Seeing and Being Seen | sambish(op)

Seeing and Being Seen<br>internet<br>July 2, 2026<br>16 min read<br>tl;dr

attention is a basic human need, and it's really easier than ever to acquire on the internet. but beware lest ye acquire too much. you might not like what happens<br>I’m a youngest child. This may not come as a surprise to you.<br>I’ve always loved (positive) attention. Throughout my childhood and adolescence I felt I was very good at commanding it from my peers, whether through creating things I wanted them to look at (little games and stories and such, too embarrassing to get into here) or acting out in absurd ways to get a laugh. My main extracurricular activity was theatre, the purest form of attention-seeking out there.<br>As I’ve entered adulthood I lost that once reliable joie de vivre that let me make a fool of myself for others’ amusement. I’ve become the sort of fussy self-conscious bore I always feared I would. On the bright side, that has enabled me to avoid disturbing my academic or professional associates with my antics like I used to with my schoolmates. Nevertheless, my appetite for attention abides, gnawing at me like an empty stomach. I suspect a nontrivial number of my goals and motives ultimately reduce down to acquiring more attention. Like I’m a special sort of evil extrovert that only acquires energy by sucking it out of others.<br>Is this a universal human foible? Probably not, at least not to the degree that I have it. Some people are content to fade into the background of a group setting. They love people-watching but they hate to be beheld. Surely you can summon someone like this to mind, someone you’d describe as “shy” or “withdrawn”. But hardly anyone truly wishes to be left completely alone. Even extreme introverts will have a partner or inner circle they cling to. A child left completely to themself will suffer mental and physical consequences (see: Genie). The Maslowian needs for belonging and esteem are really just forms of attention. Maybe a healthy disposition toward attention is yet another Aristotelian Virtue—we could call it “renown”—existing on a spectrum between two vices: antisocial withdrawal on the one hand and on the other… uh….<br>What should we call a lust for attention anyway? It’s not quite vanity, its like—vainglory? Egotism? We really ought to propagate some terminology around this phenomenon. It’s important. It governs an increasing share of our society. In fact, it might just be the main neurosis keeping the internet afloat.<br>Beyond the Profit Motive<br>The internet is not cheap to run. Too many undersea cables that could be chomped by an opportunistic shark at any moment.<br>We justify this maintenance burden with the enormous economic upsides of global trade and payments processing and instantaneous communication yada yada. But what comes to most of our minds when we hear “the internet” is none of these things. It’s the handful of attention platforms that have become synonymous with the web: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok. These entities all operate in the same manner, as conduits for massive amounts of media that are produced and consumed by their users. A bag to be filled by someone else. Users need a strong motivation to produce this content so that other users can come view the content and also be shown advertisements.<br>Some of the content producers are incentivized by getting a cut of the advertising revenue or the ability to leverage their audience into brand deals, merchandising, donations, and various other ways one can scrape out a living on the web. But the vast majority of the content on these platforms, 99.9% of it, goes completely uncompensated. Think of all the comments and effortposts and memes—the vital ingredients to make a social platform feel like anything more than a ghost town—authored by random individuals who melt back into the crowd. What motivates them?<br>I try my best to refrain from leaving comments or posting on these platforms. When I was just getting into my teens I would write all sorts of braindead stuff on my Facebook wall, immortalizing my underdeveloped pubescent thoughts for the whole world to see. I would dabble in a comment thread argument from time to time. It was incredibly embarrassing. Nowadays I drop a photo dump with a cryptic caption on Instagram 1 or 2 times a year to let my friends know I live yet. I also fill some of my online social needs on closed community platforms like Discord servers, where there’s a Dunbar’s number of participants and a legible social web that foregrounds communication and connection over content and consumption. If I really need to express something to the whole world, I do it in longform writing right here babyyy.<br>Recently I’ve broken my long fast and left some comments on substack articles. After depriving myself for so long, the rush of the like and especially the reply is incredibly potent. It feels so good to be seen by another human (at least I hope they’re human). I have been...