Stand Out of Our Light

Yet, as the noted economist Herbert Simon pointed out in the 1970s, when information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource

"To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery," wrote Rousseau in The Social Contract.

This is how the twenty-first century began: with sophisticated persuasion allying with sophisticated technology to advance the pettiest possible goals in our lives.

What do you pay when you pay attention? You pay with all the things you could have attended to, but didn’t: all the goals you didn’t pursue, all the actions you didn’t take, and all the possible yous you could have been, had you attended to those other things. Attention is paid in possible futures forgone. You pay for that extra Game of Thrones episode with the heart-to-heart talk you could have had with your anxious child. You pay for that extra hour on social media with the sleep you didn’t get and the fresh feeling you didn’t have the next morning. You pay for giving in to that outrage-inducing piece of clickbait about that politician you hate with the patience and empathy it took from you, and the anger you have at yourself for allowing yourself to take the bait in the first place.We pay attention with the lives we might have lived.

British philosopher John Stuart Mill. In his seminal text On Liberty, Mill writes 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," he writes, "requires liberty of tastes and pursuits; of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character."8 Here, Mill seems to me to be articulating something like a freedom of attention. Crucially, he points out that freedom of the mind is the first freedom, upon which freedom of expression depends. The freedom of speech is meaningless without the freedom of attention, which is both its complement and its prerequisite.

The "Spotlight"Our immediate capacities for navigating awareness and action toward tasks. Enables us to do what we want to do.The "Starlight"Our broader capacities for navigating life "by the stars" of our higher goals and values. Enables us to be who we want to be.The "Daylight"Our fundamental capacities – such as reflection, metacognition, reason, and intelligence – that enable us to define our goals and values to begin with. Enables us to "want what we want to want."These three "lights" of attention pertain to doing, being, and knowing, respectively. When each of these "lights" gets obscured, a distinct – though not mutually exclusive – type of "distraction" results.

Bob Dylan said, "A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do."

Sometimes our technologies help us do what we want to do. Other times they don’t. When our technologies fail us in this regard, they undermine the "spotlight" of our attention. This produces functional distractions that direct us away from information or actions relevant to our immediate tasks or goals. Functional distraction is what’s commonly meant by the word "distraction" in day-to-day use. This is the sort of distraction that Huxley called the"mere casual waste products of psychophysiological activity."Like when you sit down at a computer to fulfill all the plans you’ve made, to do all those very responsible and adult things you know at the back of your mind you absolutely must do, and yet you don’t: instead, your unconscious mind outruns your conscious mind, and you find yourself, forty-five minutes later, having read articles about the global economic meltdown, having watched auto-playing YouTube videos about dogs who were running while sleeping, and having voyeured the life achievements of some astonishing percentage of people who are willing to publicly admit that they know you, however little it may actually be the case.

William James wrote that "our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do." When we become aware that our actual habits are in dissonance with our desired values, this self-feeling often feels like a challenge to, if not the loss of, our identities.

Until then, we must staunchly defend, and indeed enhance, people’s ability to decline the harvesting of their attention. Right now, the practice currently called "ad blocking" is one of the only ways people have to cast a vote against the attention economy. It’s one of the few tools users have if they want to push back against the perverse design logic that has cannibalized the soul of the web. Some will object and say that ad blocking is "stealing," but this is nonsense: it’s no more stealing than walking out of the room when the television commercials come on. Others may say it’s not prudent to escalate the "arms race" – but it would be fantastic if there were anything remotely resembling an advertising arms race going on. What we have instead is, on one side, an entire industry spending billions of dollars trying to capture your attention using the most sophisticated computers in the world, and on the other side ... your attention. This is more akin to a soldier seeing an army of thousands of tanks and guns advance upon him, and running into a bunker for refuge. It’s not an arms race – it’s a quest for attentional survival.