Paying attention with our lives
Notes on "Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy" by James Williams
“If you wanted to train all of society to be as impulsive and weak-willed as possible, how would you do it? One way would be to invent an impulsivity training device – let’s call it an iTrainer – that delivers an endless supply of informational rewards on demand. You’d want to make it small enough to fit in a pocket or purse so people could carry it anywhere they went. The informational rewards it would pipe into their attentional world could be anything, from cute cat photos to tidbits of news that outrage you (because outrage can, after all, be a reward too). To boost its effectiveness, you could endow the iTrainer with rich systems of intelligence and automation so it could adapt to users’ behaviors, contexts, and individual quirks in order to get them to spend as much time and attention with it as possible. …
Then, what if you wanted to take things even further? What if you wanted to make everyone even more distracted, angry, cynical – and even unsure of what, or how, to think? What if you wanted to troll everyone’s minds? You’d probably create an engine, a set of economic incentives, that would make it profitable for other people to produce and deliver these rewards – and, where possible, you’d make these the only incentives for doing so. You don’t want just any rewards to get delivered – you want people to receive rewards that speak to their impulsive selves, rewards that are the best at punching the right buttons in their brains. For good measure, you could also centralize the ownership of this design as much as possible.
If you’d done all this ten years ago, right about now you’d probably be seeing some interesting results. You’d probably see nine out of ten people never leaving home without their iTrainer. Almost half its users would say they couldn’t even live without their device. You’d probably see them using it to access most of the information they consume, across every context of life, from politics to education to celebrity gossip and beyond. You’d probably find they were using the iTrainer hundreds of times per day, spending a third of their waking lives engaged with it, and it would probably be the first and last thing they engaged with every day. …
Of course, the iTrainer project would never come anywhere close to passing a research ethics review. Launching such a project of societal reshaping, and letting it run unchecked, would clearly be utterly outrageous. So it’s a good thing this is all just a thought experiment.”
Perceptive readers may notice that the iTrainer bears a certain resemblance to technologies that have rapidly become part of our everyday lives. They may also infer that the impact of the iTrainer has not been entirely positive. In Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and resistance in the attention economy, James Williams offers a distinctive diagnosis of the damage done by these technologies—their effect on our ability to pay attention.
One day Williams had what he describes as an epiphany: “there was more technology in my life than ever before, but it felt harder than ever to do the things I wanted to do.” Digital technologies were directing him rather than serving him, like a GPS that instead of taking you where you want to go, takes you where it wants you to go: “No one would put up with this sort of distraction from a technology that directs them through physical space. Yet we do precisely this, on a daily basis, when it comes to the technologies that direct us through informational space.” Williams used to be an advertising strategist at Google, so he knows what he’s talking about and he didn’t like the cause he found himself working for. He took himself off to Oxford to study this problem and the result, distilled in this open-access book, is something he describes as a combination of a scream and a thesis—part intuition, part argument.
His central insight is that digital technologies pose issues of attention, not information. We usually refer to them as “information technology” or “communication technology” (or “information communication technology”), but in a world where “information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource.” We are simply overwhelmed—by the sheer volume of information coming at us, by design logic that prioritises technologists’ goals, and by the economic model that couples revenue with engagement and inexorably drives the juggernaut forward. Williams is quick to stress that this conglomeration of effects has happened by default, not design. There’s no evil genius masterminding societal change from Silicon Valley. But there are millions and millions of individual decisions, some big and some small, that in aggregate have led us to this place.
That’s a place where, Williams says, digital technologies are fundamentally “adversarial” to us. By this he means that they serve their creators’ goals, not their users’ who, as a result, are unable to pay attention to the things that matter to them. This is more than mere moment-to-moment distraction; it’s the blocking out of our ability to ask and answer higher-order questions. Who has the time or the ability to reflect on how they’ll spend their life and what they truly value when they’re being stupefied by an endless stream of ads, memes and messages?
Williams argues that our current solutions to these problems are “self-regulatory” and therefore inadequate. We each have to “bring our own boundaries” and we’re simply outmatched by the array of engineers, behavioural psychologists, strategists and capitalists on the other side of our devices. Instead, he proposes measures like “the resuscitation of serious advertising ethics”, having designers take a Hippocratic-style oath to “do no harm” with their technologies, and “user representation in the design process”. Somewhat alarmingly, he also considers that governments are well-placed to be part of the solution: “governmental bodies are uniquely positioned to host conversations about the ways new technological affordances relate to the moral and political underpinnings of society, as well as to advance existential questions about the nature and purpose of societal institutions.” One of the few ways I can imagine making this problem worse is to put it in the hands of the higher-level authority of government, with its even more concentrated power (Google can deluge you with ads, but they can’t send the cops to your door) and generally greater commitment to reshaping society to achieve ideological ends.
But I think Williams is on to something when he points to the need for sustained moral and ethical reflection on these tools that seem to have dropped into our laps from the gods. It’s just that we can’t leave it to others to do all this thinking for us. By all means, emphasise ethics in advertising and design, but not at the expense of each of us asking critical questions about the role we allow digital technology to play in our lives. We all have a responsibility to reflect on these questions. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible, and when the answer to our problems is always ‘out there’ and resting with ‘other people’ it may never arrive—and in the meantime, as Williams says, “We pay attention with the lives we might have lived,” with the opportunities foregone and the paths not taken while we stared into the digital abyss. No-one sets out to trade meaning and fulfilment for an endless supply of cat videos, but it’s a trade-off that becomes more and more likely every day we inhabit this giant, uncontrolled experiment. Books like this, the conversations they stimulate, and the actions they catalyse in each of us may just be the most likely way out of it.
Sensible conclusion, Alex.
Industrial and/or political oversight will only corrupt the system further, and besides people shouldn't expect "others" to solve their problems. The solution lies within ourselves and we will only reach it when each of us following their own path deletes the apps that constantly seek our attention. It's no wonder that people who delete such apps often say they feel "reborn". Of course they do: a life without being constantly metaphorically battered over the head with a sledgehammer is indeed a new life - and a joyous one at that.