In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley points out that the Lords Prayer has 50 words, and six of them are dedicated to imploring God not to lead us into temptation. When I was a child sitting in Sunday school in west Texas, I often wondered why God would engineer these temptations into our environment in the first place much less lead us into them if he was only going to enjoin us to avoid them later.

Today I feel the same way about the creators of our technological environments. We are bombarded at every turn with persuasive design that exploits our psychological weaknesses and often leads us into temptation, habituation and distraction. At the same time, we are expected to take up arms against these distractions, to muster superhuman levels of self-regulation, just to adapt to this all-out war others are waging for our attention.

So far, the closest thing to a bible for designers who have been enlisted in that war for our attention those tasked with hacking human psychology to increase engagement with their products has been Nir Eyals bestselling 2014 book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Eyal advanced a four-part model for exploiting triggers, rewards and other elements of habit formation to systematically manipulate user behaviour; he described the model as a new superpower for designers.

Now, five years later, as individuals and societies have begun to discern the extent to which distraction is a feature, not a bug, of the industrialisation of persuasive design, Eyal has returned with a self-help book. Here, as in Hooked, Eyal advances a four-part model and even describes it as a superpower again only this time its for users: it sets out how to be indistractable in a world thats angling for our attention.

It would be too uncharitable to dismiss Indistractable as merely an attempt to backtrack. It would also be a mistake to place it among the crop of repentant-tech-insider confessionals so fashionable lately those tragic narratives of grovelling and apology that the media gleefully stenograph for readers who instinctively click on them. In fact, a notable absence in Indistractable is any trace of regret or re-examination whatsoever, and for this Eyal deserves some credit.

This is a book with two souls. One is concerned with prescription, the other with persuasion. The prescriptive part offers techniques for resisting distraction. These include: scheduling your life so assiduously that you eliminate all white space in your calendar, beginning with prioritising and timeboxing You time; hacking back or changing the external triggers that distract you (for instance, disabling device notifications, or having a signal at work that tells your colleagues youre in a focus mode); and using precommitment devices such as pacts to motivate you to follow through on your goals (which in Eyals case consisted of agreeing to pay his friend $10,000 if he didnt finish Indistractable on time). There is some value in compiling these techniques in one place; readers might find some of them useful.

However, it is the persuasive soul of Indistractable that merits greater attention. At the books beating heart is a sales pitch for the blamelessness of technology vis--vis distraction. This argument is important in part because it carries significance for wider conversations about the ethics of persuasive design, and in part because it is so profoundly, yet so subtly, wrong.

Eyals argument is roughly as follows. Distraction is any action we take thats misaligned with our broader intentions. We often blame technology for distraction. However, because all human behaviour is motivated by the desire to minimise discomfort, the root cause of distraction therefore lies within us. Technology, by contrast, is merely a proximate cause. If we dont deal with the root causes, well continue to find ways to distract ourselves and will remain helpless victims in a tragedy of our own creation. On the other hand, if we do acknowledge that distraction originates inside ourselves, we can take steps to become indistractable and ultimately live the lives we want.

There are many curious contortions here. Eyals conception of distraction remains mercurial. His foundational claim that avoiding discomfort or dissatisfaction is our motivation for everything we do in life is simply asserted; no evidence is adduced. (Its a claim that, in any event, seems unfalsifiable cant any desire for change be framed as dissatisfaction with some status quo?) Yet the essential rhetorical move, for which Eyal gives no justification, is his separation of inner motivations from external factors and his conception of them as root causes. This root/proximate cause distinction comes from a diagnostic process in engineering and management sciences called root cause analysis. Why is this method appropriate for diagnosing human behaviour? No reason is given. Why cant a behaviour be the result of multiple root causes? The question goes unasked. Cant technologies, like many other external influences, increase our degree of inner discomfort and dissatisfaction? The issue is not even raised. What even counts as a root cause? Eyal leaves it undefined.

In fact, throughout the book he is inconsistent about what he treats as a root cause versus a proximate cause. At various points he is happy to construe all manner of environmental factors relational, organisational, psychological, and cultural as root causes of distraction, while treating as a ridiculous moral panic any suggestion that technologies that have literally been designed to distract many by designers he has influenced are themselves part of any structural problem. He seems to allow for any root cause of distraction, as long as it is not technology.

This is a fundamentally unserious way of approaching the question. Imagine weve just discovered that a facial recognition algorithm is amplifying some racial inequality. In response, we might ask: how could the algorithm be designed so that it promotes equality instead? Can it in principle be designed to do so? Should an algorithm even be used in this situation? And so on. However, it would not occur to us to say unless we were mired in anxious defensiveness about the fact that criticism is occurring at all that even though the algorithm amplifies inequality, it poses no problem worthy of immediate corrective action because it is not the root cause of that inequality. To say so would be a digital version of the odious Guns dont kill people, people kill people deflection. (Of course, neither side of that false dichotomy is correct; it is clearly the gun-person interface which is at issue.) Technology doesnt distract people; people distract people. This, in a phrase, is Indistractables persuasive soul.

I recently read that the pope wanted to alter a line of the Lords Prayer, from lead us not into temptation to do not let us fall into temptation. Indistractable is Eyals attempt at a pope-like pivot. Thankfully, he cant pivot by fiat. However, as the book Merchants of Doubt by Erik M Conway and Naomi Oreskes brilliantly chronicled in the domains of climate science and tobacco research, a smokescreen of doubt can be thrown up, which provides a cover for interests averse to systemic change, whether regulatory or otherwise. And Eyal can make people who get distracted by adversarial design less inclined to demand more from their technologies, and more inclined to demand superpowers of themselves that their all-too-human limitations render them unable to meet.

Technology exists to help us transcend our limitations. This book could have been a welcome recognition by a leading voice in the field that we cant fight distractions on our own that we shouldnt have to and that technology, properly designed and incentivised, is necessary for helping us do so. That is the book I wish I could have read.

In Hooked, Eyal wrote: It will be years, perhaps generations, before society develops the mental antibodies to control new habits. However, in Indistractable he writes: We have the unique ability to adapt to such threats. We can take steps right now to retrain and regain our brains. To be blunt, what other choice do we have? We dont have time to wait for regulators to do something and if you hold your breath waiting for corporations to make their products less distracting, well, youre going to pass out.

Its one thing to tell this to knowledge workers who ride electric scooters to work and stream productivity podcasts into their AirBuds. But tell it to the single working mother who can barely carve out enough me time to take a shower. Better yet, tell the tech designers its not their fault, that its ultimately their users responsibility to manage distractions, and that even if their products do distract, the root cause of it lies in users themselves.

To throw everything back on the individual and to ignore the structural causes of distraction is not only unscientific in its approach to human nature, it is unjust in its implications for society, and unimaginative in its capitulation to design. Such a position would be understandable, though still not acceptable, from someone who didnt know better. But to spend years building up those structural causes of distraction, and then to take such a position? That would be a spectacle of sophistry from which no amount of self-help pabulum could distract.

James Williamss Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Restriction in the Attention Economy is published by Cambridge. Indistractable is published by Bloomsbury (20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over 15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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Indistractable by Nir Eyal review letting tech off the hook - The Guardian