The paradox of attention is that, at any moment, there’s a very good chance that it won’t seem worth attending to. Attention, after all, is so navel-gazy. There are always so many other things—more specific and urgent and obviously worthy things—clamoring for people’s focus. But that there’s never a good time to think about attention is precisely why we should be thinking about it—right now, urgently. Climate change looms. People’s rights are under threat. Books are being banned. The Big Lie keeps lying; disinformation, compounding the chaos, competes for our care just as fervently as all the scattered truths do. The volume of the distractions only grows; like Boebert and Greene’s antics, they threaten to drown out everything else. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Steve Bannon, that noted purveyor of noise, said in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The strategy works. Attention is zero-sum; that makes distraction a potent weapon. The era of attention crisis is also the era that has given rise to “paper terrorism,” a flood-the-zone approach carried out with bureaucratic forms and filings. It is the era that finds the Supreme Court making binding pronouncements about the most intimate areas of Americans’ lives not through its standard proceedings, with all their pesky scrutinies, but via shadow docket. Activists have boasted about how simple it’s been for them to dissolve hard-won voting rights with the flick of a pen, in part because many of the people who would be horrified at the regression are unaware that it is happening at all. “Honestly, nobody even noticed,” one of those activists said. “My team looked at each other and we’re like, ‘It can’t be that easy.’”