window. (People sit facing the wall with their eyes open)

Complete Silence (no phone, obviously), just sitting in front of a wall for eight hours a day in slices of 30 minutes and 90 minutes of communal physical work (I was cleaning the big pots in the kitchen). This happens when you take away your daily life: you realise that all your hangups and annoyances are not the result of your environment but the products of how you process this environment. In other words, I was left with a magnification of the annoyances of my regular life to process. As if my mind was a lens, and going on retreat shone a blinding light through it instead of a background: the problem always was with the lens and not the background. Things became so unbearable that I had to leave the retreat or completely surrender, which I managed to do only one sit at a time. The saying “wherever you go, there you are” never rang more true. Any deep processing of ourselves cannot come from manipulating external circumstances but from letting go of our fears, anxieties, and cravings.

The problem is that you can’t “do” letting go. You have to let the world unfold one small step at a time.

Just Chess

I need to link here my article on “How to Focus” and the practice of ‘just chess’ which involves preceding chess work with a ‘just sitting’ practice.

just-chess:

Prepare ahead one course or book.

Do the just-sitting practice for 5 minutes.

Then do just-chess for 25 minutes. Read or solve, not doing anything else.

No need to think about focus itself.

Repeat the entire 5/25 split as many times as convenient.

Slown down and read physical books.

From Chris Hayes in the Atlantic:

You hear complaints about the gap between what we want to pay attention to and what we end up paying attention to all the time in the attention age. Someone ambitiously brings three new novels on vacation and comes back having read only a third of one of them because she was sucked into scrolling through Instagram. Reading is a particular focus of these complaints, I find.

Step one is to slow down and reconnect with the beauty of chess. If you study chess, don’t use a lichess study; instead, use an actual book and board and move the pieces. Annotate your games with a pen and paper. I understand this adds extra friction, but how happy did you become by removing friction and boredom? Don’t wear headphones while playing sports, and always carry an actual book on public transport.

I’ve got time

My absolute favourite book on time management is Paul Looman’s “I’ve Got Time” (you will also find it under the title “Time Surfing”). The first two main instructions are

1. Do one thing at a time, and finish what you’re doing

2. Be aware of what you’re doing and accept it.

If you do the dishes, say to yourself, "Now it is time for me to do the dishes." Name the activity in your head. Some people also find it impossible to clean their house (or do a workout!) without listening to a podcast. That robs you of a beautiful connection with being present.

Leverage the ‘mindless grasping impulse’

I successfully use the ‘mindless grasping impulse’ as a cue to rest in current awareness. It is a simple loop:

1. Feel the impulse to grab the phone

2. Be aware of the impulse.

3. Realise you're about to grab the phone for no reason other than craving.

4. Deliberately leave the phone alone!

5. Take a deep breath and rest in awareness.

The stronger the phone craving, the better this works!

Outlook

If someone declares war on your attention, trust them and fight back. This is highly asymmetrical warfare, challenging to fight as a group but possible to progress as individuals. I worry about the long-term consequences for the spectators, the content creators, and the players. I hope the few pointers in this article are helpful, and I look forward to your comments and criticism.