Stand out of our light | James Williams | TEDxAthens

Our technological reality is flooded with fake news, identities, realities. Design ethicist James Williams argues that we need to redefine the way we use social media if we want to be, ironically, more social.

James Williams is a design ethicist and a co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign, an effort that aims to evolve the design ethos of digital technologies to help them be more respectful of our time and attention and more supportive of our deeper human values and goals. He is currently completing doctoral research at the University of Oxford, where he is focused on questions of attention and persuasion in technology design.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx.

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)