The Age of Distraction: reclaiming our attention from technology’s hands

The will of the people is being undermined by the attention economy

by James Williams @WilliamsJames_

James Williams is a design ethicist at the University of Oxford, a former Google strategist, a co-founder of Time Well Spent, and winner of the inaugural Nine Dots Prize

Five years ago I was working for Google, advancing a mission that I still admire for its audacity of scope: “To organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Then I had an epiphany: there was more technology in my life than ever before, but it was harder than ever for me to do the things I wanted to do.

If you have never pulled back the curtain on technology design, if you have never spent week after week monitoring dashboards of user engagement metrics, you might be forgiven for thinking that our guiding lights are somehow hard-coded into the brains behind our screens, that there is moral fibre in the wires.

I had quickly come to understand that the cause to which I had been conscripted was not the organisation of information, but of attention. The digital technology industry was not launching and iterating neutral tools, but directing flesh-and-blood human lives. I began imagining my own life reflected in the primary-colour numbers on screens around me: ‘number of views’, ‘time on site’, ‘number of clicks’, ‘total conversions’ and so on. To me, these goals suddenly seemed petty and perverse; they were not my goals, or anyone else’s. They were the goals of a system that was not on my side.

Though we call our time the Information Age, a better name for it would be the Age of Attention. As Herbert Simon, the American political scientist and computer technologist, pointed out in the 1970s, when information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource. The advent of digital technology, and especially the emergence of the smartphone, has now effected this information/attention reversal across the entirety of our day-to-day lives.

As the newly scarce resource, attention is now the object of intense global competition. The large-scale effort that has emerged to capture and exploit our attention as efficiently as possible is often referred to as the attention economy, where winning means getting as many people as possible to spend as much time and attention as possible using your product or service. (Although, as it is often said, in the attention economy ‘the user is the product’.) This results in design that fundamentally and intentionally diverges from the interests of users. As Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, has said: “We are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc.” Most of the information in the world is now being monetised via this competition for our attention.

As a result, digital technologies now privilege our impulses over our intentions. As information technologies have enveloped our lives, they have transformed our experiential world into a never-ending flow of novel attentional rewards. The ubiquity, instantaneity and randomised delivery of these rewards has imbued our technologies with a distinctly dopaminergic character: it has turned them into informational ‘slot machines’. Like regular slot machines, the benefits (‘free’ products and services) are upfront and immediate, whereas the attentional costs are paid in small denominations distributed over time. Rarely do we realise how costly free things are.

The new challenges the attention economy poses for life and politics are thus fundamentally challenges of self-regulation. “Who will be great,” wrote Goethe, “must be able to limit himself.” Yet this greatness is impeded by the wholesale exploitation of our non-rational psychological biases by design. In recent decades, psychologists and behavioural economists have catalogued myriad non-rational biases that shape our thought and behaviour. These include loss aversion (for example, fear of missing out), social comparison, the status quo bias, anchoring, framing effects and countless others. An industry of authors and consultants has emerged to help designers and marketers exploit these cognitive vulnerabilities and hook us on their persuasive technologies. The political and ethical acceptability of this state of affairs has, to date, gone broadly unreviewed.

The Citizen Is The Product

Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government.” If the digital attention economy were compromising the human will, it would be striking at the very foundations of democracy.

Attention, in its wider sense, extends far beyond what cognitive scientists call the ‘spotlight’ of attention, or our moment-to-moment awareness. Ultimately, it converges on conceptions of the human will. William James, the American philosopher and psychologist, pointed this out as early as 1890, calling the effort of attention “the essential phenomenon of will”. Yet societal discussion lacks this wider view of attention; as a result, we have failed to account for the wider set of technological distractions that threaten the will most.

In the short term, the externalities of the digital attention economy can distract us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, they can distract us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our foundational capacities, making it harder, in the words of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want”. In this way, a primary effect of digital technologies is to undermine the operation and even development of the human will. This militates against the possibility of all forms of self-determination at both individual and collective levels, including all forms of politics worth having.

Clicks Against Humanity

Beyond the surface level of what we might call functional distractions, or frustrations of action in the task domain, the persuasive designs of the attention economy can habituate us into living in ways that are misaligned with our desired values. The proliferation of pettiness is a highly visible example of this. Pettiness may be understood as the pursuit of a low-level goal as though it were a higher, intrinsically valuable one. Pettiness is what I discerned in the character of those engagement metrics on the product-design dashboards. It is why ‘clickbait’ headlines make us squirm. And it is on brazen display in the comment made by Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, in February of 2016, when he said, “[Donald Trump’s candidacy] may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS”.

Trump is very straightforwardly an embodiment of the dynamics of clickbait: he is the logical product (though not the endpoint) in the political domain of a petty media environment defined by impulsiveness and zero-sum competition for our attention. One analyst has estimated that Trump is worth $2bn to Twitter. His success metrics — the number of rally attendees, the size of his ‘buttons’, the grandiosity of his imagined military parades, or the number of retweets his trollish fusillades receive — these are attention-economy metrics. Given this, it is remarkable how consistently societal discussion has completely misread him by casting him in informational, rather than attentional, terms. Like clickbait or so-called fake news, the design goal of Trump is not to inform but to induce. Content is incidental to effect.

During the 2016 US presidential election I encountered a highly moralised variant of pettiness coming from unexpected places. Over the course of just a few months, I witnessed several acquaintances back in Texas — good, loving people and deeply religious ‘values voters’ — go from vocally rejecting one particular candidate as being morally reprehensible and utterly unacceptable, to ultimately setting aside those foundational moral commitments in the name of securing a short-term political win. By the time a video emerged of the candidate bragging about committing sexual assault, this petty overwriting of moral commitment with political expediency was so total as to render this staggering development barely shrug-worthy. By then, their posts on social media were saying things like, ‘I care more about what Hillary did than what Trump said!’

Consider that across many liberal democracies, the percentage of people who say it is ‘essential’ to live in a democracy has in recent years been in a freefall. The starlight of democratic values seems to be dimming across diverse cultures, languages, political systems and economic situations. However, one of the few factors these countries do have in common is their dominant form of media, which just happens to be the largest, most standardised and most centralised form of attentional control in human history. It is also one that is structured to undermine our higher values by design.

The Last Shadow Of Liberty

But there is an even deeper level of distraction we must contend with: the undermining of fundamental capacities that can make it harder for us to ‘want what we want to want’. This deepest sort of ‘distraction’ can take many forms. We see it in the way endless distractions decrease our intelligence. We see it in the way technology has crowded out opportunities for reflection and replaced leisure with entertainment. We see it in the physiological stresses of perpetual informational barrage, as in the phenomenon of email apnoea, where people unconsciously breathe shallowly or even hold their breath when responding to their emails or texts. In last year’s US election we also saw people’s faculties of prediction subjugated to the incentives of the attention economy, as insignificant day-to-day changes in a candidate’s probability of winning served as the ‘reward’ drawing readers back to websites whose ultimate goal is to drive page views and clicks.

However, the most visible form of this deep distraction in the political domain is perhaps best seen in the production and amplification of moral outrage. Moral outrage consists of more than just anger: it also includes the impulse to judge, punish and shame someone you think has crossed a moral line. Today, because the targets of moral outrage can no longer be burned at the stake (in most places), the implicit goal becomes to destroy them symbolically, reputationally — we might even say attentionally — for their perceived transgression. Moral outrage played a useful role earlier in human evolution, when people lived in small nomadic groups; it enabled greater accountability, cooperation and in-group trust. However, the amplification of moral outrage on a societal, or even global, scale carries dire implications for democracy.

In The Republic, Socrates identifies mob rule as the main route societies take from democracy back into tyranny. Mob rule is unfortunately hard-coded into the design of the attention economy, and this is apparent in the way the internet now functions as an outrage machine. Whether Cecil the Lion, Kony, Gamergate, or countless other outrage cascades, the rewards of outrage serve as extremely powerful tools of ‘virality’. It may seem odd to describe outrage as a reward, but it is, at least psychologically speaking; it provides a sense of purpose, moral clarity, social solidarity and an opportunity to signal our trustworthiness to others. And Trump has mastered these dynamics to an extraordinary degree.

When the attention economy amplifies moral outrage in a way that moralises political division, it clears the way for the tribalistic impulse to claim for one’s own group the mantle of representing the ‘real’ or ‘true’ will of the people as a whole. For Princeton’s Professor of Politics, Jan-Werner Müller, such a ‘moralistic imagining’ of the political realm, which involves more than mere anti-elitism or anti-pluralism, is the essence of populism. Division itself is not objectionable; indeed, it is inevitable and desirable in a free and diverse society. However, when division becomes moralised in such a way that it leads to the delegitimising of others in society, then it can be fatal to the pursuit of the common interest. The digital attention economy is effectively a utility function for maximising moral outrage, as well as other forms of extremism, and thus militates against the kind of thought and discourse that democracy requires. Importantly, these dynamics beleaguer both the political left and right. (Here, as before, content is incidental to effect.)

The Canadian media theorist Harold Innis once said that throughout his career, his work began with the question, “Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?” Asking this question about our turbulent political landscape leads us to the inevitable conclusion that it is our communications media, engineered primarily to capture and hold our attention, which serve as the lens through which we engage the political realm, and thus are the formal cause of our political world.

Empires Of The Mind

The proliferation of ubiquitous, portable and connected general-purpose computers has enabled this infrastructure of industrialised persuasion to circumvent all other societal systems and open a door directly onto our attentional faculties, on which it now operates for over a third of our waking lives. In the hands of a few dozen people now lies the power to shape the attentional habits — the lives — of billions of human beings. This is not a situation in which the essential political problem involves the management or censorship of speech; the total effect of these systems on our lives is not analogous to that of past communications media. The effect is much closer to that of a religion: it involves the installation of a worldview, the habituation into certain practices and values, the appeals to tribalistic impulses, the hypnotic abdication of reason and will, and the faith in omnipresent and seemingly omniscient forces that we trust, without a sliver of verification, to be on our side.

This fierce competition for human attention is creating new problems of kind, not merely of degree. Via ubiquitous and always-connected interfaces to users, as well as a sophisticated infrastructure of measurement, experimentation, targeting and analytics, this global project of industrialised persuasion is now the dominant business model and design logic of the internet. To date, the problems of distraction have been minimised as minor annoyances. Yet the competition for attention and the persuasion of users ultimately amounts to a project of the manipulation of the will. We currently lack a language for talking about, and thereby recognising, the full depth of these problems. At individual levels, these challenges threaten to frustrate one’s authorship of one’s own life. At collective levels, they threaten to frustrate the authorship of the story of a people and obscure the common interests and goals that bind them together, whether that group is a family, a community, a country or humankind. In a sense, these societal systems have been short-circuited and the operation of the will — the basis of the authority of politics — has also been short-circuited and undermined.

Today, as in Huxley’s time, we have failed to take into account our almost infinite appetite for distractions. They guide us and direct us, but they do not fulfil us or sustain us. These are the distractions of a system that is not on our side. It is instructive to note that the gover- in ‘government’ and the cyber- in ‘cybernetics’ derive from the same Greek root: kyber-, meaning to guide or to steer. The digital technologies that now guide our attention are our new empires of the mind, and our present relation with them is one of attentional serfdom. Rewiring this relationship is a political task in two ways. First, because our media are the lens through which we understand and engage with those matters we have historically understood as political. Second, because they are now the lens through which we view everything, including ourselves. “The most complete authority,” Rousseau wrote in A Discourse on Political Economy, “is the kind that penetrates the inner man, and influences his will as much as his actions”. This is the kind of authority that technologies now have over us. We must therefore begin to understand them as the ground of first political struggle, the politics behind politics. It is now impossible to achieve any political reform worth having without first reforming these totalistic forces that guide our attention and our lives.

Freedom Of Attention

What form would such a project of reform take? First, we must acknowledge what we must not do. We must reject the impulse to ask users to ‘just adapt’ to distraction, as well as the illusion that mere education about the nature of the problem will ever be enough. Nor can we reply that if someone does not like the choices on technology’s menu, their only option is to unplug or detox. This is a pessimistic and unsustainable view of technology. And, of course, we cannot expect the attention economy to fix itself.

We must, then, move urgently to assert and defend our freedom of attention. Asserting our freedom of attention means developing its conceptual and linguistic foundations. We can find precedent for such a freedom in Mill when he writes, in On Liberty, that the “appropriate region of human liberty … comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness … liberty of thought and feeling; absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative”. “This principle,” says Mill, “requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character.” This sounds to me like the beginning of a freedom of attention.

Defending the freedom of attention requires reforming the attention economy. Such an effort will involve, among other things, a fundamental re-evaluation of the nature and purpose of advertising in an environment of information abundance, as well as the imposition of systemic constraints to move advertising away from the mere capture and exploitation of user attention, and towards the active support of users’ intentions. New business models, organisational structures and incentives, and measurements of both harms and benefits to users, will be essential components of such a project.

Doing anything that matters requires giving attention to the things that matter. Reforming the digital attention economy may therefore be the major moral and political task of our time. Future generations will judge us not only for our stewardship of the outer environment, but also of the inner environment. Our current global crisis takes the form not only of a precipitous rise in global temperatures, but also in our injured capacities of attention and will. Rejecting our present attentional serfdom — a task no more utopian than the pursuit of democracy itself — is now a necessary condition for the preservation of democracy at all.