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

by Matthew B. Crawford

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. But the term could also be applied to some jobs. The anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom worked in the financial futures trading pits in Chicago, and 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.7 Traders get into “the zone” (they actually call it this), a state of total absorption where all else falls away. This is possible only because the messy human realities behind the financial entities they are trading in (for example, people’s mortgages) are mediated away by layers of representation and mathematical models, allowing a kind of “control without contact.” The models become fascinating in their own right; traders enter deep into their logic and live in the data, rapt in the experience of a growing, intuitive grasp of it.