On cruel optimism

Can we really be expected to take on the onus of change?

I’ve gotten into the habit of screenshotting books that I want to read. It’s not exactly a productive exercise because I very rarely remember to go through said screenshots. So, when I picked up Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention by Johann Hari this past summer, I found it quite fitting that I had 5 screenshots of the book spanning 18 months. I clearly wanted to read this book, it just took me a year and a half to focus on it.

Finally reading Stolen Focus was a big turning point for me. Hari took the path that I’ve day dreamed about for years — taking an entire season completely disconnected. He left his laptop, tablet, and smartphone at his apartment, then moved to a rental home near the beach for two months. I’ve often joked about wanting to spend a few months in a cave, away from everything. Hari opted for the more scenic view.

Hari documents his experience without technology and interviews experts as he journeys to better understand why our attention spans have decreased and why our ability to focus has been obliterated in recent decades.

Halfway through the book, I began wondering how it would conclude — how would Hari suggest we fix this problem we find ourselves in? Is there any hope for us? I won’t spoil the book’s conclusion, but he does bring up a really unique perspective that I want to discuss — one that I hadn’t heard before.

Cruel optimism

As Hari walks us through the twelve factors that have tentacles into our attention problems — including the obvious (too much time on our phones, the designs that keep us there) and the not-so-obvious (lack of sleep, diet) — he introduces the idea of cruel optimism.

From the book, “This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression, or addiction - and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon - but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.”

Hari’s POV is that the people responsible for fixing the problem are those who are causing the problem. In this case, it’s the tech companies who have designed social media platforms and phone apps to suck us in and keep us put.

He acknowledges, however, that tech companies will never make changes of their own accord. These companies profit from you through advertising and more importantly, mining and selling your data. For these companies to do the right thing and own up to the harm they’re doing, they’d have to take a loss. When there’s money involved, you can count on companies to choose money over “the right thing” 9 out of 10 times.

This means that to enact real change, there would need to be government oversight and regulations. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Hari from Thought Economics (condensed for context):

Q: Is this problem solvable?

[Johann Hari]: When you and I were young, the standard form of petrol was leaded, and our paints were leaded too. It was discovered that exposure to lead can profoundly damage our brains (the brains of children in particular) and so having paint in our walls, and in our air from fumes was clearly bad. A group of ordinary mothers banded together and decided to do something about it. Importantly, they didn’t say, ‘let’s get rid of all paint and petrol!’ they campaigned to remove the component of the pant and petrol that was harming children’s brains. They fought like hell… they fought for years… and they won. There’s no lead in our paint anymore… there’s no leaded petrol anymore… As a result of this campaign, the average child is 3-5 IQ points higher than they would have been had lead not been banned. That’s a great model for how we should think about tech.

….

Today, as soon as you open Twitter, TikTok or Facebook, those apps start to make money out of you immediately. They make money out of you in two ways. First, they show you advertising… Secondly, and much more importantly, they gather huge amounts of data on you and your behaviour which is analysed by algorithms and then used to push products and content back to you. They are hacking your attention to keep you scrolling and clicking.

In the same way that those mothers stood-up and said that lead in paint and petrol was unacceptable, we must stand up and say that a business model based on secretly tracking us in order to find, and exploit, weaknesses in our attention is not acceptable. It’s immoral. Technology companies push back and say that there are no business models which can fix this, but that’s simply not true. The simplest business model is subscription – you pay a certain amount for access… we do this all the time with Netflix, HBO, Spotify…. Another business model is to treat these platforms as a public good, like our sewers for example. Right now, to use this analogy, our sewage pipes are giving us cholera!

These companies will never do this on their own accord – it will take a movement to press for regulation.

Can we regulate Big Tech?

Here is where my opinion starts to differ with Hari a bit.

Let’s start with three things that I agree with:

1. Yes, tech companies should carry the onus for change, clean up the mess they made.

2. With money involved, they will never change their model. Morality be damned (see: Insurance industry).

3. Government oversight and regulation are likely the only way we will have change at the scale we need as a society.

And yet, I don’t believe that impactful regulations will ever be enacted. I despise being the pessimist in a discussion on cruel optimism, however, in America, we cannot even pass simple gun reform.

There may be hope for younger generations. In Australia, the government recently banned social media for minors under 16. Jon Haidt of The Anxious Generation and organizations like Wait Until 8th have made strides in creating movements here in the U.S.

When it comes to us grown ups, I fear that the change we may be owed is not the change we will receive.

Further into the Thought Economics article, Hari says this, “Cruel optimism is where someone comes along with a very simple app which says you can mediate for a few minutes a day and it will give you your attention back. It’s optimistic because you’re offering a solution in an upbeat tone – but it’s cruel because solution is small, and incommensurate to the scale of the causes. You are in effect setting up people to fail.”

What he says here has merit, of course, but I can’t help myself from shaking my head – we can’t count on leaders to help us, so we have to build the tools to help ourselves.

I have to put the work in to make changes with my relationship with technology or else only I will suffer. If I am going to wait around for leaders to make change, I will be wasting years of my life.

A movement for change

Hari concludes in the interview ”When we think about reclaiming our attention, we need to create a movement, we need to raise consciousness...Together, we can change these things. This isn’t a force of nature we’re dealing with… our attention has collapsed because it’s been stolen. We need to take it back. We’re not weak… we’re not peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for a few little crumbs of attention…. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our minds. We can take them back if we want to.”

And here is where I again agree, but with a twist.

A movement does need to happen. We need a wave of dissenters and technology rebels. We need a group of people who will fight for their attention back. We need to be brave enough to leave social media in droves, to take away Big Tech’s data, their advertising clicks.

We can fight back against the powers that be BY making changes to our own habits.

At the end of the day, at the end of this life, all we are left with are the choices we make. We can control our own actions and be the movement of change together.

How’s that for optimism?