The Art of (Attention) War
Recognizing we must win back our attention…as the infinite is making us insane
Excerpted from a ZINE post by Matt Klein and Nick Susi, Dec 29, 2025
“Do not swallow bait offered by the enemy.”
And make no mistake. If you don’t learn to command your attention, soldier, someone else sure as hell will.
01.
THE PATH TO THE INFINITE IS THE PATH TO MADNESS
For thousands of years, across ancient history to modern culture, a mythic archetype continues to repeat.
From the Norse legend of Odin, in his relentless search of Mimir’s Well, to the 1964 X-men’s creation of Cerebro…the mythological lesson is the same:
The path to the infinite is the path to madness.
And yet, we still gouge out our eyes…we still plug our untrained minds into the infinite machines: smartphones, social media, Oura rings, prediction markets, AIs.
And as a result, we are going mad.
02.
THE MIND THAT ENTERS LIMITLESS TERRAIN WITH LIMITED CAPACITY INVITES DEFEAT
We’re not built for the infinite.
The human brain is powerful, but finite.
And our attentional capacity is a limited resource.
Nelson Cowan, a leading researcher on working memory, tells us the Magic Number is 4±1. Meaning, we can only focus our attention on 3 to 5 meaningful chunks of information before our cognitive capacity overflows. How does that compare to the number of tabs you have open right now? the number of TikToks you’ve scrolled today? the number of unread emails sitting in your inbox?
When we exceed the Magic Number, we risk ego depletion. When our cognitive load becomes too high, our self-control depletes. We become a soft target: more impulsive, more predisposed to reach for short-term gratification, distractions, rage bait, junk food, gambling and buying more things we don’t actually need.
But what about paying constant attention to the things that really matter? Global crises, suffering, injustice? Isn’t it our duty to care for our brethren?
Noble, but there’s a paradox here.
The more suffering we try to absorb, the less we’re able to act. This is called psychic numbing. Compassion fatigue. It’s a defense mechanism where empathy-response reduces as tragedy increases. The mind can’t metabolize the infinite, so it shuts down. This is why a single person’s story can sometimes move millions more effectively than statistics of mass suffering.
It’s not that we don’t or shouldn’t care, but because the infinite exceeds the limits of human capacity.
03.
In the 5th century BCE, Chinese general & philosopher Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War…the oldest known military treatise in the world: a collection of numbered maxims on how to understand & win battles. Now, in our modern attention war, perhaps there are some amendments to be made to his principles for surviving a battlefield where our own minds are under siege every waking second.
Our attention deserves protection, because our attention is our reality.
Attention is our field of view: the small slice of the world that our mind chooses to look at.
That field of view becomes our reality tunnel: a narrow corridor carved by what holds our focus, shaping what we notice and, equally, what we miss. That reality tunnel becomes our perceived reality: the world we believe we’re in, simply because it’s the only world we’re seeing. And our perceived reality becomes our lived action –it dictates how we move, what we choose, who we become.
We must strategically protect and take aim with our attention, not just because it’s the lens through which we see, but because:
attention is the architecture of our reality.
04.
KNOW THY ENEMY: A 24/7 CULTURE WITHOUT REST
How did we even get here? How did we begin to desire and attempt to pay attention to the infinite, which consistently defeats us?
Art critic Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 explores how we entered a culture that battles against rest and time itself. A nonstop 24/7 culture that never turns off. If attention is finite, our 24/7 society organizes to terrorize it.
Reed Hastings has famously stated that Netflix’s main competition isn’t other media or entertainment companies. It’s sleep.
This acceleration really took off with cable news and the birth of CNN in 1980. TV news and programming stopped ending with nightly sign-offs. It stopped syncing with the rhythms of our sleep cycles. Media became an infinite loop of endless, real-time information.
05.
THAT WHICH SEEKS ATTENTION CANNOT BE DEFEATED BY GIVING IT ATTENTION
Information expands to fill the space available, and in our 24/7 culture and modern media environment, the space available is infinite. This means there are now more news stories than there is actual news.
Further, the aspirational identity around media literacy has drifted toward a belief that we must remain fluent in every single thing online: high culture, low culture, things we love, things we hate.
This traps us in an endless chase to consume every. single. narrative.
It creates a hyperstitious loop of debate and critique disproportionately amplifying the very thing we hope to squash…pushing it further into existence and significance through repetition.
In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote,
“Do not swallow bait offered by the enemy.”
We cannot defeat that which seeks attention by giving it attention.
This is the paradox at the heart of the attention war.
06.
THE DIGITAL REALM APPEARS INFINITE TO THE EYE BUT IS FINITE IN DEPTH
Modern technology makes it feel like we possess infinite knowledge at our fingertips. Not.
Two things are true at once: the internet is both too large for any one person to fully grasp in their lifetime, and yet that internet is still nowhere close to a true reflection of all our human knowledge.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean these technological gateways aren’t extraordinary. They expand our minds in ways no past generation could ever have imagined. But reality can’t be fully understood without curiously wandering beyond a feed and paying attention to the physical world, to people, places and knowledge uncaptured by the internet.
What we notice depends on what we’re primed to see.
‘Touch grass’ isn’t just a cute meme. It’s a reminder to break the 24/7 infinite loop and widen our aperture of attention so our field of reality expands.
07.
TO MISTAKE THE STAGE FOR THE WORLD IS TO BE CONQUERED
“All warfare is based on deception.”
In our current social media era, we’re more aware than ever that everyone is performing. Yet this awareness doesn’t seem to make us any less susceptible to staged performance, or curbs us from performing ourselves. Even authenticity is now a performance…manufactured aesthetic.
None of this would matter if we treated the online as an entertainment stage, a series of magic tricks, a dreamworld. But reality becomes strange when we continuously mistake performance for truth and pass it around as an insightful cultural signal. Much of today’s commentary looks less like real cultural analysis and more like white collar fan fiction and conspiracy theories about what’s happening ‘backstage.’
We’re all putting on a front stage performance that’s shaping real life decisions, but many are forgetting it’s all just an act.
As a result, even among people who claim to defend media literacy, we’re losing our grip on what’s real.
08.
REALITY IS NOT COLLAPSING, BUT CONSTANTLY RECOMPOSING
“We do not see the world as it is, but as we are.”
In the 17th century, Galileo was right that the sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth as the center of the universe, but the Church’s constructed world was more dominant and consequential than his truth. Galileo’s true world didn’t become consequential until many centuries and technological developments later. It wasn’t until about 350 years later in 1992 that the Vatican formally acknowledged the Catholic Church’s error in condemning Galileo. Oops.
So what we call the ‘real world,’ our shared social reality, is really just a temporary construction which lasts only as long as enough people believe in it.
Reality is in constant negotiations. When belief fades, that world dissolves and a new one forms. Today, for example, we can see the neoliberal world losing consequentiality, while the worlds of Trump, mysticism and the accelerating AI arms race rise.
Understanding reality isn’t about infinitely chasing truth with our finite attention. It’s about understanding which worlds are becoming more or less consequential.
Perhaps part of why we experience reality collapse is that 24/7 media and infinite access to information allow us see more of these worlds rising, falling, and recomposing.
The churn was always happening. We just couldn’t access it in real time...until now.
09.
VICTORY BELONGS TO HE WHO KNOWS LIMITED ATTENTION IS NOT A WEAKNESS BUT A STRENGTH
“If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.”
Even Sun Tzu understood that finite resources must be spent wisely. The same law governs the attention war.
Survival isn’t just about what you focus on. It’s about what you deliberately refuse to focus on.
Restraint is a winning strategy. Move on.
10.
MASTERY BEGINS WITH TRIAGING WHAT CAN BE CONTROLLED AND WHAT IS DISTRACTION
It begins with a system of triage.
Looking at the work of psychologist Julian Rotter, we must ask, what is in our locus of control?
What can I directly act on right now? What is in our locus of influence. What can I not control, but can affect over time? What is in our locus of concern? What are the things I deeply care about, but cannot meaningfully change? And what is in our zone to ignore? What is everything outside my knowledge and reach, which I must accept I don’t and can’t fully know?
(this is where we make so many MISTAKES :\)
In our current 24/7 culture and relationship with media, we’ve become so disembodied from our physical surroundings. In a weightless state, it’s become much harder to discern what is actually within our control or influence, our inner locus, and what’s actually materially consequential to our lives.
Instead, so many of us get stuck endlessly in the outer locus of concern -the areas far outside our control or influence– expending scarce attention on things we dislike, can’t meaningfully affect, or don’t even need to have an opinion on. We form opinions about everything, unable to have an informed opinion about anything.
Nietzsche, in On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, argued that active selective forgetting is essential for life itself. That without the ability to let go of the infinite, action becomes impossible. He warns that the infinite overwhelms the present and weakens vitality, and that every living being needs a limited horizon.
11.
STRATEGIC FOCUS IS NOT STRATEGIC IGNORANCE
Now, to be clear, there is a dark side in shifting from the infinite to the finite.
We risk an overcorrection to an overcorrection.
We can turn too far inward, toward isolation, narcissism, echo chambers, tribalism, xenophobia, and authoritarian nationalism. We’re already feeling these worlds gaining consequentiality today.
But strategic focus is not the same as strategic ignorance.
In The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules The World, sociologist Linsey McGoey warns about ostrich instruction, dissociating…claiming ignorance to absolve one’s self of responsibility.
The flood of infinite information leaves us overwhelmed, manipulated, and exhausted. It’s a lot. Limiting what we take in defends us –but only if we retain self-awareness and humility of what we don’t know, and stay curious and humble enough to learn from perspectives outside our immediate field of view.
There is much that we don’t know and can’t affect.
This is permission to find comfort in knowing that we cannot, and will not, know or change everything.
I am…