Homo Attentus: Technological Backlash and the Attentional Subject

• In Event: Attention! - I: Human/Machine Boundaries

Abstract

Recently, an organized popular critique has emerged in response to the power of large “tech” companies like Facebook, Google, and Netflix. One main target of this “techlash” has been the use of persuasive design techniques, which firms use to capture user attention. Books like Douglas Rushkoff’s _Team Human_ and organizations like The Center for Humane Technology frame this new resistance as an affirmation of the human, against the dehumanizing forces of technological design. The emergence of “tech humanism,” as Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff have named it, within the social world of Silicon Valley corporations, raises a classic question for STS and anthropology: What constitutes the human? This paper critically analyzes the discourse of the new tech humanism, finding that it figures the defining human quality as our capacity to pay attention. This understanding of the human as homo attentus is rooted in evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics, much like the behavioral design it nominally critiques. Tech humanism posits an attentional subject whose humanity is distinguished by the capacity for attentional sovereignty, while always being at risk of interpellation as a reactive animal mind. Building on social critiques of evolutionary psychology and the human/machine dichotomy, this paper pursues the consequences of this potentially influential refiguration of the human.

Author

• Nick Seaver, Tufts University