In the summer of 2017, Hurricane Irma—a monster category 5 hurricane—was bearing down on us. The storm was projected to make a head-on collision with the southernmost point of Florida (where we both live), and then it was going to travel up the peninsula, threatening virtually every region of the state.
When a storm of this magnitude makes landfall, an unthinkable amount of ocean water is shoved up onto shore. Sea levels rise by eighteen feet or more. Over a foot of rainwater is dumped on top of those surging waters. All the while, winds in excess of 155 mph bring what can best be described as “total devastation.”
Preparing for storms like Irma requires an enormous amount of social cooperation. Residents—especially those expected to be affected by storm surge—need to evacuate. But nearly as important, other residents need to refrain from evacuating. Here, one is reminded of Hurricane Rita, which is estimated to have taken over 100 lives via over evacuation: people dying, horrifically, of heat stroke and dehydration as a result of running out of gas and water in gridlock traffic. Hurricanes are life-or-death tests of our ability to coordinate the actions of millions of human beings.
Before we get to that story, let’s step back. This is supposed to be a blog post about autonomy, mobile devices, and the attention economy. What do hurricanes have to do with any of this?
To answer that question, we need to say a few words about autonomy and some of the empirical findings about the effects of our excessive use of mobile devices and social media.
These days, it is difficult to avoid discussions of the harmful effects of smartphones and the attention economy. Newspapers are teeming with headlines about dopamine, addiction, fake news, democracy, and the technological arms race to capture our attention. It has become commonplace to hear people talk about their efforts (or at least their desire) to reduce their screen time. People are worried that their phones are making them more anxious or depressed. They are getting less sleep; they find it harder to focus; and they have less self-esteem. There is now an entire cottage industry dedicated to helping people rebuild their relationship with their phones: self-help books, digital detox retreats, mindfulness practices, and even (somewhat ironically) apps to monitor and restrict usage.
There is a wealth of empirical evidence to back up these worries. Psychologists and neuroscientists are becoming increasingly alarmed about the effects that smartphones have on everything from executive function and working memory to literacy and relationship satisfaction. And that should already be enough to generate prudential reasons to restructure your relationship with your phone—to be more deliberate about how you use it. Doing so is likely to make you better off in some respects. But if you believe that autonomy matters morally, then you might see the issue in a different light. You may conclude that you are, in fact, morally obligated to rebuild your relationship with technology.
Many people find it hard to resist the claim that autonomy has moral weight. As much disagreement as there is between thinkers like Kant and Mill, the two of them converged on this point. You ought to be the author of your own life story. As a rational agent, you have a right to self-govern—to set and pursue your own ends. This is why, in most cases, it would be wrong for someone to undermine your autonomy by manipulating or coercing you. We tend to believe that something has gone awry when you act on alien desires.
If that sounds plausible to you, then you should be alarmed by the empirical findings on smartphones and social media. The research attests to what many of us have already felt; we are deeply alienated from our relationships with these devices. A majority of users report that they use their phones too much. People would like to cut back, but they often struggle to do so. They find their devices irresistible. As a result, it takes some coaxing to get people to do what they already believe to be in their own self-interest.
In 2018, a group of economists conducted the largest study to date on the effects of social media on well-being. They wanted to find out how much they would have to pay people to quit using Facebook for just one month. The average figure ended up being $180. Ironically, the majority of people reported feeling happier without it. They spent more time with family and friends, and they used Facebook less often after the study was over. Perhaps the most shocking statistic was that those in the study reported an increase in well-being that is equivalent to the jump you would get from earning $30,000 more in annual income.
There is surely something wrong with a situation in which you have to pay people to do something that is in their own self-interest. It would be terribly strange if you had to plead with someone in order to get them to begrudgingly accept a $30,000 pay raise. But that is exactly how people feel about their phones and social media. They don’t want to use them so much, but they are unable to quit. And when that is the case, people do not seem to be in control of their own lives. We appear to have forfeited some of our autonomy to these devices that we carry with us everywhere we go. People have, as Thoreau once quipped, “become tools of their tools.”
We believe that this situation is morally worrisome. We think there are moral reasons to restructure your relationship with technology and to help your students (and others) do the same. If what we have described so far resonates with you, then you may already be on board. You believe that autonomy matters morally, and you think there may be some ways that the attention economy is undermining your autonomy. But you might be a skeptic. Perhaps you are not convinced that this applies to you. You may be one of the lucky few who is perfectly content with the amount of time you spend on your devices and the ways that you use them. Your autonomy has not been compromised, so why should you be concerned?
This brings us back to hurricanes.
In addition to being concerned with personal autonomy, there are good reasons to care about our ability to act autonomously as a group. In many cases, there are serious problems that we cannot solve as individuals. In order to respond to things like climate change or global pandemics, we need to alter the behavior of large groups of people. In some situations, we have created institutions—group agents—to deal with these problems. For instance, we have charged the National Hurricane Center with “saving lives” and “mitigating property loss” by issuing forecasts and being a “calm, clear, trusted voice in the eye of the storm.”
But what happens when people do not trust institutions? What happens when those institutions are no longer perceived as trustworthy because they have lost their ability to signal their competence? When trust and trustworthiness break down, we lose our ability to act effectively as a group. We may struggle with vaccination rates, because people do not trust medical authorities or regulatory bodies. We might find it difficult to preserve our democracy when there is widespread distrust in elections. And people might not listen when the National Hurricane Center tells them to evacuate or to stay put.
Once again, there is an abundance of research from social scientists that has demonstrated the effect of the attention economy on our capacity for trust. If we want to address the breakdown of our collective ability to set and pursue our own ends, we cannot ignore the ways that our collective capacities are being undermined by algorithms that were designed to maximize the amount of time we spend looking at screens. And we cannot ignore the fact that posts that express or elicit outrage climb to the top of our news feeds because they command our attention and that these posts, pushed to the top of news feeds because they are engaging, are part of a feedback loop that is detrimental to our ability to trust one another.
This story touches everything from the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar to the Zika virus in Brazil. And whether you live in Hurricane Alley or not, you surely have a stake in the future of democratic legitimacy. And that legitimacy depends crucially on trust and trustworthiness.
We are witnessing a massive breakdown of trust at all levels. People have lost confidence in vital institutions; they do not trust members of perceived outgroups; and they have even lost trust in themselves. It is hard to deny the role that smartphones and the attention economy have played in this saga. They may not have started the fire, but they have certainly stoked the flames of polarization and moral outrage. As Harindra Dissanayake—a presidential advisor in Sri Lanka—said after witnessing mass, fatal, social media-fueled ethnic violence against Muslims, “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind.”
By allowing ourselves to become compulsively tethered to the constant stream of content coming from our devices, we are undermining our autonomy—collective and individual—one swipe at a time.
Charlie Taben graduated from Middlebury College in 1983 with a BA in philosophy and has been a financial services executive for nearly 40 years. He studied at Harvard University during his junior year and says one of the highlights of his life was taking John Rawls’ class. Today, Charlie remains engaged with the discipline, focusing on Spinoza, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. He has worked with the APA Blog, creating the Philosophy and the Mirror of Technology Series. Charlie has also performed volunteer work for the Philosophical Society of England. You can find Charlie on Twitter @gbglax
Tim Aylsworth
Tim Aylsworth is an assistant professor of philosophy at Florida International University in Miami. He works on a variety of issues in normative and applied ethics. He is especially interested in questions about autonomy, manipulation, technology, and collective harm. He is co-authoring a book about Kantian ethics and the attention economy with Clinton Castro
Clinton Castro
Clinton Castro is an assistant professor of information science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Before that, he was an assistant professor of philosophy at Florida International University, where he and Tim first began their conversations about their (and their children and students') relationships with screens. His main areas of specialization are information ethics, epistemology, and fair machine learning
