I think there’s something very profound and maybe irreversible happening to human
attention in the digital age. I think it’s more than just distraction, and it’s more
than even just addiction. It could actually be the defining political and moral challenge
of our time. I want to start with clearing the ground with
an observation that Herbert Simon made in the 1970s – “when information becomes
abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource”. This is an observation that I think we’re
only just starting to understand what it means for human life and society.
This whole environment that has emerged in the last couple of years to compete for our
attention in scientific, systematic ways is often called the attention economy.
If you think about the goals that you have for yourself, your life, today, this week,
this year – they’re probably things like, I want to spend more time with family, I want
to learn how to play the piano, I want to take that trip I’ve been thinking about
and reflect on my life – these are real human goals.
But if you look at the goals that technologies have for us – they’re not usually these
things – they’re things like - maximise the amount of time we spend with them, time
on site, or the number of clicks, the number of times we can scroll or tap, the number
of page views or ad views – things like this.
There’s a deep fundamental gap here, between the goals we have and the goals our technologies
have for us. And so, I think there is this kind of inconvenient truth that we either
kind of ignore, or maybe don’t know about a lot of the time, which is that the attention
economy, by and large, is not on our side. Its goals are not our goals. We trust these
things to be GPS for our lives, but really they’re directing us to these petty engagement
goals. And this is very well known by the people
who create them – the CEO of Netflix a little while back said in addition to Snapchat and
YouTube, one of their major competitors was sleep. Steve Jobs did not let his children
use the iPad, right? Broadly speaking, what’s happened in the
last couple of decades is our knowledge of psychology, and particularly our non-rational
biases, these vulnerabilities in our brain, you know, non-rational dynamics of decision
making, we’ve developed an enormous catalogue of these things, and at the same time this
system has emerged on the internet – a system of measurement, message delivery, optimisation
and experimentation – and these two trends have come into conversation now in the attention
economy. What this means now is that this industrial-scale persuasion is now the primary
business model of our first really major global communications medium.
And this isn’t widely talked about. We still call companies like Facebook or Google social
media companies, but they’re not selling social media, they’re selling our attention.
But I think another factor that makes this so urgent is this power to shape people’s
attention, to persuade people to one end or another, is increasingly centralised in the
hands of just a few people, in a few companies, in one state, in one country.
It’s a weird irony that the whole point of the internet was that it was decentralized
in its infrastructure, but then the platforms that have emerged on it have been so so centralized
so that literally there are people who would probably fit in this room who have their hands
on levers that can control the attentional habits of over 2 billion people on Planet
Earth. What I realised when I was working at Google
is, looking across at the industry, at the state of the attention economy and how little
it was being talked about it society and then feeling its effects in my own life, honestly
– that there was more technology around me than ever before but it was harder somehow
to do what I wanted to do - I felt we’d made the same mistake that Aldous Huxley talked
about when he was lamenting that the defenders of freedom in his own time had failed to take
into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
I want to suggest that if we’re at all serious about promoting freedom or autonomy in the
digital age, it’s really urgent for us to look at this situation and to start taking
into account our infinite appetite for distractions. I think what that would entail is starting
to assert and defend our freedom of attention.