Why (and How) to End the Attention Economy In Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley lamented that the defenders of freedom in his time had ‘failed to take into account...man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.’ In the design of digital technology, we’ve made exactly the same mistake. In the ‘attention economy,’ where technologies win by maximizing the amount of our time and attention they capture, design increasingly exploits our non-rational psychological vulnerabilities in order to persuade us toward goals that may not align with our own. This has produced a suite of ‘deep distractions,’ or cognitive and behavioral externalities, that pose a major threat to human self-determination at both individual and collective levels. Moving beyond the attention economy is thus an urgent task for society. Doing so requires a coordinated effort of systemic change, which I will describe in this talk. James Williams CO-FOUNDER TIME WELL SPENT James Williams is a design ethicist and a co-founder of the Time Well Spent campaign. He is currently completing doctoral research at the University of Oxford, where he is focused on questions of attention and persuasion in technology design. Previously, he worked at Google for over ten years, where he received the Founders’ Award, the company’s highest honor. He has consulted for companies and governments, and his work has been covered by major publications such as The Atlantic and The New York Times.
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