In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Alysworth & Castro, 2021; Castro & Pham, 2020; Williams, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only attention, but self- control, and addiction as (...) well. Of note are accounts of the attention economy that rely on the ‘brain disease’ rhetoric of addiction and subsequent control failures (Aylsworth & Castro, 2021; Bhargava & Velasquez, 2021), accounts that rely on a strict dichotomy of top-down vs. bottom-up attention (Williams, 2018; Aylsworth & Castro, 2021), and accounts that construe attention as a limited resource (Williams, 2018). -/- Drawing on recent work from the neuroscience and psychology of attention, I demonstrate the shortcomings of these accounts and sketch a way forward for an empirically grounded account of the attention economy. These accounts tend to uphold strict dichotomies of voluntary control (e.g., compulsion versus choice, dual-process models of self-control, and top-down versus bottom-up) that cannot account for the complexities of attentional control, mental agency, and decision-making. As such, these empirically and conceptually impoverished accounts cannot adequately address the current so-called crisis of attention. To better understand the harms associated with the attention economy, we need an empirically responsible account of the nature and function of attention and mental agency. (shrink)

It has been debated whether the so-called attention economy, in which the attention of agents is measured and sold, jeopardizes something of value. One strand of this discussion has focused on so-called attention rights, asking: should attention be legally protected, either by introducing novel rights or by extending the scope of pre-existing rights? In this paper, however, in order to further this discussion, we ask: How is attention already protected legally? In what situations does a person have the right to (...) attention under current law? -/- Unlike (Chomanski, Neuroethics 16:1–11, 2023), who discusses an overall right to attention, or (Puri, Rutgers Law Record 48:206–221, 2021), who discusses an overall right to attentional privacy, in this paper we focus on two types of situations in which a person’s attention is already protected by legal regulation. Sustained attention-requiring tasks can be jeopardized by distractions whereas attentiveness to certain kind of stimuli can be jeopardized by immersive stimuli. That is why distractions are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a concentration right and immersive stimuli are regulated in situations where an agent has what we call a duty to be attentive. The further analysis of these situations provides an understanding of the legal means by which attention is already regulated, which can be helpful when thinking about how it should be regulated in the future. (shrink)

Despite growing understanding of the addictive qualities of the internet, and rising concerns about the effects of excessive internet use on personal wellbeing and mental health, the corresponding ethical debate is still in its infancy, and many of the relevant philosophical and conceptual frameworks are underdeveloped. Our goal in this chapter is to explore some of this evolving terrain. While there are unique ethical considerations that pertain to the formalisation of a disorder related to excessive internet use, our ethical concerns (...) (and indeed our mental health concerns) about whether certain technologies undermine wellbeing can and should be far broader than the debates about the appropriateness of particular diagnostic categories. In this chapter we introduce some of these wider debates with regards to persuasive digital technologies— particularly those which aim to maximise use, or even to encourage compulsive engagement—as well as the difficulty in articulating the harms involved in excessive internet use, especially where such use has not led to functional impairment. Following these conversations we briefly consider some more practical ethical implications, including regulation of certain design features, concerns about growing socioeconomic inequality in online services, and whether there should be a “right to disconnect.”. (shrink)

What explains people's propensity to ask existential questions that they have little hope of resolving, such as: Why are we here? What, if any, is our purpose? What is the structure of the universe? That humans engage in these endeavors has long puzzled evolutionary theorists, as they go beyond the immediate demands of fending for ourselves, seeking safety, finding food, and reproducing, which occupy the daily lives of other animals. In this book, philosopher Helen De Cruz draws on a wide (...) range of disciplines and thinkers, from Aristotle and 12th-century Muslim philosopher Ibn Tufayl to Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel and science writer Rachel Carson, showing how awe and wonder lie at the heart of such existential questions. She argues that there is an emotional basis to this drive for inquiry, as wonder and awe are epistemic emotions that help us think about big-picture questions and that motivate the answers we provide to those questions. (shrink)

In this chapter, I argue that it is impossible to trust the Big Tech companies, in an ethically important sense of trust. The argument is not that these companies are untrustworthy. Rather, I argue that the power to hold the trustee accountable is a necessary component of this sense of trust, and, because these companies are so powerful, they are immune to our attempts, as individuals or nation-states, to hold them to account. It is, therefore, literally impossible to trust Big (...) Tech. After introducing the accounts of trust and power that I deploy, I argue that Big Tech companies have four kinds of power that render them unaccountable: fiscal power, political power, data power, and cognitive power. I conclude by reflecting on recent calls to break up the Big Tech firms, suggesting a new antitrust test in the light of my arguments. (shrink)

Smartphone use plays an increasingly important role in our daily lives. Philosophical research that has used first wave or second wave theories of extended cognition in order to understand our engagement with digital technologies has focused on the contribution of these technologies to the completion of specific cognitive tasks (e.g., remembering, reasoning, problem-solving, navigation).However, in a considerable number of cases, everyday smartphone use is task-unrelated. In psychological research, these cases have been captured by notions such as absent-minded smart-phone use (Marty-Dugas (...) et al., 2018) or smartphone-related inattentiveness (Liebherr et al., 2020).Given the prevalence of these cases, we develop a conceptual framework that can accommodate the functional and phenomenological characteristics of task-unrelated smartphone use. To this end, we will integrate research on second wave extended cognition with mind-wandering research and introduce the concept of ‘extended mind-wandering’. Elaborating the family resemblances approach to mind-wandering (Seli, Kane, Smallwood, et al., 2018), we will argue that task-unrelated smartphone use shares many characteristics with mind-wandering. We will suggest that an empirically informed conceptual analysis of cases of extended mind-wandering can enrich current work on digitally extended cognition by specifying the influence of the attention economy on our cognitive dynamics. (shrink)

Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain the collective irrationality of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, such as partisanship and ideology, exposure to misinformation and conspiracy theories or the effectiveness of public messaging. This paper presents a complementary explanation to epistemic accounts of collective irrationality, focusing on the moral reasons underlying people’s decisions regarding vaccination. We argue that the moralization of COVID-19 risk mitigation measures contributed to the polarization of groups along moral values, which ultimately led to the emergence of collective irrational (...) behaviors. Collective irrationality arises from groups explicitly or implicitly endorsing values that ultimately harm both themselves and those around. The role of social media platforms in amplifying this polarization and contributing to the emergence of collective irrationality is also examined. Finally, potential strategies for addressing the moral sources of collective irrationality are discussed. (shrink)

The term attention has been used to mean so many different things that some have despaired of it being useful at all. This paper is devoted to bringing a modicum of order to the chaos through the time-honored device of categorization. The chief purpose of this paper is to introduce a comprehensive descriptive taxonomy of the nuanced ways the term attention may be employed. It is presented in table form, followed by elucidations and illustrations of each of its items. But (...) first, I offer reasons why a taxonomy of attention is needed and explore some of its possible benefits. After presenting the taxonomy, I sketch by way of example how it might be applied to two interesting questions: is the umbrella term attention still useful?; and, what is it that ties the subdefinitions of attention together yet distinguishes them from other kinds of cognition? (shrink)

What precisely does a distraction threaten? An agent who spends an inordinate amount of time attending to her smartphone – what precisely is she lacking? I argue that whereas agency of attention is the agent’s non-automatic decision-making on what she currently pays attention to, autonomy of attention is the agent, through her second-order desires, effectively interfering with her non-automatic decision-making on what she currently pays attention to. Freedom of attention is the agent’s possibility to hold or switch her focus of (...) attention without fixating on any specific focus against her will or without distraction from chosen foci. This conceptual work provides resources to track manipulations that diminish a person’s freedom of attention. (shrink)

Technologies can have profound effects on social moral systems. Is there any way to systematically investigate and anticipate these potential effects? This paper aims to contribute to this emerging field on inquiry through a case study method. It focuses on two core human values—truth and trust—describes their structural properties and conceptualisations, and then considers various mechanisms through which technology is changing and can change our perspective on those values. In brief, the paper argues that technology is transforming these values by (...) changing the costs/benefits of accessing them; allowing us to substitute those values for other, closely-related ones; increasing their perceived scarcity/abundance; and disrupting traditional value-gatekeepers. This has implications for how we study other, technologically-mediated, value changes. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating how social networking platforms fare as epistemic environments for human users. I begin by proposing a situated concept of epistemic agency as fundamental for evaluating epistemic environments. Next, I show that algorithmic personalisation of information makes social networking platforms problematic for users’ epistemic agency because these platforms do not allow users to adapt their behaviour sufficiently. Using the tracing principle inspired by the ethics of self-driving cars, I operationalise it here and identify (...) three requirements that automated epistemic environments need to fulfil: (a) the users need to be afforded a range of skilled actions; (b) users need to be sensitive to the possibility to use their skills; (c) the habits built when adapting to the platform should not undermine the user’s pre-existing skills. I then argue that these requirements are almost impossible to fulfil all at the same time on current SN platforms; yet nevertheless, we need to pay attention to these whenever we evaluate an epistemic environment with automatic features. Finally, as an illustration, I show how Twitter, a popular social networking platform, will fare regarding these requirements. (shrink)

New technologies are the source of uncertainties about the applicability of moral and morally connotated concepts. These uncertainties sometimes call for conceptual engineering, but it is not often recognized when this is the case. We take this to be a missed opportunity, as a recognition that different researchers are working on the same kind of project can help solve methodological questions that one is likely to encounter. In this paper, we present three case studies where philosophers of technology implicitly engage (...) in conceptual engineering (without naming it as such). We subsequently reflect on the case studies to find out how these illustrate conceptual engineering as an appropriate method to deal with pressing concerns in the philosophy of technology. We have two main goals. We first want to contribute to the literature on conceptual engineering by presenting concrete examples of conceptual engineering in the philosophy of technology. This is especially relevant, because the technologies that are designed based on the conceptual work done by philosophers of technology potentially have crucial moral and social implications. Secondly, we want to make explicit what choices are made when doing this conceptual work. Making explicit that some of the implicit assumptions are, in fact, debated in the literature allows for reflection on these questions. Ultimately, our hope is that conscious reflection leads to an improvement of the conceptual work done. (shrink)

Are we being manipulated online? If so, is being manipulated by online technologies and algorithmic systems notably different from human forms of manipulation? And what is under threat exactly when people are manipulated online? This volume provides philosophical and conceptual depth to debates in digital ethics about online manipulation. The contributions explore the ramifications of our increasingly consequential interactions with online technologies such as online recommender systems, social media, user-friendly design, micro-targeting, default-settings, gamification, and real-time profiling. The authors in this (...) volume address four broad and interconnected themes: • What is the conceptual nature of online manipulation? And how, methodologically, should the concept be defined? • Does online manipulation threaten autonomy, freedom, and meaning in life, and if so, how? • What are the epistemic, affective, and political harms and risks associated with online manipulation? • What are legal and regulatory perspectives on online manipulation? The Philosophy of Online Manipulation brings these various considerations together to offer philosophically robust answers to critical questions concerning our online interactions with one another and with autonomous systems. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in moral philosophy, digital ethics, philosophy of technology, and the ethics of manipulation. (shrink)

This paper argues for the normative significance of attention. Attention plays an important role when describing an individual’s mind and agency, and in explaining many central facts about that individual. In addition, many in the public want answers and guidance with regard to normative questions about attention. Given that attention is both descriptively central and the public cares about normative guidance with regard to it, attention should be central also in normative philosophy. We need an ethics of attention: a field (...) of study of which normative pressures, if any, govern attention. Like the ethics of belief, the ethics of attention will connect those normative questions to issues regarding the nature of attention, i.e. to what is subject to such normative pressures. Philosophers should develop an ethics of attention that helps to provide normative guidance and that is commensurate in its richness to the descriptive significance of attention. The second half of the paper sketches a framework that may help us to get started at developing the ethics of attention. (shrink)

I motivate three claims: Firstly, attentional traits can be cognitive virtues and vices. Secondly, groups and collectives can possess attentional virtues and vices. Thirdly, attention has epistemic, moral, social, and political importance. An epistemology of attention is needed to better understand our social-epistemic landscape, including media, social media, search engines, political polarisation, and the aims of protest. I apply attentional normativity to undermine recent arguments for moral encroachment and to illuminate a distinctive epistemic value of occupying particular social positions. A (...) recurring theme is that disproportionate attention can distort, mislead, and misrepresent even when all the relevant claims are true and well supported by evidence. In the informational cacophony of the internet age, epistemology must foreground the cognitive virtues of attunement. (shrink)

How might emerging and future technologies—sex robots, love drugs, anti-love drugs, or algorithms to track, quantify, and ‘gamify’ romantic relationships—change how we understand and value love? We canvass some of the main ethical worries posed by such technologies, while also considering whether there are reasons for “cautious optimism” about their implications for our lives. Along the way, we touch on some key ideas from the philosophies of love and technology.

Digital technology is rapidly transforming human life. But our cognition is honed for an analog world. I call this the problem of digital whiplash: that the digital transformation of society, like a vehicle whose sudden acceleration injures its occupants, is too fast to be safe. I focus on the unprecedented phenomenon of digital surveillance, which I argue poses a long-term threat to human autonomy that our cognition is ill-suited to recognize or respond to. Human cognition is embodied and context-sensitive, and (...) thus faces four problems of digital whiplash vis-à-vis digital surveillance. First is the problem of signal sparsity, that there are few if any perceptible indications of digital surveillance. Second is the problem of signal elusiveness, that the few indications there are prohibitively difficult to discover. Third is the distraction problem, that using digital technologies corrodes the cognitive abilities we need to recognize and respond to digital surveillance. Fourth is the hooking problem, that digital technologies are engineered to cultivate dependency. I address, among other objections, the idea that we choose to exchange our privacy for the use of digital technologies, so their use is in fact an expression of autonomy. The response to digital whiplash, I argue, is not to slow down the digitalization of society in its current form so that we can adapt our cognitive capacities. It is to allow ourselves the time to reflect on and debate whether digitalization, in its current form, is delivering a socially and ethically desirable future. (shrink)

This chapter serves as an introduction to the edited collection of the same name, which includes chapters that explore digital well-being from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, economics, health care, and education. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to provide a short primer on the different disciplinary approaches to the study of well-being. To supplement this primer, we also invited key experts from several disciplines—philosophy, psychology, public policy, and health care—to share their thoughts on what they (...) believe are the most important open questions and ethical issues for the multi-disciplinary study of digital well-being. We also introduce and discuss several themes that we believe will be fundamental to the ongoing study of digital well-being: digital gratitude, automated interventions, and sustainable co-well-being. (shrink)

This commentary contributes to philosophical reflection on the growing challenge of digital distraction and the value of attention in the digital age. It clarifies the nature of the problem in conceptual and historical terms; analyzes “freedom of attention” as an organizing ideal for moral and political theorizing; considers some constraints of political morality on coercive state action to bolster users’ attentional resources; comments on corporate moral responsibility; and touches on some reform ideas. In particular, the commentary develops a response to (...) an anti-paternalistic line of argument rooted in Mill’s Harm Principle that would oppose state regulation on the grounds that securing attentional capacities is a matter of personal responsibility alone. The commentary engages throughout with James Williams’s recent work on the attention economy by identifying areas of agreement and difference. (shrink)

This chapter serves as an introduction to the edited collection of the same name, which includes chapters that explore digital well-being from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, psychology, economics, health care, and education. The purpose of this introductory chapter is to provide a short primer on the different disciplinary approaches to the study of well-being. To supplement this primer, we also invited key experts from several disciplines—philosophy, psychology, public policy, and health care—to share their thoughts on what they (...) believe are the most important open questions and ethical issues for the multi-disciplinary study of digital well-being. We also introduce and discuss several themes that we believe will be fundamental to the ongoing study of digital well-being: digital gratitude, automated interventions, and sustainable co-well-being. (shrink)

Augmented reality (AR) technologies function to ‘augment’ normal perception by superimposing virtual objects onto an agent’s visual field. The philosophy of augmented reality is a small but growing subfield within the philosophy of technology. Existing work in this subfield includes research on the phenomenology of augmented experiences, the metaphysics of virtual objects, and different ethical issues associated with AR systems, including (but not limited to) issues of privacy, property rights, ownership, trust, and informed consent. This paper addresses some epistemological issues (...) posed by AR systems. I focus on a near-future version of AR technology called the Real-World Web, which promises to radically transform the nature of our relationship to digital information by mixing the virtual with the physical. I argue that the Real-World Web (RWW) threatens to exacerbate three existing epistemic problems in the digital age: the problem of digital distraction, the problem of digital deception, and the problem of digital divergence. The RWW is poised to present new versions of these problems in the form of what I call the augmented attention economy, augmented skepticism, and the problem of other augmented minds. The paper draws on a range of empirical research on AR and offers a phenomenological analysis of virtual objects as perceptual affordances to help ground and guide the speculative nature of the discussion. It also considers a few policy-based and designed-based proposals to mitigate the epistemic threats posed by AR technology. (shrink)

This paper engages in what might be called anticipatory virtue epistemology, as it anticipates some virtue epistemological risks related to a near-future version of brain-computer interface technology that Michael Lynch (2014) calls 'neuromedia.' I analyze how neuromedia is poised to negatively affect the intellectual character of agents, focusing specifically on the virtue of intellectual perseverance, which involves a disposition to mentally persist in the face of challenges towards the realization of one’s intellectual goals. First, I present and motivate what I (...) call ‘the cognitive offloading argument’, which holds that excessive cognitive offloading of the sort incentivized by a device like neuromedia threatens to undermine intellectual virtue development from the standpoint of the theory of virtue responsibilism. Then, I examine the cognitive offloading argument as it applies to the virtue of intellectual perseverance, arguing that neuromedia may increase cognitive efficiency at the cost of intellectual perseverance. If used in an epistemically responsible manner, however, cognitive offloading devices may not undermine intellectual perseverance but instead allow us to persevere with respect to intellectual goals that we find more valuable by freeing us from different kinds of menial intellectual labor. (shrink)

This is an interdisciplinary article providing an account of a phenomenon that is quite widespread but has been thus far mostly neglected by scholars: the overuse of digital technologies. Digital overuse can be defined as a usage of digital technologies that subjects perceive as dissatisfactory and non-meaningful a posteriori. DO has often been implicitly conceived as one of the main obstacle to so-called digital well-being. The article is structured in two parts. The first provides a definition of the phenomenon and (...) a brief review of the explanations provided by various disciplines, in particular psychology and the evolutionary and behavioural sciences. Specifically, the article distinguishes between the endogenous and exogenous factors underlying digital overuse, that is between causes that seem to be intrinsic to digital technologies, and design techniques intentionally aimed at nudging users towards this behaviour. The second part is devoted to a discussion of the ethical concerns surrounding the phenomenon of the overuse of digital technologies, and how it may be possible to reduce such overuse among users. (shrink)

Don Ihde and Lambros Malafouris (Philosophy and Technology 32:195–214, 2019) have argued that “we are homo faber not just because we make things but also because we are made by them.” The emphasis falls on the idea that the things that we create, use, rely on—that is, those things with which we engage—have a recursive effect on human existence. We make things, but we also make arrangements, many of which are long-standing, material, social, normative, economic, institutional, and/or political, and many (...) of which are supported by various technologies, including AI, more and more. Critical theorists, such as Habermas, have argued that we need a “depth” or critical hermeneutics (one that combines hermeneutical understanding with scientific explanation) to provide a full account of this kind of recursivity. For Habermas, the explanatory aspect of critical hermeneutics has been modeled on neo-Marxist and neo-Freudian theories. We propose a new critical hermeneutical approach that uses the tools of embodied cognitive science, affordance theory, material engagement theory, and the concept of the socially extended mind. (shrink)

The Internet has been identified in human enhancement scholarship as a powerful cognitive enhancement technology. It offers instant access to almost any type of information, along with the ability to share that information with others. The aim of this paper is to critically assess the enhancement potential of the Internet. We argue that unconditional access to information does not lead to cognitive enhancement. The Internet is not a simple, uniform technology, either in its composition, or in its use. We will (...) look into why the Internet as an informational resource currently fails to enhance cognition. We analyze some of the phenomena that emerge from vast, continual fluxes of information–information overload, misinformation and persuasive design—and show how they could negatively impact users’ cognition. Methods for mitigating these negative impacts are then advanced: individual empowerment, better collaborative systems for sorting and categorizing information, and the use of artificial intelligence assistants that could guide users through the informational space of today’s Internet. (shrink)

This paper critically investigates the ethical perspectives and practices of individuals and organizations who make persuasive technologies. An organization that claims to be at the forefront of ethical persuasion is behavioral software company Boundless Mind. Yet Boundless Mind sells ostensibly oxymoronic software products: an Application Programming Interface for third-party applications that optimizes the capture of end user attention, and an application for end users on how to make third-party applications less persuasive. Drawing upon Foucault’s interpretation of ethics as an “aesthetics (...) of existence” and the related concept of “therapeutic authority,” I argue Boundless Mind justify the “poaching” and “protecting” of user attention based on a view of the human subject as fixable and their capability to instrumentalize user subjectivity to socially desirable ends. I walkthrough Boundless Mind’s technology-habit-breaking application Space and highlight a behavioral technique administered by Space called stimulus devaluation, which enables the user to develop a transformative relationship with their technology habits and persuasive applications. I conclude the paper by arguing that a persuasive technology ethics based on fixing the user obfuscates the power of persuasive technologists by limiting the scope of ethical inquiry to the activities of the user. (shrink)

The afterword discusses how this special issue’s articles work from different angles to unsettle the precepts of “attentional sovereignty” — the socially, politically, and economically valorized virtue that anchors most discussions over attention in its contemporary technological predicament. Whether the attentional sovereign appears in its liberal humanist or its neoliberal behavioral economic guise, sovereignty is valorized and considered under threat. By revealing the contemporary and historical backstories to our investment in this notion, these articles shift the terms of the debate (...) around the attention crisis and clear space for thinking anew about the possibilities and limits of attention today. (shrink)

This contribution focuses on one member in particular of the anthropocenic triad Earth – technology – humankind, namely the current form of human subjectivity that characterizes humankind in the Anthropocene. Because knowledge, desire and behavior are always embedded in a particular form of subjectivity, it makes sense to look at the current subjective structure that embeds knowledge, desire and behavior. We want to move beyond the common psychological explanations that subjects are unable to correctly assess the consequences of their current (...) technological lifestyle or unable to change their lifestyle because well-intended behavior is modified by factors such as laziness, lack of knowledge, seduction by convenience, etc. Instead, we will argue from a philosophical point of view that transcendental illusions play a central role in a contemporary account of subjectivity. Consumerism is considered as a means of not becoming a subject and framed in a profound ambivalence at the heart of our acting against better knowledge. We appeal to collective transcendental conditions of subjectivity in the Anthropocene in terms of illusions without owners – a term borrowed from Robert Pfaller’s work on interpassivity. Central in our account is the idea that illusions without owners are the conditions of possibility for the disconnection between knowledge and behavior – the characteristic par excellence of the Anthropocene. (shrink)