The Genuinely Hard Problem of the Digital Attention Economy

What is the Philosophical Difference between Censorship, Curation, and Moderation?

Attention as a Bookshelf

Let’s start with something easy to understand the contours of the problem.

I am a bibliophile. The idea of throwing a book into the garbage causes me something like physical pain. Whenever I have to part with a book, I get something like the emotion of saying goodbye to an orphan of impeccable character who wants nothing more in the world than to become part of my family. I want to save every book I possibly can because every book is unique and precious.

There’s no physical way I could ever possibly keep as many books as I want.

Without infinite shelving, I have to start making hard choices.

So, did I censor the books that didn’t make it up to the shelf?

There are a few things that make this analogy a good starting point for attention. The shelf is my shelf. I’m not going into someone else’s library and making these choices on their behalf. Every book is being weighed against what I personally value. My shelf. My choices. My shelf, as stated is also limited. You can’t pay attention to everything in the world in the same way you can’t shelve every book you might want. You have to make a decisioning process for what makes it to your shelf and what doesn’t.

So if I personally am sorting through the world’s books to decide what does and doesn’t go on my shelf? Cleary, that’s not censorship. I’m choosing not to pay attention to all kinds of things! You have to do this just to live.

Let’s say one day I get lucky enough to strike it rich. Suddenly, I own too many books to keep track of by myself. I need to get a librarian. I interview candidates, explain my vision and my preferences, then hire the best person I can find for the job. This librarian then goes off and does all kinds of things without my direct supervision. I might check in with them at some frequency but I’m not hovering over their shoulder constantly.

Is that censorship if we switch back to the attention model? Again, clearly not. I chose that librarian to do this work for me. They curate rather than censor. There’s more to say here about keeping that librarian honest, but that’s not where we are going yet.

Now imagine a book thief! Not only of single volumes but of entire intellectual properties. This thief sneaks into my home and grabs one of the books off my shelf and then does the same to every other copy of that book. My ownership of the book was taken as well as my ability to obtain a new copy. The book is gone!

Is that person a censor?

Yes! Of course.

Now let’s take this simple framing and extend it to the strange world in which we find ourselves.

The Spammers and the Abyss Tomes

Let’s say that for some strange economic reasons there are people who not only want to steal books from my library, but that there are other people who want to break in and add books. Books I very definitely don’t want, full of advertisements for cheap trinkets that will break immediately, or hot tubs, or garish vacation packages to loud places.

This person is a spammer.

They don’t want delete access to my shelf. Only the censor wanted to have delete access. The spammer wants add access.

In this way, the spammer accomplishes the same end goal as the censor. My ability to focus on the things I want to focus on has been limited. I only have so much shelf space, so even though the spammer hasn’t directly removed a book they’ve pushed aside all kinds of other books that are more worthy of my attention. There’s simply no time or space for those books because of all the spam.

Now, let’s say the spammer isn’t breaking into my house to add books when I’m not looking. Let’s say this new evil book salesman comes right to my door. He smiles at me and when I think he’s going to show me some perfectly wonderful tome, he opens it up and it turns out it’s full of some super-stimulus. It’s a book I can’t take my eyes away from, not because it is objectively valuable, but because it hits some kind of bypass in my brain that causes me to fixate on its contents.

For a lot of people, this is porn. But it doesn’t have to just be porn. It could be political content that makes you feel super righteous. It could be pictures of dogs and cats. It’s clickbait. Whatever is in that abyss tome, it is something that will immediately distract you from whatever you were trying to focus on previously. It works even if you’re aware that it works this way! The thing that makes an abyss tome an abyss tome is that you regretted it afterward and sort of regretted it the moment you looked at it, all while it added no lasting value to your life.

The Network of Anti-Librarians

You and your librarian can’t really do anything about spammers and abyss tomes at scale. You keep away sketchy book salesmen and you try to keep track of places that have a bad track record but you’re doing this all on your own.

Bringing this back to the attention model, the kinds of block tools you have access to on social media are pretty terrible. Imagine the entire world is trying to break into your library and add a bunch of garbage to your shelves. The solution to this on social media is that you, completely by yourself, should identify and “block” each of these spammers one at a time.

Oh, the most obvious scams get filtered after a while, but sometimes noise is coming from regular people. There are people running around with Abyss Tomes stuck over their faces, cut off from reality, acting like a zombie trying to break into your library and shove their book on your shelf. In your everyday life, you can’t keep dealing with these kinds of forces over and over and certainly not in a dynamic where it’s you versus the entire world.

Here, the spammers and abyss tomes have a clear numerical advantage The entire world of spammers can head your way all at once and you have to face them on your own. Even Leonidas was allowed a few hundred friends to defend his homeland!

What you really need is an Anti-Librarian. Or a whole team of Anti-Librarians. People who will create and curate filters for you. If you could point to other people and designate them as having mutual authority to “block” then suddenly the forces come closer to parity. You need a force that pushes back on the things that tug at your attention to say: “Okay, maybe I have a thing for watching tiny hamsters eat tiny burritos. While I recognize that is almost always guaranteed to temporarily capture my interest, I always regret it later so I don’t need to see anymore videos of that please.”

You need Anti-Librarians whose whole job is to on-purpose block malicious actors from gaining access to your attention shelf. It’s too big of a job for you to do it all on your own.

Bro, You Just Made a Tyranny So You Wouldn’t See Hamsters Eat Tiny Burritos

I get the concern. You don’t want people building up strong filters that nobody else can penetrate. That’s how you get things like bluesky. People shouldn’t just live in a filter bubble of people who agree with them all the time. That’s how cults start.

Except we do kind of already do. This is why the problem is hard. Oh, we don’t call it that but when we live our actual physical meatspace lives we don’t go out of our way to be around people we can’t stand or have radical disagreements with or people we find obnoxious. We go around people we can tolerate and people who are like us. That’s how we set our home base.

Then we find natural balances to make sure the filter bubbles are tolerably permeable. This is why the problem is hard because there’s no black and white line you can easily systematize. It’s a vibes-out process.

For instance, in real life we never give one particular person in our circle of friends the totalitarian authority to remove other people from our communities. If someone did, we’d all think there was something wrong going on there. We’d call that a cult. If one of your friends doesn’t like to associate with another one of your friends, that tends to be fine as long as both of them aren’t with you at the same time. We don’t give other people the unchecked right to forbid us access to other people.

The great secret here is rules and process. An Abyss tome might be the next Michelangelo painting, or a spammer might be the guy who is sincerely warning you of a meteor strike. Once you have a library you can live with and defenses that are strong, you need to give your Anti-Librarians a review process to make sure everyone is being reasonable. Your Anti-Librarians can easily morph into censors but you can’t live without them!

You need to know some things that will disturb you. Sometimes it’s great to have your attention diverted! The tricky part is the rules that help you figure that out as part of a balanced life are complicated.

This is all boring stuff, but it’s all boring stuff we already do in real life. In the same way that land is the substrate on which laws are enacted in the meatspace world, your attention is the place that laws where laws have to be enacted in the digital world. And that means your screen, like the one you’re viewing right now.

So what would a system that does this in real life look like? At the Trust Assembly, we believe it’s finding people who see the world the way you do and building technology to help each other make sense of the world deliberately and on purpose. Then pushing your ideas and point of view up against the ideas of other groups to see who can create the best explanation. The scroll doesn’t have to be an endless drain of your mental faculties. It could be something like your home country and the pursuit of truth.