Autonomy

On the one hand, digital technologies have proven to be very liberating: they give us unprecedented access to information, ways to communicate with others, or voice our own thoughts and opinions to a global public. However, excessive use of digital technology and the proliferation of companies that are fighting for our attention also mean that we are becoming increasingly distracted. Moreover, this “attention crisis” puts pressure on the foundations of our moral theory and ideas of freedom, and forces us to rethink our ideas about everyday practices.

Observations

Analysis

Digital technology gives us more access to the world (e.g. global news is just a click away) and provides us with a higher degree of freedom to do what we like (our smartphone connects us to global networks and an increasing variety of digital services). As such, it ties in with the ethics of consumer capitalist culture, as we are freed from constraints and experience an increase in the possibilities to satisfy our consumer preferences. However, given the proliferation of big tech companies vying for our attention, using swaths of big data to track and predict what we like to pay attention to, this means that we are also experiencing a “crisis of attention”, according to Crawford. As we are increasingly distracted, whether by our devices, social media or because companies use data to make their attention-capturing techniques even more pervasive and well-targeted, the anthropological foundation of our moral theories and conceptions of the self is being undermined.

However, new, positive reactions are emerging to these forces that undermine the coherence of our individuality and autonomy

However, as our attention is more and more drawn by commercial parties, our ability to make autonomous choices is decreasing. Human beings are reflective and rational beings, and it is only by reason-giving, i.e. by justifying our actions and constructing a narrative about ourselves (and more broadly: the society and symbolic order we live in called “culture”), that we become truly human. Most of this thinking and rational deliberation happens when we abstract from the immediate sensory inputs of the environment (e.g. we look up to the sky when we try to remember something or gaze into the void when we think). “Autobiographical thought” thus arises only when we are in a position to let go of our direct environment, reinforcing our mental capacities, as with thoughts and ideas, we are better able to control our environment (e.g. the Hegelian idea of concrete freedom). It is in these times that we find coherence in our experience and ourselves, making human beings the only beings able to recall something that is not cued by the environment or which transcends sensible reality. However, this thus happens only in times when the environment does not make urgent claims on our attention, and we need to have a space for this rational agency in which we suppress our awareness of the environment and have no external stimuli to distract us. Thus our age of distraction puts our human activity of coherence-finding at risk.

Furthermore, this increased distraction puts the foundation of our moral theory under pressure. We have written before that Western culture places high value on autonomy and individual freedom, much more so than other cultures. In fact, in Kantian moral philosophy, autonomy and individual free choice make up the foundation of moral philosophy that is still dominant in today’s moral theory. Autonomy, according to Kant, means “giving a law to oneself”, and its opposite is “heteronomy”: being ruled by something alien to oneself. Only autonomous decisions, which come from rational reason itself, can be the proper foundation of a universal and rational moral theory. But as we are becoming more distracted and algorithms now often determine what we get to see and make our choices, we are ever-more determined by heteronomous forces, undermining our autonomy and thus the freedom to make real, moral choices.

However, new, positive reactions are emerging to these forces that undermine the coherence of our individuality and autonomy. One example is the returning cult of craftsmanship that wants to amplify the causality between action and effect, between work and production. This is visible in, for example, the emergence of craftsmanship in food and drinks, such as beer or coffee. Other examples are about creating a serious space for rational agency in which the external stimuli of the environment are suppressed, and focus is redirected towards the self, such as meditation or the popularity martial arts, which combine spirituality with sports. More theoretically, this is reflected in the re-emergence of philosophy in popular discourse or the increased interest in different cultural notions of autonomy and individuality.

Implications