Hi friends, welcome back. In the first two posts of this series, we have discussed pain, pleasure, then danger, and discomfort. Now let’s switch gear and talk about something more concrete: technology.
My aim is that after this you will start seeing all the different addictech & anestechia around us, and find yourself more consciously curating the kinds of attentech you deploy into your life. I’ll try to land these portmanteaus on you and hope they stick because I promise it will help you navigate the modern life better.
First, let’s define what we mean by technology. I like Kevin Kelly’s definition of technology the most[1]:
My working definition of technology is “anything useful that a human mind makes.” It’s not just hammers and gadgets, like laptops. But it’s also law. The system of law is a kind of technology. – (2009) TEDxAmsterdam – Kevin Kelly
I want to focus this essay on more the interesting concept of attentech, so I will keep this next section fairly short but hopefully clear and compelling enough to forge a new lens you can try on.
Addictech and anestechia
When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. – Viktor Frankl
We have touched upon before how addiction is one major way we calm the anxious throbbing of our religious impulse. As you can already guess from the term, I define addictech as technologies that (are designed to) keep us wanting more.
And then, quoting Tim Ferriss in his conversation with Amanda Palmer linked in the first part of this series:
Am I putting pain in pole position because I’m unwilling or unable to feel other things? So I just want to feel something? Because pain can become a kind of a music that drowns out the the other conversations that you should maybe be listening to.
Pain and pleasure are both things we can use to temporarily distract, numb, and escape. We eat to reward ourselves. We drink to escape some gritty reality we can’t comfortably grasp or control. We stay glued to our phones for an easy way out of the discomfort of boredom. We avoid difficult conversations, we rationalise feelings, we dismiss emotions.
Tech can aid our addiction to pain and pleasure. And we gladly and perpetually anesthesise ourselves with them.
Attentech. the proof is in the doing.
One of the most useful lens I learned last year was this idea of a device and a focal thing coined by philosopher Albert Borgmann.
Put simply,
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devices are technologies that do things for us, while
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focal things are technologies that help us do things.
Smartphones, on-demand apps, social media, recommendation systems are devices. Utensils, musical instruments, and pens & papers are focal things.
Devices foster passivity and consumption while focal things foster engagement, social cohesion, and human flourishing.
In Why An Easier Life Is Not Necessarily Happier, Michael Sacasas made the connection between a series of three articles [2] by Tim Wu and Borgmann’s work. Don’t let me rob you of the richness of the full essay, but Michael essentially invites us to reflect that perhaps at this point, we are too obsessed with creating tech that help us remove more friction and hassle (and for what/whose purpose? 😉) and we too quickly pass on tech that challenged us and demanded engagement from us.
I can summarise it as: Convenience breeds consumers, challenge breeds agents. We need challenge to balance off the convenience.
Sometimes we need things to be done for us. Sometimes we need to do things ourselves. And they can be the exact same things. There’s value in both if we want the full human experience[3].
So, am I just rebranding “focal things” as attentech? Yes I am, because it needs it.
I wish more people are aware of this framework because it has provided me with a snappy compass in orienting myself in this increasingly complex times.
Attentech: what it is, what it isn’t
First, “attention economy”.
If you have paid any attention (ahem) to the meta-murmurs about the state of our online media, or spent any time reflecting on the notion of attention economy, you’d be aware of the diagnostics for it: a cleverly-engineered seductive trap where your attention is the product. You would also be aware of the overarching generic vague prescriptions for it: Reclaim your attention! Think critically! Dismantle the Big Tech!
I think these combative advices are counterproductive as they add a layer of guilt and conflict in us. You feel like it’s you against your nature (being exploited).
Attention economy is tech that seduces our attention and sustains it through human engineering. Attentech is tech that demands our attention and sustains it organically[4].
Both are OK. In fact, you need both. Attentech is an antidote to attention economy (attentec, if you will). You fight (their) tech with (your) tech[5].
Attentech: gateway to flow and mastery
Other than being an enabler to Flow, the quality of our attention is the keystone skill and probably most potent performance enhancer that anyone passionate about their craft can develop. Quoting Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game of Tennis:
One could say that most of the mistakes made by adults are caused by a loss of focus of attention. And with that loss of focus comes a loss of productivity, learning, and enjoyment in the process of work.
It is by focus of attention that we make contact with everything in our world and by this means alone that things become knowable and understandable to us. Thus, attention is critical to all learning, understanding, and proficiency of action. It is only when we are giving our full attention to what we are doing that we can bring all of our resources to bear effectively. Why? Because when we are giving full attention, self-interference is neutralized. In the fullness of focus, there is no room for Self 1’s fears or doubts.
How to grow? Engage. How to engage? Get yourself into uncomfortable situations.
Seoul is the most illegible big city I’ve ever visited. … Seoul is a city that stimulates sensemaking. Its illegibility is uncomfortable, and discomfort forces engagement.
Attentech: God-mode or bot-mode?
But, why bother engaging? Well, if you are still unconvinced at this point, let me offer another alarming fact: because humans who are not concentrating are not general intelligence.
The point is OpenAI HAS achieved the ability to pass the Turing test against humans on autopilot.
There are probably a lot of people who would be completely taken in by literal “fake news”…… Even more alarming: unless I make a conscious effort to read carefully, I would be one of them.
This bit from Robin Hanson’s Better Babblers is too good for me to not pull out from Sarah’s essay above:
After eighteen years of being a professor, I’ve graded many student essays. And while I usually try to teach a deep structure of concepts, what the median student actually learns seems to mostly be a set of low order correlations. They know what words to use, which words tend to go together, which combinations tend to have positive associations, and so on. But if you ask an exam question where the deep structure answer differs from answer you’d guess looking at low order correlations, most students usually give the wrong answer.
Simple correlations also seem sufficient to capture most polite conversation talk, such as the weather is nice, how is your mother’s illness, and damn that other political party. Simple correlations are also most of what I see in inspirational TED talks, and when public intellectuals and talk show guests pontificate on topics they really don’t understand, such as quantum mechanics, consciousness, postmodernism, or the need always for more regulation everywhere. After all, media entertainers don’t need to understand deep structures any better than do their audiences.
A large portion of what people do in most communication are to a degree, stochastic parrotting. We hallucinate and fabricate all the time. We listen and read shallowly[6]. We are impatient and overstimulated. We default to our existing biases and prejudices. We do error correction and rounding to the nearest familiar patterns all the time. And we’re also deeply biased[7] (biologically wired and through social conditioning). I’d even venture that these LLMs are less biased than us in the sense that they can actually be retrained.
What I’m ultimately implying here is that the difference between you and a chat bot is in the quality of attention you dispense to the person you are conversing with. If you don’t attend to your conversations, or more importantly, engage in your life, you’re no more than a bot (which is OK as long as you unlock your god-mode every once in a while….).
Closing thoughts
There are a lot other interesting and overlooked ideas around attentech. But because this essay is already as long as it is and I don’t yet have the skill to employ any compelling storytelling trick here to game your attention, I’ll leave them here as a partially linked listicle for you to investigate further at your own volition.
- Iain McGilchrist’s assertion that “attention is a moral act“
- Sherry Turkle on how screens are cozy shields to forge a false sense of safety
- Nancy Kline on the thinking environment (achieved through listening)
- The Minefield – What does it mean to be literate
… Reading is where we have moral encounters. It’s an act of encounter where we come face to face with something that isn’t us but which we should attend. The opposite of haste, superficiality, mis/characterisation, dismissal, disdain, and rushing to judgement
- Understanding is Overrated | Why You Should Read “Difficult” Literature
- Cognitive effort is the best predictor to learning efficacy.
Footnotes
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Kevin Kelly also wrote specifically about the history of the word Technology here.
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I have since discovered that Tim Wu has published 2 more installments to his series on technological evolution on The Newyorker in addition to the 3 that Michael Sacasas discussed in his essay:
Part I: If a Time Traveller Saw a Smartphone
Part II: As Technology Gets Better, Will Society Get Worse?
Part III: The Problem With Easy Technology
Part IV: How To Live Forever
Part V: _A World Where Nothing Gets Lost._ -
If you need further elaboration and convincing, here’s another juicy part of the essay:
Like Tim Wu, Borgmann does believe that the greater comfort and ease promised by technology does not necessarily translate into greater satisfaction or happiness. There is a point at which the gains made by technology stop yielding meaningful satisfaction. Wu believes this is so because of “our biological need to be challenged.” I made a similar argument some time ago in opposing the idea of a frictionless life.
Borgmann’s analysis adds two more important considerations: bodily and social engagement.
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As Wu points out in his third piece, the answer is not necessarily an embrace of all things that are hard and arduous or a refusal of all the advantages that modern technology secures for us. Borgmann, too, is concerned with distinguishing between different kinds of troubles: “trouble we reject in principle and accept in practice and trouble we accept in practice and in principle.”
And If you want to avoid what Tim Wu cheekily called “sofalarity”.
Our will-to-comfort, combined with our technological powers, creates a stark possibility. If we’re not careful, our technological evolution will take us toward not a singularity but a sofalarity. That’s a future defined not by an evolution toward superintelligence but by the absence of discomforts.
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In Cognitive Load Theory, this is closest to the idea of a Germane Load.
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Yes, yes, I’m consciously exploiting our “us vs them” instinct here. I’m sure you know I mean no harm.
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The work of Maryanne Wolf and Naomi Baron RE:deep reading. And McLuhan’s: “reading is rapid guessing“.
“The word read means to guess — look it up in the big dictionary. Reading is an activity of rapid guessing because any word has so many meanings — including the word reading – that to select one in a context of other words requires very rapid guessing.
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But this limitation of ours and cognitive tendencies can also be a feature, not a bug.
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In The Master and His Emissary, Dr Iain McGilchrist speaks about how in split-brain experiments, the left-hemisphere will always make up justification for whatever action the person does but doesn’t understand. Need to dig up some links or digitally-available references.
