I’ve been saying this for a while, that I need to get back into writing again. The podcast feels like it’s become this all encompassing thing that consumes my time. I’ve gone from sitting down to write for hours a day to get the book out the door (which you can also read on the Substack, if you want), to not writing at all. I disappoint myself.
So here’s the first of hopefully a reasonably consistent set of follow up articles to the podcast episodes. This week, I’m talking about Bernard Stiegler and his prophetic critique of the attention economy.
Before I begin, if you haven’t yet listened to the episode, you can find it here:
120 Attention is the Last Frontier: Bernard Stiegler and the Age of Distraction
Bernard Stiegler’s life reads like something out of a parable. A young man with no future robs banks in 1970s France, spends years behind bars, and in that captivity rebuilds himself with philosophy. He walks out of prison not as a criminal, but as a thinker possessed, convinced that the real theft in our time is not money, but attention.
Bernard Stiegler, then. The bank robber turned philosopher. Caught by the police. Put away for five years. In those years, where most men would scratch the passing of days into the wall and contemplate their sense of self, Stiegler drowned himself in philosophy. Plato. Kant. Husserl. Derrida. Time, memory, technology. Reinventing himself with the power of thought.
He came out of prison a tour de force. He never stopped thinking about prison, and this shows in his work. There’s a certain urgency about it. None of the lofty, esoteric vibe that you tend to get with old school philosophy. Stiegler was raw. Real. Unyielding. He recognised the importance of the present moment. A man who had time stolen from him, and realised the weight of making the most of the time he had left.
Technology as Poison and Cure
Stiegler took an old Greek word and turned it into the cornerstone of his philosophy - pharmakon. Technology, for him, is an ontological feedback loop. What we design also designs us back. Fire cooks or kills. Writing preserves wisdom or weakens memory. Smartphones (one of his favourite devices) hollow us out. The poison and the cure, the dreaded pharmakon, come in the same pill.
We are the animal that externalises memory. We write it down, record it, film it, upload it. But once memory leaves your head and lives in a book, or a film, or a server farm, it isn’t neutral anymore. It shapes you. It shapes what you remember, what you forget, what you desire. And when those memories are stored on platforms you don’t own, curated by corporations that feed them back to you for profit, then memory itself becomes theft.
Freud always said that it’s important to forget. It’s a shame we’ve forgotten that.
Stiegler called this tertiary memory, the storage of experience outside the mind. And he saw it as the battleground of the twenty-first century. Whoever controls tertiary memory controls attention. Whoever controls attention controls desire. And whoever controls desire controls everything.
Capitalism as Attention Theft
Advertising doesn’t sell products. It sells your attention to whoever’s paying. This was already true with television. I’m sure most of you remember the days before on-demand streaming, having to sit through adverts during your favourite program. Being sold washing up liquid, and breakfast cereals, and scaled-down models of Castle Greyskull.
(You know I love an 80s cartoon reference)
Digital capitalism perfected this idea. The algorithm doesn’t wait for you to want. It trains the wanting into you. It colonises your psyche, implants cravings, manufactures the self.
Stiegler called this psychic proletarianization. In the old factory, the Marxist world, you lost your tools, your craft, your labour. In the new factory, you lose your desires. You lose the slow, fragile process of becoming yourself. You become a copy of a copy of a copy (borrowing from Chuck Palahniuk), formatted and resold.
This is why you check your phone in the middle of the night, half-conscious, scrabbling in the dark, searching for something you can’t name. This is why reading a book feels like climbing a mountain. Your attention has been mined, fragmented, stripped. A shattered remnant of what it used to be.
And the terrifying price is more than distraction. The price is care.
The Collapse of Care
Care is slow. To read a book, to raise a child, to love someone, to grow a culture. These take time. Attention. Patience. Repetition. But capitalism cannot afford slow. Profit thrives on speed. The economy needs a quick fix. And so care collapses.
Stiegler wrote about this collapse with a terrifying urgency. A man on fire. Education reduced to test scores. News reduced to tweets. Love reduced to swipes. Culture hollowed out into spectacle. A society addicted to acceleration, incapable of imagining the long future.
And the result is what he called symbolic misery. The dull ache of living without meaning. Without memory. Without care. Depression, burnout, anxiety. Not as individual weaknesses, but as collective symptoms of a system eating itself alive.
It’s part of why I gave up being a therapist. I realised that what was presenting as so-called symptoms of the individual were actually a psychological pandemic of our culture. Fixing the person felt pointless, because the manifestations of the individual were a red herring. The grander picture became fixing society. I don’t know how to do that. Instead, I decided to start this Substack so I could talk about the broader picture. Can I change people’s minds? Has any of this worked? I doubt it. But I remain.
What Now?
Stiegler leaves us with a challenge. Technology is not going away. The pharmakon is in our bloodstream now. As human beings, we are innately technical. It’s part of what we are. Creatures of psychedelia. The mind made manifest in technology. Every search, every scroll, every notification is another dose. Poison and cure, fused together.
The question is not escape. There is no going back. The question is dosage. How do we invent ways of using technology that cultivate attention, that nourish care, that extend memory without enslaving it? How do we turn the poison into medicine?
I don’t know the answer to any of this. I’m just a man navigating the void. But, like Stiegler, I believe this can only happen collectively. Not through self-help hacks, not through weekend detoxes, but through new institutions, new practices, new rituals of care. Shared attention. Shared memory. Shared resistance.
And maybe that’s the lesson he leaves behind. That every moment of care is defiance. Every act of attention is survival. Every attempt to slow down is resistance against a system addicted to speed.
From prisoner to philosopher, Stiegler’s rebirth was radical. But his message is even more radical: if attention is the last scarce resource, then care is the last form of freedom.
The question is whether we can remember that before it’s too late.
Much love, David