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 rig...