Johann Hari sounds anti-tech – he uses words like “hack”, “invade” and “steal” to describe how technology companies operate – but the UK author insists he’s not.
“I’m not going to join the Amish – no disrespect to the Amish,” he tells ABC RN’s Big Weekend of Books.
He does, however, have strong criticisms of the tech industry; namely, that their wares are specifically designed to “undermine our attention”.
He argues the business model of “big tech” – think companies like Google and apps like Facebook – is “designed to surveil you in order to figure out the weaknesses in your attention … and keep you scrolling”.
“Every additional minute you scroll or your children scroll, they make more money. Every time you or your kids close those apps, they lose money. It’s very simple,” he says.
Yet, he argues, “it doesn’t have to work that way”.
Hari has come to view attention as our “superpower”, worth protecting and nurturing. In doing so himself, he says he’s profoundly changed his life.
Now he wants others to do the same.
‘The building block of absolutely everything’
Hari was motivated to learn more about focus and attention when he realized a few years ago that his was declining.
“It felt for me like things that require deep focus that are so important to me – like reading books, watching long films, having proper conversations with my friends – were getting more and more like running up a down escalator.
“They were getting harder and harder,” he says.
A lack of attention, an abundance of message pings and a compulsion to check emails mightn’t be the biggest crisis we face, but Hari believes it underpins an ability to deal with anyone else.
“[Attention] is the building block of absolutely everything you want to do,” he says.
“Think about anything you’ve ever achieved in your life that you’re proud of. That thing required a huge amount of attention.
“And when your ability to actually pay attention breaks down, your ability to achieve your goals breaks down [and] your ability to solve your problems breaks down.”
Hari interviewed various experts to learn how to remedy his compromised attention, a process he shares in his latest book, Stolen Focus.
UK tech ethicist James Williams told Hari he considers there to be three kinds of attention – each worth protecting for different reasons.
The first is the type of attention needed to complete an immediate task, and an interruption can easily throw us off course. For example, say you go to the kitchen to get a drink. On the way there your friend texts, then you text back, and suddenly you’ve forgotten why you’re there, only to leave without a drink.
The second kind impacts longer-term goals – for example setting up a business, being a good parent or learning to play the guitar.
Here, too, if we’re constantly interrupted, our ability to achieve what we set out to “starts to fail”, Hari says.
The third kind of attention is deeper, required not just to achieve long-term goals, but to conceive of them at all.
“How do you know you want to set up a business? How do you know what it means to be a good parent? You only get your sense of those things if you have time to think, … to rest, … to let your mind wander,” Hari says.
“If you’re jammed up all the time, your ability to see things clearly and figure out who you are and who you want to be also begins to fail.”
What can we do about it?
There’s both a defensive and an offensive way to deal with challenges to our attention, Hari says.
A defensive shift might be to move your phone out of the bedroom at night so it’s not the first and last thing you reach for. It might be deleting a social media app or two, locking your phone away for a period of time each day (as Hari does), or using an app that kicks you off the internet after a certain amount of time online.
“I’m passionately in favor of these individual changes; they’re really important; they’ll help,” Hari says.
“But on their own, they’re not going to solve the problem.”
Enter the offensive move – a significantly bigger task.
Hari believes we should be lobbying and pushing back against structures that are “systematically undermining the ability of all of us to pay attention”.
We should be campaigning for better tech regulation, he says. He offers the example of France, which in 2016 introduced the right to disconnect from out-of-hours emails and neither send nor respond to them.
Structural changes such as these require collective, not individual, actions, which he’d like to see all tech-users take.
“We’ve got to decide that attention is something we value and we’re willing to fight for,” he says.
More attention, less stress, better sleep
Structural changes take time. For now, Hari says he’s made lots of individual changes that “have hugely helped”.
“This is still something I struggle with, partly because it’s just an inherent human struggle and even if we created utopia, there’d still be some struggles over attention.
“But when you start to get your attention back… you start to feel competent again. It’s such a great feeling.”
One change has had a particularly big impact on his life.
While he was writing his latest book, Hari spent three months completely offline. He says the impacts were stark and his attention “went back to being as good as it had been when I was 17”.
“I was much less stressed. I was eating completely differently. I was sleeping much better,” he says.
Hari acknowledges that being offline for so long isn’t an option for everyone, and that it’s a choice that comes from a certain amount of privilege.
He also admits social media and the internet aren’t the only causes of his attention problems.
But anything that pushes us towards having a stronger focus helps, he says.
He now gets off social media for a few months every year.
“I got my friend Lizzie to change my password so I can’t crack,” he says.
“I’m much more productive in those three months … and I feel better.”
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