The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

As traffic engineers have discovered, our approach to driving is influenced quite a bit by the features of a road. Eric Dumbaugh, a civil and environmental engineer at Texas A&M University, says, “We assume that safety is the result of ‘forgiving’ roads. We figure straightening out streets and widening shoulders makes a road safe.”1 This turns out to be wrong. When roads look dangerous, people slow down and become more heedful.

Emily Anthes writes that among traffic engineers, “in the last decade or so, a few iconoclasts have begun making roads more hazardous—narrowing them, reducing visibility, and removing curbs, center lines, guardrails, and even traffic signs and signals. These roads, research shows, are home to significantly fewer crashes and traffic fatalities.”

This fact gets conveyed to the driver in a necessary and lawlike way with the familiar “brake fade” in conventional hydraulic brakes. What was so deeply disturbing about the Toyota recall episode of 2008, I believe, was the revelation that there was software—convention, language, representation—involved in the brakes.

This design problem of disconnection or arbitrariness mirrors a fundamental problem in cognitive science: the symbol-grounding problem.

In the computational theory of mind that prevails in conventional cognitive science, we are assumed to have internal representations of the world, and these representations are built on symbols that are meaningless in themselves; they “encode” features of the world in the same way a computer represents states of affairs with a string of zeroes and ones. The symbol-grounding problem is this: How can arbitrary symbols take on ...

The same question is posed in philosophy of language, since after all there is no necessary connection between the sounds ...

One can refer the words to a lexicon, but the words used in the lexicon face the same problem; there seems to be an infinit...

world. As Arthur Glenberg writes in the article I cited earlier, “embodied representations do not need to be mapped onto the world to become meaningful because they arise from the world.” They are “directly grounded by virtue of being lawfully and analogically related to properties of the world and how those properties are transduced by perceptual-action systems.”5 To invoke once more the motto of the new wave of robotics: The world is its own best model.

of your own hand moving through space gets bound to the feeling of this action. The child develops an embodied self-awareness through learning the properties of objects. Different objects resist his body in various ways (light or heavy, soft or hard, slippery or sticky, and so forth), yielding different time-locked bundlings of sensorimotor experience, corresponding to different classes of interaction.

Andy Clark writes that “the key to such developing capabilities is the robot’s or infant’s capacity to maintain coordinated sensorimotor engagement with its environment.”7 A driving experience that provides impoverished feedback limits such engagement, and would seem to promote a kind of regression—back into the womb. Let me concede that this can be nice, especially on a long drive on the interstate. The ideal thing would be to enter a coma. Or perhaps to be like the passive kitten on the carousel.

figure out what’s going on, decide on some course of action, and enact it through the narrow interface of the keyboard or the data-glove, carefully monitoring the result to see if it turns out the way they expected. Our experience of the everyday world is not of that sort. There is no homunculus sitting inside our heads, staring out at the world through our eyes, enacting some plan of action by manipulating our hands and checking carefully to make sure we don’t overshoot when reaching for the coffee cup.8

reality” windshield that overlays a digital version of your environment in front of you. BMW, a company that until recently was exemplary in preserving the bonds between car and driver, now gives us fake engine sounds, piped into the car’s sound system to enhance the driving experience. I suppose one could call this auditory “information,” but it doesn’t inform one of anything.10 When falsification is offered as a remedy for abstraction, we have the engineering equivalent of the last, desperate days of the Roman Empire. Powdered mandarins glided about the Senate, ripe for conquest and slaughter.

Further, we normally orient ourselves in our physical environment according to an axis of proximity and distance, and this basic orientation is not available when the world appears through mediating representations.

According to Alfred Schutz, the spatial categories we employ in everyday life arise from our embodiment. A person is “interested above all in that sector of his everyday world which lies within his reach and which arranges itself spatially and temporally around him as its center.” Relative to this center, one carves up the surrounding world at its egocentric joints: right, left, above, below, in front of, behind, near, far. The world within “actual reach” is basically oriented according to proximity and distance. This reachable world “embraces not only actually perceived objects but also objects that can be perceived through attentive advertence.”12

This idea of orientation around a bodily center helps us to see how the attentional environment that has emerged in contemporary culture is novel and somehow centerless.

mediated by representations,

To repeat a formulation I used in the previous chapter, if choosing replaces doing for the mouse-clicking Mouseke-doer, it figures that such a disengaged self should be especially pliable to the “choice architectures” that get installed in public spaces. As we shall see, in the darker precincts of capitalism things are being designed to foster disengagement, to the point of inducing a kind of autism.

The appeal of the Leap Frog Learning Table for toddlers frustrated with their bodies appears to be similar to the appeal of slot machines for adults frustrated by life. The latter is explained by Natasha Dow Schüll in her deeply disturbing book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. The goal for compulsive machine gamblers is not to win money, as one might suppose, and you cannot understand their addiction without keeping this in mind. The goal is to get in the zone: the place where “their own actions become indistinguishable from the functioning of the machine. They explain this point as a kind of coincidence between their intentions and the machine’s responses.”1 You hit the button and the machine responds every time. Schüll in fact notes parallels to children’s electronic games, and draws on studies of these that explore a certain paradox. The appeal of the games is that they give the player a sense of control. But precisely because she is able to reliably produce an effect (such as an auditory beep), the player loses herself in the machine and enters a state of absorbed automaticity, which would seem to be the opposite of control. This state is in fact more passive than active. Schüll quotes

Both are instances of cognitive extension. Schüll quotes one of her gambler informants saying, “I get to the point where I no longer feel my hand touching the machine.” The informant continues: “I feel connected to the machine when I play, like it’s an extension of me, as if physically you couldn’t separate me from the machine.”3

There is a closed loop between your action and the effect that you perceive, but the bandwidth of variability has been collapsed to the point that it can no longer be said that through your actions you are “extracting invariants from the stimulus flux,” to borrow Gibson’s phrase.

Schüll refers to a concept called perfect contingency in the literature of child development, which names a situation of “complete alignment between a given action and the external response to that action, in which distinctions between the two collapse.” (I find it confusing to call this perfect contingency because it seems rather the complete absence of contingency.)

After they reach about three months of age, babies come to prefer “imperfect contingency,” in which “environmental responses are closely yet not perfectly aligned with their own vocal or gestural actions in intensity, affect, or tempo.”

autistic children are an exception; they remain distressed when an exogenous entity does something that demonstrates vitality of its own, and they are especially intolerant of social contingency, or the unpredictability of another’s perspective or intentions. Preferring sameness, repetition, rhythm, and routine, they retreat into circular, self-generated perfect contingencies such as rocking or swinging, or object-based interactions that allow close-to-perfect stimulus-response [circuits] such as bouncing a ball or pressing a button.5

In playing at a slot machine or video poker terminal, either you are going to win or you are going to lose. One of Schüll’s informants tells her, “I don’t care if it takes coins, or pays coins: the contract is that when I put a new coin in, get five new cards, and press those buttons, I am allowed to continue.

If so, it is not without reason. As the world becomes more confusing, seemingly controlled by vast impersonal forces (e.g., “globalization” or “collateralized debt obligations”) that no single individual can fully bring within view; as the normative expectation becomes to land a cubicle job, in which the chain of cause and effect can be quite dispersed and opaque; as home life becomes deskilled (we outsource our cooking to corporations, our house repairs to immigrant guest workers); as the material basis of modern life becomes ever more obscured, and the occasions for skillful action are removed to sites overseas, where things are made; to sites nearby but socially invisible, where things are tended and repaired; and to sites unknown, where elites orchestrate commercial and political forces—

Advanced economies are said to be moving away from producing goods or delivering services, in favor of creating experiences.

Perhaps this is what is left to us, given the deep contradiction that we live in: on the one hand, we have the individualist ideal—one is tempted to say the autistic ideal—of the unencumbered self who acts in freedom, and on the other hand we feel beset by insecurities and obscurities that emanate from the collective world. These latter are often technological in nature. We therefore seek out other, personal technologies that can give us safe haven: “manufactured certainties,” as Schüll puts it, that help us “manage [our] affective states.”

Managing frustration by sidestepping the intractable contingencies of life is a growth industry; the demand for manufactured experiences is met by a growing economy of “affective capitalism,” as it has been called. This is usually explained with reference to leisure activities like gambling, playing video games, viewing porn, or taking recreational drugs.

relates what it is like to be a derivatives trader who stares at screens of rapidly shifting data, looking for patterns. In this intense, self-enclosed world, which she compares to a video game, traders engineer “peak experiences of attention” for themselves.

Schüll’s book is arguably one of the more important works of social science to appear in the last thirty years.

It is not uncommon for heavy users to stand at a machine for eight or even twelve hours at a stretch, developing blood clots and other medical conditions. Paramedics in Las Vegas dread getting calls from casinos, which usually turn out to be heart attacks. The problem is that when someone collapses, the other gamblers won’t get out of the way to let the paramedics do their job; they won’t leave their machines. Deafening fire alarms are similarly ignored; there have been incidents where rising floodwaters didn’t dislodge them. The gamblers are so absorbed that they become oblivious to their surroundings.

Schüll interviews one woman who makes sure to wear dark clothing when she goes to gamble so it won’t show when she urinates on herself. Once a gambler has taken possession of a machine, the thought of leaving it is intolerable, and so the urine-and-feces issue turns out to be a fairly common part of the machine gambling experience.

This image of gambling as a rich social practice no longer fits the reality. Schüll writes, “Until the mid-1980s, green-felt table games such as blackjack and craps dominated casino floors while slot machines huddled on the sidelines … along hallways or near elevators…” By 2003, the president of the American Gaming Association estimated that “over 85 percent of industry profits came from machines.”

Then you spend your leisure time feeding your paycheck into the machines. Schüll writes that nearly 82 percent of local gamblers are members of the “loyalty clubs” that casinos offer, “carrying player cards that document the volume of their play and reward them accordingly” with various trifles. Through their loyalty cards, repeat players are tracked and their behavior is carefully analyzed. Some casinos have facial recognition software that enables a player’s favorite machine to call out to her by name if cameras on the casino floor detect that she is headed toward the exit.

The speed of play has been accelerated with some fairly straightforward innovations over the years, such as replacing the mechanical pull handle of slot machines with an electronic push button (which you can rest your hand on constantly), which was followed by the mechanically spinning reels being replaced with a video screen. Once the machines accepted bills (in large denominations), one no longer had to insert coins laboriously into the machine; merely eliminating this fumbling generated a 30 percent increase in the amount of money played. Experienced video poker players (you may have seen one hunched at a terminal at a bar or gas station, waving fingers over a touch screen in a blur that rivals the best typists) can complete up to 1,200 hands per hour; the rate of play on video slots is similar, up from about 300 games per hour a couple of decades ago.

But the real progress in productivity came when the industry realized that there was an intimate connection between speed and duration: increasing the speed of play makes the experience more absorbing, and hence also tends to extend the duration of play. As Schüll notes, the gaming industry has embarked on a program that resembles the Taylorist time-and-motion analyses of the early twentieth century, whereby the productivity of factory workers was maximized.

What is new is that the apparent odds that are presented to the player are now subject to manipulation,

We acquire intuitions for grasping probabilities over the course of our development from infancy, as embodied beings who negotiate a stable, orderly world. The breakthrough insight of the gaming industry came when it realized that these intuitions can be manipulated—through “virtual reel mapping.”

Poignantly, one of Schüll’s gambler informants says, “You get to learn the pattern and just need to get it right.” Always on the verge of winning, he is led to believe that he is developing an arcane skill, an intuitive connection to the machine’s obscure workings. He is not. The frequency with which he almost wins can be made to increase over the course of his play in a single session, and because players are tracked, it can be made to increase from one session to the next as well, leading to a feeling of growing mastery.

Human beings are exquisitely sensitive to detecting patterns, and this is clearly connected to our drive to become competent. As I noted before, Nietzsche said that joy is the feeling of your power increasing.

sensitive to the patterns by which the flux of sensual data reveals a stable world.

An exquisite case of attentional design, it creates an illusion of growing competence because it creates the illusion of a stable entity to be known, governed by its own necessities. But in fact the connections between the visual data presented to the player and the machine states where the wins and losses are determined are not only arbitrary, they are contrived to deceive.

One industry insider says that the megajackpots that arrived with virtual reel mapping were “the primary impetus for the meteoric rise of popularity in slot machines.”12 There must be smaller wins as well, at some optimal frequency; this is called the “reinforcement schedule”

She quotes a gambler named Maria who says, “The only real control you can have over the end is to make it come faster.” This sounds like the peculiar, self-negating agency of suicide, and the analogy is apt (quite apart from the prevalence of actual suicide among gambling addicts, which is higher than for any other addiction). The design script of the machines—to enact “player extinction”—mates up with a deep human tendency, one that I believe is not confined to addicts and suicides.

The aim is “to extinguish life’s excitations and restore stasis.”

This might seem exotically pathological, but I can detect something like a death instinct in myself, for example in those times when I slump in front of the TV and watch whatever is served up. It becomes an occasion for self-disgust as soon as I rouse myself from the couch, and is no great source of pleasure while I am in the trance, so why do I do it?

by insisting that “the upside” to having casinos in the state is significantly bigger than “the downside.” This language of cost-benefit analysis might be fitting if there were a single entity that were subject to both the upside and the downside. But of course, the benefit to the state is due to a transfer of wealth, and as taxes go it is a highly regressive one, hitting lower-income people hardest. It also cannibalizes other forms of taxation such as sales taxes, since money spent on gambling isn’t spent on other things.

Liberal agnosticism about the good life has some compelling historical reasons behind it. It is a mind-set that was consciously cultivated as an antidote to the religious wars of centuries ago, when people slaughtered one another over ultimate differences. After World War II, revulsion with totalitarian regimes of the right and left made us redouble our liberal commitment to neutrality. But this stance is maladaptive in the context of twenty-first-century capitalism because, if you live in the West and aren’t caught up in battles between Sunnis and Shiites, for example, and if we also put aside the risk of extraordinary lethal events like terrorist attacks in Western countries, then the everyday threats to your well-being no longer come from an ideological rival or a theological threat to the liberal secular order. They are native to that order.

“freedom from what?” he would presumably answer, “the government.” But this begins to seem a strangely eighteenth-century answer, when you think about a typical day in the twenty-first century. You may find yourself on the telephone, caught in an unwinnable battle with TRW or some other credit rating bureau because they made a mistake—perhaps a very consequential one—in administering your credit history. While on hold you get on the computer and try to figure out a recurring, unexplained charge on your Verizon cellular bill. Our founding republican spirit of “No taxation without representation” and “Don’t tread on me” is laudable, but must be directed to the proper offshore entity. Libertarians are confused because, unlike King James I, Verizon doesn’t make a straightforward assertion of sovereignty. Instead, it wraps you up in the embrace of rational-looking bureaucratic irrationality. While in this embrace (“Your call is important to us”), one catches a distinct odor of bad faith and begins to suspect that the irrationality one is battling is not due to a system error, but part of the business plan.

The success of those engineering efforts offers good evidence that we are indeed situated beings, formed in very consequential ways by our interactions with our environment.