Attention Stuffed
Attention Stuffed
Our future rests on our capacity to make digital technology more boring.
If there’s one universally held truism in the digital age, it’s that our attention has gone awry. The subject has been developed by so many authors—including Johann Hari, Cal Newport, Nicholas Carr, Tim Wu, Jenny Odell, and Jonathan Haidt—that it has become a subgenre of tech writing, complete with its own obligatory tropes (our evolutionary brain is being hacked!), quotes (Blaise Pascal, P.T. Barnum), and home remedies (have you considered meditation?).
Attention is not a newly discovered capacity. But it has attained problem status over the last two decades for the obvious reason that digital screens completely saturate and quantify our conscious experience. In doing so, they create new compulsions to use them, which seem to erode our sense of what is within our conscious control. Regardless of whether the language of addiction is useful to describe these compulsions, we all feel that something is off. Our user experience is unsettled in ways we don’t fully like or choose or want.
Given how utterly uncontroversial the fact of this problem is—and how much high-octane effort has been expended denouncing it—it’s surprising how divergent, or controversial, the proposed solutions have been. There are invectives against the evil of algorithms, exhortations for better legislation, and calls for software engineers to take ethics pledges. Cory Doctorow’s The Internet Con suggests “seizing the means of computation” in order to improve competition among and access to digital services. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism details capital’s “dispossession of human experience” and domination of human nature, before concluding with hopes for a renewal of vows to the liberal social contract. Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine describes the pathologies of social media with searing accuracy, even as he concludes by advocating state-sector versions of the same services. The People’s Bid for TikTok proposes giving the app’s users ownership over their existing digital identities, even as it reassures them that the user experience would remain untouched. Chris Hayes wraps up his new attention book, The Sirens’ Call, by admitting that there is not much to do except read the analog newspaper, take a walk, and step off the attentional treadmill (which is a good idea, but when can we find the time?).
Still, beneath the surface of these reassuring non-solutions, there is a deeper disagreement surrounding the characterization of the problem itself. While the problem of attention is indicated by certain empirical facts (like our diminishing capacity to read deeply and retain what we learn), those facts don’t add up to an account of what is wrong with this change. The problem of attention urges on us fundamental questions about who we are and what we should do with our lives. While the answers to these questions cleave along political lines, only the right has grasped their weight.
Consider the lopsided reception of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. A prominent social psychologist, Haidt argues that the increased use of social media is a measurable cause of the spike in anxiety and depression among American teens since around 2010. As in his other books, Haidt’s case is (perhaps ostentatiously) nonpartisan; he does not grind any obvious political axes. But Anxious Generation has received a much warmer welcome from Christian conservatives (for example, in Christian Scholar’s Review, Gospel Coalition, and Public Discourse) than from secular liberals (in the Atlantic, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, and New York Times).
It’s not hard to see why. Anxious Generation offers substantial confirmation to the view, shared by many Christian parents, that children should be kept off smartphones and social media until high school. Haidt, himself an atheist, doles out spiritual self-help ideas—engage in rituals, still your mind, marvel at nature—and cites studies showing that some religious practices are beneficial to mental health. (One can only imagine the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob breathing a deep sigh of relief.) Critics on the left, on the other hand, questioned the link between our digital environment and negative mental health outcomes. They also worried about whether Haidt gives cover to a conservative moral panic justifying a campaign of censorship and control. But, setting aside the accuracy of Anxious Generation, these criticisms offered no other practical alternative.
I myself am the author of a recent philippic against the effects of digital technology on our attention (A Web of Our Own Making). I argue that digital tech is dehumanizing, and that the stakes of mitigating its psychic, social, and political effects could not be greater. The book is chiefly inspired by Frankfurt School analysis. Yet it has almost exclusively been reviewed, commented on, and touted by Christian and/or conservative readers. I have received many invitations to Christian podcasts, colleges, schools, and institutions. The book was cited as an authority on why children should not have unrestricted access to online content in an amicus brief filed to the Supreme Court by a conservative think tank. And its most standout booster (après mom) has been the conservative Christian writer Rod Dreher.
These divergent receptions bespeak a wider cultural asymmetry. Conservative and Christian institutes, publications, and authors are interested in questions about the ultimate stakes of digital technology. Corresponding thinking on the left tends to accept the technological status quo, focusing on the inequality that tech companies generate, the embedded biases of algorithms, the empowerment of users, and the proprietary control of data. But the bearing of these arguments is unimaginative, wishful, or narrow. Just as “virtue,” “pursuit of truth,” “the whole person,” and “human flourishing” have become terms exclusive to conservative educational discourse, categorical tech skepticism—criticism not just of how existing digital technologies happen to be used to exploit us but also of how they completely reshape us—has become a partisan practice.
There are a few obvious reasons for this alignment. Access to and restriction of social media have become proxies for questions about acceptance of gender identity (i.e., about what parents would like their children to regard as normal). Limiting access to social media strikes many on the left as of a piece with banning books from school libraries. The liberal left also tends to think in terms of rights rather than norms—and is thereby reluctant to propose limits on private preference or adult consent.
The trouble is that one cannot claim that the capture of attention is a big deal without supplying some larger vision within which to evaluate our libidinal appetites, needs, desires, preferences, and pleasures. Whereas past generations of the left relied on the authority of Marx and Freud to mark the distinction between, say, genuine desires and pseudo-desires (desires that feel like our own but are in fact products of self-deceit, alienation, and conformity), the contemporary left’s surrender of these questions to scientism has divested it of any analogous theory or vocabulary.
Attention is typically understood as an “inside-out” problem: each of us is supposed to manage our focus individually. In a fully screened environment, this is like suggesting that we keep dry in a rainstorm by running really fast between the drops. But there is another, “outside-in” approach to the problem: to change the world to be worthy of our full attention. Instead of focusing on the distribution of wealth or on data rights as ends in themselves, we need to take up the question of what living well looks like. The clearest way for the left to reclaim this ground is to revive old socialist questions about the purpose, meaning, and quality of labor.
This suggestion will seem misplaced only if we picture our struggles with screens as a matter of leisure and socialism as a matter of work. In fact, just as our screens confound the distinction between leisure and labor altogether, socialist arguments about the meaning of labor concern not just the time we spend on the clock, but also the shape of our lives as a whole. Questions of attention do not concern something numinous and ineffable; they are about the texture and quality of our material experience—and whether we can work to free ourselves from the quagmire of consumption, performance, and sensational reaction that forms our digital environment.
Good work (whether it’s parenting, ranching, plumbing, playing an instrument, or coding) disciplines our attention because it is recalcitrant to our immediate inclinations. It is because the matter and rhythm of the craft resists our will that it makes some aspect of the world newly interesting and alive for us; it allows us to take the world personally. It places the worker into a creative relationship with reality, which thereby becomes more legible. The vision expressed by Marx’s epigram about a utopia in which people fish, rear cattle, and engage in intellectual criticism in the course of a day is that of a world we act on and own together, rather than one we buy into and are consumed by. In drawing us into creative and responsive relationships, good work opens us to the possibility of recognizing ourselves in solidarity with others; it forms the basis of collective action. As Richard Sennett put it, “good craftsmanship implies socialism.” To work is to matter, and to matter is to make whole.
These principles were once basic to socialism—not emancipation from work, but through work. Not rapport with others on the basis of shared views, but love of them as fellows at the task. At Deep Springs College, the self-proclaimed socialist utopia at which I taught for four-and-a-half years, I routinely watched progressive students from Brooklyn learn to work alongside mechanics and ranchers from rodeo America. I am not saying that these people all got along or that their relationships were frictionless, but rather that their opinions, identities, and affinities became less salient when there was a shared commitment to practices collectively acknowledged as important. The work was the bond.
In contrast, our current digital interface—defined as it is by the extraction, circulation, and consumption of virtual experiences—is at once information-rich and experience-poor. The compulsion to participate in it comes about not through external coercion but through the open-ended gratification of small choices that come to feel authentically our own. This dynamic perversely makes endless choice of whatever kind seem good in and of itself. But our consumption of virtual choices is the very picture of alienation, particularly to the extent that it infiltrates our self-understanding, identities, and self-regard. The malaise around attention is one emergent feature of this larger alienation from good work.
Marx denounced the nineteenth-century factory floor as intrinsically alienating. Much of our doom-scrolling experience—on social media in particular—is no less dehumanizing than the assembly line. The latter degraded people through physical drudgery, while the former enthralls our minds, scratching the glandular itches that digital products themselves create. To suggest that social media can become salutary under different ownership or with better legislation is like suggesting that Louis Vuitton bags could be used to tote potatoes around in a socialist collective: it’s only very technically true. So long as the appeal of digital services consists of the quantified reification of identity and the provision of anxious satisfactions, it will continue to obscure questions about the quality of our material lives. We should work to cut these services down or out entirely.
This is not an anti-technological proposition. We can meaningfully distinguish between the automation of essential activities like logistics, data processing, and resource allocation on the one hand and the gratuitous economy of virtual experiences on the other. At one end of this spectrum are bureaucratic text-based or number-crunching tasks that are the necessary evils of optimizing any modern economy. At the other end is a system for circulating images and experiences, with its own autonomous logic of imperatives and incentives, that has appropriated our social and inner lives. The distinctions between these two extremes may be unstable, and there are shades of gray in between. Are we therefore unwilling to distinguish between what we can use best and what uses us for the worst? The future of an emancipated and fully human society rests on our capacity to make digital technology seriously more boring—boring enough that we will be free to be interested in what we are really doing with ourselves.
The defense of the virtues of work has been recoded as crypto-conservative, associated with Wendell Berry’s nostalgic agrarianism or Matthew Crawford’s woke-bashing self-reliance. Part of the appeal of these writers consists in the connections they draw between work and community. But the image of community on the right (as well as on the left) often requires like-mindedness or ideological conformity—a Benedict-optioned enclave, a retreat behind a firewalled garden. Instead of the retrenched community of creed, we should insist on the vision of the open workshop—one that allows our affinities, opinions, and identities to become secondary to the work at hand.
It is the mark of good work that its quality and meaning can be assessed internally to the work itself, rather than what one thinks about the particular worker doing it. This criterion might seem like starry-eyed idealism or, worse, a sanction for less palpable forms of discrimination. There is nonetheless a difference between bullshit jobs in which success is measured by how well we come across—jobs centrally dependent on “people skills” like collaboration and leadership, on branding and influencing, and on emotional manipulation strategically deployed for profit—and work assessed by public or craft standards. The latter is not just more materially satisfying; it also allows us to create a world in common and to make visible our practical, mutual reliance on each other.
It was this vision that engendered coherent forms of cross-ideological partisanship (like Christian socialism) that have now fallen out of use. Enough people may be disenchanted with troll-poisoned politics and with the big reveal that tech companies don’t have the public interest at heart that such a vision may stand a chance again. Projects like Side Street (a woodworking and art collective in L.A. County), the Eliot School (a cluster of craft workshops in the Boston area), and the Clubhouse Network (a series of centers that teach tech skills to young people across the United States)—which anyone can join at little or no cost and which introduce participants to good work in common—offer glimpses of what such open workshops might look like as local, transformative foci of education, participation, and cooperation. If this sort of thing seems quaint, unprofitable, improbable, or impractical, then we should go all-out to revive our capacity for and interest in work—at the same time that we automate jobs that don’t have this character and go all-out to undermine the influence that Big Tech wields over our politics and our psychic lives.
The current MAGA–Musk formation might be read as the opportunistic coupling of tech-skeptical conservatism with utopian techno-libertarianism—forces that share nothing but an enemy. It might also reflect the reality that technologies of attention have grown so absolutely powerful that whoever controls them can stipulate the terms of speech and attention upstream from everything else. Much of the liberal left, in contrast, still clings to the notion that the digital public sphere should remain impartial—an article of faith that has collapsed into yet another partisan position.
One may lament this state of affairs, while also using the opportunity to advance ideas that have long lain dormant under consensus. Beyond questions of employment and remuneration, what kinds of work do we want? Beyond our rights and entitlements, what forms of attention liberate us from mass conformity? Beyond the memeing of our foes, what do we want digital technology to be for? The future of the left as something other than an anti-right rests not on the full embrace of the TikTokification of political attention—on coming up with a Democratic counterpart to Truth Social—but on offering a substantial and fulfilling vision of the human good. As Erich Fromm argued, the more technology frees us from dependence on nature and on others, we can seek out forms of pseudo-security that destroy our freedom and integrity of self—or we can try to attend to the world in the better work of love.
Antón Barba-Kay is a distinguished fellow at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, as well as the senior fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego. His book, A Web of Our Own Making, was published in 2023 by Cambridge University Press.
