How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

  There are potentially wider parallels to be made, since inattentional blindness is basically a form of visual bias, and something like inattentional blindness seems to be at work in broader forms of bias. In her Atlantic piece “Is This How Discrimination Ends?” the author Jessica Nordell takes part in a session of the Prejudice Lab, a project run by psychology professor Patricia Devine. As a graduate student, Devine had done experiments around the psychological aspects of implicit racial bias: “She demonstrated that even if people don’t believe racist stereotypes are true, those stereotypes, once absorbed, can influence people’s behavior without their awareness or intent.” The Prejudice Lab runs workshops at businesses and schools with the aim of showing people their own biases—in effect, to help learn how to see what they’re not seeing.18

  In the two-hour workshop that Nordell attended, Devine and her colleague Will Cox explained the science of bias, “barreled through mountains of evidence,” and invited students to share stories of how bias had played out in their own lives—stories none of them had a hard time coming up with. Nordell writes that while many other psychology experiments treat bias as a condition to be adjusted, Devine’s treats it as a behavior, aiming simply to “make unconscious patterns conscious and intentional.” In effect, the Prejudice Lab was the “attentional key” that brought racist thought and behavior to consciousness. So far, Nordell writes, the data suggest that the Prejudice Lab’s approach is working. But the success of the intervention largely rests on the individual: “To [break a habit], Devine said, you have to be aware of it, motivated to change, and have a strategy for replacing it.”

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  IT’S HERE THAT I want to come back to the relationship between discipline and attention from the previous chapter. An element of effort and straining exists in the word attention itself, which comes from Latin ad + tendere, “to stretch toward.” This relationship finds one of its most compelling expressions in William James’s 1890 The Principles of Psychology. Defining attention as the ability to hold something before the mind, James observes that the inclination of attention is toward fleetingness. He quotes the physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz, who had experimented on himself with various distractions:

  The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we must seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.19

  If, as I’ve said, attention is a state of openness that assumes there is something new to be seen, it is also true that this state must resist our tendency to declare our observations finished—to be done with it. For James as for von Helmholtz, this means that there is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention. Instead, what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency. Furthermore, if attention attaches to what is new, we must be finding ever newer angles on the object of our sustained attention—no small task. James thus makes explicit the role of will in attention:

  Though the spontaneous drift of thought is all the other way, the attention must be kept strained on that one object until at last it grows, so as to maintain itself before the kind with ease. This strain of attention is the fundamental act of will.20

  Nordell closes her piece on the Prejudice Lab with an eloquent example of this constant, effortful return. She writes that the day she left University of Wisconsin–Madison, where the workshop had taken place, she saw two people in her hotel lobby wearing “worn, rumpled clothes, with ragged holes in the knees.” A story about them formed in her mind before she could catch it, wherein they couldn’t possibly be guests of the hotel and must have been friends of the clerk. “It was a tiny story, a minor assumption,” she writes, “but that’s how bias starts: as a flicker—unseen, unchecked—that taps at behaviors, reactions, and thoughts.” The Prejudice Lab had helped train her to catch it, though, and she could catch it again. Her commitment to do so demonstrates the vigilance at the core of sustained attention:

  Afterwards, I kept watching for that flutter, like a person with a net in hand waiting for a dragonfly. And I caught it, many times. Maybe this is the beginning of how my own prejudice ends. Watching for it. Catching it and holding it up to the light. Releasing it. Watching for it again.21

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  IF ATTENTION AND will are so closely linked, then we have even more reason to worry about an entire economy and information ecosystem preying on our attention. In a post about ad blockers on the University of Oxford’s “Practical Ethics” blog, the technology ethicist James Williams (of Time Well Spent) lays out the stakes:

  We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like “annoying” or “distracting.” But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to “want what we want to want.” Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self.22

  I first learned about James Williams from a recent Stanford master’s thesis by Devangi Vivrekar, called “Persuasive Design Techniques in the Attention Economy: User Awareness, Theory, and Ethics.” The thesis is mainly about how Vivrekar and her colleagues in the Human-Computer Interaction department designed and experimented with a system called Nudget. In an effort to make the user aware of persuasive design, Nudget used overlays to call out and describe several of the persuasive design elements in the Facebook interface as the user encountered them.23

  But the thesis is also useful simply as a catalog of the many forms of persuasive design—the kinds that behavioral scientists have been studying in advertising since the mid-twentieth century. For example, Vivrekar lists the strategies identified by researchers Marwell and Schmitt in 1967: “reward, punishment, positive expertise, negative expertise, liking/ingratiation, gifting/pre-giving, debt, aversive stimulation, moral appeal, positive self-feeling, negative self-feeling, positive altercasting, negative altercasting, positive esteem of others, and negative esteem of others.” Vivrekar herself has study participants identify instances of persuasive design on the LinkedIn site and compiles a staggering list of 171 persuasive design techniques.24 A few for example:

  This detailed vocabulary of persuasion and eagle-eyed attentiveness to its many forms aligns with my interest in “knowing your enemy” when it comes to the attention economy. For example, one could draw parallels between the Nudget system, which teaches users to see the ways in which they are being persuaded, and the Prejudice Lab, which shows participants how bias guides their behavior.

  But as for the results of this accounting, Vivrekar and I come to very different conclusions. Indeed, I found a helpful articulation of my own argument for discipline in a section of hers titled “Counter-Arguments.” She writes, “Proponents of the ‘agency’ side in the agency vs. structure debate claim that instead of focusing on the problem of how to make persuasion more ethical, we should focus on empowering people to have more self control” (that’s me!). Vivrekar and the technology ethicists she cites, however, are less than optimistic about this approach:

  Portraying the problem as one in which we just need to be more mindful of our interaction with apps can be likened to saying we need to be more mindful of our behavior while interacting with the artificial intelligence algorithms that beat us at chess; equally sophisticated algorithms beat us at the attention game all the time.25

  F
or Vivrekar, persuasion is a given, and the only thing we can do about it is redirect it:

  When we remember that hundreds of engineers and designers predict and plan for our every move on these platforms, it seems more justified to shift the focus of the discussion towards ethical persuasion.

  This argument takes a few important things for granted. “Ethical persuasion” means persuading the user to do something that is good for them, using “harmonious designs that continuously empower us instead of distracting and frustrating us.” Reading this, I can’t help but ask: Empower me to do what? Good for me according to whom? And according to what standards? Happiness, productivity? These are the same standards that Frazier uses when designing Walden Two. The idea that I’ve already lost the battle of attention doesn’t sit right with me, an agential being interested in gaining control of my attention rather than simply having it directed in ways that are deemed better for me.

  This solution also takes the attention economy itself for granted—something to be corrected but which is otherwise inevitable. Vivrekar notes that “metrics that align better with user values are not always contrary to the long-term business profits of companies in the attention economy; they actually pose a market opportunity.” She quotes Eric Holmen, the Senior Vice President of Urban Airship, a company on whom “[e]very day, marketers and developers depend on…to deliver one billion mobile moments that inspire interest and drive action.” Holmen sees big bucks in authenticity:

  People increasingly want to spend time well, not spend more of it…If it’s our shallowest self which is reflected to us every time we open Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, the best business opportunity around might be to begin to cater for our aspirational selves.26

  But just who is this “our”? What does persuasive design look like when someone else tries to bring out my “aspirational self,” and does it for profit? Help!

  Lastly, there is attention itself, which this approach also takes for granted. It assumes not only that our attention will always be captured, but that our attention remains the same throughout. I described in the previous chapter how the attention economy targets our attention as if it were an undifferentiated and interchangeable currency; the “ethical persuasion” approach is no exception. When we think about the different kinds of attention we are actually capable of—the pinnacle being the kind that William James describes, if we only have the discipline—it becomes clear that most forms of persuasive design (whether nefarious or “empowering”) assume a rather shallow form of attention. We might extrapolate from this to conclude that deeper, hardier, more nuanced forms of attention are less susceptible to appropriation, because discipline and vigilance inhere within them.

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  JUST A DAY before reading Vivrekar’s thesis, I had seen the film Blindspotting at an old Oakland theater in Grand Lake. Daveed Diggs (of Hamilton fame) and the poet Rafael Casal, both of whom grew up in the East Bay, wrote and starred in what is essentially a virtuosic poem on the gentrification of Oakland. In the film, Diggs plays Collin, a young black man in the last days of his yearlong probation after prison, and Casal plays Miles, his hot-tempered white friend from childhood. Tantalizingly close to a year without incident, Collin struggles emotionally after witnessing a white police officer gun down a black man running and yelling, “Don’t shoot!”

  On top of that, Miles keeps getting them in trouble, jeopardizing Collin’s probation and risking his return to prison. At an obnoxious hipster party in West Oakland, where one of the few Black attendees assumes Miles is a hipster newcomer because he’s white, Miles gets so angry that he beats the man senseless and pulls out a gun, which Collin has to take away from him—all this on the night before his probation is up. Having fled the scene, Collin and Miles have a screaming fight in which the racial dimension of their friendship finally surfaces. They are angry at each other not just as friends but as a black man and a white man for whom the stakes are very different.

  There is only one other scene in the film in which the two face each other so intensely. It happens much earlier, in Johansson Projects, a small gallery downtown. Collin and Miles are visiting a middle-aged photographer who makes portraits of Oakland residents. As the camera zooms in on each portrait, bringing the eyes of each subject into focus, the photographer tells Collin and Miles that this is his way of fighting gentrification: by presenting viewers with the faces of the people being pushed out. Then, seemingly out of the blue, he asks Collin and Miles to stand and look at each other without speaking. Initially sheepish, the two oblige, and what follows is a long, weird, magical moment. The camera cuts back and forth, but we can have no idea what each is seeing in the other. This opacity reflects the experience each might be having of the other as an unfathomable, undeniably real being. Eventually the spell is broken, and the two men laugh, embarrassed, deflecting emotion by poking fun at the photographer for his strange request.

  In the discomfort and unnaturalness of the moment in which Collin and Miles stare at each other, you can feel the “stretching toward” (ad tendere) in attention. They do not just have their eyes directed toward each other; they are seeing each other. It was this scene that made clear for me the connection between attention, perception, bias, and will. In effect, the opposite of a racist view is Buber’s “I-Thou” perception, which assiduously refuses to let the other collapse into any one instrumental category. Recall that Buber refuses to see the tree as image, species, or relationship of numbers. Instead “thou” has the same depth as I. Seeing this way means foregoing all of the many easier and more habitual ways to “see,” and as such, it is a fragile state requiring the discipline to continue.

  As a response to the attention economy, the argument for ethical persuasion happens on a two-dimensional plane that assumes that attention can only be directed this way or that way. I am not as interested in that plane as I am interested in a disciplined deepening of attention. While I am all for legal restrictions on addictive technology, I also want to see what’s possible when we take up William James’s challenge and bring attention back, over and over again, to an idea “held steadily before the mind until it fills the mind.” I am personally unsatisfied with untrained attention, which flickers from one new thing to the next, not only because it is a shallow experience, or because it is an expression of habit rather than will, but because it gives me less access to my own human experience.

  To me, the only habit worth “designing for” is the habit of questioning one’s habitual ways of seeing, and that is what artists, writers, and musicians help us to do. It’s no accident that in Blindspotting, the moment between Collin and Miles is organized by a photographer, whose work confronts viewers’ “blind spots” with the reality of Oakland residents in all their human fullness. It’s in the realm of poetics that we learn how to encounter. Significantly, these encounters are not optimized to “empower” us by making us happier or more productive. In fact, they may actually completely unsettle the priorities of the productive self and even the boundaries between self and other. Rather than providing us with drop-down menus, they confront us with serious questions, the answering of which may change us irreversibly.

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  THERE ARE MORE reasons to deepen attention than simply resisting the attention economy. Those reasons have to do with the very real ways in which attention—what we pay attention to and what we do not—renders our reality in a very serious sense. From the same set of “data,” we draw conclusions based on our past experiences and assumptions. In her piece on the Prejudice Lab, Nordell speaks with Evelyn R. Carter, a social psychologist at UCLA, who tells her that “people in the majority and the minority often see two different realities” based on what they do and do not notice. For example, “[w]hite people…might only hear a racist remark, while people of color might register subtler actions, like someone scooting away slightly on the bus”

  Thinking about the idea of rendering, I sometimes borrow from my experienc
e with (literal, computational) rendering. For the last couple of years, I’ve been teaching my students Blender, an open-source 3-D modeling program. One of the hardest things to explain to students who have never worked in 3-D before is the concept of “a render.” That is, for those who are used to working in something like Photoshop, the image shown in the workspace generally reflects the resulting image, to the point where there is little distinction. It can be difficult to get used to the idea of a program in which there is no image until you render it, and furthermore that the render may seem to have absolutely nothing to do with what you see in the workspace. (I often have students render a completely black image because they’ve accidentally deleted the only lamp from the scene.) Yes, there are objects in the file. But the actual image relies on a long list of variables like camera angle, lighting, textures, material, render engine, and render quality. Any one scene could thus produce an infinite number of different images depending on how it is rendered, each image essentially a different treatment of the same set of objects.

  It’s not hard to expand this into a more general model of rendering, where the objects in the scene are the objects, events, and people of the outside world, and the rendering decisions are the particular map of our attention. Already in 1890, William James wrote about how interest and attention renders the world from a “gray chaotic indiscriminateness,” inadvertently evoking the default gray of an un-rendered scene in Blender:

  Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground intelligible perspective, in a word. It varies in every creature, but without it the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive.27