Good afternoon.
Most philosophers do not live in big ceramic barrels
in their local supermarket.
But there was one,
just down the road from here, actually,
not so very long ago.
His name was Diogenes of Sinope,
and he was probably the closest thing philosophy has ever produced to a troll.
He was rude, outrageous, impulsive, offensive,
but he was deeply admired by Alexander the Great,
who was, arguably, the most powerful person in the world at the time.
It's said that one day, Alexander went to visit Diogenes
in his big barrel in the marketplace
and went up to him and said,
"Diogenes, I will grant any one wish that you have;
just tell me what you want."
And Diogenes was lying in the sun at the time,
and true to his form, he looked up at Alexander and replied,
"Stand out of my light."
And I love this story because it has lessons for us
about how we should be responding to the Alexanders of our time,
our digital technologies and the people who create them.
Because like Alexander,
they've come into our lives
and offered to fulfill all sorts of needs and wishes that we have,
and in many ways, they've done so extremely well.
But we're beginning to realize now that in doing so, they, like Alexander,
have also been standing in our light, in a sense,
and in one light in particular
that is so precious and so essential for human flourishing,
that without this light,
the other benefits of technology might not do us very much good.
The light that I mean is the light of our attention.
There's something profound and potentially irreversible
happening to human attention in the digital age.
It's more than just distraction.
It's more than just addiction or manipulation.
In fact, I think that the way we respond to this challenge
could be the defining moral and political issue of our time.
I'd like to tell you why I think so and what I think we can do about it.
In the 1970s, Herbert Simon pointed out
that in an environment of information abundance,
attention becomes the scarce resource.
There's a kind of figure-ground inversion that takes place,
and this inversion has happened so quickly and so recently
that we're still just beginning to come to terms
with what it means for human life.
But because attention is the scarce resource,
it is now the object of competition
among most of the technologies we use everyday.
The total environment of competition for our attention
is often called "the attention economy,"
and in the attention economy, there are no truly free products.
You pay with your attentional labor
every time you look or tap or scroll or click,
and this is exactly what they're designed to try to get you to do.
And they use their attentional labor to advance their goals, not yours.
Because there is a difference between their goals and yours.
If you think about the goals that you have for yourself
today, this year and even beyond,
they're probably things like "I want to spend more time with family"
or "I want to learn how to play the piano"
or "I want to take that trip I've been thinking about for a while."
You know, these are real human goals,
the stuff that when we're on our death bed,
if we don't do, we'll probably regret it.
But if you look at what the technologies of the attention economy
are designed to promote in our lives,
you don't see these goals.
What you see are things like
"Maximize the amount of time I spend using it"
or "the amount of clicks that I make"
or "the number of pages or ads that I view."
Now, I don't know anybody who has these goals for themselves.
Does anybody wake up in the morning
and think, "How much time can I possibly spend on Facebook today?"
I certainly don't.
If there's someone out there like that, I'd love to meet them.
But what this means
is that there's a deep gap between our goals and theirs
and that the technologies of the attention economy are not on our side;
their goals are not our goals.
These are distractions, petty distractions,
from the goals of life.
And this seems to me to be a really big deal,
even more so because the creators of these technologies
know that this is the case.
Steve Jobs did not let his children use the iPad.
The CEO of Netfilx, a little while back,
said that in addition to Snapchat and YouTube,
one of their biggest competitors was sleep.
This seems to me a crisis of design ethics,
a crisis of self-regulation
that design is actually amplifying and making even worse.
In the last couple of decades,
psychology and behavioral economics research
has cataloged an enormous number of vulnerabilities in our brains,
little buttons that can be pushed to get us to think or do certain things.
In parallel with this,
the advertising industry has effectively colonized the internet
and turned it into a large-scale system of industrial persuasion -
of measurement, of optimization, of message delivery.
What's more, this power, this persuasive power,
is more centralized than at any time in human history.
Never before in history
have a few people at a few companies, in one state, in one country,
been able to shape the attentional habits of billions of human beings.
Alexander could have never even dreamed of that sort of power.
So I think it's no hyperbole to say that the digital attention economy
is the largest system and most effective system
for human attitudinal and behavioral manipulation the world has ever seen.
And again, this seems to me an enormous question.
I think what's happened
is that, as Aldous Huxley said of the defenders of freedom in his time,
that they had "failed to take into account
man's almost infinite appetite for distractions."
I think that in the design of digital technologies,
we've made exactly the same mistake,
and I think that it is urgent for us to start taking those into account.
So how can we start to do that?
Well, I think what it would require, essentially,
is to start asserting and defending our freedom of attention.
Now, this is a type of freedom we have always had
but never needed to seriously assert or defend
because there wasn't a whole lot in our world
that could seriously threaten it.
But I think we can find good precedent in the great writers on the subject.
For instance, John Stuart Mill,
who said that "The appropriate region of human liberty
comprises the inward domain of consciousness."
Freedom of mind is the first sort of freedom.
He adds that "The principle of liberty, liberty of tastes and pursuits,
of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character."
So what this suggests to me
is that we need to start thinking more broadly
about what we mean by the concept of attention
in order to take into account the full spectrum of distractions
that are now being unleashed in our world.
Because when we hear the term "attention,"
what we normally think of is the spotlight of attention,
kind of the immediate way we shape our awareness within the task domain,
so the attention that you are all giving to me right now in this moment,
attention for which, by the way, I am very grateful.
But when the spotlight of our attention gets obscured,
it sort of interferes with our ability to act.
So let's say I'm trying to read a book,
but I see on my phone that Donald Trump has unleashed another outrageous tweet,
and so I stop reading my book and don't finish reading it until later.
But over time, actions become habits; the things we do become the people we are.
And we don't have a way of talking about attention in this longer-term view
with respect to our higher goals and our values.
So I think that we could maybe think of another light of attention
beyond this spotlight of attention.
We could think of the starlight of attention,
so the way we navigate our lives by the stars of our higher values.
So when technology obscures the starlight of our attention -
we can see this especially in infinite scrolling news feeds,
like on Facebook or Twitter,
and when you pull down to refresh,
the same psychological mechanism is at play
that is at play in the design of slot machines,
so there's intermittent variable rewards.
When you randomize the reward you give somebody,
they're more like to do the behavior you want them to do.
And when the attention economy stands in the starlight of our attention,
it shapes our lives in its image;
our values become its values.
We become more petty, more narcissistic, more impulsive.
And I think this is perfectly represented
by the CBS CEO's comment from February of last year,
when he said, "Donald Trump's candidacy may not be good for America,
but it's damn good for CBS."
The attention economy doesn't just shape our lives in its image;
it shapes our politics in its image.
Again, I think this is an urgent moral question
that is being talked about virtually by no one.
But I think we could find one more light of our attention to talk about.
It's when the technology doesn't just make it harder
to do what we want to do or to be who we want to be,
but in a sense, to want what we want to want -
to define our goals and values in the first place.
So we can think of this as the daylight of our attention,
the light by which we're able to do everything else.
When technology undermines the daylight of our attention,
it erodes our fundamental capacities
like reason, reflection, intelligence, metacognition.
One way we see this very clearly
is in the proliferation of outrage in our societies and in our world.
Outrage - the impulse to judge and punish -
was extremely valuable at earlier stages of human evolution
in small foraging groups that promoted moral clarity, social solidarity.
It was a way of signalling to other people that you could be trusted.
But when we amplify this on a societal scale,
it results in large-scale social division and rampant retaliation.
To give you one example -
I don't know how many of you remember this -
there was a dentist from Minnesota, a little while back,
that went to Zimbabwe and killed the lion named Cecil.
It was a stupid thing to do; he probably shouldn't have done it.
It might have been illegal - I don't know.
But what happened as a result of that
is the entire internet came down on this man for a bad decision.
It was this whole sort of festival of public shaming.
People showed up at his place of work, putting signs on it saying, "Rot in hell."
They showed up to his home and spray-painted it.
When children do this sort of thing, we call it "cyber-bullying."
But when adults do it, it is mob rule, plain and simple.
And mob rule is precisely what Socrates held
was the main route democracies take when they turn into tyrannies.
So, we can think beyond the spotlight of our attention;
we can think not just in terms of doing what we want to do
but being who we want to be
and ultimately wanting what we want to want.
This is an intolerable situation; this should not persist.
As Aristotle said, "It is disgraceful to be unable to use our good things."
We should not have to settle
for a relationship with technology that is adversarial.
We should demand that they be on our side.
Isn't that what technology is for?
So how would we do that?
Well, in the past, we've typically put it back on people themselves
to deal with distraction, to deal with the effects of technology,
to say work harder.
But in the digital age, the persuasion is just too powerful and too ubiquitous,
and this will not work.
But neither can we blame the people who make these technologies.
These are by and large good people, and I count many of them as my friends.
They're just players in a game called the attention economy.
The problem is that game.
Ultimately, this is not a problem of the ethics of individual actors;
it's a problem of the ethics of the system, of the infrastructure,
what philosopher Luciano Floridi at Oxford calls the "infraetchics."
So how can we change the situation?
Well, go back to what I said earlier
about how what we're doing is attentional labor
when we're using these technologies
and paying for them with our time and our attention.
In this light, we can frame the problem in two ways.
One is that we're getting poor value for our attentional labor.
The other problem is that the conditions of that attentional labor
are extremely poor.
Now, throughout history, when people have been faced with this situation,
what they've done is to organize,
to create mechanisms of collective representation
so that they collectively negotiate with those in power,
with those Alexanders of their time.
So what I think is needed is something that will give us a voice,
a direct voice,
in the design of our technologies,
and no mechanism like this exists today.
So what I am calling for and what is needed
is a labor union or something like it for the attention economy.
And there's a community of people
who are passionate in thinking about these issues
going under the name Time Well Spent,
so that you can know when you spend time with your technologies,
that it won't just be time spent; it will be time well spent.
So we're thinking about how to change the attention economy,
coming up with better metrics, better principles, processes, business models.
And if you're passionate about this, we would love to engage with you
because the thing is, we need your help to make this a reality,
to change the system.
Because at the end of the day,
your attention is the most precious resource that you have.
It's the ultimate scarce and finite resource,
and the challenges that are facing humanity right now,
so many big and important challenges,
before anything else, what they require of us
is that we be able to give attention to the things that matter
on individual levels and at the collective level,
and this is precisely
what the technologies of the attention economy are undermining.
And ultimately, this relates to the very goals of life.
Because nobody on their death bed ever looked back and said,
"I wish I'd spent more time on Facebook."
You know, what we regret are those real goals, the human goals,
those things that make life worth living.
And so, from here, I think it will take some time to reform the attention economy.
Big projects usually take time.
But in the meantime, I think what we need to do is organize
so that we can have a voice, a direct voice,
to those who create our technologies,
and we should continue to reap the benefits of our technologies
and continue to affirm and support the people who create them
because they carry that flame of innovation and creativity
that is so core to the human project.
But before anything else,
we need to organize and ask them for their attention
so that we can tell them what we want them to do with ours.
Before anything else,
we need to ask them to stand out of our light.
Thank you for your attention.
(Applause)