"It’s tempting to see our attention economy as purely dystopian. It is nightmarish, after all, to compete with one another via avatars..."

"... for work, for sex, for companionship, for cash to pay our medical bills. But the rise of the attention economy also reveals a truth that the dandies of the café terrace did not realize: of course our selfhood is defined by the attention, and with it the love, of others. Even in the disembodied terrain of the Internet, we are utterly contingent creatures: not just self-makers or, God forbid, influencers, but beings dependent on the attention of others, an attention that, at its core, is not so unlike love. (As Simone Weil famously put it: 'Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.')"

From "Eat Me, Drink Me, Like Me /Is love in the attention economy unreal?" by Tara Isabella Burton (in The New Atlantis, Winter 2020).

This is a very interesting article. Highly recommended. But I got totally sidetracked wanting to understand that Simone Weil quote — "Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love."

It doesn't really fit the idea Burton is talking about, which is the urge and effort to grab attention. The article title "Eat me, drink me, love me" comes from this Christina Rossetti poem, "Goblin Market." Excerpt:

“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”

But the Simone Weil quote seems as though it must mean not clamoring for attention but paying attention.  Read the Weil quote in context here, then — if you're with me this far — apply it to what we are doing or failing to do when we experience what Burton calls "purely dystopian... in the disembodied terrain of the Internet."

As for "the dandies of the café terrace":

Nineteenth-century dandy culture... was said by Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, one of its chroniclers, to be for “miniature Gods.” The dandy, aloof and nonchalant, is never subject to the affection of others, or to the contingency that comes with being loved. He does not love, for he is emotionally invulnerable. Both d’Aurevilly and his fellow dandy Charles Baudelaire believed dandyism to be about the disconnect between the power to affect others and the power to be (at least seemingly) unaffected. In one telling anecdote, Baudelaire compares the dandy to the myth of the Spartan schoolboy concealing a stolen fox from his tutor by hiding it under the boy’s tunic. The boy maintains a courageous air of impassivity with his tutor until the fox claws out his innards and kills him. “A dandy may be blasé,” Baudelaire assures us, “he may even suffer; but in this case, he will smile like the Spartan boy under the fox’s tooth.”....

ALSO: That Simone Weil quote appears in a recent WaPo piece, "Mysterious Matisse/What are these three strange figures doing?" It's easy enough to state the obvious: It's "Bathers With a Turtle" — they're looking at a turtle. But:

Why does it have their attention?... The philosopher Simone Weil likened attention to prayer, calling it the “rarest and purest form of generosity.” I think she was onto something. But beyond that, I don’t know. The mystery persists.