I had a pile of classic novels I had been meaning to read for decades, with War and Peace at the top. — *location: 331* ^ref-58954 >First mistake: unrealistic expectations. lets see if he reads it --- If you don’t do this now, I told myself, you’ll never do it, and you’ll be lying on your deathbed seeing how many likes you got on Instagram. — *location: 336* ^ref-61114 --- I had learned years before from social scientists that when it comes to beating any kind of destructive habit, one of the most effective tools we have is called “pre-commitment.” It’s right there in one of the oldest surviving human stories, Homer’s Odyssey. Homer tells of how there was once a patch of sea that sailors would always die in, for a strange reason: living in the ocean, there were two sirens—a uniquely hot blend of woman and fish—who would sing to the sailors to join them in the ocean. Then, when they clambered in for some sexy fish-based action, they’d drown. But then, one day, the hero of the story—Ulysses—figured out how to beat these temptresses. Before the ship approached the sirens’ stretch of sea, he got his crew members to tie him to the mast, hard, hand and foot. He couldn’t move. When he heard the sirens, no matter how much Ulysses yearned to dive in, he couldn’t. — *location: 338* ^ref-63190 --- It’s when you set aside your distractions, he said, that you begin to see what you were distracting yourself from. — *location: 423* ^ref-39889 --- My normal mode of consuming news, I realized, induced panic; this new style induced perspective. — *location: 454* ^ref-60534 --- Shortly before I met with him, Sune had seen a photograph of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, standing in front of a room of people who were all wearing virtual reality headsets. He was the only person standing in actual reality, looking at them, smiling, pacing proudly around. When he saw it, Sune said, “I was like—holy shit, this is a metaphor for the future.” If we don’t change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where “there’s going to be an upper class of people that are very aware” of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with “fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they’re going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.” — *location: 532* ^ref-42802 --- What’s happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that’s with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.” He looked at me and smiled. “I wanted to give myself a chance at choosing something that’s more difficult.” — *location: 543* ^ref-13300 --- The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time. To pretend this was the case, we took a term that was never meant to be applied to human beings at all. In the 1960s, computer scientists invented machines with more than one processor, so they really could do two things (or more) simultaneously. They called this machine-power “multitasking.” Then we took the concept and applied it to ourselves. — *location: 599* ^ref-14023 --- broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention—it’s where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego. — *location: 750* ^ref-56786 --- Many of us are like those birds in cages being made to perform a bizarre dance to get rewards, and all the while we imagine we are choosing it for ourselves—the men I saw in Provincetown obsessively posting selfies to Instagram started to look to me like Skinner’s pigeons with a six-pack and a piña colada. In a culture where our focus is stolen by these surface-level stimuli, Mihaly’s deeper insight has been forgotten: that we have within us a force that makes it possible to focus for long stretches and enjoy it, and it will make us happier and healthier, if only we create the right circumstances to let it flow. — *location: 904* ^ref-58640 --- After three months in Provincetown, I had written 92,000 words of my novel. They might be terrible, but in one sense, I didn’t care. The reason why became clear to me when one day, shortly before I left Provincetown, I placed my deck chair in the ocean so the sea was lapping at my feet and I finished the third volume of War and Peace. As I closed its last page, I realized I had been sitting there for most of the day. I had been reading like this, day after day, for weeks. And I thought suddenly: It came back! My brain came back! I feared my brain had been broken, and this experiment might just reveal I was a permanently degenerated blob. But I could see now that healing was possible. I cried with relief. — *location: 956* ^ref-20541 --- I felt in that moment that we all have a choice now between two profound forces—fragmentation, or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us. I asked myself: Do you want to be one of Skinner’s pigeons, atrophying your attention on dancing for crude rewards, or Mihaly’s painters, able to concentrate because you have found something that really matters? — *location: 977* ^ref-37403 --- The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy. — *location: 1365* ^ref-788 --- So I thought that in Provincetown, stripped of distractions, I would gain one benefit—I would be able to be even more stimulated, for even longer periods, and retain even more of what I inhaled. I can listen to longer podcasts! I can read longer books! That did happen—but it occurred alongside something else, something I didn’t see coming. — *location: 1434* ^ref-26967 --- My consciousness drifted like the boats I could see bobbing on the horizon. At first I felt guilty. You came here to focus, I said to myself, and to learn about focus. But what you are indulging in is its opposite—a mental detumescence. — *location: 1440* ^ref-36536 --- I felt more creative than I had since I was a child. Ideas started spinning out of my head. When I would get home and write them down, I realized I was having more creative ideas—and making more connections—in a single three-hour walk than I usually had in a month. — *location: 1443* ^ref-44213 --- thought about the people I had looked at on the train, staring out the window for hours. I had been silently judging them for their lack of productivity—but now I realized they may have been more meaningfully productive than me, as I frantically took notes on one book after another, without taking time to sit back and digest. — *location: 1519* ^ref-19892 >Goal is productivity --- If thinking is like a symphony that requires all these different kinds of thought, then right now, the stage has been invaded. One of those heavy-metal bands who bite the heads off bats and spit them at the audience has charged the stage, and they are standing in front of the orchestra, screaming. — *location: 1540* ^ref-52468 --- One of the things that he was taught at camp is that a person’s susceptibility to magic has nothing to do with their intelligence. “It’s about something more subtle,” he said later. It’s “about the weaknesses, or the limits, or the blind spots, or the biases that we’re all trapped inside of.” — *location: 1646* ^ref-33450 --- every new technology brings with it a panic where people say it’ll trash the world—after all, Socrates said writing things down would ruin people’s memories. We were told that everything from the printed book to television would trash the minds of the young, but here we are, and the world survived. — *location: 1813* ^ref-16317 --- One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: “How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?” There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand. — *location: 1920* ^ref-44976 --- Chamath Palihapitiya, who had been Facebook’s vice president of growth, explained in a speech that the effects are so negative that his own kids “aren’t allowed to use that shit.” — *location: 1913* ^ref-24085 --- Tony Fadell, who co-invented the iPhone, said: “I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world?” He worried that he had helped create “a nuclear bomb” that can “blow up people’s brains and reprogram them.” — *location: 1914* ^ref-26001 --- One of its most famous investors, Paul Graham, wrote: “Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.” — *location: 1917* ^ref-34738 --- Aza explained it to me by saying that I should imagine that “inside of Facebook’s servers, inside of Google’s servers, there is a little voodoo doll, [and it is] a model of you. It starts by not looking much like you. It’s sort of a generic model of a human. But then they’re collecting your click trails [i.e., everything you click on], and your toenail clippings, and your hair droppings [i.e., everything you search for, every little detail of your life online]. They’re reassembling all that metadata you don’t really think is meaningful, so that doll looks more and more like you. [Then] when you show up on [for example] YouTube, they’re waking up that doll, and they’re testing out hundreds of thousands of videos against this doll, seeing what makes its arm twitch and move, so they know it’s effective, and then they serve that to you.” It seemed like such a ghoulish image that I paused. He went on: “By the way—they have a doll like that for one in four human beings on earth.” — *location: 1950* ^ref-60940 --- The truth is creepier. It’s not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.” — *location: 1963* ^ref-49203 --- Aza told me: “It’s getting to be so good that whenever I give a presentation, I’ll ask the audience how many think Facebook is listening to their conversations, because there’s some ad that’s been served that’s just too accurate. It’s about a specific thing they never mentioned before [but they happen to have talked about offline] to a friend the day before. Now, it’s generally one-half to two-thirds of the audience that raises their hands. The truth is creepier. It’s not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.” — *location: 1960* ^ref-12470 --- A study by the Pew Research Center found that if you fill your Facebook posts with “indignant disagreement,” you’ll double your likes and shares. So an algorithm that prioritizes keeping you glued to the screen will—unintentionally but inevitably—prioritize outraging and angering you. If it’s more enraging, it’s more engaging. — *location: 2043* ^ref-64665 --- In 2015 a researcher named Motahhare Eslami, as part of a team at the University of Illinois, took a group of ordinary Facebook users and explained to them how the Facebook algorithm works. She talked them through how it selects what they see. She discovered that 62 percent of them didn’t know their feeds were filtered at all, and they were astonished to learn about the algorithm’s existence. One person in the study compared it to the moment in the film The Matrix when the central character, Neo, discovers he is living in a computer simulation. I called several of my relatives and asked them if they knew what an algorithm was. None of them—including the teenagers—did. I asked my neighbors. They looked at me blankly. It’s easy to assume most people know about this, but I don’t think it’s true. — *location: 2055* ^ref-27305 --- When I pieced together what I’d learned, I could see that—when I broke it down—the people I interviewed had presented evidence for six distinct ways in which this machinery, as it currently operates, is harming our attention. (I will come to the scientists who dispute these arguments in chapter eight; as you read this, remember that some of it is controversial.) First, these sites and apps are designed to train our minds to crave frequent rewards. They make us hunger for hearts and likes. When I was deprived of them in Provincetown, I felt bereft, and had to go through a painful withdrawal. Once you have been conditioned to need these reinforcements, Tristan told one interviewer, “it’s very hard to be with reality, the physical world, the built world—because it doesn’t offer as frequent and as immediate rewards as this thing does.” This craving will drive you to pick up your phone more than you would if you had never been plugged into this system. You’ll break away from your work and your relationships to seek a sweet, sweet hit of retweets. Second, these sites push you to switch tasks more frequently than you normally would—to pick up your phone, or click over to Facebook on your laptop. When you do this, all the costs to your attention caused by switching—as I discussed in chapter one—kick in. The evidence there shows this is as bad for the quality of your thinking as getting drunk or stoned. Third, these sites learn—as Tristan put it—how to “frack” you. These sites get to know what makes you tick, in very specific ways—they learn what you like to look at, what excites you, what angers you, what enrages you. They learn your personal triggers—what, specifically, will distract you. This means that they can drill into your attention. Whenever you are tempted to put your phone down, the site keeps drip-feeding you the kind of material that it has learned, from your past behavior, keeps you scrolling. Older technologies—like the printed page, or the television—can’t target you in this way. Social media knows exactly where to drill. It learns your most distractible spots and targets them. Fourth, because of the way the algorithms work, these sites make you angry a lot of the time. Scientists have been proving in experiments for years that anger itself screws with your ability to pay attention. They have discovered that if I make you angry, you will pay less attention to the quality of arguments around you, and you will show “decreased depth of processing”—that is, you will think in a shallower, less attentive way. We’ve all had that feeling—you start prickling with rage, and your ability to properly listen goes out the window. The business models of these sites are jacking up our anger every day. Remember the words their algorithms promote—attack, bad, blame. Fifth, in addition to making you angry, these sites make you feel that you are surrounded by other people’s anger. This can trigger a different psychological response in you. As Dr. Nadine Harris, the surgeon general of California, who you’ll meet later in this book, explained to me: Imagine that one day you are attacked by a bear. You will stop paying attention to your normal concerns—what you’re going to eat tonight, or how you will pay the rent. You become vigilant. Your attention flips to scanning for unexpected dangers all around you. For days and weeks afterward, you will find it harder to focus on more everyday concerns. This isn’t limited to bears. These sites make you feel that you are in an environment full of anger and hostility, so you become more vigilant—a situation where more of your attention shifts to searching for dangers, and less and less is available for slower forms of focus like reading a book or playing with your kids. Sixth, these sites set society on fire. This is the most complex form of harm to our attention, with several stages, and I think probably the most harmful. — *location: 2063* ^ref-3280 --- A major study asked white nationalists how they became radicalized, and a majority named the internet—with YouTube as the site that most influenced them. A separate study of far-right people on Twitter found that YouTube was by far the website they turned to the most. “Just watching YouTube radicalizes people,” Tristan explained. Companies like YouTube want us to think “we have a few bad apples,” he explained to the journalist Decca Aitkenhead, but they don’t want us to ask: “Do we have a system that is systematically, as you turn the crank every day, pumping out more radicalization? We’re growing bad apples. We’re a bad-apple factory. We’re a bad-apple farm.” — *location: 2131* ^ref-6512 --- One was Ronald Purser, who is professor of management at San Francisco State University. He introduced me to an idea I hadn’t heard before—a concept named “cruel optimism.” This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture—like obesity, or depression, or addiction—and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon—but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail. Ronald gave lots of examples of this idea, which was first coined by the historian Lauren Berlant. — *location: 2333* ^ref-20193 --- We won’t give workers insulin, but we’ll give them classes on how to change their thinking. It’s the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.” Let them be present. — *location: 2356* ^ref-30084 --- That’s why, one morning, Aza said to me starkly: “We could just ban surveillance capitalism.” I paused to try to process what he was saying. This would mean, he explained, that the government would ban any business model that tracks you online in order to figure out your weaknesses and then sells that private data to the highest bidder so they can change your behavior. — *location: 2434* ^ref-34591 --- Sometimes, hackers decide to attack a website in a very specific way. They get an enormous number of computers to try to connect to a website all at once—and by doing this, they “overwhelm its capacity for managing traffic, to the point where it can’t be accessed by anyone else, and it goes down.” It crashes. This is called a “denial-of-service attack.” James thinks we are all living through something like a denial-of-service attack on our minds. “We’re that server, and there’s all these things trying to grab our attention by throwing information at us…. It undermines our capacity for responding to anything. It leaves us in a state of either distraction, or paralysis.” We are so inundated “that it fills up your world, and you can’t find a place to get a view on all of it and realize that you’re so distracted and figure out what to do about it. It can just colonize your entire world,” he said. You are left so depleted that “you don’t get the space to push back against it.” — *location: 4148* ^ref-30035 --- With this image in mind, I now had a sense of what a movement to reclaim our attention might look like. I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because children who are imprisoned in their homes won’t be able to develop a healthy ability to pay attention. If we achieve these goals, the ability of people to pay attention would, over time, dramatically improve. Then we will have a solid core of focus that we could use to take the fight further and deeper. — *location: 4263* ^ref-33399 ---