Does it feel to you as if you are free in the deployment of your attention throughout any given day? Allow me here to speak out of my own experience: I know that it often doesn’t feel that way to me.
“it is also good for me to cultivate a form of expectant attentiveness to what is, a form of attention that commits itself to seeing the world before me.“ perfect
Always seems worthwhile to return to reflection on attention, especially in a digital economy that is founded on capturing and controlling our attention. Iris Murdoch's discussion of the moral role attention plays in our lives is really compelling. Seems to really get at the heart of most of moral philosophy - how you attend to self/others/world determines how you will act, and that the quality of this attention, over time, is likely of more moral weight and consequence than any moment of choice or judgment. Our moral concepts are meant to help shape our attention, and in turn the quality of attention we exercise shapes our understanding of moral concepts.
When it comes to regulation of digital tools and systems, I think attention should be a central concept. That if we are going to try to do something, trying to get engineers and designers to think about how their tools shape how people relate to their attention would be a helpful step in the right direction. Crawford's description of the "attentional commons" is a powerful concept, creating space for thinking about a right to share governance over how environments and tools shape our attention.
Attention also shifts focus away from outcomes and toward the subjective experience of using digital tools. It is not just that our attention is currently captured and controlled toward questionable ends, or even the worth of what we are attending to, but that the quality of our attention is at stake. I think similar to Milosz's discussion of wonder, Weil and Murdoch were trying to describe a quality of attention that was central to living well, or at least responsibly. Trying to figure recognize changes in the quality of my attention toward self/others/world is not easy, but I think it is probably a good way to evaluate digital tools.
How can an ethic of attention help design more moral digital tools, systems, and environments? How can an ethic of attention help us govern our lives with these tools?
Thanks for mentioning Murdoch, she definitely belongs in this conversation. Appreciated your third paragraph, especially. That distinction between outcomes and subjective experience is critical.
Anyone read Crawford's latest yet? I'm kind of leary that he's riffing on driving for the third time, but I found plenty of interest in the first two books (minus his occasional tough-guy-isms and the tour through the finer points of organ making). One of them, or part of one, be worth reading together here at some point.
On the format - your recent experiments with audio and reading groups have accommodated busy schedules, which I certainly appreciate. It’s not your fault, but I’ve missed or had to proceed faster than I’d have liked through some of your installments when they’ve caught me at preoccupied moments. Whenever audio can be offered as an addition, it’s a non-trivial one as far as I’m concerned.
Your interactions with readers have so far provided another engrossing rabbit hole to this adventure. I am curious to see whether, if you go much further down this road, a less constrained platform for interaction will be preferred, or if keeping things more perishable and obscure is the fitting option. Surely there are arguments for both.
Thanks the feedback. This was pretty much what my friend had in mind in asking about an audio version.
I'm not keen on any big changes right now. Feeling okay with what Substack is offering, but you've got some specific thoughts on what a less constrained platform might look like, feel free to share!
I've been sussing out what Illich thought the ideal arrangement of attention, austerity, and freedom would be, and it is possibly more technocratic, capitalistic, and prescient than I thought it was previously. It sounds like a contemporary Degrowth scheme that is sensible but perhaps too late and not enough with 407.4 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere.
Illich's essay, "The Three Dimensions of Public Choice" in «Shadow Work» (1981) is remarkably optimistic — Illich sees industrial society reaching the limits of its growth and forcing questions upon us that were delayed in actually reaching us as crises until about 2008 to the present. Financialization, doubling down on fossil fuels, and digital technology kept the old racket going, but now we seem to be where he expected us to be in the 1980s.
He's quite clear in «Shadow Work» what he thinks is the best "mode of life" we should choose. It is one that is "characterized by austerity, modesty, and modern yet hand-made and built on a small scale."
Only a few years later, Illich wrote “The Social Construction of Energy” (1983), but it was not published until 2009. It updates his essay, “Energy and Equity” from 1974 and engages with physics and computer technology on a level that has aged very well. Here he fleshes out his idea of the best possible way of life as one where the commodification of life would be constrained to the very minimum of necessary goods everyone truly needs, like food. Their production and distribution would be completely automated and managed by "science and artificial intelligence." This "modern subsistence" would diminish the differences between rich and poor societies.
Illich wants to be clear he is not "sentimental" or a "Luddite" — in this world he envisions most people would not be engaged in subsistence activity directly. He wants to go a step beyond Karl Polanyi's great disembedding of labour, land, and money from common, ordinary life, which created modern economic society.
(Illich's take on Polanyi: For us, "society" no longer includes the ordinary, "vernacular," non-market realm of the commons and the domestic except as fragments of "traditional life" subsumed into a "shadow economy" of uncommodified, unpaid work that's given freely and/or exploited as a kind of highly gendered serfdom. E.g., contractors, homemakers, caregivers, certain arts and crafts.)
To go another step with disembedding, Illich suggests we leave behind scarcity and false needs by shrinking the commodity-based society. This would allow for a kind of rewilding of domesticity and community by allowing the commons and the vernacular to flourish again apart from an extractive, transactional market rationality.
The impossibility of full employment is one driver of change Illich anticipates in "The Three Dimensions of Public Choice" where he concludes "the example of a poor society that enhances modern subsistence by vernacular work [e.g., people building their own homes, doing their own learning, etc.] should be rather attractive to jobless males in a rich society now condemned, like their women, to social reproduction in an expanding shadow economy."
That is precisely where we are today, with many pressures making it the crisis Illich seems to have anticipated. (E.g., industrial efficiency, peak population, climate change, pandemics, remote work, bullshit jobs, and universal basic income.)
Illich says to live in a convivial society and be engaged in useful unemployment / vernacular work, we need to insist on it by fully understanding and breaking from "the perception of homo economicus." The mentalité of modern economic man is the ideology and habitus we need to exorcise and step out of, a kind of snakeskin to slough off perhaps.
“If by our attention we grant the object of our attention some non-trivial power over the shape of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, then this may be one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves.“
All this is like Aladdin’s lamp - we rub it, and the genie appears, and hey presto, we get what we wish for - and we’ll keep getting what turns out to be rubbish, until we pay attention to what we really need, and want, as opposed to sweeties and distractions that turn into nightmares.
and that digital technology is in fact a new improved genie, in that it appears to be able to deliver what we “want”, just like that, without cost or effort, which is why I think this whole process (of a fundamental change in consciousness) is accelerating
“The issue at hand is not the juridical ownership of tools, but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some tools which make it impossible for anybody to ‘own’ them. The concept of ownership cannot be applied to a tool that cannot be controlled.”
The whole “world” is a manifestation of our collective consciousness (or lack of it) - and that includes the whole COVID19 saga, in all its aspects - the truth is the virus is a pinprick, but we are reacting to it as if it were a new Black Death (or, if it isn’t, that it might become one). We are literally expressing, “out there”, our unhappiness and despair “in here”. Jeff Bezos or the CCP is no more in control of this than you or I, thankfully. So yes, we must start with attention, to ourselves, to our neighbours, to the world. Not seeking to control, or even to change, but as Solzhenitsyn says, not propagating the lie, either.
“it is also good for me to cultivate a form of expectant attentiveness to what is, a form of attention that commits itself to seeing the world before me.“ perfect
Always seems worthwhile to return to reflection on attention, especially in a digital economy that is founded on capturing and controlling our attention. Iris Murdoch's discussion of the moral role attention plays in our lives is really compelling. Seems to really get at the heart of most of moral philosophy - how you attend to self/others/world determines how you will act, and that the quality of this attention, over time, is likely of more moral weight and consequence than any moment of choice or judgment. Our moral concepts are meant to help shape our attention, and in turn the quality of attention we exercise shapes our understanding of moral concepts.
When it comes to regulation of digital tools and systems, I think attention should be a central concept. That if we are going to try to do something, trying to get engineers and designers to think about how their tools shape how people relate to their attention would be a helpful step in the right direction. Crawford's description of the "attentional commons" is a powerful concept, creating space for thinking about a right to share governance over how environments and tools shape our attention.
Attention also shifts focus away from outcomes and toward the subjective experience of using digital tools. It is not just that our attention is currently captured and controlled toward questionable ends, or even the worth of what we are attending to, but that the quality of our attention is at stake. I think similar to Milosz's discussion of wonder, Weil and Murdoch were trying to describe a quality of attention that was central to living well, or at least responsibly. Trying to figure recognize changes in the quality of my attention toward self/others/world is not easy, but I think it is probably a good way to evaluate digital tools.
How can an ethic of attention help design more moral digital tools, systems, and environments? How can an ethic of attention help us govern our lives with these tools?
Thanks for mentioning Murdoch, she definitely belongs in this conversation. Appreciated your third paragraph, especially. That distinction between outcomes and subjective experience is critical.
Anyone read Crawford's latest yet? I'm kind of leary that he's riffing on driving for the third time, but I found plenty of interest in the first two books (minus his occasional tough-guy-isms and the tour through the finer points of organ making). One of them, or part of one, be worth reading together here at some point.
I just found out about it in the last week. Duly noted!
On the format - your recent experiments with audio and reading groups have accommodated busy schedules, which I certainly appreciate. It’s not your fault, but I’ve missed or had to proceed faster than I’d have liked through some of your installments when they’ve caught me at preoccupied moments. Whenever audio can be offered as an addition, it’s a non-trivial one as far as I’m concerned.
Your interactions with readers have so far provided another engrossing rabbit hole to this adventure. I am curious to see whether, if you go much further down this road, a less constrained platform for interaction will be preferred, or if keeping things more perishable and obscure is the fitting option. Surely there are arguments for both.
Thanks the feedback. This was pretty much what my friend had in mind in asking about an audio version.
I'm not keen on any big changes right now. Feeling okay with what Substack is offering, but you've got some specific thoughts on what a less constrained platform might look like, feel free to share!
I've been sussing out what Illich thought the ideal arrangement of attention, austerity, and freedom would be, and it is possibly more technocratic, capitalistic, and prescient than I thought it was previously. It sounds like a contemporary Degrowth scheme that is sensible but perhaps too late and not enough with 407.4 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere.
Illich's essay, "The Three Dimensions of Public Choice" in «Shadow Work» (1981) is remarkably optimistic — Illich sees industrial society reaching the limits of its growth and forcing questions upon us that were delayed in actually reaching us as crises until about 2008 to the present. Financialization, doubling down on fossil fuels, and digital technology kept the old racket going, but now we seem to be where he expected us to be in the 1980s.
He's quite clear in «Shadow Work» what he thinks is the best "mode of life" we should choose. It is one that is "characterized by austerity, modesty, and modern yet hand-made and built on a small scale."
Only a few years later, Illich wrote “The Social Construction of Energy” (1983), but it was not published until 2009. It updates his essay, “Energy and Equity” from 1974 and engages with physics and computer technology on a level that has aged very well. Here he fleshes out his idea of the best possible way of life as one where the commodification of life would be constrained to the very minimum of necessary goods everyone truly needs, like food. Their production and distribution would be completely automated and managed by "science and artificial intelligence." This "modern subsistence" would diminish the differences between rich and poor societies.
Illich wants to be clear he is not "sentimental" or a "Luddite" — in this world he envisions most people would not be engaged in subsistence activity directly. He wants to go a step beyond Karl Polanyi's great disembedding of labour, land, and money from common, ordinary life, which created modern economic society.
(Illich's take on Polanyi: For us, "society" no longer includes the ordinary, "vernacular," non-market realm of the commons and the domestic except as fragments of "traditional life" subsumed into a "shadow economy" of uncommodified, unpaid work that's given freely and/or exploited as a kind of highly gendered serfdom. E.g., contractors, homemakers, caregivers, certain arts and crafts.)
To go another step with disembedding, Illich suggests we leave behind scarcity and false needs by shrinking the commodity-based society. This would allow for a kind of rewilding of domesticity and community by allowing the commons and the vernacular to flourish again apart from an extractive, transactional market rationality.
The impossibility of full employment is one driver of change Illich anticipates in "The Three Dimensions of Public Choice" where he concludes "the example of a poor society that enhances modern subsistence by vernacular work [e.g., people building their own homes, doing their own learning, etc.] should be rather attractive to jobless males in a rich society now condemned, like their women, to social reproduction in an expanding shadow economy."
That is precisely where we are today, with many pressures making it the crisis Illich seems to have anticipated. (E.g., industrial efficiency, peak population, climate change, pandemics, remote work, bullshit jobs, and universal basic income.)
Illich says to live in a convivial society and be engaged in useful unemployment / vernacular work, we need to insist on it by fully understanding and breaking from "the perception of homo economicus." The mentalité of modern economic man is the ideology and habitus we need to exorcise and step out of, a kind of snakeskin to slough off perhaps.
“If by our attention we grant the object of our attention some non-trivial power over the shape of our thoughts, feelings, and actions, then this may be one of the most important questions we can ask ourselves.“
All this is like Aladdin’s lamp - we rub it, and the genie appears, and hey presto, we get what we wish for - and we’ll keep getting what turns out to be rubbish, until we pay attention to what we really need, and want, as opposed to sweeties and distractions that turn into nightmares.
and that digital technology is in fact a new improved genie, in that it appears to be able to deliver what we “want”, just like that, without cost or effort, which is why I think this whole process (of a fundamental change in consciousness) is accelerating
“The issue at hand is not the juridical ownership of tools, but rather the discovery of the characteristic of some tools which make it impossible for anybody to ‘own’ them. The concept of ownership cannot be applied to a tool that cannot be controlled.”
The whole “world” is a manifestation of our collective consciousness (or lack of it) - and that includes the whole COVID19 saga, in all its aspects - the truth is the virus is a pinprick, but we are reacting to it as if it were a new Black Death (or, if it isn’t, that it might become one). We are literally expressing, “out there”, our unhappiness and despair “in here”. Jeff Bezos or the CCP is no more in control of this than you or I, thankfully. So yes, we must start with attention, to ourselves, to our neighbours, to the world. Not seeking to control, or even to change, but as Solzhenitsyn says, not propagating the lie, either.