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Hope For Film
Hope For Film
Please value YOUR own attention even more than THEY do.

Please value YOUR own attention even more than THEY do.

Let's stop sucking down all that they shove down the pipe.

Ted Hope's avatar
Ted Hope
May 07, 2025
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Hope For Film
Hope For Film
Please value YOUR own attention even more than THEY do.
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it doesn’t need to leave a sour taste in your mouth

Whether it is a plot to make us all stupid or just the natural course of unregulated capitalism, the Entertainment Industrial Complex practices a combination of policies – virtual monopolization, flooding the zone, more noise than signal, data hoarding, drift to mediocrity – that reduce your ability to focus, generalize your taste and individuality, and isolate you from the community. As a result, you begin to abdicate your choice and learn how to be happy (enough) with what you get.

Isn’t it time for you (and all of us) to do something about it? Particularly if you want better cinema, better working conditions, and a better ecosystem to make, find, and love cinema in?

I get it. There’s so much that needs to be fixed, for some it is hard to prioritize our Entertainment Industrial Complex. Let HopeForFilm help you find your way to a better world. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Fortunate for us – and the state of culture – we can do something about it. And it is easy to do.

Like our labor, the value of our attention is inherent in our being, but we need to prioritize it throughout our conscious actions if we don’t want it diminished. Everything is enhanced when you can free yourself from deciding everything and anything in the moment. You need to first cement your foundation, but once you do you can more securely reach for the sky. That is, we all do.

Sometimes it pays to conflate distinct ideas a bit. Or at least I find it helps to equate attention with consumption. Because we register these as separate actions, and think the ingestion is what predominately matters – we won’t get fat if we just look at all the candy – we devalue attention. In today’s era of media overload, we can see how regulating our diet of attention might just prevent an early death, right?

It's easy to blame our descent on the TechBros choosing the algorithm over human curation, but that’s a bit like the 90 million Americans who didn’t go to the polls in 2024 complaining that they did not vote for the dismantling of democracy we are currently experiencing. Our actions will always be a major contribution to the system that we live in and the one that resides within us. You are either on the bus or not, and I am hoping there’s enough of us who know when we want to get off.

That said, if I don’t blame the TechBros, I blame the once powerful Studio honchos and the Agency Overlords who could’ve and should’ve held them back from looting the store. By my count this is now the FIFTH round TechBros won. I wrote about the first four here:

They Won’t Get Fooled Again! Or Will They?

They Won’t Get Fooled Again! Or Will They?

Ted Hope
·
September 11, 2023
Read full story

And this, call it the Attention Sweepstakes, is their fifth. By highjacking our attention, they determined what got made and where we watched it. There is a sixth match already lined up, and based on the dismal prior performances, I don’t think it is the old guard that will triumph in the AI round either.

We still have a shot though in this the final Sudden Death round of the Attention Sweepstakes, but we are going to have to try a wee bit harder, team. That is if we want to win. After all, it is only all of cinema that is at stake.

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