Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher, James Williams writes that “the liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time”.
Philosopher Ann Kerwin takes a look at his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy, in which he argues that digital technology is training us to be impulsive, weak-willed, and reactive.
He also explains how three types of ‘light’ can help us push back against this.
Photo: Creative Touch Imaging Ltd/NurPhoto
While working for Google, Williams began to realise big tech companies, whose purpose was to connect people or keep them informed, had morphed into the world’s largest and most sophisticated advertising companies, Kerwin says.
“And what they need from us is our attention. So, Williams discovered that he was actually in the business of capturing and exploiting people’s attention.
“As these systems got more sophisticated and got more amazing technology behind them, they began to compete with each other to grab our limited attention, that is as many clicks as possible, to spend as much time and attention as possible on their systems, to give them information that would allow them to feed [to advertisers], and that’s their business model.”
While surfing the internet is our choice, Kerwin says that Williams argues big tech companies are competing to erase “the lower brain stem”.
“According to Williams, they have begun more and more to resort to the cheapest pettiest tricks in the book, appealing to the lowest parts of ourselves, to the lesser selves that our higher natures perennially struggled to overcome.”
He refers to these companies as “adversarial persuaders”, in that they are insidiously rewiring us, Kerwin says.
For example, algorithms are keeping us fed with what we engage with most – firstly anger and outrage, secondly fear, and thirdly insecurity or envy.
“These are the motives that are driving people to stay on things, do more, exchange more, give more information to advertisers unwilling and if the business is to keep people engaged, then the algorithms keep feeding them things that will intentionally invoke that.”
Although Williams agrees these big tech firms didn’t set out to create social dissent or drive us against each other, “the infrastructure and incentives are such, the drivers are such, that they will engage in that business”, Kerwin says.
He uses an anecdote about ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, who asked Alexander the Great to stand out of his light after he offered to grant him any wish, as an analogy for three types of light to help us overcome the distractions of technology.
The first is the spotlight or our ability to focus on a task.
“The companies in a way don’t want us to have too coherent a spotlight, because we actually need to be dashing around … and [it] can get in the way of our ‘doing’. So, we can become aware of that and we can have better laws and regulation to focus on that,” Kerwin says.
Then there’s the starlight which is navigating life by our higher values.
“It enables us to be who we want to be, our better selves rather than our petty selves.”
Last is the ‘daylight’ which is about reflection, self-regulation, and cognition.
“It enables us to see what we want and to look at the importance of what we care about.”
Kerwin questions why we should accept the way technology companies are acting, not just as individuals, but as a society.
“People can use their devices and things a lot more but when they realise how much reactivity there is around, how so many people are so angry all the time, how people don’t have leisure, that they can see that these are not natural developments, they have come into ‘being’, and we are impoverished by them and we should try to figure out how in our lives to regain some balance.
“So daylight, some starlight, and some spotlight.”
