Stand Out of Our Light Quotes

“It’s my firm conviction, now more than ever, that the degree to which we are able and willing to struggle for ownership of our attention is the degree to which we are free.”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“For most of human history, when you were born you inherited an off-the-shelf package of religious and cultural constraints. This was a kind of library of limits that was embedded in your social and physical environment. These limits performed certain self-regulatory tasks for you so you didn’t have to take them on yourself. The packages included habits, practices, rituals, social conventions, moral codes, and a myriad of other constraints that had typically evolved over many centuries, if not millennia, to reliably guide – or shall we say design – our lives in the direction of particular values, and to help us give attention to the things that matter most. In the twentieth century the rise of secularism and modernism in the West occasioned the collapse – if not the jettisoning – of many of these off-the-shelf packages of constraints in the cause of the liberation of the individual. In many cases, this rejection occurred on the basis of philosophical or cosmological disagreements with the old packages. This has, of course, had many great benefits. Yet by rejecting entire packages of constraint, we’ve also rejected those constraints that were actually useful for our purposes. “The left’s project of liberation,” writes the American philosopher Matthew Crawford, “led us to dismantle inherited cultural jigs that once imposed a certain coherence (for better and worse) on individual lives. This created a vacuum of cultural authority that has been filled, opportunistically, with attentional landscapes that get installed by whatever ‘choice architect’ brings the most energy to the task – usually because it sees the profit potential.” The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, in his book You Must Change Your Life, has called for a reclamation of this particular aspect of religion – its habits and practices – which he calls “anthropotechnics.”6 When you dismantle existing boundaries in your environment, it frees you from their limitations, but it requires you to bring your own boundaries where you didn’t have to before. Sometimes, taking on this additional self-regulatory burden is totally worth it. Other times, though, the cost is too high. According to the so-called “ego-depletion” hypothesis, our self-control, our willpower, is a finite resource.7 So when the self-regulatory cost of bringing your own boundaries is high enough, it takes away willpower that could have been spent on something else.”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“The “Spotlight” Our immediate capacities for navigating awareness and action toward tasks. Enables us to do what we want to do.

The “Starlight” Our broader capacities for navigating life “by the stars” of our higher goals and values. Enables us to be who we want to be.

The “Daylight” Our fundamental capacities – such as reflection, metacognition, reason, and intelligence – that enable us to define our
goals and values to begin with. Enables us to “want what we want to want.”

These three “lights” of attention pertain to doing, being, and knowing, respectively. When each of these “lights” gets obscured, a distinct – though not mutually exclusive – type of “distraction” results.”
― James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light

“Instead of your goals, success from their perspective is usually defined in the form of low-level “engagement” goals, as they’re often called. These include things like maximizing the amount of time you spend with their product, keeping you clicking or tapping or scrolling as much as possible, or showing you as many pages or ads as they can. A peculiar”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“Here’s the problem: Many of the systems we’ve developed to help guide our lives–systems like news, education, law, advertising, and so on–arose in, and still assume, an environment of information scarcity. We’re only just beginning to explore what these systems should do for us, and how they need to change, in this new milieu of information abundance.”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“Whether we’re using a slot machine or an app that’s designed to “hook” us, we’re doing the same thing; we’re “paying for the possibility of a surprise.”24 With slot machines, we pay with our money. With technologies in the attention economy, we pay with our attention. And, as with slot machines, the benefits we receive from these technologies – namely “free” products and services – are up front and immediate, whereas we pay the attentional costs in small denominations distributed over time. Rarely do we realize how costly our free things are.”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“Orwell focuses in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley’s foresight, Postman writes, lay in his prediction that freedom’s nastiest adversaries in the years to come would emerge not from the things we fear, but from the things that give us pleasure: it’s not the prospect of a “boot stamping on a human face – forever” that should keep us up at night, but rather the specter of a situation in which “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”6 A thumb scrolling through an infinite feed, forever.”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“it’s not the prospect of a “boot stamping on a human face – forever” that should keep us up at night, but rather the specter of a situation in which “people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”6 A thumb scrolling through an infinite feed, forever.”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery,” wrote Rousseau in The Social Contract, “while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“Do we conjure up an image of a "monster" at whom to direct our blame, and take a path which, while psychologically rewarding, is likely to distract from the goal of enacting change in the real world? Or do we take the second path, and look head-on at the true nature of the system, as messy and psychologically indigestible as it seems to be?”
― James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light

“The freedom of speech is meaningless without the freedom of attention, which is both its complement and prerequisite”
― James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light

“What do you pay when you pay attention? You pay with all the things you could have attended to, but didn't: all the actions you didn't take , all the possible yous you could have been, had you attended to those other things. Attention is paid in possible futures forgone. You pay for that extra Game of Thrones episode with the heart-to-heart talk you could have had with your anxious child. You pay for that extra hour on social media with the sleep you didn't get and the fresh feeling you didn't have the next morning. You pay for giving in to that outrage-inducing piece of clickbait about that politician you hate with the patience and empathy it took from you, and the anger you have at yourself for allowing yourself to take the bait in the first place.”
― James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light