Kim, Pete, or Vladimir, Volodymyr?
Please, Kim Kardashian, don’t elope with Pete Davidson. We’re already distracted by the wonder of Ketanji Brown Jackson and the blunder of Will Smith.
If we get one more shiny object to contemplate, I fear our support for Ukraine might waver.
With brutal methods perfected in other conflicts, the Russians are committing ever more brazen atrocities; they are raping and killing civilians. On Friday, they struck fleeing civilians in a train station in Ukraine, where a missile psychopathically labeled “For our children” killed 50 people and wounded nearly 100.
“Why do they need to hit civilians with missiles? Why this cruelty?” Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked the Finnish parliament Friday. “Sometimes, you think whether they are human at all.”
He pleaded, “Hatred has to lose.”
But are we moving on? Moving on is the favorite American activity. And technology has exacerbated our twitchy consciousness and sensationalist culture. We have a way of turning everything into trends. Once, there were causes. Now, there are trends.
But trends are transient, by definition. American attention goes from transient to transient to transient. A lifetime of ephemera. We used to have thought leaders; now we have influencers.
It’s a cognitive challenge, but can we find ways to keep our attention on things that require our attention? Do we have any mental discipline at all?
Consider climate change. We can stick with our concern when California and Colorado are burning to a crisp. But then the fires burn out and we move on to the next thing, the next trend. Crises are not trends.
Look at energy independence. We dwell on it when the Saudi crown prince sends a team to dismember Jamal Khashoggi or when Vladimir Putin shows what a monster he is in Ukraine. But then the fickleness of our attention span kicks in.
To add to the distraction, Putin creates his own alternative reality in Russia, as Donald Trump does here, with those susceptible to his lies. The Russians denied striking the train station in eastern Ukraine. They claim the Ukrainians are blowing themselves up.
I called Jaron Lanier, known as the father of virtual reality, to ask him about this.
“It takes a lot of energy to process a big lie compared to a little lie, and so the big lie actually has a better chance of sailing through,” he said. “I think, in the same sense, just the degree of atrocity and evil is hard for us to process.”
He shared his philosophy that when politics, culture and technology get too fancy and theoretical, they lose staying power and brutality breaks through.
“The Bolsheviks had this tremendously sophisticated, fancy rhetoric and all of these complicated ideas,” Lanier said. “They were building their own socioeconomics. Then, Stalin came in and said, ‘No, it’s really just about violence and domination, and screw all that.’ “I think the current wave of populism has that character,” Lanier said. “The ever finer gradations of thought on all kinds of issues, like gender and intersectionality, it’s so sophisticated that it requires a lot of patience.
“There’s more and more sophisticated talk about how we’re going to do blockchain, non-fungible tokens and cryptocurrencies, with contracts built in in its algorithms. This very fancy approach to technology is headed in the same direction as cultures or politics that get too fancy and too full of themselves.
“Basically, the Russians came in and said, ‘Screw all of your ideas. We’re just going to brutally take this stuff over and use it for power.’ Putin’s psychological operatives looked at all we do on social media and said, ‘We’ll just step in and use that to weaken you. We don’t care about these ideas.’
“I think ideals are great, but idealists who get too involved with their own sense of getting more sophisticated to perfect their schemes? I think then it reverts to brutality.”
As he got off the phone, Lanier offered a note of optimism about Trump, Putin and their ilk: “One of the great truths of history is that the great deceivers also deceive themselves.”
We live in a world of easy deceit and endless distractions. Solidarity with Ukraine is trending now, but will it last? Real solidarity is a commitment. Can the Ukrainians count on us? Or are we going to let them down as our attention wanders?