attention in the digital age. I think it's more than just distraction, and it's more

than even just addiction. It could actually be the defining political and moral challenge

of our time. I want to start with clearing the ground with

an observation that Herbert Simon made in the 1970s – “when information becomes

abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource”. This is an observation that I think we're

only just starting to understand what it means for human life and society.

This whole environment that has emerged in the last couple of years to compete for our

attention in scientific, systematic ways is often called the attention economy.

If you think about the goals that you have for yourself, your life, today, this week,

this year – they're probably things like, I want to spend more time with family, I want

to learn how to play the piano, I want to take that trip I've been thinking about

and reflect on my life – these are real human goals.

But if you look at the goals that technologies have for us – they're not usually these

things – they're things like - maximise the amount of time we spend with them, time

on site, or the number of clicks, the number of times we can scroll or tap, the number

of page views or ad views – things like this.

There's a deep fundamental gap here, between the goals we have and the goals our technologies

have for us. And so, I think there is this kind of inconvenient truth that we either

kind of ignore, or maybe don't know about a lot of the time, which is that the attention

economy, by and large, is not on our side. Its goals are not our goals. We trust these

things to be GPS for our lives, but really they're directing us to these petty engagement

goals. And this is very well known by the people

who create them – the CEO of Netflix a little while back said in addition to Snapchat and

YouTube, one of their major competitors was sleep. Steve Jobs did not let his children

use the iPad, right? Broadly speaking, what's happened in the

last couple of decades is our knowledge of psychology, and particularly our non-rational

biases, these vulnerabilities in our brain, you know, non-rational dynamics of decision

making, we've developed an enormous catalogue of these things, and at the same time this

system has emerged on the internet – a system of measurement, message delivery, optimisation

and experimentation – and these two trends have come into conversation now in the attention

economy. What this means now is that this industrial-scale persuasion is now the primary

business model of our first really major global communications medium.

And this isn't widely talked about. We still call companies like Facebook or Google social

media companies, but they're not selling social media, they're selling our attention.

But I think another factor that makes this so urgent is this power to shape people's

attention, to persuade people to one end or another, is increasingly centralised in the

hands of just a few people, in a few companies, in one state, in one country.

It's a weird irony that the whole point of the internet was that it was decentralized

in its infrastructure, but then the platforms that have emerged on it have been so so centralized

so that literally there are people who would probably fit in this room who have their hands

on levers that can control the attentional habits of over 2 billion people on Planet

Earth. What I realised when I was working at Google

is, looking across at the industry, at the state of the attention economy and how little

it was being talked about it society and then feeling its effects in my own life, honestly

– that there was more technology around me than ever before but it was harder somehow

to do what I wanted to do - I felt we'd made the same mistake that Aldous Huxley talked

about when he was lamenting that the defenders of freedom in his own time had failed to take

into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

I want to suggest that if we're at all serious about promoting freedom or autonomy in the

digital age, it's really urgent for us to look at this situation and to start taking

into account our infinite appetite for distractions. I think what that would entail is starting

to assert and defend our freedom of attention.