The Attention Economy — What’s Wrong and How to Fix It
This piece is a TED Talk-style speech I wrote on March 12, 2021 as a course assignment. It was written after the Cambridge Analytica scandal and before whistleblower Frances Haugen came forward.
If you’re alive right now, I’d like you to put your hand up. If you can hold your breath for over a minute, please keep your hand up. Otherwise, put it down. Now, if you can not flinch when someone pretends to throw something at you, please keep your hand up. Otherwise, please put it down. Now I’m going to show an image on the screen behind me. [Shows image of mail app with red notification bubble in the top right.] If you feel no desire to read those messages and make the notification icon go away, please keep your hand up. Otherwise, please put it down.
Now, as we can see, most of us here have our hands down. There are certain parts of ourselves that we cannot change without long periods of training and focus, such as holding our breath, or suppressing our blink reflex. You can think of these things as generally being controlled by what we call your “primal” or “reptilian” brain. I like to think of some lizard in my head dutifully pressing a button every few seconds so that I breathe.
In fact, this “lizard brain,” formally consisting of what we call the hindbrain and medulla, is located at the bottom of your brain stem. And technology developers take advantage of it.
Now how many of you have seen the documentary “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix? Okay, well it’s a very good film, I highly recommend it. If you’ve seen it, you’ll know that there’s this phrase used in the tech industry called “race to the bottom of the brain stem.” And what this means is that app developers are developing apps to interact with your reptilian brain. Not the parts of your brain that you would usually consider to actually be “you.” Nope, they want to target your reptilian brain, because it’s your reptilian brain that can actually override what you decide to do. That’s why you flinch, even if you don’t want to.
There’s this great scene in The Social Dilemma where the CEO and founder of Pinterest talks about how he wanted to spend time with his kids, but he couldn’t put his phone down because he was on Pinterest. And you might think they develop this stuff by accident, right? That once he realized how addicting it was for him, and how it was taking away from things he loved in life, he decided to change how his company works? But no! He goes on to describe the lengths he went to keep his phone locked up and away from himself while he was at home, while continuing to go to work to develop the app that was causing the problem. (I don’t even know if “develop” is the right word to use there, ’cause that sort of implies that the app was getting better, when in reality, it was just becoming more addictive. Maybe “design” would be a better choice of words.)
And this “race to the bottom of the brain stem” really is a race. I remember talking with one of the leaders of Zynga. Oh, you probably don’t know what Zynga is because they don’t want you to know how pervasive they are, but have you ever heard of Farmville or Words With Friends or Toy Blast or Draw Something? Yeah? All made by Zynga. The business model behind these games is basically the same as Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, etc. They make a free game and run ads and their goal is either to get you to spend as much time on their game as possible so that they can run as many ads as possible, or for you to spend as much money on in-app purchases as possible.
So what they’d do is they’d run these experiments. They’d try adding a notification with a particular wording and see how many people that brought back into the app. Or a mechanism like wait times that you can pay to remove. In other words, they were testing to see how good they were at getting people’s reptilian brains to make people play their game and make them money. And they’d be running hundreds of these experiments all at the same time. It didn’t matter to them what people wanted to be doing with their life. What mattered is whether or not people were playing and paying.
And when one of these experiments went well, immediately all of the other games within Zynga would try to copy it if they could. People’s jobs would be on the line as they frantically tried to implement a new mechanism within hours to see if they could improve revenue. In fact, they would watch other games that weren’t created by Zynga and copy the mechanisms that seemed to be working as well. And this was what kept Zynga on top. Whatever would make people come to their app and play more or pay more, they could generally implement within a single day. They were winning the race to the bottom of the brain stem.
So now I think you have some idea of what’s going on. The businesses in charge know exactly what they’re doing by targeting your reptilian brain, and are racing each other to try to figure out how to do it the most effectively. That’s how we end up with red notification symbols that people feel like they want to get rid of. It was an experiment that went well and increased engagement, so it was kept.
Now, there are ways of doing this that can be good. One of these methods, developed by Thaler and Sunstein, is called “libertarian paternalism.” The idea here is that it’s okay to have a race to the bottom of the brain stem as long as that race is to get people’s reptilian brains to help them to do what they want to do. As long as you’re not completely restricting people’s options, and you’re trying to get them to do something that’s helpful for them, then it’s okay to “nudge” people’s reptilian brains to get them to do stuff.
One might imagine apps like Duolingo, a language learning app, to engage in this sort of libertarian paternalism race. When Duolingo notifies you, they do use particular word choices that have been shown to get people back on the app. They use competitions and gamification to keep you on the app and keep you engaged. These are all hitting your reptilian brain to make you want to stay on the app. However, when you get a notification, you don’t have to look at your phone. Duolingo isn’t forcing you to pick up your phone or open the app when it gives you a notification. And, even more importantly, you probably want to learn that new language, and these notifications are likely helping you to do that. That’s libertarian paternalism in action.
So, to the extent that apps aren’t like Duolingo in those ways, they’re probably not that great. Most apps are going to end up fitting the “libertarian” criteria, in that they don’t force you to use them. (Though you might worry about how much practice it takes to not pay attention to your phone when there’s a notification.) However, many apps do fail the “paternalistic” criteria, in that if there weren’t any in-app consequences for it, you probably wouldn’t open the app. That is, if you weren’t worried about losing your streak, you wouldn’t open the app, and you wouldn’t regret keeping the app closed. And the fact that you do open the app is a sign that the app isn’t the best for you.
So that’s one thing that we should try to fix with apps and technology in general. Rather than having them guess at what we want or just trying to get our attention, we should have them actually ask us what we want in our lives, and help us to do that.
But there’s another worry aimed directly at the heart of the business model of these tech companies: even if the technology is libertarian and paternalistic, should we be allowing companies to make money off of our attention? Should we be allowed to sell our attention to these companies in order to get services? Should there be an attention economy?
In general, there are a few things we look for when trying to figure out whether or not people should be able to buy and sell something. 1. Would it hurt people too much? 2. Would it cause too much harm to existing systems that are in place to help people (for example, democracy) 3. Would it stop people from thinking clearly and accomplishing what they want? 4. Does it prey on people’s vulnerabilities?
So if allowing people to sell something caused a lot of harm to people, caused harm to existing support systems, stopped people from thinking clearly and accomplishing their goals, and preyed on people’s vulnerabilities, that would generally be something we probably wouldn’t want people to be able to sell, right? We call markets that sell stuff that’s bad in these ways “noxious markets,” because they’re markets that are harmful.
Well, as you might have already started to sense, the attention economy is in fact a noxious market. You could probably already tell from what I said earlier about the reptilian brain and paternalism that the attention economy isn’t all that great for helping people to think clearly and accomplish their goals, and it also preys on people’s vulnerabilities. Very few of us are trained to not succumb to a notification.
So, since that part is hopefully already pretty obvious, I’ll dive more into how the attention economy harms people and systems, because it’s not immediately clear how apps are causing that much harm to us, much less harming big systems like democracy. This stuff mostly comes from a paper by Castro and Pham called “Is the Attention Economy Noxious?” that you should check out if you’re interested in hearing more of the details.
There are three main studies that support the idea that the attention economy is really actually hurting us. The first comes from a guy named Tromholt, who, in 2016, told people to quit Facebook for a week. He found that people felt significant increases in life satisfaction, positive emotions, satisfaction with their social life, and ability to concentrate, as well as being 55% less likely to feel stressed. Meanwhile, back in 2013, Kross and others were looking at the people who were using Facebook, and found that Facebook use predicted a decline in their emotions and life satisfaction. Finally, a researcher named Twenge pointed out that around 2011, right when smartphones became ubiquitous, we also experienced an unprecedented spike in mental health problems in teens and college students that has continued to this day.
Now, two out of three of these studies were aimed directly at Facebook, but I think that the results generalize. And regardless, if you aren’t worried about the growing mental health crisis, especially with the exacerbation from COVID-19, then I don’t know what to tell you. This stuff is really hurting people.
And not only is it hurting people, it’s also hurting big systems like democracy. This happens in two ways 1. By increasing polarization and 2. By removing the shared experiences that are required for democracy to function.
I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the polarization argument before, that having insulated groups on Facebook or 4chan or only getting media from particular news sites like CNN and Fox, makes it so that people are dragged to one side of the political spectrum and they don’t listen to the other side. What’s worse, Schkade and others showed that when people discuss these sorts of things with people on “the opposite side,” they tend to leave with even more extreme views than they started with! [Sarcastically] Which is great for productive political conversation.
Also, since these tech platforms are huge into personalization, people don’t have the same experiences as other people. Even if you and I both watch a ton of YouTube, our experiences of what we watch on YouTube are likely extremely different. I don’t think that this sort of personalization necessarily leads to bad outcomes, because I believe that people with very diverse experiences can still support the same values. However, when it’s the values themselves that change due to the experiences in one’s life, then I think that this argument holds more sway. For example, if I’m picking up different values than you by watching alt-right YouTube videos while you’re watching videos that support far-left ideology, then we may disagree when it comes to how the country should move forwards, and we might disagree in a deep way that political discussion can’t resolve, which is really bad for democracy.
So if we put this all together, I think we have a clear case that the attention economy is a noxious market on all four fronts. It hurts people, it hurts democracy, it makes it hard for people to think and accomplish their goals, and it preys on people’s vulnerabilities by exploiting our reptilian brain.
So, if attention isn’t something that should be exchanged for services because it has all of these awful side effects, how do we stop the attention economy? It turns out that we can actually take a lesson from how the tobacco market was dealt with, and how the vaping market is now starting to be treated.
I think it’s worth mentioning that the tobacco market is actually less noxious than the attention economy. Tobacco physically harms people, it makes it hard for them to think clearly, and it exploits vulnerabilities in the form of addiction. However, tobacco doesn’t seem doesn’t seem to have the same negative influence over large-scale supportive structures like democracy.
Now, I don’t know if you know this, but smoking didn’t actually used to be considered to be bad for you. It was thought to have pretty much no side effects other than bad breath. My great-grandfather was a smoker because he literally didn’t believe that it was bad for him. On the very day that the government announced that smoking was indeed bad for you, he quit. Yet, he still died from the damage it caused to his lungs. My family says he likely lived a lot longer, though, because he stopped so early.
One of the first steps the government could make towards limiting the damage caused by the attention economy is to officially announce and advertise the negative effects of these technologies and their impacts on mental health, so that people are more aware of what’s going on and how bad this stuff is for you.
The government is currently doing this with the vape market, and I’ve seen quite a few ads that encourage people to step away from vaping based on the time it takes away from their family and its negative physical effects. I think the founder of Pinterest and Kross et. al can tell you that apps also take time away from your family and have harmful mental effects.
Castro and Pham literally recommend putting a warning on websites and apps similar to what’s found on cigarettes that says “CAUTION: THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES HAS DETERMINED THAT EXCESSIVE SCREEN TIME IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR MENTAL HEALTH.”
Because it’s true. Let that sink in for a moment…
If you ever wonder if you would have stopped smoking like my great grandfather did back in the day, and saved yourself a few years of life, well, now is the time for you to find out! Don’t download apps that won’t help you accomplish the goals you want to achieve in your life. Go out, meet people, live a life off of the screens. And yes, COVID does make it harder, but as Thaler and Sunstein would point out with their libertarian fingers, it generally doesn’t make it impossible.
So let me ask you this: when your great grandchildren tell your story, what would you want them to say?
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic, especially since related topics recently hit the news with Haugen’s testimony about Facebook.
Potentially Inaccurate or Misleading Information
Information from this speech may be out-of-date, unverifiable, or inaccurate. (I am not perfect.) I am relying on my readers to help point out these items in a constructive and kind fashion. If you read something that you think is incorrect, please leave a comment below!
Facebook may not be polarizing in general
I was recently informed by a friend that when presented with the argument that Facebook increases polarization, Mark Zuckerberg replied with the following argument: while the United States becomes very polarized, other countries with more traffic on Facebook and Instagram are getting less polarized or stay at similar levels of polarization. I have not done enough research to verify this, but I thought it might be helpful information for readers.
