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Should You Let Google Make a Voodoo Doll Out of You

By Marco den Ouden

September 17, 2022

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Book Review—Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari, Publisher: ‎Crown (January 2022).
 
Have the people of Western civilization lost their focus? If so, why? Are there external factors causing this loss of focus? What are these factors and how can they be remediated?

These are the issues that Johann Hari explores in his new book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again.

Hari argues that people in Western civilization have been steadily losing their ability to focus since the Industrial Revolution and that slide is accelerating. Before we get to his argument, consider the following quotation from a well-known philosopher.

In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one’s consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make.

That quote is from Ayn Rand’s essay The Objectivist Ethics. The issue of focus has long been of key importance to Objectivists. So, the observations Hari makes strike a deep chord. Hari reveals some astounding information.

The world has become so information driven that we are inundated by more than we can focus on.

The world has become so information driven that we are inundated by more than we can focus on. In 1986, when Microsoft was founded and the information age was just beginning, “if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being—TV, radio, reading—it amounted to 40 newspapers’ worth of information every day.” (85-page newspapers!) “By 2007, it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day.”

Sune Lehmann, a professor of applied mathematics and computer science at the Technical University of Denmark, had become alarmed by his own increasing inability to focus. He found himself unable to control his own use of the internet. “He found himself mindlessly following the small details of events like the U.S. presidential election on social media, hour after hour, achieving nothing.”

He set about to investigate and not surprisingly, discovered that “the more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.” This increase in information flow had been steadily increasing for over a century with the inventions of radio and television. The internet pushed it into warp drive. “What we are sacrificing,” says Lehmann, “is depth in all sorts of dimensions….Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection.”

Depth takes time and commitment. As a result of this surfeit of information, we are suffering a focus deficit. People are perpetually caught up in the trivial and unimportant. Lehmann said we are undergoing a “rapid exhaustion of attention resources.”

Hari employs a financial metaphor. “If we don’t change course, he (Lehmann) fears we are headed towards a world where ‘there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware’ of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of society with ‘fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.’”

Lehmann himself stopped using most social media, stopped watching television, and started to read newspapers instead. And more books. It “helped to trigger a philosophical shift in how he approached life.”

Like Malcom Gladwell, Hari is a master of the anecdote to illustrate points he is making. He starts out with a recollection of time spent with his nine-year old godson. The lad was a keen Elvis fan and they often sang Elvis songs together. One day Adam (the name is changed to protect his godson’s privacy) asked if Hari would take him to Graceland some day. Hari agreed.

Fast forward to ten years later and Hari has become appalled by the unfocused young man his godson had become. A high school dropout at age fifteen, Adam now

spent literally almost all his waking hours at home alternating blankly between screens—his phone, an infinite scroll of WhatsApp and Facebook messages, and his iPad, on which he watched a blur of YouTube and porn. At moments, I could still see in him traces of the joyful little boy who sang “Viva Las Vegas,” but it was like that person had broken into smaller, disconnected fragments. (4)

Hari recalled his promise and suggested to Adam that they go to Graceland. But he had to promise to leave his cellphone off except at night. And so they went. What Hari discovered was a horror show in itself.

Hari expected a tour guide to show them around Graceland. What he and Adam got were tablets connected to earbuds. The people touring Graceland followed the pied piper in front of them, looking down at their screens, oblivious to the real Graceland surrounding them.

The iPad tells you what to do—turn left; turn right; walk forward. In each room, the iPad, in the voice of some forgotten actor, tells you about the room you are in, and a photograph of it appears on the screen. So we walked around Graceland alone, staring at the iPad.

Occasionally somebody would look away from the iPad and I felt a flicker of hope, and I would try to make eye contact with them, to shrug, to say, Hey, we’re the only ones looking around, we’re the ones who traveled thousands of miles and decided to actually see the things in front of us—but every time this happened, I realized they had broken contact with the iPad only to take out their phones and snap a selfie. (5–6)

Hari heard a man tell his wife that they can swipe their iPad screens to see the room they are in from different perspectives. Hari lost it. “But, sir,” he said, “there’s an old-fashioned form of swiping you can do. It’s called turning your head.”

“Look!” I said, in a louder voice than I intended. “Don’t you see? We’re there. We’re actually there. There’s no need for your screen. We are in the Jungle Room.” They hurried out of the room, glancing back at me with a who’s-that-loon shake of the head, and I could feel my heart beating fast. I turned to Adam, ready to laugh, to share the irony with him, to release my anger—but he was in a corner, holding his phone under his jacket, flicking through Snapchat. (6–7)

To discover the reasons for this loss of focus, Hari spent three months isolated on the furthest tip of Cape Cod with just a laptop to write but disconnected from the internet and an ancient cellphone he can only use to call 911 in an emergency. He embarked on a global 30,000-mile journey interviewing over 250 experts in various fields to get at the roots of the problem. And he came up with twelve reasons why we are losing our focus.

His twelve causes include: The Increase in Speed, Switching, and Filtering; The Crippling of Our Flow States (in which he talks to renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi); The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion; The Collapse of Sustained Reading; The Disruption of Mind-Wandering; The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You; The Rise of Cruel Optimism; The Surge in Stress and How It Is Triggering Vigilance; Our Deteriorating Diets; Rising Pollution; The Rise of ADHD and How We Are Responding to It; and The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically.

Of the twelve causes of the widespread waning of focus, there is one he devotes two whole chapters to—The Rise of Technology That Can Track and Manipulate You.

These two chapters could be called The Revival of the Skinner Box, or The Skinner Box Writ Large. Hari tells us the story of Tristan Harris, a whiz kid who had been coding since age ten. In 2002 in his first year at Stanford, he heard about a research facility called the Persuasive Technology Lab, “a place where a leading scientist was figuring out how to design technology that could change your behavior—in unprecedented ways.” (108)

The course was taught by a behavioral scientist name B.J. Fogg who

…explained to students that computers had the potential to be far more persuasive than people. They could, he believed, “be more persistent than human beings, offer greater anonymity,” and “go where humans cannot go or may not be welcome.” (109)

One of the texts was based on the work of B.F. Skinner, the psychologist who worked with rats and birds devising ways to alter their behavior. One of his inventions was the Skinner Box, a cage where a test animal was programmed to perform certain tasks for a reward. Skinner’s philosophy dominated psychology until the discovery of neuroplasticity. As I said of Skinner:

Skinner was the most notable psychologist of the mid-twentieth century. His behaviorist approach focused on learning in laboratory animals in what came to be known as Skinner boxes. As Steven Pinker puts it in The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, the only organisms studied in Skinner’s book The Behaviour of Organisms “were rats and pigeons and the only behavior was lever pressing and key pecking.” (20) He notes that “behaviorists were as hostile to the brain as they were to genetics.” Skinner viewed the study of the brain as a “misguided quest.”

“Skinner wrote several bestsellers arguing that harmful behavior is neither instinctive nor freely chosen but inadvertently conditioned. If we turned society into a big Skinner box and controlled behavior deliberately rather than haphazardly, we could eliminate aggression, overpopulation, crowding, pollution, and inequality, and thereby attain utopia. The noble savage became the noble pigeon.” (20)

Fogg emphasized ethical concerns, stipulating that such behavior control methods should be used for good. Harris remembers his last class with Fogg where the professor led a discussion on “What if in the future you had a profile of every single person on earth?” (Hari 111) The question proved prescient because today, that is exactly what the big tech social media companies do in spades.

Hari demonstrates that the objectives were clear. The behavior desired from the great unwashed was to keep eyeballs on their pages. Eyeballs mean ad revenue. Social media started engaging viewers by reinforcement: likes and hearts.

Harris invented an app that created a pop-up with relevant additional information when you highlighted something. This, he believed would keep people focused on what they were working on instead of pulling them away to other pages. The app became widely used and was popular (you can see a variation of it in action at Wikipedia). Google came calling, bought the app and hired Harris to work for them.

Harris noticed that “The engineers were always looking for new ways to suck eyeballs onto their program and keep them there. Day after day, he would watch as software engineers proposed more interruptions to people’s lives—more vibrations, more alerts, more tricks—and they would be congratulated.” (113)

Google modified Gmail so a new email would cause the user’s phone to buzz and the user would drop what he was doing to check his messages, disrupting his focus of the moment.

Tristan started asking colleagues “How do you ethically persuade two billion people’s minds? How do you ethically structure two billion people’s attention?” (113)

After a few years at the heart of the Googleplex, Tristan couldn’t take it anymore, and he decided to leave. As a final gesture, he put together a slide-deck for the people he worked with, to appeal to them to think about these questions. The first slide said simply: “I’m concerned about how we’re making the world more distracted.” He explained: “Distraction matters to me, because time is all we have in life…Yet hours and hours can get mysteriously lost here.” (114–-115)

His slide show was passed around and became immensely popular with Google staff. It also created some backlash. But Google used the controversy to appoint Harris as their first “design ethicist.” But whenever he came up with ideas to make the technology less disruptive to people’s lives, he was put off because it might affect the bottom line. After ten years in the ethicist job, he felt “completely hopeless.” (119)

Hari continues with the story of Aza Raskin. Like Harris, Raskin was a prodigy. His father invented the Apple Macintosh. At age ten, young Aza gave his first talk on user interfaces. He went on to be the creative lead in developing the Firefox browser. And this led to his inventing of something that changed the Internet forever, the infinite scroll. No longer would a user have to click over to a new page periodically. You no longer had to actively think, “Do I want to see more results?” Instead, the app lets the website automatically add new page after new page as the user scrolled.

One day, when he was thirty-two, Aza sat down and did a calculation. At a conservative estimate, infinite scroll makes you spend 50 percent more of your time on sites like Twitter…. Every day, as a direct result of his invention, the combined total of 200,000 more human lifetimes—every moment from birth to death—is now spent scrolling through a screen. (120)

Raskin was stunned. He realized that “one of my biggest learnings as a designer or technologist is—making something easy to use doesn’t mean it’s good for humanity.”(121) It led to people wasting their time and their lives. He constantly met people within the industry who felt that their own lives had been hijacked by the technology they helped create.

He told Hari “one of the ironies is there are these incredibly popular workshops at Facebook and Google about mindfulness—about creating the mental space to make decisions nonreactively—and they are also the biggest perpetrators of non-mindfulness in the world.” (122)

Chamath Palihapitiya, who had been Facebook’s vice president of growth, explained in a speech that the effects are so negative that his own kids “aren’t allowed to use that shit.” Tony Fadell, who co-invented the iPhone, said: “I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world?” (123)

But while Silicon Valley’s drive to lure eyeballs is disruptive to our attention spans, Hari devotes the next chapter to something he views as even more egregious. When he first heard of it he was skeptical, but he discovered that the phenomenon was all too real.

Social media doesn’t just want your eyeballs glued to their websites for the direct advertising revenue. There is a more subtle way they manipulate you. They profile you. They monitor everything you say and do online to create a detailed profile to sell to advertisers.

For example, starting in 2014, if you used Gmail, Google’s automated systems would scan through all your private correspondence to generate an “advertising profile” exactly for you. If (say) you email your mother telling her you need to buy diapers, Gmail knows you have a baby, and it knows to target ads for baby products straight to you. If you use the word “arthritis,” it’ll try to sell you arthritis treatments. (125–-126)

If you’ve ever wondered why, after you Googled something, ads for related products start to show up in your Facebook feed, now you know.

Raskin suggested you should imagine that inside of Google’s servers there’s a little voodoo doll of yourself and it keeps getting more detailed as information is added.

Why are Amazon Echo and Google Nest Hubs sold for as cheap at $30, far less than they cost to make? So they can gather more info; so the voodoo doll can consist not just of what you search for on a screen but what you say in your home. (127)

Alexa is Mata Hari in disguise? Who knew?

Shoshana Zuboff, a professor of business administration at Harvard, termed this phenomenon “surveillance capitalism.” For an excellent sci-fi story on where this may lead, I highly recommend Ken Liu’s short story The Perfect Match included in The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and online at Lightspeed Magazine.

Trying to capture the potential scope of such surveillance, Raskin told Hari, “Imagine if I could predict all your actions in chess before you made them. It would be trivial for me to dominate you. That’s what is happening on a human scale now.” (127)

Another surprising revelation in the book for me is that the elements you see in your Facebook feed are not chronologically arranged by when they were posted. When your favorite aunt posts some pictures of your cousins, will you see it? Maybe not. It depends on how you reacted to her posts in the past and how long you are willing to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. Algorithms decide what you see and when you see it.

The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen. That’s it….The algorithm is always weighted toward figuring out what will keep you looking and pumping more and more of that onto your screen to keep you from putting down your phone. It is designed to distract. (130)

Unfortunately, Hari tells us,

On average, we will stare at something negative and outrageous for a lot longer than we will stare at something positive and calm. You will stare at a car crash longer than you will stare at a person handing out flowers by the side of the road, even though the flowers will give you a lot more pleasure than the mangled bodies in a crash. (131)

So Facebook and YouTube and other social media use algorithms to find stories that will push your buttons. That will make you angry or outraged. They exploit this so-called “negativity bias.” If you’re a content producer what words should you use in the title to make sure it gets picked up by an algorithm?

They are—according to the best site monitoring YouTube trends—words such as “hates,” “obliterates,” “slams,” “destroys.” A major study at New York University found that for every word of moral outrage you add to a tweet, your retweet rate will go up by 20 percent on average, and the words that will increase your retweet rate most are “attack,” “bad,” and “blame.” A study by the Pew Research Center found that if you fill your Facebook posts with “indignant disagreement,” you’ll double your likes and shares. (131)

Hari now diverges into a more controversial area. “We don’t just pay attention as individuals,” he writes. “We pay attention together, as a society.” (134) He looks to government for solutions. In the past, such common consensus with the scientific community led to government banning lead-based paints and CFCs. These bans did not lead to the elimination of all paint nor did it lead to replacing refrigerators with ice boxes. We still have paint and we still have fridges. Society adapted.

Hari suggests an outright ban on what he calls “surveillance capitalism.” As explained by Aza Raskin,

This would mean that the government would ban any business model that tracks you online in order to figure out your weaknesses and then sells that private data to the highest bidder so they can change your behavior. This model is, Aza says, “just fundamentally anti-democratic and anti-human,” and it has to go. (156–-157)

He considers government nationalizing social media, but rejects the idea: “It would be a bad idea for the government to run it—it’s easy to imagine how authoritarian leaders could abuse that.” (158) But he is open to the idea of a government-owned but independent entity like Britain’s BBC. Hari is British.

But there is a bigger fish to fry for Hari. A firm believer in climate change, he believes this loss of focus makes it impossible for the people to come together for a common purpose. “This machinery (social media and its algorithms) is systematically diverting us—at an individual and a social level—from where we want to go.” (140) Because society banned lead-based paints and CFCs, he believes climate change can be similarly addressed.

His complaint sounds similar to liberal philosopher Charles Taylor’s complaint about the so-called “fragmentation” of society “that is, a people increasingly less capable of forming a common purpose and carrying it out.” (Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, 112–-113) As I wrote in a review of that book, “But such is the nature of a constitutional parliamentary system. It is based on the rule of law, and a guarantee of equality under the law. It has no predisposition for or against any sort of collective resolve or collective action.”

One last note on Johann Hari’s book. Chapter 12: The Confinement of Our Children, Both Physically and Psychologically is a superb discussion of the way modern society mollycoddles its children:

By 2003, in the U.S. only 10 percent of children spent any time playing freely outdoors on a regular basis. Childhood now happens, overwhelmingly, behind closed doors, and when they do get to play, it is supervised by grown-ups, or takes place on screens. (239)

Children learn to focus by free play, by exploring and experimenting, by discovery. When I was a kid, my brother and I built a tree fort. I got a couple of pet rabbits and built a hut for them myself using a saw, a hammer and nails and wood scrounged from my Dad. Today many parents would be appalled to see their child climbing a tree, let alone building a fort in its branches. My brother and I were quite young at the time, under ten as I recall. My other, even younger, brother had to use a leg brace when he was very young. He could scramble up a tree with that thing like nobody’s business.

Today many jurisdictions have laws forbidding children from riding on buses or even walking to the park unsupervised.

Hari writes about this paranoia about letting children explore and learn on their own and talks to Lenore Skenazy who launched a movement against such close supervision and stifling of youthful creativity. She founded the Free Range Kids movement. Among other things:

She noticed that when a DVD of the early episodes of Sesame Street from the late 1960s was released, they had put a warning on the screen at the start. Five-year-olds are shown walking the streets on their own, talking to strangers, and playing on vacant lots. The warning says: “The following is intended for adult viewing only and may not be suitable for our youngest viewers.” (242)

Elsewhere I wrote about the bowdlerizing of Clement Moore’s A Visit from Saint Nicholas where the lines about his pipe smoking have been excised, also something Skenazy thinks absurd.

I believe Hari draws attention to a real problem, but I am skeptical of his proposed solution.

I believe Hari draws attention to a real problem, but I am skeptical of his proposed solution. While he acknowledges everyone has an individual responsibility to focus, he seems to favor government mandated solutions rather than individual responsibility. He shares Charles Taylor’s delusion that everyone can or ought to be united in some great effort of groupthink. Yet his outlook is strongly individualistic in spite of that. He has great concern for individual privacy and the invasion of this privacy by powerful interests.

In his previous book, Chasing the Scream, he challenged the government’s relentless and cruel war on drugs, but here he fails to consider that maybe government isn’t the right solution to the problems he sees. If we consider privacy a right, the government mandated protection may be a solution. But to what extent is privacy a right and to what extent does Big Tech violate that right. And to what extent is it the individual’s responsibility to deny corporations access to their private information?

All in all though, I enjoyed this book and it presents a lot of interesting insights. Well worth the read.

 

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