Liberation of human attention
SAYS JAMES WILLIAMS, EX-GOOGLE EMPLOYEE, OF HOW TECH DESIGNERS RESPONDED TO HIS QUESTION AT A CONFERENCE LAST YEAR, AS HE CAMPAIGNS FOR THE LIBERATION OF HUMAN ATTENTION
It’s time to spare a thought for the consequences of screen time |
Call it the latest milestone in Silicon Valley’s year of apology. Facebook and Instagram announced new tools for users to set time limits on their platforms, and a dashboard to monitor one’s daily use, following Google’s introduction of Digital Well Being features.
In doing so, the companies seemed to suggest that spending time on the internet is not a desirable, healthy habit, but a pleasurable vice: One that if left uncontrolled may slip into unappealing addiction.
Having secured our attention more completely than ever dreamed, they now are carefully admitting it’s time to give some of it back, so we can start living our lives again.
“The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time,” writes James Williams, a technologist turned philosopher and the author of a new book,
Stand Out of Our Light.
Williams, 36, should know. During a decade-long tenure at Google, he worked on search advertising, helping perfect a powerful, data-driven advertising model. Gradually, he began to feel that his life story as he knew it was coming unglued, “as though the floor was crumbling under my feet”, he writes.
Williams compares the current
design of our technology to “an entire army of jets and tanks” aimed at capturing and keeping our attention.
And the army is winning, he says. We spend the day transfixed by our screens, thumb twitching in the subways and elevators, glancing at traffic lights.
You’ve got chaos
Originally from Abilene, Texas, Williams had arrived to work at Google in what could still be called the early days, when the company, in its idealism, was resistant to the age-old advertising model. He left Google in 2013 to conduct doctoral research at Oxford on the philosophy and ethics of attention persuasion in design.
Williams is now concerned with overwired individuals losing their life purpose.
“In the same way that you pull out a phone to do something and you get distracted, and 30 minutes later you find that you’ve done 10 other things except the thing that you pulled out the phone to do — there’s fragmentation and distraction at that level,” he said. “But I felt like there’s something on a longer-term level that’s harder to keep in view: that longitudinal sense of what you’re about.”
He knew that among his colleagues, he wasn’t the only one feeling this way. Speaking at a technology conference in Amsterdam last year, Williams asked the designers in the room, some 250 of them: “How many of you guys want to live in the world that you’re creating? In a world where technology is competing for our attention?”
“Not a single hand went up,” he said.
Williams is also far from the only example of a former soldier of big tech now working to expose its cultural dangers.
Another whistleblower
In late June, Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist for Google, took the stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival to warn the crowd that what we are facing is no less than an “existential threat” from our very own gadgets.
Red-haired and slight, Harris, 34, has been playing the role of whistleblower since he quit Google five years ago. He started the Center for Humane Technology in San Francisco and travels the country, appearing on influential shows and podcasts like 60 Minutes and Waking Up, as well as at glamorous conferences like Aspen, to describe how technology is designed to be irresistible.
He likes a chess analogy. When Facebook or Google points their “supercomputers” towards our minds, he said, “it’s checkmate”.
Back in the more innocent days of 2013, when Williams and Harris both still worked at Google, they’d meet in conference rooms and sketch out their thoughts on whiteboards. Since then, both men’s messages have grown in scope and urgency. The constant pull on our attention from technology is no longer
just about losing too many hours of our so-called real lives to the diversions of the web. Now, they are telling us, we are at risk of fundamentally losing our moral purpose.
“It’s changing our ability to make sense of what’s true, so we have less and less idea of a shared fabric of truth,” Harris said. “Without shared truth or shared facts, you get chaos — and people can take control.”
Using our phones to save us from our phones
A whole industry has sprung up to combat tech creep. Oncefree pleasures like napping are now monetised by the hour. Those who used to relax with monthly magazines now download guided-meditation apps like Headspace ($399.99 for a lifetime subscription).
HabitLab, developed at Stanford, stages aggressive interventions whenever you enter one of your self-declared danger zones of internet consumption.
Moment, an app, monitors your screen time and sends you or your loved ones embarrassing notifications of how much time was spent on Instagram today.
Apparently, we now need our phones to save us from our phones.