If ever there was an indictment on the attention economy, it's the attention deficit that's created a job in Japan to service those whose lives are untouched by the slightest smidgen of attention. “The Rental Person Who Does Nothing” is the job title of Shoji Morimoto. He gets hired by the lonely, the unseen, the bereft of any kind of attention to pay them some. But not too much. It seems that when he conceived of this service in 2018, he sought to fill a peculiar lacuna in contemporary life.
Don't imagine that he comes swooping in to save these people from the sad fact of themselves — he's not a balm for the loneliness epidemic or a solution to the social anxiety situation befalling many sad hearts on this planet. His job is a lot more prosaic. For example, someone hired him to respond to a text. The text was a picture of this person's dog. “The Rental Person Who Does Nothing” was obliged to respond with the following uplifting statement: “That is unbelievably cute.”
A lazy writer needs him to sit and watch him write so he can finish his assignment. A marathon runner wants him to wait at the end of the race. Another person wants him to sit on a park bench with them so they can drink a can of chuhai and not look weird because they're drinking alone. Another client wants to be reminded to cut their toenails around lunchtime in case they get lucky that evening.
In a world driven by likes, follows and blue ticks, this seems awfully sad. What does it say about us that our performative self on social media can get attention, but our real self needs a warm person in a real-life body to impassively take note of our most quotidian of experiences?
It's a very human drive to be seen by our fellow humans. To really be seen. Even the richest man in the world needs a Rental Person to take note. Elon Musk's authorised biographer, who recently published the monograph called, unsurprisingly, Elon Musk, was given access more than two years ago to everything to do with the big man. His texts, his tweets (oh, sorry, everyone has access to that), his family, nine of his 10 children (one has cut off all access and doesn't want to see him or be seen for that matter), his board meetings, his emails, lots and lots of face time and rambling late-night phone calls, as well as his former lovers, wives and parents of his many progeny. In this maelstrom of all-access detail and this minutely observed dailiest of dailies, Walter Isaacson has concluded certain things. The most glaringly obvious is that Elon is a “man child”. He came to this realisation after monitoring the grandiose ambitions and the ego-driven fallout at X, the company formerly known as Twitter.
The thing with being seen, as Elon found out back in high school in Pretoria, is that it can be to your detriment. You want to stay under the bully radar until you are big enough to fight back. Sometimes being seen can result in primal traumas that then play out on a global scale — just ask the executives and staff members at X, who once tweeted their real feelings about Elon on the bully pulpit he now owns. One of his first tasks on taking over was to get his Muskateers (yes, they really call themselves that) to trawl the platform for evidence of negative feedback on his person and frog march those people off the campus. A case of being seen, but not liking what they saw.
Grimes, his most recent baby momma, realised that there's a fine line between being seen and really being seen, and that Elon probably crossed it when he took a picture of baby X, their first reproduction, as he crested. This is the technical term for the baby's head beginning to make its long road to freedom from betwixt the limbs of Grimes. She felt seen, but also really, awfully and completely unseen as he sent this informative picture to members of his family and a broad selection of Muskateers.
I surmise he bought himself a platform so it could be his own 'Rental Person Who Does Nothing' while we were ostensibly watching him do stuff and tweet outrageous things.
This is a man who will get us to Mars and is considering the ideal governance structures for the colony there; he is the chap who funded the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution despite real personal fears about it; plus the man who has outsize influence here on Earth, having quietly seeded the stratosphere with a satellite communications empire that is bigger than anything in possession of any nation in the world — thereby determining the fates of nations and the war in Ukraine.
Seems to me the “man child” has internalised something Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu said long ago in The Art of War: “The whole secret lies in confusing the enemy so that he cannot fathom our real intent.” Elon worked out how to be radically seen and yet not really be seen at all. I surmise he bought himself a platform so it could be his own “Rental Person Who Does Nothing”, while we were ostensibly watching him do stuff and tweet outrageous things. We responded to his grand experiment in grabbing the attention — he was busy executing a totally unseen global coup.
Whose your daddy now? He's the richest man on Earth, he owns all the satellites and AI, and nobody public or private can hope to catch up. His diversionary tactics at X allowed us to believe he was being seen one tweet at a time. But like all brilliant strategists he was moving and shaking everything up in the shadows. Bet you didn't see that one coming.
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