Archons and the Economy of Attention

We have repeatedly discussed that one of the main mechanisms that keeps the human mind in heimarmene is “attention management” — the control and redirection of psychic streams from productive vectors into the “channels of pleasures,” a process accompanied by marked activation but very little processing of pneuma; this, on the one hand, keeps people within controlled boundaries and, on the other, causes a large release of energy into the Interval.

At the same time, it is precisely attention that can be regarded as the only truly common currency for three levels of energy consumption:

· biological (neurotransmitters, fatigue/arousal);

· social (money, influence, ratings);

· interworld (streams of pneuma).

From this view, any directed attention, any focusing of the mind on an action, event, or object can be regarded as an energetically significant action, a kind of “act of payment.” Therefore the real question is not whether “we pay,” but to whom and for what we are paying with our attention.

Accordingly, one can single out three interconnected and mutually conditioned levels on which the “attention economy” is formed — that is, the transformation of psychic energy into other forms: two “worldly” ones — the market and power, and one — the “interworld” one, “purely” Archontic. It is clear that the Archons, as the creators and de facto rulers of the manifested world, influence all levels. However, the aims and masses are mainly governed by provoked fear, xenophobia, hatred, and outrage.

The market level is the simplest and most obvious: various platforms, media, and games monetize attention directly as resources, money, and/or data.

Finally, at the properly-interworld level of influence, all these levers together turn attention into stable, regulated, and predictable flows of energy and a steady outflow of pneuma into the Interval.

The system is aimed at the maximum retention of attention with minimal inner dynamics, tension of awareness, and human development. Economic analogies can also be extended to how the energy of attention is produced and spent. In this sense, one can speak of “attention inflation,” in which impressions are “printed,” like ordinary currency. It is well known that the more certain stimuli are “printed,” the “cheaper” each stimulus or experience becomes. Therefore the system of “milking” low-tonic pneuma has to behave practically the same way as an economy under monetary inflation: it has to shout louder and flash brighter, more intensely, and more colorfully in order to keep getting the same response.

And this, of course, entails direct losses for the “Archontic economy,” in which the value of depth and duration of experiences is devalued by increasing the quantity of events, news, topics, and conflicts.

We have discussed repeatedly that the Archontic world is a system of broad, shallow experiences with social pressures like “don’t overthink it” and “why do you need this,” and the current one — of metamodernity — demonstrates this tendency on ever-increasing scales. All intense experiences, deep realizations, and completed actions end up “in the red,” and Archontic influence can be described as a kind of “tax on depth.” Any prolonged, serious effort requires a person’s continuous concentration and holds attention in a single channel, and this, of course, entails direct losses for the “Archontic economy.” Therefore any forms of sustained concentration of attention (reading books, studying, prayer, practice) are structurally disadvantaged: they seem to be subject to an additional tax, because they are always accompanied by ever-increasing fatigue, boredom, social pressure of the type “don’t overthink it” and “why do you need this.” Under such conditions, deep attention increasingly becomes a “psychic luxury” that fewer and fewer people can “afford” without internal or external “sanctions.”

At the same time, attention, as a “universal currency,” is often forced to “work on credit”: subscriptions, series, feeds, and endless games are built as “debt repayment schedules,” when a person in advance gives away part of their future time/attention in exchange for a guaranteed flow of small pleasures.

And it is clear that such a mechanism of “attention lending” is fraught with falling into “debt pits,” when an unwatched season of a popular series, a missed stream, an unopened feed — is experienced as a debt to one’s own pleasure system.

For the Archontic “attention economy” this is a highly convenient instrument, because a person voluntarily allocates not only their present focus but also portions of their future attention to the “needs of the interworld.” Views, retention, and likes become crude counters of channels leaking attention energy. Even when initial intentions are merely to earn money, express an idea, or share something, the very logic of optimization in the modern digital environment gradually subsumes content: creators are pushed to follow market demands and to produce not what interests them but what is in demand.

Accordingly, more and more content reflects market trends rather than real spiritual or psychic processes, which, in turn, creates a “vicious circle”: what is produced is not what is interesting to the soul, and gradually the mind itself begins more and more to believe that what is important to it is not what comes from itself, but what will lead to growth, but — require effort, can wound and transform, and provide depth, meaningfulness, and fullness of experience, and the transcendence of current forms. While “existential crises,” boredom, waiting, the road, loneliness (to read, to do one’s work honestly, to go against the trend) used to be moments where productive thoughts were born, one’s own limitations and fears were realized, and revelations and insights arose, now every such “empty” moment is immediately offered to be filled with screen reinforcement. In fact, the digital environment “privatizes silence,” depriving attention of its own inner “wastelands” and “forests,” in which something of its own could grow, and all its space turns into a cultivated field with a predetermined harvest.

Accordingly, if a person wants to reduce (and in the long run — stop) the extent to which they serve as a resource for Archontic chains of energy distribution, they should move from an “Archontic” to a “Pleromic” or “Aeonic” attention economy. Then, just as Archontic mechanisms are aimed at ensuring the predictability of attention flows, their short-term bursts and minimizing risk, promising quick, easy rewards, Aeonic forms of attention can be accumulated. Each person has the right to accumulate those actions and events in which attention is invested not in maintaining habitual, encouraged slumber, but in creativity, in creating that which has not existed before, in experiencing to such depths where their attention has not yet descended in the Archontic system of energy exchange, but brings “profit” — in the Aeonic one.

In this sense, resistance to heimarmene can also be expressed in economic analogies and strategies. Attention requires investment, the aware choice of precisely those things that make them less a battery in someone else’s system of consumption, and more a being that determines which worlds will be born and sustained by their attention. Another strategy of resistance may be the cultivation of the “white zones” of attention mentioned above, those types of activities that are consciously not amenable to direct monetization or “digitization” (practices/prayers/meditations, walks in nature, time with loved ones, “handicraft” creativity and similar “cozy” actions), as personal “reserves” to which the Archontic market has no access.

Of course, as long as the manifested world exists, the Archons will remain in it as an inevitable external system of administration. However, it is important to remember that within the bounds of one’s own life, each person has the right to conduct their own accumulation of those actions and events in which attention is invested not in maintaining habitual, encouraged slumber, but in creativity, in creating that which has not existed before, in experiencing to such depths where their attention has not yet descended. Where we go against the logic of Archontic exchange — we read what is not trendy, we pray or practice when “there’s no time,” we honestly do work that no one will rate with likes — there, attention becomes a free gift again. And the more such investments a person makes, the less they are merely a battery in someone else’s system of consumption and the more they become a being that determines which worlds will be born and held in being by its attention.