Bicycle to Runaway Train

It’s been 33 years since Steve Jobs talked about the personal computer becoming a bicycle for the mind. In that time, the advent of the smartphone and mass adoption of social media have turned those bicycles into runaway trains. Over the last 3 decades, billions of dollars of research funded by the attention economy have gone to developing weapons grade distraction machines deployed on every screen in the world.

“When we invented the ship, we invented the shipwreck” - Paul Virilio

Americans spend more than 4 hours a day on their phones, and more than half say they are addicted to their cell phone. The surgeon general issued a warning in May of 2023 about the concerning effects of social media on youth mental health.

Most of us probably do not require such statistics to identify the phenomenon; our own habits reveal that the state of digital wellbeing today is a grim one. There is a fundamental misalignment between human attention and intention when engaging with screens.

But I’m an optimist about this, here’s why:

Behavioral misalignment is not a new problemWe have an unfair advantage because it’s a digitally native problem Addressing Problems of Behavioral Misalignment “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes” - Mark Twain The Universal Challenge of Behavioral Misalignment

Behavioral misalignment – where our actions diverge from our best interests – is a recurring challenge across various domains. From the obesity epidemic spurred on by the mass introduction of processed foods to habitual overspending that came on the heels of access to easy credit, history is replete with examples of such misalignments. However, the trend in U.S. cigarette smoking provides a promising example of progress in society-wide issues of behavioral misalignment.

The downward pressure on this graph was driven by a number of efforts in concert:

Public Awareness and Education: The Surgeon General's 1964 report on smoking's health risks sparked widespread awareness, leading to extensive public health campaigns.Policy Interventions: Comprehensive legislation, including smoking bans in public places and stringent advertising restrictions, significantly curtailed smoking habits.Cultural Shifts: Over time, smoking became socially less acceptable, aided by changing media portrayals and public opinion.Support Systems: The proliferation of smoking cessation programs and groups like Nicotine Anonymous provided crucial support for individuals looking to quit.Technological Advances: The introduction of nicotine replacement therapies and digital tools for cessation support played a key role in helping smokers overcome addiction.

The motions of the anti-smoking movement are similar to early movements we are seeing around digital wellbeing. There is an increased cultural awareness around screen time and it’s detrimental effects. This awareness is giving rise to an increase in research attention that deepens the understanding of the complexities involved. As cultural awareness grows birthing programs and policies developed to address digital addiction, the time has come for a parallel solution: technology that is just as good at protecting our attention as social media platforms are at exploiting it.

The unfair advantage in fighting digital addiction

Imagine if you could write code that would make a donut increasingly heavier as you got closer to your calorie limit for the day. We are able to encode the practices of responsible device engagement in the same environment as the “addiction” itself. That means we have:

a categorically unique opportunity for effective behavioral interventionan unfair advantage against the massive machine of the big tech attention economy

We can deploy environment change at scale with no marginal cost to anyone that wants to change their behavior. That is an unfair advantage that smoking cessation, or health food campaigns have never had.

Here are our tenants for how we think about useful and sustainable environment change:

High Tech Solutions for a High Tech Problem: Digital armor is needed in the war for your attention. The best technology of our day can become a force to protect attention rather than exploit it.

Enabling Moderation vs Abstinence: Abstinence is often an easier protocol than moderation when dealing with compulsive or addictive behaviors. But an outright war to remove technology is futile and unhelpful. Fortunately, we have the opportunity to develop integrated methods of moderating our usage so that we can keep the tool while ditching the distraction.

Nutrition Based Content Consumption: You can’t change what you can’t measure, and we can measure this habit perfectly. Up-skilling is a fundamentally different digital engagement practice than doom scrolling. As we track the difference we unlock the ability to forge useful progress towards a healthy digital diet.

Replacement Behaviors (The “Better Yes”): In the same moment that you are enticed to scroll, we can remind you of the something better; like hiking in the mountains, deep conversations, pursuing your life’s work. That is an incredible opportunity, and wildly powerful in the face of the battle for your attention.

Looking Forward: Getting this right for the future of AI, VR, & BCIs “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our happiness.” - Victor Frankl

The next generation of digital interfaces (LLMs, VR, and BCIs) promise to bring the digital world closer to us than ever before. BCIs (Brain Computer Interfaces) like Neuralink are the most potent example of this promise to reduce the latency of communication between humans and devices. Our impulse to access the internet is now a reach to the pocket away, in the future it will be one thought away.

Gathering what we’ve learned so far about the impact of the digital world on our wellbeing we ought to be vigilant about the way we protect the space between stimulus and response. The underlying asset of human attention will be coveted and exploited by these tools, unless we increase the capacity to articulate our attention preferences in a digitally native tongue.

The digital world has become an inseparable part of modern life, and we must do what has been done at the dawn of every major technological innovation in human history: adapt.

Getting Started: Constructing an Attention Protection Protocol in 3 Steps Reflect on what good and bad tech usage means to you. (Be specific.)Invest in environment changes that encourage alignmentDevelop a system for tracking and regular revisitation of your goals Background

I’m one of the cofounders of Clearspace (YC W23). Our mission is to inject intentionality into tech usage. Which means for the past 2 years I’ve worked on tooling and methods that help people eliminate compulsive device usage and reclaim control over their relationship with their phones. Our team developed an iPhone app that has saved over 5M wasted scrolling sessions by deploying simple behavioral intervention techniques on device. We’ve worked with everyone from neuroscience experts, fitness coaches, therapists, to full time content creators to understand what it looks like to effectively address this problem, and are building towards a future where humans leverage technology to it’s fullest extent while preserving the things that make us healthy and whole.