Stand out of our Light

The book “Stand out of our Light” by James Williams, a former Google strategist is an answer to the inaugural question “Are digital technologies making politics impossible?” posed by http://ninedotsprize.org ↗ in 2016.

Complete book is available at https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108453004 ↗ under a Creative Commons Open Access license.

The book title is a wordplay on a famous quote attributed to Diogenes, who lived 2000 years ago. In fact, the book begins right there and presents the present day challenges with extraordinary clarity.

However as the book progresses, the author falls into the familiar trap of philosophy i.e neither clear nor actionable. Somewhere I’ve read that psychologists write to their fellow psychologists, and this book is another proof that this applies to every profession.

The following sections contain extracts and select quotes from the book. Anything added by me has a bracket “()” and “…” indicates something left out.

I have taken a number of steps in my personal life to avoid some of the issues addressed in this book. All of them are marked as @myaction under the relevant sections of the book.

Distraction by Design

The Faulty GPS

The technology industry wasn’t designing products; it was designing users.

Instead of your goals, success from their perspective is usually defined in the form of low-level “engagement” goals, as they’re often called. These include things like maximizing the amount of time you spend with their product, keeping you clicking or tapping or scrolling as much as possible, or showing you as many pages or ads as they can.

The Canadian media theorist Harold Innis once said that his entire career’s work proceeded from the question, “Why do we attend to the things to which we attend?”

Aldous Huxley’s observation from Brave New World Revisited “freedom’s nastiest adversaries in the years to come would emerge not from the things we fear, but from the things that give us pleasure”

The age of Attention

Because information has historically been scarce, the received wisdom has been that more information is better.

Herbert Simon pointed out in the 1970s, “in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

Consider the video game Tetris.The challenge of the game, and what ultimately does you in, is the increasing speed at which they fall.

In the same way, information quantity as such is only important insofar as it enables information velocity. At extreme speeds, processing fails. (What) we ought to worry about pertains less to the management of information, and more to the management of attention.

We call our time the Information Age, but I think a better name for it would be the “Age of Attention.”

In summary, the real challenge we face is the age old challenge of self-regulation.

Bring your own Boundaries

If you wanted to train all of society to be as impulsive and weak-willed as possible, how would you do it? One way would be to invent an impulsivity training device – let’s call it an iTrainer – that delivers an endless supply of informational rewards on demand. You’d want to make it small enough to fit in a pocket or purse so people could carry it anywhere they went. The informational rewards it would pipe into their attentional world could be anything, from cute cat photos to tidbits of news that outrage you (because outrage can, after all, be a reward too). To boost its effectiveness, you could endow the iTrainer with rich systems of intelligence and automation so it could adapt to users’ behaviors, contexts, and individual quirks in order to get them to spend as much time and attention with it as possible.

So let’s say you build the iTrainer and distribute it gradually into society. At first, people’s willpower would probably be pretty strong and resistant. The iTrainer might also cause some awkward social situations, at least until enough people had adopted it that it was widely accepted, and not seen as weird. But if everyone were to keep using it over several years, you’d probably start seeing it work pretty well. Now, the iTrainer might make people’s lives harder to live, of course; it would no doubt get in the way of them pursuing their desired tasks and goals. Even though you created it, you probably wouldn’t let your kids use one. But from the point of view of your design goals – in other words, making the world more impulsive and weak-willed – it would likely be a roaring success.

Then, what if you wanted to take things even further? What if you wanted to make everyone even more distracted, angry, cynical – and even unsure of what, or how, to think? What if you wanted to troll everyone’s minds? You’d probably create an engine, a set of economic incentives, that would make it profitable for other people to produce and deliver these rewards – and, where possible, you’d make these the only incentives for doing so. You don’t want just any rewards to get delivered – you want people to receive rewards that speak to their impulsive selves, rewards that are the best at punching the right buttons in their brains. For good measure, you could also centralize the ownership of this design as much as possible.

Of course, the iTrainer project would never come anywhere close to passing a research ethics review. Launching such a project of societal reshaping, and letting it run unchecked, would clearly be utterly outrageous. So it’s a good thing this is all just a thought experiment.

Since the book was published, the technology giants have moved further along and released LLM models that can keep people hooked 24*7*365.

@myaction: For android mobile like Note6Pro I use Grey scale mode and KISS launcher ↗ to reduce distractions.

(L)imits are necessary if we are to have any freedom at all. As the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt puts it: “What has no boundaries has no shape.” “To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery,” wrote Rousseau in The Social Contract, “while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom”

According to … “ego-depletion” hypothesis, our self-control, our willpower, is a finite resource. So when the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else.

(With) constant stream of new products … (we) are in a constant state of learning and adaptation … living on what I sometimes call a “treadmill of incompetence.”

@myaction: I do not change any product until it breaks down completely as shown in computers page.

In “Reflections on Progress”, Aldous Huxley writes, “however powerful and well trained the surface will is, it is not a match for circumstances.” The Oxford philosopher Neil Levy writes in his book Neuroethics, “Autonomy is developmentally dependent upon the environment: we become autonomous individuals, able to control our behavior in the light of our values, only if the environment in which we grow up is suitably structured to reward self-control.”

Empires of the Mind

(G)oals and metrics that served the ends of advertising became the dominant goals and metrics in the design of digital services themselves. By and large, these metrics involved capturing the maximum amount of users’ time and attention possible. In order to win the fierce global competition for our attention, design was forced to speak to the lowest parts of us, and to exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities.

We have not been primed, either by nature or habit, to notice, much less struggle against, these new persuasive forces that so deeply shape our attention, our actions, and our lives.

This problem is not new just in scale, but also in kind. The empires of the present are the empires of the mind.

Many of the most widely used platforms, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are at core advertising companies… (I)t was impossible to study the effectiveness of one’s advertising efforts, or to know how to improve on them…

The internet changed all that… In particular, the browser “cookie” – a small file delivered imperceptibly via website code to track user behavior across pages – played an essential role. In his book The Daily You, Joseph Turow writes that the cookie did “more to shape advertising – and social attention – on the web than any other invention apart from the browser itself.”

Since 2014, for instance, Google’s advertising platform has been able to track whether you visit a company’s store in person after you see their ad.

(A) four-stage model for hooking users that consists of a trigger, an action, a variable reward, and the user’s “investment” in the product (e.g. of time or money).

Whether we’re using a slot machine or an app that’s designed to “hook” us, we’re doing the same thing; we’re “paying for the possibility of a surprise.” With slot machines, we pay with our money. With technologies in the attention economy, we pay with our attention.

Clicks against Humanity

The Citizen is the Product

To develop this wider notion of “attention” in the direction of the will, both individual and collective, … (three) types of attention:

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 reflection, metacognition, reason, and intelligence – that enable us to define our goals and values to begin with. Enables us to “want what we want to want.”

These three “lights” of attention pertain to doing, being, and knowing, respectively. When each of these “lights” gets obscured, a distinct – though not mutually exclusive – type of “distraction” results.

The Spotlight

“At Netflix, we are competing for our customers’ time, so our competitors include Snapchat, YouTube, sleep, etc.” (said) Reed Hastings, CEO, Netflix.

@myaction: I follow a simple rule here. I never click any link that is served by algorithms.

Bob Dylan said, “A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and gets to bed at night, and in between he does what he wants to do.”

Functional distraction is what’s commonly meant by the word “distraction” in day-to-day use. This is the sort of distraction that Huxley called the “mere casual waste products of psychophysiological activity.

Matthew Crawford writes, “Distractibility might be regarded as the mental equivalent of obesity.”

The Starlight

In his book Neuroethics, Neil Levy writes “We want to live a life that expresses our central values, and we want that life to make narrative sense:”

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.” …When we become aware that our actual habits are in dissonance with our desired values, this self-feeling often feels like a challenge to, if not the loss of, our identities.

I saw the “starlight” getting obscured … in the proliferation of pettiness. Pettiness means pursuing a low-level goal as though it were a higher, intrinsically valuable one. Low-level goals tend to be short-term goals; where this is so, pettiness may be viewed as a kind of imprudence.

(P)ettiness can (also) manifest as narcissism, a preoccupation with being recognized by others, valuing attention for its own sake.

@myaction: I do not use any use any social media that has a walled garden approach i.e whose content cannot be accessed without signing in.

William James, in The Principles of Psychology, writes, “There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision.”

This sort of distraction makes us start to lose the story, at both individual and collective levels. When that happens, we start to grasp for things that feel real, true, or authentic in order to get the story back. We try to reorient our living toward the values and higher goals we want to pursue.

The Daylight

“When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.” - Thomas Paine, Common Sense

The third, and most profound, level of attention is the “daylight.” By this I mean the suite of foundational capacities that enable us to define our goals and values in the first place, to “want what we want to want.” When our daylight is compromised, epistemic distraction results. Epistemic distraction is the diminishment of underlying capacities that enable a person to define or pursue their goals: capacities essential for democracy such as reflection, memory, prediction, leisure, reasoning, and goal-setting.

Like existential distraction, epistemic distraction also has an impact on both autonomy and dignity. It violates the integrity of the self by undermining the necessary preconditions for it to exist and to thrive, thus pulling the carpet out from under one’s feet, so to speak.

Our daylight may be obscured when our capacities for knowing what’s true, or for predicting what’s likely to be true, are undermined. The undermining of truth can happen via the phenomenon of fake news… misinformation, polarizing and conspiratorial content.

@myaction: I pay attention to the source of any information. If a study is quoted, I’ll rather find the study and read from the source. In fact this site has huge number of references in the same spirit.

Also, whenever there are two parties in conflict i read both sides. If Russia and Ukraine fight, i refer sites from both countries. Similar is the case, when there is a Indo-pak conflict.

Our daylight can also be obscured via the diminishment of intelligence or other cognitive capacities… (D)istractions decreased the IQ scores of knowledge workers by 10 points, which the researchers note is “twice the decline recorded for those smoking marijuana.”

Reflection is an essential ingredient for the kind of thinking that helps us determine “what we want to want.”

Closely related to the task of reflection is the activity of leisure. We often conflate leisure with entertainment. However, properly understood, leisure is akin to what Aristotle called “periodic nonthought”. It’s that unstructured downtime that serves as the ground out of which one’s true self bubbles forth. This sort of unstructured thought is of particular developmental importance for children.

(T)he most visible and consequential form of compromised “daylight” we see in the digital attention economy today is the prevalence and centrality of moral outrage.

(I)f you’ve got two equally “bad” pieces of news to share with your friends, one of which makes you feel sad and the other angry – but you only want to share one of them – then odds are you’ll share the one that angers you, because anger’s a high-arousal emotion whereas sadness is low-arousal.

One might object here and say that “mob justice” is better than no justice at all. But if justice is our goal – as it should be – then it is not at all clear that these dynamics of moral outrage and mob rule advance it. If anything, they seem to lead in the opposite direction.

In her book Anger and Forgiveness, Martha Nussbaum describes the ways in which anger is morally problematic. She uses Aristotle’s definition of anger, which is pretty close to the concept of moral outrage I gave above: it’s “a desire accompanied by pain for an imagined retribution on account of an imagined slighting inflicted by people who have no legitimate reason to slight oneself or one’s own.”

She argues that much moralistic behavior, therefore, aims not at justice-oriented but status-oriented outcomes.

(O)ne particular type of anger that Nussbaum views as valuable: what she calls “transition anger.” This refers to anger that is followed by “the Transition,” or the “healthy segue into forward-looking thoughts of welfare, and, accordingly, from anger into compassionate hope.”

(I)n the attention economy, outrage cascades in such a way that the “Transition” rarely, if ever, has any chance to occur. What results, then, is unbridled mobocracy, or mob rule.

In 1838 a young Abraham Lincoln gave a speech “[T]here is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts:”

“There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law. ‘Mobocratic justice’ is no justice worth having, and this is only partly because of the outcomes it tends to produce. It’s also because of the way mobocracy goes about producing them.”

Legal professionals have a saying: “Justice is the process, not the outcome.” The process of mobocratic “justice” fueled by viral outrage that cascades online is one of caprice, arbitrariness, and uncertainty. So it should come as no surprise that mob rule is precisely the path that Socrates, in The Republic, describes as being the path societies take from democracy back into tyranny.

Unfortunately, mob rule is hard-coded into the design of the attention economy.

In his essay A Free Man’s Worship, Bertrand Russell writes, “indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world; and in the fierceness of desire from which rebellion springs there is a kind of self-assertion which it is necessary for the wise to overcome.” Or, as a worker in a Russian “troll house” put it, “if every day you are feeding on hate, it eats away at your soul.”

When the attention economy amplifies moral outrage in a way that moralizes political division, it clears the way for the tribalistic impulse to claim for one’s own group the mantle of representing the “real” or “true” will of the people as a whole.

The problem, of course, is that the “patient and forbearing disposition to see and seek the good” does not grab eyeballs, and therefore does not sell ads. “Harping obsessively on the bad,” however, does.

In fact, to the extent that we take these fundamental capacities to be among our uniquely human guiding lights, there’s a very real sense in which epistemic distraction literally dehumanizes.

Freedom of Attention

The Ground of First Struggle

(T)he technologies of the digital attention economy are also poised to know us ever more intimately, in order to persuade us ever more effectively.

Success in surmounting these challenges requires that we give the right sort of attention to the right sort of things. A major function, if not the primary purpose, of information technology should be to advance this end.

(R)esponding in the right way means treating the design of digital technologies as the ground of first struggle for our freedom and self-determination.

(This) also means changing the system so that these technologies are, as they already claim to be, on our side. It is an urgent task to bring the dynamics and constraints of the technologies of our attention into alignment with those of our political systems. This requires a sustained effort to reject the forces of attentional serfdom, and to assert and defend our freedom of attention.

The Monster and the Bank

Whether irresistible or not, if our technologies are not on our side, then they have no place in our lives.

At “fault” are more often the emergent dynamics of complex multiagent systems rather than the internal decision-making dynamics of a single individual. As W. Edwards Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

John Steinbeck captured well the frustration we feel when our moral psychology collides with the hard truth of organizational reality in The Grapes of Wrath, when tenant farmers are evicted by representatives of the bank:

“Sure,” cried the tenant men, “but it’s our land … We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours … That’s what makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.”

“We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.”

“Yes, but the bank is only made of men.”

“No, you’re wrong there – quite wrong there. 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’t control it.”

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.’” The route that remains is the route in which we move urgently to assert and defend our freedom of attention.

@myaction: The design philosophy of this website is an example for this. I have nothing to sell and i don’t intend to earn from this site.