Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

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

If we’re going to stand a chance of reclaiming our own attention, we have to really understand that our attention does have great value, to us, to our lives, to our well-being, to our collective future; it matters what we give our attention to.

Dr. James Williams—who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University—he told me: “If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can’t do that, it’s really hard to do anything.”