Your phone or your freedom?

Lately, I've been trying to spend more time doing nothing. I'll sit down, or go on a walk, and, instead of reaching for my phone, spend a few minutes letting my mind wander. Or at least, that's what I hope will happen. Instead, and despite investing years in therapy, device hygiene, and meditative practices to rid myself of social media addictions and train my mind to rest, I still find it challenging to sit for even five minutes without reaching for something – anything – to fill the smallest amounts of idle time.

Of course, I'm not the only one facing this challenge. The average American checks their phone hundreds of times per day, a number that has soared in recent years. That's a problem, because our brains need idle time to turn our day-to-day experiences into durable memories, to build on hunches that lead to inspiration and innovation, and even to develop the complex cognitive processes that allow us to make meaning of the world and our place in it. It's no wonder, then, that the so-called attention economy's demand that we fill every second with a distraction appears to be taking its toll on both individuals and society.

Just last week, the Financial Times reported on a large, longitudinal survey of Americans that found a troubling long-term decline in conscientiousness, the personality trait associated with responsibility and follow-through, concentrated among young people. This new data joins research that has found increasing levels of loneliness and mental illness rates, particularly among the young.

Though the causes of the decline in conscientiousness are complex and will require more research to fully understand, the authors note that the attention economy is a likely contributor:

The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them. The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting”.

Researchers warn that these crises, if proven to be real and durable, could pose a civilization-level risk. Conscientiousness, in particular, is a trait that society depends on to function. If we can't expect strangers to keep their promises and follow basic norms and customs, we become less likely to hold up our own end of the bargain, creating a vicious circle that can create the conditions for the kind of widespread resentment and distrust of our fellow citizens that leads to very dark outcomes.

It's important to understand how technologies are changing individual human behavior from the bottom up. But as with all technological revolutions, the individual experience is only half of the story. As our behavior changes in response to technology, society's most powerful institutions tend adapt to those changes, too, often to reinforce the behaviors most beneficial to them. The more I've been able to distance myself from my devices and observe my own thought processes, and the behavior of others, the more I've been able to understand the coercive ways in which the attention economy's features are being used to change the way we live from the top down.

Making Time

In one of my first interviews for a technology job, I asked my potential boss the classic question of how he made sure that his work would be used for good. He responded with a still-common line, apparently originated by Noam Chomsky, that technology itself is neutral. It's how we use it that matters.

While generally true, I've come to believe that Chomsky's observation underestimates the ways in which technology's specific features determine its likely impacts. I think it's more accurate to say that technology is neutral, but shifts power in unpredictable ways. Or, as media theorist Neil Postman said in his 1990 speech Informing Ourselves To Death, "technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose."

In his speech, Postman cited the example of mechanical clocks. Originally invented in the 12th and 13th centuries by Benedictine monks to help them better track their daily periods of devotion to God, clocks were soon seized upon by capital owners to impose and enforce regular schedules on their workers.

If your initial reaction, like mine, is to ask what's so bad about having regular working schedules, that thought alone is worth examining. Prior to mechanical clocks, people's lives, and the economies they lived in, were more "task-oriented" than time-oriented. Tasks like, say, milking cows, were understood to take certain amounts time and to be possible only when cows were ready to be milked. People were largely compensated based on what they produced, not how long it took them to produce it.

Of course, clocks, and the derivative inventions built on them, have yielded extraordinary benefits. But one cost of these benefits is that most of us spend our days rushing from one meeting to another, or grinding to shave an extra minute or two off of our assigned tasks, without questioning whether we should. The fact that life without clocks is unimaginable today shouldn't be interpreted only as evidence of progress. It should also be understood as a sign that, once adopted, the changes to power structures that new technologies enable can quickly recede into the background of everyday life until they become invisible to us.

Applying that framework to the attention economy, we should be asking who benefits most from a world where everyone is constantly distracted. Here, too, Postman has an answer: those who are adept at commanding attention. In his seminal 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman argued that television, in turning public discourse into entertainment, has become a sort of mass narcotic, similar to the "soma" of Aldous Huxley's sci-fi classic Brave New World. In a world where everything is entertainment, we tend to judge everything, including politics, not on its substance or impact, but on how consuming it makes us feel.

It's easy to draw the through line from Postman's 40 year-old observation to our reality TV president. But the rise of the attention economy, particularly via the medium of social media, has in some ways been even more insidious than television. Unlike television, social media demands participation and dialog. But because its algorithms are designed to sell ads, it prioritizes the types of dialog that get the most engagement, which tends to be negative, emotional, and belief-affirming. It's no wonder that conscientiousness is receding given that if you spend most of your time on social media, you might believe that half the world is out to get you.

For all its rage-provoking bluster, social media can have curious little impact on real-world behavior. In 2023, a host of studies found that, although the majority of content Facebook users see does tend to align with their pre-existing beliefs, it does little to change their views or attitudes. All of that posting, commenting, and liking, signifying nothing. While some researchers found this result surprising, or suspect, given that Facebook (sorry, Meta) funded it, I believe it perfectly illustrates the way the attention economy is shifting power.

Sound and Fury

In his 1935 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, philosopher Walter Benjamin argued that fascism maintains its power, in part, by giving citizens the ability to express their desire for change without the actual ability to affect those changes. Social media, which allows everyone to shout into the void with limited impacts on anyone else's behavior, while amplifying the most extreme, belief-affirming content, may thus be the perfect enabler for the fascist and populist movements gaining steam around the globe.

There are at least three ways in which the particular features of the attention economy may be shifting power for the benefit of anti-democratic actors. The first is that by concentrating attention on the most extreme voices, social media, in particular, gives anti-institutional political actors who are capable of commanding attention ways to do so outside of traditional power structures, enabling them to bypass formal policymaking apparatuses and claim to rule by decree. Pick just about any one of Trump's 2025 Truth posts as an example. Even, or perhaps especially, when their discourse proves to be hollow, the aesthetics of social media allow these actors to claim to be advancing their agendas, satisfying their followers even when they have done very little, or in fact the opposite.

The second is that by prioritizing and rewarding shallower forms of engagement, digital organizing, while effective at amassing large groups of people and large amounts of donations, tends to fall short when it comes to developing the deep social ties necessary to build sustained opposition that are typically formed over months and years of activists spending time together. If you've been to any of the major protests this year, you've probably felt this disconnect as you march in your bubble of family and friends without knowing anything about the thousands of people alongside you. Thus, everyone from the Trump administration to New York Governor Kathy Hochul, after her bizarre decision to extra-legally suspend congestion pricing, can tolerate significant amounts of discursive opposition and even on-the-ground protest without risking real political backlash.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the attention economy strips us of significant amounts of agency by giving us the illusion of choice in how to spend our time. We have nearly unlimited amounts of content we could choose to consume, and hundreds of enraging events we might post about every day. But if our only real choice is to consume or create content, either because we’re functionally addicted or because we believe it’s the best way to fill time, we’re no longer truly in control of our behavior. Increasingly, we're ceding it to those who benefit from keeping us glued to our devices, instead paying attention to what's going on around us.

State of Attention

In resisting the urge to fill every minute of my time with a screen, I often watch people around me interact with theirs. Seeing people flip through social media, games, books, and messages appears so normal, just like glancing at the clock, waiting for a meeting to start. When I manage not to pull out my own phone, I usually start to feel uncomfortable, like some kind of voyeur refusing to avert my eyes from the intimate activities of strangers. I can understand why conscientiousness is on the decline when the act of not ignoring those around you feels so uncivil.

Of course, I'm far from the most intrusive observer of these moments. Every single app and website each one of us uses is collecting a treasure trove of data about our behavior, then turning around and selling it – or worse, giving it away to our governments. Every extra minute we spend on a device is an extra minute's worth of potential information our government knows about us. Even with the most trustworthy administration in power, that trade shouldn't be made lightly.

In his book Seeing Like A State, political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott argued that states are largely in the business of making their subjects legible, so that they can be organized and controlled. To do this, states often coerce subjects into adopting more homogenous behaviors that are easier to surveil and direct. Scott contended that even tools like agriculture, which many of us think of as synonymous with progress, were coopted by early states to make taxation and population management easier than hunter-gatherer and semi-sedentary cultures allowed.

Viewed through Scott's lens, the attention economy should be seen as a particularly attractive tool for states seeking to further understand and control their subjects. Not only does online activity render us extremely legible, generating thousands of data points per person per day, but, as discussed above, even the most viral digital discourse poses very little threat to power.

I can think of almost nothing more attractive to those in power, regardless of party or ideology, than entire populations who spend the vast majority of their time ignoring each other in favor of consuming and producing content that has very little impact on mass behavior while allowing themselves to be constantly surveilled. It's no wonder that governments left and right have resisted regulating social media companies, used it to vet immigrants and travelers, and are now actively adopting generative AI, which promises to make even more activities, online and off, legible to systematic surveillance.

And yet, I'm no more likely to give up my phone than I am my watch. So what is a powerless subject to do?

Turn Off, Tune In, Go Out

As usual, kids likely have the answer. In a survey written up by columnist Lenore Skenazy and psychologists Zach Rausch and Jonathan Haidt, children overwhelmingly said they want to spend less time on their devices, but struggle to do so because of how addicting they are, and how few other choices they're given for how to spend their time away from adults. The answer, according to Skenazy, Rausch, and Haidt, is to let them loose on the world to spend time amongst each other without the rigid structures imposed by adult supervision.

I suspect adults, who can be even more tied to their phones than kids, can learn a similar lesson. The more time we spend out in the world, interacting with each other rather than our devices, the less time, and information, we give to those who would seek to monitor and control us.

The next time you feel the urge to take out your phone, especially to avoid seeming bored in public, consider pushing against it. Take a few minutes to do nothing. Lean into the awkwardness of being the only one paying attention to the people around you. Maybe even consider making eye contact with one of those strangers. Though they're small, these little acts of resistance may add up to far more than even the most viral social media post. At the very least, they'll remind you that despite living through an era closing civil society and economic opportunity, you are still free to choose how to spend your idle time. These days, any amount of freedom is precious.