Our attention is stolen

How corporations effect you

The most powerful forces in all of society - corporations - are pointing their power at getting you to be addicted to their thing. Whether it is scrolling their app, eating their food, watching their show - all their intelligence is pointed at you and trying to get you to be addicted.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari

According to the former Google engineer James Williams – who has become the most important philosopher of attention in the western world –

Individual abstinence is not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution.

It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.

Our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society.

Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just pushing it back on to the individual when it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference.

It will help us grasp what’s happening if we compare our rising attention problems to our rising obesity rates.

Fifty years ago there was very little obesity, but today it is endemic in the western world. This is not because we suddenly became greedy or self-indulgent. Obesity is not a medical epidemic – it’s a social epidemic. We have bad food, and so people are getting fat. The way we live changed dramatically – our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or cycle around, and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. Something similar is happening with the changes in our attention.

To give one example:

there is strong scientific evidence that stress and exhaustion ruin your attention.

Today, about 35% of workers feel they can never switch off their phones because their boss might email them at any time of day or night.

The factors harming our attention are not all immediately obvious. We focus on tech at first, but in fact, the causes range very widely – from the food we eat to the air we breathe, from the hours we work to the hours we no longer sleep. They include many things we have come to take for granted – from how we deprive our children of play, to how our schools strip learning of meaning by basing everything on tests.

We need to respond to this incessant invasion of our attention at two levels. The first is individual. There are all sorts of changes we can make at a personal level that will protect our focus. By doing most of them, we can boost our focus by about 20%. But we have to level with people. Those changes will only take you so far.

At the moment, it’s as though we are all having itching powder poured over us all day, and the people pouring the powder are saying: “You might want to learn to meditate. Then you wouldn’t scratch so much.” Meditation is a useful tool – but we actually need to stop the people who are pouring itching powder on us.

We need to band together to take on the forces stealing our attention and take it back.

This can sound a bit abstract – but this is being put into practice in many places. In France, ordinary workers decided that work stress was intolerable and pressured their government for change – so now, they have a legal “right to disconnect”. It’s simple. You have a right to defined work hours, and you have a right to not be contacted by your employer outside those hours. Companies that break the rules get huge fines. There are lots of potential collective changes like this that can restore part of our focus. We could, for example, force social media companies to abandon their current business model, which is specifically designed to invade our attention in order to keep us scrolling. There are alternative ways these sites could work – ones that would heal our attention instead of hacking it.

Some scientists say these worries about attention are a moral panic, comparable to the anxieties in the past about comic books or rap music, and that the evidence is shaky. Other scientists say the evidence is strong and these anxieties are like the early warnings about the obesity epidemic or the climate crisis in the 1970s. Given this uncertainty, we can’t wait for perfect evidence. We have to act based on a reasonable assessment of risk. If the people warning about the effects on our attention turn out to be wrong, and we still do what they suggest, what will be the cost? We will spend less time being harassed by our bosses, and we’ll be tracked and manipulated less by technology – along with lots of other improvements in our lives that are desirable in any case. But if they turn out to be right, and we don’t do what they say, what’s the cost? We will have – as the former Google engineer Tristan Harris puts it – downgraded humanity, stripping us of our attention at the very time when we face big collective crises that require it more than ever.

But none of these changes will happen unless we fight for them. Just as the feminist movement reclaimed women’s right to their own bodies (and still has to fight for it today), we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. We need to act urgently, because this may be like the climate crisis, or the obesity crisis – the longer we wait, the harder it will get.

The more our attention degrades, the harder it will be to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus.

The first step it requires is a shift in our consciousness. We need to stop blaming ourselves, or making only demands for tiny tweaks from our employers and from tech companies. We own our own minds – and together, we can take them back from the forces that are stealing them.