And at long last, I finally arrive at the final post in my series on Johann Hari’s important book, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention – And How to Think Deeply Again. This series stretched on for longer than I intended, but I hope that you have found it helpful. You can find the previous post in this series here (and from it link back through all the previous posts) :
[ “A Flaw in The World We Built” ]
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This final post in the series will look at the “How to Think Deeply Again” parts of Johann Hari’s book, or in other words, Hari’s proposals for how we can begin to recover our attention. These proposals are found in chapters 9, 11, and his conclusion entitled “Attention Rebellion.” Judging simply by the numbers of chapters and pages, Hari devotes substantially more energy to the first facet of his title (“Why you can’t pay attention”) than the second one. And thus, like many other books in the same critique genre, much more energy flows into analyzing the problem, and overshadows the efforts to explore how we might move forward in a more helpful direction.
To be fair, Hari is rightfully concerned about dishing out simplistic, individualized solutions (See the previous post in this series on Cruel Optimism). If we hadn’t figured this out by the time we get to the book’s conclusion, Hari emphasizes there that Stolen Focus is not a self-help book. And he seems also to have a keen sense of how messy and contingent social solutions to these kinds of social ills can be. He admits, for example, that: “[Measuring] the changes these sites [i.e., Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc.] are triggering is really complicated and hard to figure out. We have to be honest that we are making decisions based on a lot of uncertainty here” (163). However, he is not hesitant to begin envisioning what social solutions might look like.
For instance, in Chapter Nine: “The First Glimpses of the Deeper Solution,” he suggests that one way forward would be to ban surveillance capitalism. He is skeptical that tech companies that profit from laying siege to our attention will voluntarily change their ways. “[If] Facebook won’t stop promoting fascism – promoting Nazism in Germany – they will never care about protecting your focus and attention. … They have to be stopped by us. (165). And so, he looks toward regulatory solutions imposed on technology platforms. A ban on surveillance capitalism, of course, would have major financial implications for technology companies like Google and Facebook whose current business models rely on personal data collected through surveillance. Hari imagines several ways that these corporations could continue to thrive beyond such a ban – including shifting to a paid subscription model, or becoming publicly owned non-governmental entities (e.g., like the BBC is in the UK). Although Western nations are still nowhere close to the sort of ban that Hari proposes, it is fascinating to note that – in the 2+ years since the book’s publication – we seem to be moving toward greater restriction of such surveillance. Europe is substantially ahead of the US in this regard, and here in the US there has been little movement at the federal level, but some states, most notably California, are moving toward greater transparency and restriction around the collection and use of personal data (via their CCPA and CRPA legislation).
But imposing legislative resistance on technology companies is not the only solution that Hari recommends. He also explores the socioeconomic forces that grind us down, dilute our attention, and make us even more susceptible to the addictive nature of social media technologies. In Chapter 11, he offers helpful stories of “places that figured out how to reverse the surge in speed and exhaustion.” Again, these stories are ones of social resistance to the increasing culture of speed in the Western world. The two proposals that he suggests here – and supports with stories where they have been used effectively – are shortening the work week, and restricting the demands that our employers can make on us during our time off. Both of these solutions are plausible, and would move us forward toward recovering some degree of our capacity for attention, but they also both face stiff resistance from corporate and other powers that have a vested interest in their failure.
In the book’s conclusion, Hari lays out six changes that he has made to his own life in response to what he has learned from his research. He emphasizes though that each person will need to find their own parameters for recovering attention (and thus, I will not recount his changes here). He then moves on to imagine what a social movement for recovering attention might look like. In addition to the notions of banning surveillance capitalism and shortening the work week (as described above), he adds a third goal: “rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely – in their neighborhoods and at school” (274). He admits that these three goals are audacious, but notes that any major movement for social change is driven by goals that seem nearly absurd at the outset.
If we cannot recover our capacity for attention, he concludes, we will not be able to address climate change, or any other major social crisis, adequately. We need, he argues, an attention rebellion, a concerted social effort to take back our attention from the powers that profit handsomely from our distraction.
I find Hari’s account largely compelling (hence my spending months engaging in detail with it here), but I’m not completely convinced that the “attention rebellion” he imagines will necessarily bear the fruit of “how to think deeply again” as his title suggests. Yes, it could easily create a social space in which deep thinking could be cultivated, but he doesn’t really offer much in the way of our formation into deeper habits of thinking.
In this regard, my next post (or maybe two at most) will focus on two crucial new books that explore this sort of formation in detail. These books are: How to Focus: A Monastic Guide for An Age of Distraction which is an adaptation of the early Christian monastic John Cassian’s work created by Jamie Kreiner, and Deep Reading: Practices to Subvert the Vices of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age. I hope that these reviews will serve as a nice supplement to this series on Stolen Focus.
Has this series on Stolen Focus been helpful to you? Any posts in it that were especially helpful? If you read this post in your email, reply and drop me a line. Or leave a comment here for others to engage with.
I read Hari's book a couple of months ago and really resonated with it, but yes I agree on the conclusion you're drawing. Becoming undistracted is an extremely important first step, but taking the next steps toward thinking deeply will require different tools