You need to pay better attention

A case for breaking away from our attentional addictions.

Social media isn’t free. Quite the opposite. It’s one of the most expensive things you can use. The creation of every user account starts with a contract laying out terms of barter: In exchange for using MegaCorp’s services, you agree to transfer your private information to MegaCorp. MegaCorp will study what you pay attention to on its services, collect or infer your demographic information, and predict your future preferences. MegaCorp then brokers this data to connect third-party advertisers directly to your eyes and ears, via constant, repetitive interruptions of your focus — ads. Maybe you never got out your credit card (though the advertiser certainly did when paying MegaCorp to find you). Yet you traded away two precious possessions that were, together with other users, worth trillions of dollars to MegaCorp: your privacy and your attention. Two things that, once given away, tend to be gone forever.

Is that a good trade? What do you do if it isn’t?

Over the years, it’s been customary at this point in the conversation to say that continuing to use social media is a personal decision. Don’t like how much time you’re spending on Instagram? Just quit. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t holding a gun to your head. But today, the conversation starts a full step earlier, with asking whether there’s much decision at all and if more aggressive interventions are needed.

Not far from me, in downtown Los Angeles, the first product liability trial is unfolding over whether social media companies like Meta and YouTube have designed ad-powered products so addictive that they’re hard to quit, like tobacco. Australia and Indonesia are banning social media use for kids under 16, as is the state of Karnatka, an Indian tech hub. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan is one of many tech executives over the years to say they limit use of their products for their own kids. For a 2020 paper in the American Economic Review, researchers found that

deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i) reduced online activity, while increasing offline activities such as watching TV alone and socializing with family and friends; (ii) reduced both factual news knowledge and political polarization; (iii) increased subjective well-being; and (iv) caused a large persistent reduction in post-experiment Facebook use.

In the list of this study’s findings, you can spot the outlines of the user-agreement barter: It’s true that the Facebook user was getting news in exchange for logging on. They just had to trade away everything else.

However, I struggle to think of social media addiction as a product-liability problem, while fully acknowledging, as an American, that suing the shit out of a giant company to scare their insurers to death is one of the few realistic ways to force systemic changes to the tech ecosystem in a country with a Congress seemingly incapable of keeping up with technological change.

What I say next may even amuse anyone familiar with my background, but I resist categorically thinking of tech executives as bad people making bad choices. Their own range of choices are so much more tightly constricted than most people could possibly understand. The question isn’t whether a given social media app is addictive. The question is how to break out of a doom spiral where every tech company operates in an ultracompetitive attention market so thoroughly intensified via technological innovation that any CEO with the job is forced by competition and required by fiduciary duty to keep creating addictive products, while testifying in trials that their products are not addictive.

If the CEO of YouTube thinks his own product is too habit-forming for his own children to freely use, he could order YouTube staff to require every YouTube user to stare at a black screen five minutes before the app opens, and then require users to stare at the same black screen for another five minutes before the next video loads. (Which would be one way to test whether it’s YouTube videos that are addictive, or if it’s YouTube’s product design.) The important part is what happens next: Users would wait for five seconds, grow bored staring at empty space, or anxious at being alone their thoughts, close the app, and open TikTok. The Alphabet board would take one look at the stats and order the firing of the CEO before the day was out, for just cause and zero severance. A board member who failed to do so would, in turn, get thrown out by investors, who don’t care about YouTube as much as owning one of seven tech stocks propping up the entire stock market, rather than owning shares in, say, a declining newspaper company. The ultimate addiction is to whichever line keeps going up.

A governing public, in lieu of banning social media entirely, could impose regulations on the most habit-forming attentional features (haptics, notification badges, recommendation algorithms), with a sophisticated and nimble regulatory apparatus capable of keeping up with the multiplying modes of engagement that technologies like AI will make possible.

Or you could just massively tax the central barter that makes the whole doom cycle so lucratively doomy. Advertisers aren’t stupid or irrational. They advertise with these platforms because they attract targetable audiences that trade away valuable personal data; these platforms keep attracting audiences because they keep investing in addictive product innovations that keep these audiences from wandering away to an even-more-addictive competitor. A tax on this devil’s bargain could motivate investors to seek out other, more profitable business models to explore, giving everyone’s attention spans a bit of room to breathe.

The first step to breaking out of this doom loop starts with a basic question: Do you feel satisfied with how you use your attention from day to day? I’m wary of the wellness movement due to its propensity to attract cranks. But it’s one of the real, tangible American political tendencies that may not need much goading to expand its imagination from fitness and nutrition toward attentional wellbeing. Not necessarily what people pay attention to — this is and ought to remain a free country — but our ability to focus on anything for meaningful periods of time.

The new book “Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement,” argues that the

remarkable growth of the fitness sector over the last fifty years, and the wider cultural transformation of which it is a part, offer a powerful image of what we believe lies ahead for Attention Activism. We are convinced that historians of the future will look back on 2010 with the kind of surprise we feel when we reckon with the idea that nobody was "jogging" in 1960— only they will be saying, "Yes, it's true, back in 2010 there was, shockingly, no meaningful cultural awareness concerning attentional well-being; people didn't really exercise their attention in any formal way, and there was no general, collective commitment to the idea that keeping your attention in shape was an essential aspect of human flourishing."

I expect it to be said that some of the solutions here are terrible ideas. The fitness movement was certainly terrible for tobacco and alcohol companies. For smart businesspeople, there was a lot of money to be made from people who wanted to get healthy. Some regulation and sin-taxing was involved. But people had to want to feel better about themselves.