Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed. Reading is an awakening of attention, not a deadening of it. We read to come alive to ourselves, not to forget who we are or what we are doing, or what is being done to us without our consent. We read to encounter the world, to connect what we know to what we do not know yet, knowing all the while that such understanding is always temporary, lovely precisely because it is transient. The suspension of disbelief that a reader brings to a text is an openness to becoming someone new, to shedding old selves and wriggling into new ones. It is an invitation to change.

This, of course, presumes that what we are reading is the product of a mind, that the reading is itself a gathering of minds. For each writer is really many writers. When we read Le Guin, we are also reading Woolf, Kropotkin, Lao Tzu. We are reading Le Guin’s reading of Woolf, and Woolf’s reading of Shakespeare, and adding our own readings to theirs. But when we read a text created by fake intelligence, we find not a mind but a forgery, and a glib one at that—a thin, transparent skin wrapped around an empty void. We are right to be repulsed. That revulsion is our bodies asserting their right to reality, to the knowledge that there can be no mind without a body, anymore than there can be a body without a mind.

Yet in the stream we seem to lose that body. We dissolve, dissipate, spread the edges of our selves out until we lose integrity. Here is a curious paradox: when we read, we make ourselves vulnerable, open ourselves up to being changed in ways we cannot predict or control. But when we venture into the stream, we more often than not go armed and wary, aware that we are in a place of danger. We are vigilant, alert, attuned to the predators that lurk below our thumbs. Yet it is there that we are worn down and disintegrated, that constant vigilance like a vibration that shakes all our atoms loose and tumbles them ever downstream.

Maybe there’s a clue in the way we talk of paying attention, rather than giving it. An older form of that verb also means to appease. We pay attention to the angry gods of capitalism in the hope that they will turn their anger elsewhere. Like most gods, they refuse us. We pay and pay again: each refresh and reaction like a hidden fee or interest charged. We check the boxes and agree to the terms (which we do not read), because what are our other options? Coercion was long ago rebranded as consumer choice.

In The Telling, the last of Le Guin’s novels set in the Hainish universe, a young Terran observer named Sutty sets out for the planet Aka. In the forty years it takes for her to arrive, the main continent’s literary and democratic culture is supplanted by a capitalist state, intent on speed-running through industrialization. Books are pulped and writing banned; libraries are closed. The old languages and gestures are outlawed, along with homosexuality, home-cooked food, bartering. Citizens become “producer-consumers” and must orient all of their lives to those two actions. Ordinary life becomes subsumed into regimented, surveilled, and homogenized routines.

Bewildered and heart sore, Sutty finds life in the capital city to be difficult. Her skill in language and literature has no outlet, the need to hide her sexuality rankles, and the people all seem like smooth plastic surfaces which she can’t reach. But then the envoy makes an invitation: the Akans will permit her to leave the capital and visit the mountain villages, where she might learn if anything remains of the former culture. It’s a risky venture, but there’s nothing for her in the city; she boards a riverboat and is soon on her way.

In Okzat-Ozkat, she disembarks and wanders a while, the great white cliffs of Mount Silong rising above her. When she ventures to speak to some of the people, she finds inklings of the former Aka. A boy calls her “yoz,” a word that means fellow person, a common address in the old days, since banned. An herbalist works in a shop where writing, faded but still visible, adorns the walls. When she begins to speak the words, the old man slams one hand on the counter and covers his mouth with the other. “Not aloud, yoz,” he says.

Soon, Sutty is invited to join the maz on their evening gatherings. “Maz” means “educated person” or “teacher.” The maz are couples (of any gender) who dedicate their lives to the Telling—the recitation of story, fable, poem, song, instruction, history, chant. The Telling isn’t one thing, but many, infinite things. Sutty is first inclined to call it a religion, then a philosophy, or perhaps a religion-philosophy, a “religion of process,” as the Hainish term it. But even that seems inadequate. It has no gods, no heaven or hell, no binaries of good and evil, no creator. In the end, it is only The Telling.

Each evening, the people of Okzat-Ozkat gather in the homes of the maz to hear the Telling, one person stationed outside to keep an eye out for the Monitors who would imprison them for such a transgression. Each evening, they pay “by the word,” trading a few copper coins or small bills for the songs and tales and histories. Young children join for free, until they reach adolescence, at which point they too are expected to pay their way. These payments are not donations, not charity. There is “no shame in the transaction on either side,” no sense of manipulation or rent-seeking: “cash was paid for value received.”¹

This is payment without appeasement, without coercion. The yoz freely pay in order to give their attention; the maz receive that payment in order to tell, the telling itself a way of reading, reading as understanding and learning and making sense, reading as attending the world. The attention is paid but it isn’t exploited. Sutty records her observations:

[O]n Aka, reward, whether spiritual or fiscal, was immediate. By his performance of a maz’s duties, Siez was not building up a bank account of virtue or sanctity; in return for his story-telling he would receive praise, shelter, dinner, supplies for their journey, and the knowledge that he had done his job. Exercises were performed not to attain an ideal of health or longevity but to achieve immediate well-being and for the pleasure of doing them. Meditation aimed toward a present and impermanent transcendence, not an ultimate nirvana. Aka was a cash, not a credit, economy.

Therefore their hatred of usury. A fair bargain and payment on the spot.

Le Guin, The Telling, page 171

By contrast, the attention economy is all credit: the user pays twice.

There’s a prevailing narrative that says we’ve lost our ability to pay attention, that we need drugs or discipline or sternly-worded warnings about the dangers of social media to deal with this growing public health threat. This narrative completely obscures the fact that annihilating attention is a political project with clear benefits for the billionaire class: if we cannot attend the world, neither can we intercede in it. We become passive recipients of their worldbuilding, disenfranchised from our own responsibility to make sense of—and therefore to remake—the world around us.

The abrupt emergence of the Akan capitalist state turns out to be the Terran’s doing: a religious-fundamentalist sect from Earth visited Aka and shared technological knowledge that triggered rapid industrialization, and the equally rapid rejection of all the old ways. The technology included the book banning, the patriarchal order, the authoritarian surveillance. To receive the technology was to receive the worldview it reproduced. (This is of course how all technology works.) That worldview depended on a people too busy working and shopping to be curious about how things are and how they came to be. Because once you are curious about capitalism you must reject the bargain: if the price of the comfort of the few is the immiseration of the many than the price is too damn high. It is the skill of reading that hones that curiosity, sharpens our ability to notice what is before us, what is real and what is not, which bargains are fair and which are usurious. Reading is how we attend the world, which is also how we change it.

I want to posit that the reading economy, like the umyazu—places where the Telling took place—still exists, hidden amidst the ruins of capitalism. It isn’t captured in GDP, of course, but then neither is housework, and yet everyday millions of people do the dishes, make the bed, dust the shelves. It overlaps with capitalism, in the form of large, commercial publishers who often care more for profit than words, but who still manage to publish a good many good books; and it escapes capitalism with worker-owned publishers, anarchist collectives, infoshops, personal blogs, radical literary magazines, neighborhood bookstores, used books given and sold and given again, libraries big and small and free, and with every pen put to paper or keyboard to verse, and every reader who reads and creates the text anew.

Every contribution to the reading economy—every dollar snatched from anesthetizing streaming services, from platforms that siphon money away from artists in order to fuel machines of war; every dollar given in exchange for a book or zine or illustration made with hand and heart and eye; every gaze diverted from the slop and turned instead to the gifts of the artist and the writer and the painter and so on—is not only a contribution taken from the attention economy but a repudiation of it, whole and entire. Every contribution to the reading economy is two less for its nemesis: once in cash, a second time in the resurrection of attention, in the art of reading, in the gift paid in return for the gift. A fair bargain, and payment on the spot.