flâneur

Anjali Kumar

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on the atlas — 16

highlights — 77

  • In order to do anything that matters, we must fi rst be able to give attention to the things that matter. It ’ smy fi rm conviction, now more than ever, that the degree to which we are able and willing to struggle for ownership of our attention is the degree to which we are free.
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  • In the 1960s, some people in San Francisco started walking around wearing a button that read, “ Why haven ’ t we seen a photo of the earth from space yet? ” They realized that this shift in perception – what ’ s sometimes called the “ overview effect ”– would occasion a shift in consciousness. They were right: when the fi rst photo of Earth became widely available, it turned the ground of nature into the fi gure, and enabled the environ- mental movement to occur. It allowed us all to have the perspective of astronauts, who were up in space coining new terms like “ earthlight ” and “ earthrise …
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  • but then there ’ s also the colloquial use of the term, as shorthand for “ I use this technology more than I want to. ”
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  • 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 televi- sion commercials come on
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  • But it reminds me of Diogenes, too: when he said he thought the most beautiful thing in the world was “ freedom of speech, ” the Greek word he used was parrhesia , which doesn ’ t just mean “ saying whatever you want ”– it also means speaking boldly, saying it all, “ spilling the beans, ” pouring out the truth that ’ s inside you. That ’ s the sense I get from these early critics of advertising
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  • In short, because advertisers have found ethics threatening, and ethicists have found advertising boring. (I know, because I have been both.)
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  • And we are not even debtors: we are serfs in the attentional fi elds of our digital technologies. They are in our debt. And they owe us, at absolute minimum, the bene fi t of competence.
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  • In other words, is there a “ minimum viable mind ” we should take great pains to preserve?
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  • It means being clear about what we want our technologies to do for us, as well as expecting that they be clear about what they ’ re designed to do for us. It means expecting our technologies to proceed from a place of understanding about our own views of who we are, what we ’ re doing, and where we ’ re going
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  • The route in which we take on the task of Herbert Marcuse ’ s “ great refusal, ” which Tim Wu describes in The Attention Merchants as being “ the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom –‘ to live without anxiety. ’”
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  • The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It ’ s the monster. Men made it, but they can ’
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  • I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world? ... Did we really bring a nuclear bomb with information that can – like we see with fake news – blow up people ’ s brains and reprogram them? Or did we bring light to people who never had information, who can now be empowered?
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  • However, we should seek not only to protect the most vulnerable members of society, but also the most vulnerable parts of ourselves.
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  • It ’ s slightly embarrassing to admit this, but back when I was working at Google I actually printed out the Wikipedia article titled “ List of Cognitive Biases ” and thumb-tacked it on the wall next to my desk. I thought that having it readily accessible might help me be less susceptible to my own cognitive limitations. Needless to say, it didn ’ t help at all.
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  • Whether irresistible or not, if our technologies are not on our side, then they have no place in our lives.
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  • Neither does my argument require for its moral claims the presence of
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  • doing so is inevitable
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  • We will never have the sort of “ scienti fi c ” clarity about the effects of digital media that we have, say, about the effects of the consumption of different drugs. The technology is changing too fast for research to keep up, its users and their contexts are far too diverse to allow anything but the broadest generalizations as conclusions, and the relationships between people and digital technologies are far too complex to make most research of this nature feasible at all.
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  • And I see no reason, either moral or practical, why we should be expected to tolerate it. If any- thing, I see good reasons for thinking it morally obligatory that we resist and reform it. Silver linings are the consolations of the disem- powered, and I refuse to believe that we are in that position relative to our technologies yet
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  • A perceptive and critical reader may object here that I ’ ve given too much airtime to the problems of the digital attention economy and not enough to its bene fi ts
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  • There will be no scales dropping from eyes, no Toto pulling back the curtain to reveal the would-be wizards pulling their levers. There will be no sudden realization of the gravity and unsustainability of this situation.
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  • across the full stack of human life
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  • Persuasion may also prove to be the “ killer app ” for arti fi cial intelligence, or AI
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  • the fi rst web browser I ever used
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  • of many of our digital technologies doing precisely what they are designed to do – is to frustrate and even erode the human will at individual and collective levels, undermining the very assumptions of democracy.
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  • The competition to monopolize our atten- tion is like a DDoS attack against the human will.
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  • We currently lack a language for talking about, and thereby recognizing, the full depth of these problems.
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  • despite the fact that they are, by and large, designed neither to inform us nor help us communicate – at least in any way that ’ s recognizably human
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  • Again, outrage and anger are not bad – they are understandable human responses to injustice, and they can even make us feel happy, in a way. 43 However, because the attention economy contains many incentives to induce anger but none to induce the “ Transition, ” outrage rapidly cascades into mobocracy on a societal, if not global, scale.
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  • In The Social Contract , Rousseau warned of the risk that “ particular wills could replace the general will in the deliber- ations of the people. ” Müller ’ s conception of populism can thus be seen as a kind of moralized version of that fragmentation of collective identity. But while the development of Rousseau ’ s general will “ requires actual participation by citizens; the populist, on the other hand, can divine the proper will of the people on the basis of what it means, for instance, to be a ‘ real American. ’”
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  • For example, virtue signaling often masquerades as apparently useful or prudent actions, as when people take action to ensure that sex offenders don ’ t move to their neighborhood. The real goal here, says Nussbaum, is one of “ lowering the status of sex offend- ers and raising the status of good people like herself.
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  • Anger and Forgiveness
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  • ho never advertised Jell-O on television.
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  • The busy demands of making a living can make a mind too active, but so can the busy demands of noti fi cations, never-ending feeds of information, persua- sive appeals, endless entertainment options, and all the other pings on our attention that the digital attention economy throws our way. This seems to suggest that there ’ s an opportunity to clarify where and how our interactions with the forces of the attention economy could be considered a kind of attentional labor, and what the implications of that characterization might be for the kinds of freedom we look to leisure to sustain.
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  • For instance, noti fi cations or addictive mobile apps may fi ll up those little moments in the day during which a person might have otherwise re fl ected on their goals and priorities.
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  • we can still in principle detect the errors and correct them. It seemed like there was one deeper level of “ distraction ” to contend with: the sort of distraction that would threaten our ability to know and de fi ne what our goals and values are in the fi rst place
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  • Division itself is not bad, of course: isolation is necessary for the development of individual views and opinions. Diversity requires division, of a sort. But the sort of division that removes the space in which the common interest and general will may be found is the sort that is extremely problematic.
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  • “ I wonder if Facebook KILLED anyone with their emotion manipulation stunt. At their scale and with depressed people out there, it ’ s possible. ”
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  • Reactance refers to the idea “ that individuals have cer- tain freedoms with regard to their behavior. If these behavioral freedoms are reduced or threatened with reduction, the individual will be motivationally aroused to regain them. ”
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  • I found myself spending more and more time trying to come up with clever things to say in my social posts, not because I felt they were things worth saying but because I had come to value these attentional signals for their own sake. Social interaction had become a numbers game for me, and I was focused on “ winning ”– even though I had no idea what winning looked like. I just knew that the more of these rewarding little social validations I got, the more of them I wanted.
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  • A meta- analysis of fi fty-seven studies found that social media in particular is linked with increased narcissism. 4 Another study found that young people are now getting more plastic surgery due to pressure from social media. 5 And a study of children ’ stelevisionshowsin recent years found that, rather than pro-social community values, the main value now held up by children ’ s television shows as being most worth pursuing is
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  • I witnessed several acquaintances back in Texas – good, loving people, and deeply religious “ values voters ”– go from vocally rejecting one particular candidate as being morally reprehensible and utterly unacceptable, to ultimately setting aside those foundational moral commitments in the name of securing a short-term political win.
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  • In The Theory of Moral Sentiments , Adam Smith calls prudence the virtue that ’ s “
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  • It felt like I was back in my high-school calculus class, and all these new technologies were souped-up ver- sions of Tetris . It wasn ’ t just that my tasks and goals were giving way to theirs – my values were as well.
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  • When we lose the story of our identities, whether on individual or collective levels, it undermines what we could call the “ starlight ” of our attention, or our ability to navigate “ by the stars ” of our higher values or “ being goals. ” When our “ starlight ” is obscured, it makes it harder to “ be who we want to be. ” We feel the self frag- menting and dividing, resulting in an existential sort of distraction. 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 wit…
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  • my receptacle of secrets
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  • Elliot, A. J., Maier, M. A., Moller, A. C., Friedman, R. and Meinhardt, J. (2007). Color and Psychological Functioning: The Effect of Red on Performance Attainment. Journal of Experimental Psychology , 136 (1), 154 – 168. 4 Curtis, Valerie A. (2007). Dirt, Disgust and Disease: A Natural History of Hygiene. Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health , 61, 660 – 664.
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  • but then Candy Crush reminded me I haven ’
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  • At Net fl ix, we are competing for our customers ’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc. Reed Hastings, CEO, Net fl ix
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  • 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 re fl ection, metacognition, reason, and intelligence – that enable us to de fi ne our goals and values to begin with. Enables us to “ want what we want to want. ”
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