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

by Matthew B. Crawford

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. Recall that the basic concept at the root of attention is selection: we pick something out from the flux of the available. But as our experience comes to be ever more mediated by representations, which remove us from whatever situation we inhabit directly, as embodied beings who do things, it is hard to say what the principle of selection is.

But where am I? There doesn’t seem to be any nonarbitrary basis on which I can draw a horizon around myself—a zone of relevance—by which I might take my bearings and get oriented. When the axis of closer-to-me and farther-from-me is collapsed, I can be anywhere, and find that I am rarely in any place in particular. To be present with those I share a life with is then one option among many, and likely not the most amusing one at any given moment. More broadly, to compose a coherent life on the principle of disembodied, ungrounded choice would seem to be a daunting task.

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.

AUTISM AS A DESIGN PRINCIPLE: GAMBLING

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.

Given this indifference, the response of a slot machine is like that of an electronic toy: exact and consistent. Your action of pressing a button produces an effect that aligns perfectly with your will, because your will has been channeled into the spare, binary affordances provided by the buttons: press or don’t press. You give yourself over to the logic of the machine and are rewarded by a feeling of efficacy. That is, you lose yourself, and thereby gain control.

Small differences in your action produce differences in outcome—indeed exaggerated differences, if the point of the prosthetic is to amplify your actions (as in a hundred-miles-per-hour slap shot, or the minute steering inputs that result in a quick lane change at highway speed). Variations in how you hit the button on a Leap Frog Learning Table or a slot machine do not similarly produce variations in the effect you produce.

You are neither learning something about the world, as the blind man does with his cane, nor acquiring something

that could properly be called a skill. Rather, you are acting within the perception-action circuits encoded in the narrow affordances of the game, learned in a few trials. This is a kind of autistic pseudo-action, based on exact repetition, and the feeling of efficacy that it offers evidently holds great appeal.

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 perf...

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. So it isn’t really a gamble at all—in fact, it’s one of the few places I’m certain about anything … If you can’t rely on the machine, then you might as well be in the human world where you have no predictability either.”6 The appeal of machine gambling is apparently tied to an experience of the human world as lacking a basic intelligibility.

Escaping to a zone of autistic pseudo-action has understandable appeal. Precisely because this zone has been sealed off from the world, it is experienced as a zone of efficacy and intelligibility.

Advanced economies are said to be moving away from producing goods or delivering services, in favor of creating experiences. This necessarily relies on techniques for attracting and holding attention. (For what is an experience, other than an episode in which one’s attention is engaged in some way?) Because our experiences are increasingly manufactured for us, it follows that our attention is increasingly structured by design.

The point of the design, often, seems to be to produce experiences of highly channeled pseudo-action that gratify the need to exercise the will, even if only in the merely formal sense of pushing a...

Perhaps such pursuits help us manage the anxiety and depression that come when experiences of genuine agency are scarce, and at the same time we live under a cultural imperative of being autonomous. Escape to the autistic zone, where there are no impediments between your will and its realization, is precisely the remedy that is wanted if your life resembles that of the passive kitten on the carousel of modern life, who is nonetheless exhorted at each rotation to “seize the day!”

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.

At its annual convention in 1999, the gaming industry recognized that Vegas locals represented its most “mature” market, and could be taken as a model for

the rest of the nation. The fiscal distress of state governments provided an opportunity for expansion, and indeed the machines are now permitted in forty-one states, and can be seen not just in casinos but in bars, gas stations, bowling alleys, restaurants, truck stops, supermarkets, drugstores, and car washes; this is called “convenience gambling.”

One of the determining factors in the establishment of any compulsive behavior is the frequency of rewards. The frequency has to keep increasing, as we develop tolerance for any given rate of reward. 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.

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. If you wager a quarter on a game, you may “win” fifteen cents—this loss registers as a win with flashing lights, which get integrated with the dopamine reward circuits in your brain. What gamblers call “the zone,” the industry calls “continuous gaming productivity.”

Before large bins were added to slot machines in the 1960s and 1970s to receive the flood of coins that came with a large win, a gambler who scored a jackpot had to stop playing and wait until a casino floor attendant came over to verify his win and pay him before he could continue. Schüll quotes an industry innovator saying, “This didn’t just slow down play, it suggested a kind of closure, an end to the game … it tempted the customer to cease the play and walk out the door with his winnings.”

Schüll quotes industry insiders who forthrightly articulate the design goal of the machines and of the broader casino environment as one that leads players to play “to extinction.” That is, until they have no funds left.

Total immersion is what the gambler wants, and it is also what the casino wants. The designers of the experience call their solicitude “player-centric design.” In this happy harmony of preference satisfaction, consumers are empowered. Give the people what they want.

What is new is that the apparent odds that are presented to the player are now subject to manipulation, independently of the actual odds. This is done by displaying machine

events that seem to represent the process by which randomness is generated, but are in fact completely divorced from that process. This design element sustains our natural assumption that the game is ruled by lawlike mechanical processes that could be mastered, with enough repetition. But this is an illusion.

The breakthrough insight of the gaming industry came when it realized that these intuitions can be manipulated—through “virtual reel mapping.”

But the real magic occurs because the virtual stops can be “mapped” onto the displayed stops however the designer likes.

It gets better still: via a technique known as clustering, “a disproportionate number of virtual stops are mapped to blank spaces just above or below the jackpot symbols. This ensures that they will appear more often above or below the payline than they would by chance alone, enhancing the ‘near miss’ sensation among players.” This makes them want to continue to play. Schüll cites behavioral psychology’s “frustration theory of persistence” and the related theory of “cognitive regret,” in which “players circumvent regret at having almost won by immediately playing again.” The gaming industry is well informed on this literature, and completely self-conscious in what it is doing.11

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.

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.

There must be smaller wins as well, at some optimal frequency; this is called the “reinforcement schedule” in the sort of behavioral conditioning that relies on random reinforcement (as opposed to the “classical conditioning” of Pavlov’s famous dog, where strict correlations are established between events).

The more advanced stages of machine gambling addiction are explained by Schüll with recourse to Freud’s idea of the death instinct. 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 pleasure principle—the drive to gratify desire and avoid pain—keeps us in perpetual motion. These are the motivating “life instincts,” the basis of selfhood. Yet we have also a more primitive set of instincts “to return to a state of rest, stillness, and peace,” as Schüll describes the death instinct. The aim is “to extinguish life’s excitations and restore stasis.”

Schüll quotes a gambler named Sharon who no longer looks at the cards she is dealt in video poker. “You reach an extreme point where you don’t even delude yourself that you’re in control of anything but strapping yourself into a machine and staying there until you lose … All that stuff that draws you in the beginning—the screen, the choice, the decisions, the skill—is stripped away, and you accept the certainty of chance: the proof is the zero at the end.”13

Gamblers report their annoyance at winning a jackpot in the wee hours, when they are exhausted and just want to go home. But they are compelled to “zero ou...

“their ‘gamble for control’ [by this I t...

From this perspective, the financial losses they sustain while gambling are not merely collateral consequences of their bid for control, but instead, its more profound aim.”14 If you have money left, you are obliged to exercise choice. You may have decided hours ago to abandon yourself to the video poker terminal, but as long as you still have funds available, you are faced with the possibility of acting otherwise: of stopping. Your will is still in play. Similarly, sex addicts report that they often seek out a prostitute not out of sexual desire, but in order to put to rest the question of whether they will or will not be with a prostitute today. Once they submit to the compulsion, the question is settled and the will is relieved of its burden. For this person, as for the gambler, the real relief lies in being spent. Only then can there be a moment of repose. We might view this as an exhausted response to the heightened burden of self-regulation that we bear in a culture predicated on freedom.

Consider the phenomenon of players jamming a toothpick into the button that initiates a play so that the machine plays itself continuously and the player becomes a mere bystander, watching the credit meter rise and fall (mostly fall).

“autoplay” feature has been incorporated into slot machines, to serve the “mature” player who has...

automaticity, and experiences himself as part of the machine. Such desubjectification does l...

The point of the activity is the activity itself. Talbot Brewer has elaborated such “autotelic” activities and finds that they have a certain structure to them: they are guided by intimations of something valuable that you are trying to bring more fully into view through

your activity. In the course of your repeated efforts, you find that what you are aiming at is a moving target, because it reveals itself only in the course of your pursuit. Brewer gives the example of a blues singer who is trying to find just the right phrasing to convey the subtle and complex emotional register she is aiming at in a particular passage of a song. In doing so she is not simply finding the means to express an emotional truth that she is already fully in possession of. Rather, she is finding that emotional truth in the course of singing it this way and then that way.

But here we see the sly logic by which democratic nonjudgmentalness gets turned to advantage in unregulated capitalism, with the aid of an expansionary psychiatric establishment. To capital, our moral squeamishness about being “judgmental” smells like opportunity.

Our economic system assumes that individuals are radically responsible for themselves. Maintaining this view requires that we hive off any group of people who fail to live up to the autonomous ideal (problem gamblers, sex addicts, etc.) and designate them pathological.

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.

If we have no robust and demanding picture of what a good life would look like, then we are unable to articulate any detailed criticism of the particular sort of falling away from a good life that something like machine gambling represents. We are therefore unable to offer any rationale for regulation that would go beyond narrow economic considerations.17 We take the “preferences” of the individual to be sacred, the mysterious welling up of