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ISSN 1324-685E
wish you were here

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STAFF
TECHNOLOGY CULTURE & CONSCIOUSNESS
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Nathaniel Bergstein
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Jill Vartenigian, Julia McNamara
ART DIRECTOR
Nathaniel Bergstein
COPY EDITOR
Nathaniel Bergstein
LAYOUTS
Nathaniel Bergstein
ADVERTISING MANAGER
Nathaniel Bergstein
WRITERS AND CONTRIBUTERS
Kevin Kelly, Loren Eiseley, Tom Chatfield, Jacqueline Howard,
Peter Opaskar, Jesse Singal
VOL 1 | JUNE 2017
CONTACT US
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ADVERTISERS
Nathaniel@UserMagazine.com
206.555.1234

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What DOES Technology Want?
Neo-luddite Kevin Kelly explores the link
between natural evolution and the Techium
The Bird and The Machine
Naturalist, Loren Eiseley’s wonderful essay
about life and reductionism.
The Attention Economy
Tom Chati eld thinks we are selling
ourselves too cheap.
13 FRACTALS
Images of our self-similar world
Starlings and Television Snow
15 FEEDBACK
Texting is supercharging the part of our
brains connected to our thumbs
17 Data
The numbers don’t lie, we spend more
of our lives on screens than ever
46
FILM REVIEW
Werner Herzog’s Lo And Behold: Reveries
of the Connected World
51 EVENTS 54 NEXT ISSUE
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FRACTALS
STARLINGS & TELEVISION SNOW
By Nathaniel Bergstein
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FEEDBACK
Texting Is Supercharging the Part of
Our Brain Connected to Our Thumbs
By Jesse Singal
Opposable thumbs are a pretty cool appendage
that has served humanity well since our
earliest tool-making days, and one that, over
the last 15 years or so, has been given a new
kind of workout by the advent of texting. There’s
probably never been a batch of humans, in fact,
whose thumbs have been used for so many precise
movements. And, if a new study is any indication, all
this texting is leaving an imprint on our brains.
In research published in Current Biology (I’ll add
a link to the study itself when it’s available), a team
led by Arko Ghosh of the University of Zurich took
a bunch of texters and hooked them up to EEG machines
to measure the activity in their sensorimotor
cortices. The cool thing about this particular region
of the brain is that speciic parts of it are connected
to speciic body parts, and its activity relects how
intensely those body parts are used. Among violinists,
for example, the parts of the sensorimotor
cortex connected to the ingers they use to play
their instruments are larger than they are among us
non-violinists.
So how did this apply to texters? As the press release
notes, “The more the Smartphone had been
used in the previous ten days, the greater the signal
in the brain. This correlation was the strongest …
in the area that represented the thumb.” We are
rapidly hurtling toward a future in which people
text at a thousand words a minute and never leave
their homes, and the sensorimotor cortex is nothing
but a giant thumb-controlling device. <
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DATA
SCREEN TIME
By Jacqueline Howard
The average American spends nearly half a day
staring at a screen according to a new Nielsen
Company audience report. The report reveals
that adults in the United States devoted
about 10 hours and 39 minutes each day to consuming
media during the i rst quarter of this year.
The report, which was released Monday, included
how much time we spend daily using our tablets,
smartphones, personal computers, multimedia devices,
video games, radios, DVDs, DVRs and TVs.
“The overall results don’t surprise me,” said Steve
Gortmaker, a professor of sociology at Harvard
University who was not involved in the report.
“The number of devices we have proliferate the
overall time spent with screens, and the number of
devices is increasing,” he added. “A lot of people
have been thinking about how or whether this time
spent is a good use of their time, which becomes a
deep issue.” he added. “If people are spending over
50 hours a week with media for entertainment purposes,
then there’s really no time left for any of the
other things we value.”
The report reveals a dramatic one-hour increase
over 2015 in how often the average American adult
gorges on media in a day. During the same time period
last year, people spent about nine hours and 39
minutes engaging with gadgets.
This jump could be credited to the rise in smartphone
and tablet usage, the report shows. Nielsen
collects data on media consumption only, so time
spent on a smartphone or tablet doing other things,
from taking photos to texting, was not included in
the report’s data.
About 81% of adults in the United States have
smartphones, according to the report, which are
used about one hour and 39 minutes daily on average
to consume media. <
Hours per Day
Mobile
Desktop/Laptop
Other Connected Devices
TV
9.4
9.0
8.2
7.6
0.4
2.4
0.4
1.6
2.3
0.8
9.6
9.9
2.6
2.8
2.6 2.5
2.3 2.4 2.4
0.3 0.3
0.3
0.3 0.4
4.4 4.6 4.6 4.4 4.5 4.3
2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015
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System evolution: Top left is a map of the internet from 2000 created by William Cheswick and Hal
Burch of The Internet Mapping Project started by at Bell Labs in 1997on the bottom, the tree of life.

What D0es
TEchn0l0gy
WanT?
BY KEVIN KELLY
YOUR DOG WANTS TO
GO OUTSIDE. YOUR
CAT WANTS TO BE
SCRATCHED. BIRDS
WANT MATES. WORMS
WANT MOISTURE.
BACTERIA WANT FOOD.
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Left: Diatoms arranged by researchers at the University Of
California. Below a 5th generation micro-processor developed
by Intel corporation.
The wants of a microscopic
single-celled organism are
less than the wants of you or
me, but all organisms share
a few fundamental desires:
to survive, to grow. The
wants of a protozoan are unconscious,
unarticulated, and more like an urge, or
possibly, a tendency. A bacterium tends to
drift toward nutrients with no awareness
of its needs. There is no room beneath its
membrane for a will as we know it, yet in
a dim way it chooses to satisfy its wants by
heading one way and not another.
Perhaps not much room is needed to
want. The astrophysicist Freeman Dyson
claims that we should view the smallest
known bits of organized matter — quantum
particles — as making choices. For millions
of years a particle will exist and then
suddenly it decays. Why then? Dyson says
that from the individual particle’s viewpoint,
this moment can only look like a choice, a
satisfaction of a want. It is only on the scale
of statistics with millions of particles that
a particle’s choice shapes up as a predictable
radiation half-life. But even individual
human wants and desires average out to
weirdly predictable laws in aggregate.
If a little one-celled protozoan — a very
small package — can have a choice, if a l ea
has urges, if a stari sh has a bias towards
THE TECHNIUM IS
THE SPHERE OF
VISIBLE TECHNOLOGY
AND INTANGIBLE
ORGANIZATIONS
THAT FORM WHAT
WE THINK OF AS
MODERN CULTURE.
IT IS THE CURRENT
ACCUMULATION OF
ALL THAT HUMANS
HAVE CREATED.
certain things, if a mouse can want, then
so can the growing, complexifying technological
assemblage we have surrounded
ourselves with. Its complexity is approaching
the complexity of a microscopic
organism. This tissue consists (so far) of
billions of dwellings, millions of factories, billions
of hectares of land modii ed by plant
and animal breeding, trillion of motors,
thousands of dammed rivers and artii cial
lakes, hundred of millions of automobiles
coursing along like cells, a quadrillion computer
chips, millions of miles of wire, and it
consumes 16 terawatts of power.
None of these parts operate independently.
No mechanical system can function
by itself. Each bit of technology
requires the viability and growth of all the
rest of technology to keep going. There is
no communication without the nerves of
electricity. There is no electricity without
the veins of coal mining, uranium mining,
or damming of rivers, or even the mining
of precious metals to make solar panels.
There is no metabolism of factories without
the ingest of food from domesticated
plants and animals, and no circulation of
goods without vehicles. This global-scaled
network of systems, subsystems, machines,
pipes, roads, wires, conveyor belts, automobiles,
servers and routers, institutions,
laws, calculators, sensors, works of art,
archives, activators, collective memory,
and power generators — this whole grand
system of interrelated and interdependent
pieces forms a very primitive organism-like
system. Call it the technium.
The technium is the sphere of visible
technology and intangible organizations that
form what we think of as modern culture.
It is the current accumulation of all that humans
have created. For the last 1,000 years,
this techosphere has grown about 1.5% per
year. It marks the difference between our

lives now, verses 10,000 years ago. Our
society is as dependent on this technological
system as nature itself. Yet, like
all systems it has its own agenda. Like all
organisms the technium also wants.
To head off any confusion, the technium
is not conscious (at this point). Its wants are
not deliberations, but rather tendencies.
Leanings. Urges, Trajectories. By the nature
of self-reinforcing feedback loops, any large
system will tend to lean in certain directions
more than others. The sum total of millions
of amplifying relationships, circuits, and
networks of inl uence is to push the total in
one direction more than another.
Every owner of a large complicated machine
can appreciate this tendency. Your
machine will “want” to stall in certain conditions,
or want to “runaway” in others. Left
to its own devices, complex systems will
gravitate to specii c states. In mathematical
terms this is called the convergence upon
“strange attractors” — sort of gravity wells
that pull in a complex system toward this
state no matter where it starts.
Of course we humans want certain
things from the technium, but at the
same time there is an inherent bias in the
technium outside of our wants. Beyond our
desires, there is a tendency within the technium
that — all other things being equal
— favors certain solutions. Technology will
head in certain directions because physics,
mathematics, and realities of innovation
constrain possibilities. Imagine other worlds
of alien civilizations. Once they discover
electricity, their electronics will share some,
but not all, attributes with our electrical devices.
That which they share can be counted
as the inherent agenda of electrical technology.
Throughout the galaxy any civilization
that invents nuclear power will hit upon a
small set of workable solutions: that set is
the inherent “agenda” of technology.
It would be wonderful if we could survey
all alien technological civilizations to extract
the common tendencies in technological
growth. A large number of technological
evolutions would reveal the culture-free
dynamics beneath them all. Since we have
a solitary sample of one technium back on
Earth, we have fewer methods of unraveling
inherent system bias in technology. Three
lines of evidence present themselves:
OF COURSE WE HUMANS WANT CERTAIN
THINGS FROM THE TECHNIUM,
BUT AT THE SAME TIME THERE
IS AN INHERENT BIAS IN THE
TECHNIUM OUTSIDE OF OUR WANTS.
01
We
02
03
can look back in history to when technological
development was more culturally
isolated. The pathways of technology in early
China, South America, Africa, and Western
Europe out with only minimal cross-over inl u-
ence. Examination of their parallel developmental
sequences can reveal inherent biases.
More importantly, the major predecessor
system to technology is organic life. Many of
the dynamics of evolution and syntropy extend
from living organisms into artii cial systems,
primarily because they share similar disequilibrial
states. We can see the direction of technology
in the direction of life and evolution.
The long-term history of our single technium
shows high-level patterns which we can project
forward. We can ignore individual inventions
and chart long-term l ows which enable them.
Much as we might want the compressed history
of a growing creature and guess where it
goes next. If the organism is a caterpillar we
are out of luck; if it is a worm, it will succeed.
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NO MECHANICAL SYSTEM CAN FUNCTION BY ITSELF.
EACH BIT OF TECHNOLOGY REQUIRES THE VIABILITY
AND GROWTH OF ALL THE REST OF TECHNOLOGY
TO KEEP GOING. THERE IS NO COMMUNICATION
WITHOUT THE NERVES OF ELECTRICITY.
Looking at the evolution of life and the
long-term histories of past technologies,
what then are the long-term trajectories of
the technium? What does technology want?
Here are just some of the things technology
wants. We don’t always have to
do what technology wants, but I think we
need to begin with what it wants so that
we can work with these forces instead of
against them.
P0SSIBILITIES
To increase diversity
To maximize freedom
To maximaze choices
To expand the space of the possible
C0MPLEXITY
To increase complexity
To increase social co-dependency
To increase self-referential nature
To align with nature
EFFICIENCIES
To increase specialization/uniqueness
To increase power density
To increase density of meaning
To engage all matter and energy
To reach ubiquity and free-ness
To become beautiful
EV0LVABILITY
To accelerate evolvability
To play the ini nite game
As of 2016, there are nearly 350 undersea cables
like this one (left) that are part of the physical
internet. Some cross oceans, others follow coasts
down along continents. The whole network of
submarine cables spans more than 550,00 miles,
with some as far underwater as Mount Everest
towers above ground.

TEchn0l0gy’S
TRAGECT0RY
The varieties of whatever will increase. Those varieties that give humans
more free choices will prevail.
Technologies will start out general in their irst version, and specialize
over time. Going niche will always be going with the low. There is
almost no end to how specialized (and tiny) some niches can get.
You can safely anticipate higher energy eficiency, more compact
meaning and everything getting smarter.
All are headed to ubiquity and free. What lips when everyone has one?
What happens when it is free?
Highly evolved forms become beautiful, which can be its own attraction.
Over time the fastest moving technology will become more social,
more co-dependent, more ecological, more deeply entwined with other
technologies. Many technologies require scaffolding tech to be born irst.
The trend is toward enabling technologies which become tools for
inventing new technologies easiest, faster, cheaper.
High tech needs clean water, clean air, reliable energy just as much as
humans want the same.
In general the long-term bias of technology
is to increase the diversity of artifacts,
methods, techniques. More ways, more
choices. Over time technological advances
invent more energy eficient methods,
and gravitate to technologies which compress
the most information and knowledge
into a given space or weight. Also
over time, more and more of matter on
the planet will be touched by technological
processes. Technologies tend toward
ubiquity and cheapness. They also tend
towards greater complexity (though many
will get simpler, too). Over time technologies
require more surrounding technologies
in order to be discovered and to
operate; some technologies become
eusocial — a distributed existence — in
which they are inert when solitary. In the
long run, technology increases the speed
at which it evolves and encourages its
own means of invention to change. It aims
to keep the game of change going.
What this means is that when the
future trajectory of a particular ield of
technology is in doubt, “all things being
equal” you can guess several things about
where it is headed <
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the Bird
the Machine

Isuppose their little bones have years ago
been lost among the stones and winds of
those high glacial pastures. I suppose their
feathers blew eventually into the piles of
tumbleweed beneath the straggling cattle
fences and rotted there in the mountain
snows, along with dead steers and all the other things
that drift to an end in the corners of the wire. I do not
quite know why, I should be thinking of birds over
the New York Times at breakfast, particularly the
birds of my youth half a continent away. It is a funny
thing what the brain will do with memories and how
it will treasure them and finally bring them into odd
juxtapositions with other things, as though it wanted
to make a design, or get some meaning out of them,
whether you want it or not, or even see it.
It used to seem marvelous to me, but I read now
that there are machines that can do these things in a
small way, machines that can crawl about like animals,
and that it may not be long now until they do
more things — maybe even make themselves —
I saw that piece in the Times just now. And then
they will, maybe — well, who knows — but you
read about it more and more with no one making
any protest, and already they can add better than
we and reach up and hear things through the dark
and finger the guns over the night sky.
This is the new world that I read about at breakfast.
This is the world that confronts me in my
biological books and journals, until there are times
when I sit quietly in my chair and try to hear the
little purr of the cogs in my head and the tubes flaring
and dying as the messages go through them and
the circuits snap shut or open.
This is the great age, make no mistake about it;
the robot has been born somewhat appropriately
along with the atom bomb, and the brain they say
now is just another type of more complicated feedback
system. The engineers have its basic principles
worked out; it’s mechanical, you know; nothing
to get superstitions about; and man can always
improve on nature once he gets the idea. Well, he’s
got it all right and that’s why, I guess, that I sit here
in my chair, with the article crunched in my hand,
remembering those two birds and that blue mountain
sunlight. There is another magazine article on
my desk that reads “Machines Are Getting Smarter
Every Day.” I don’t deny it, but I’ll still stick with the
birds. It’s life I believe in, not machines.
Maybe you don’t believe there is any difference. A
skeleton is all joints and pulleys, I’ll admit, and when
man was in his simpler stages of machine building
in the eighteenth century, he quickly, saw the
resemblances. “What,” wrote Hobbes, “is the heart
but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and
the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the
whole body?” Tinkering about in their shops it was
inevitable in the end that men would see the world
Loren Eiseley
Born, raised, and educated
in Lincoln, Nebraska, Loren
Eiseley (1907–77) was a
naturalist and highly respected
writer best known
for explaining complex
scientii c concepts in a way
that could be easily read
and understood by the
general public. His work
covered anthropology,
ecology, and human evolution,
topics in which Eiseley
himself was extensively
educated. Drawing inspiration
from his midwestern
upbringing Eiseley worked
to bring science into the
mainstream at a time when
its understanding was
restricted largely to those
working directly in the i eld.
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as a huge machine “subdivided into an infinite
number of lesser machines.”
The idea took on with a vengeance. little automatons
toured the country — dolls controlled by clockwork.
Clocks described as little worlds were taken
on tours by their designers. They were made up of
moving figures, shifting scenes and other remarkable
devices. The life of the cell was unknown. Man,
whether he was conceived as possessing a soul or
not, moved and jerked about like these tiny puppets.
A human being thought of himself in terms of his
own tools and implements. He had been fashioned
like the puppets he produced and was only a more
clever model made by a greater designer.
Then in the nineteenth century, the cell was
discovered, and the single machine in its turn was
found to be the product of millions of infinitesimal
machines -the cells. Now, finally, the cell itself dissolves
away into an abstract chemical machine —
and that into some intangible, inexpressible flow of
energy. The secret seems to lurk all about, the wheels
get smaller and smaller, and they turn more rapidly,
but when you try to seize it the life is gone — and
so, by popular definition, some would say that life
was never there in the first place. The wheels and
the cogs are the secret and we can make them better
in time - machines that will run faster and more accurately
than real mice to real cheese.
I have no doubt it can be done, though a mouse
harvesting seeds on an autumn thistle is to me a fine
sight and more complicated, I think, in his multiform
activity, than a machine “mouse” running a
maze. Also, I like to think of the possible shape of
the future brooding in mice, just as it brooded once
in a rather ordinary, mousy insectivore who became
a man. It leaves a nice fine indeterminate sense of
wonder that even an electronic brain hasn’t got,
because you know perfectly, well that if the electronic
brain changes, it will be because of something
man has done to it. But what man will do to himself
he doesn’t really know. A certain scale of time and
a ghostly, intangible thing called change are ticking
in him. Powers and potentialities like the oak in the
seed, or a red and awful ruin. Either way, it’s impressive;
and the mouse has it, too. Or those birds, I’ll
never forget those birds — yet before I measured
their significance, I learned the lesson of time first
of all. I was young then and left alone in a great
desert — part of an expedition that had scattered its
men over several hundred miles in order to carry on
research more effectively. I learned there that time
is a series of planes existing superficially in the same
universe. The tempo is a human, illusion, a subjective
clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.
As the long months passed, I began to live
on the slower planes and to observe more
readily what passed for life there. I sauntered,
I passed more and more slowly up and down
the canyons in the dry baking heat of midsummer.
I slumbered for long hours in the shade of huge
brown boulders that had gathered in tilted companies
out on the flats. I had forgotten the world of
men and the world had forgotten me. Now and then
I found a skull in the canyons, and these justified my
remaining there. I took a serene cold interest in these
discoveries. I had come, like many a naturalist before
me, to view life with a wary and subdued attention. I
had grown to take pleasure in the divested bone.
I sat once on a high ridge that fell away before me
into a waste of sand dunes. I sat through hours of a
long afternoon. Finally, as I glanced beside my boot
an indistinct configuration caught my eye. It was a
coiled rattlesnake, a big one. How long he had sat
with me I do not know. I had not frightened him.
We were both locked in the sleepwalking tempo of
the earlier world, baking in the same high air and
sunshine. Perhaps he had been there when I came.
He slept on as I left, his coils, so ill discerned by me,
dissolving once more among the stones and gravel
from which I had barely made him out.
Another time I got on a higher ridge among some
tough little wind-warped pines half covered over
Life
The dei nition of life is controversial.
Organisms which
maintain homeostasis, are
composed of cells, undergo
metabolism, can grow,
adapt to their environment,
respond to stimuli, and
reproduce are considered
by scientists to posess
life. However, many other
dei nitions have been proposed,
and borderline cases,
such as viruses, further
complicate the question.
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with sand in a basin-like depression that caught
everything carried by the air up to those heights.
There were a few thin bones of birds, some cracked
shells of indeterminable age, and the knotty fingers
of pine roots bulged out of shape from their long
and agonizing grasp upon the crevices of the rock. I
lay under the pines in the sparse shade and went to
sleep once more.
It grew cold finally, for autumn was in the air
by then, and the few things that lived thereabouts
were sinking down into an even chillier scale of
time. In the moments between sleeping and waking
I saw the roots about me and slowly, slowly, a foot
in what seemed many centuries, I moved my sleepstiffened
hands over the scaling bark and lifted my
numbed face after the vanishing sun. I was a great
awkward thing of knots and aching limbs, trapped
up there in some long, patient endurance that
involved the necessity of putting living fingers into
rock and by slow, aching expansion bursting those
rocks asunder. I suppose, so thin and slow was the
time of my pulse by then, that I might have stayed
on to drift still deeper into the lower cadences of
the frost, or the crystalline life that glistens pebbles,
or shines in a snowflake, or dreams in the meteoric
iron between the worlds.
It was a dim descent, but time was present in it.
Somewhere far down in that scale the notion struck
me that one might come the other way. Not many
months thereafter I joined some colleagues heading
higher into a remote windy tableland where huge
bones were reputed to protrude like boulders from
the turf. I had drowsed with reptiles and moved with
the century-long pulse of trees; now lethargically, I
was climbing back up some invisible ladder of quickening
hours. There had been talk of birds in connection
with my duties. Birds are intense, fast-living
creatures-reptiles, I suppose one might say, that have
escaped out of the heavy sleep of time, transformed
fairy creatures dancing over sunlit meadows. It is a
youthful fancy no doubt, but because of something
that happened up there among the escarpments of
that range, it remains with me a lifelong impression.
I can never bear to see a bird imprisoned.
We came into that valley,
through the trailing mists
of a spring night. It was
a place that looked as
though it might never
have known the foot of
man, but our scouts had been ahead of us and we
knew all about the abandoned cabin of stone that
lay far up on one hillside. It had been built in the
land rush of the last century and then lost to the
cattlemen again as the marginal soils failed to take
to the plow.
There were spots like this all over that country.
Lost graves marked by unlettered stones and old
corroding rim-fire cartridge cases lying where
somebody had made a stand among the boulders
that rimmed the valley. They are all that remain of
the range wars; the men are under the stones now. I
could see our cavalcade winding in and out through
the mist below us: torches, the reflection of the truck
lights on our collecting tins, and the far-off bumping
of a loose dinosaur thigh bone in the bottom of
a trailer. I stood on a rock a moment looking down
and thinking what it cost in money and, equipment
to capture the past.
We had, in addition, instructions to lay hands
on the present. The word had come through to get
them alive - birds, reptiles, anything. A zoo somewhere
abroad needed restocking. It was one of those
reciprocal matters in which science involves itself.
Maybe our museum needed a stray ostrich egg and
this was the pay off. Anyhow, my job was to help
capture some birds and that was why I was there
before the trucks.
The cabin bad not been occupied for years. We
intended to clean it out and live in it, but there were
holes in the roof and the birds had come in and
were roosting in the rafters. You could depend on it
in a place like this where everything blew away, and
even a bird needed some place out of the weather
and away from coyotes. A. cabin going back to nature
in a wild place draws them until they come in,
listing at the eaves, I imagine, pecking softly among
the shingles till they find a hole and then suddenly,
the place is theirs and man is forgotten.
Sometimes of late years I find myself thinking the
most beautiful sight in the world might be the birds
taking over New York after the last man has ran
away to the hills. I will never live to see it, of course,
but I know just how it will sound because I’ve lived
up high and I know the sort of watch birds keep on
us. I’ve listened to sparrows tapping tentatively on
the outside of air conditioners when they thought
no one was listening, and I know how other birds
test the vibrations that come up to them through the
television aerials.
“Is he gone?” they ask, and the vibrations come
up from below, “Not yet, not yet.”
Well, to come back, I got the door open softly
and I had the spotlight all ready to turn on and
blind whatever birds there were so they couldn’t see
to get out through the roof. I had a short piece of
ladder to put against the far wall where there was

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a shelf on which I expected to make the biggest
haul. I had all the information I needed just like any
skilled assassin. I pushed the door open, the hinges
squeaking only a little. A bird or two stirred - I could
hear them- but nothing flew and there was a faint
starlight through the holes in the roof.
I padded across the floor, got the ladder up and the
light ready, and slithered up the ladder till my head
and arms were over the shelf. Everything was dark as
pitch except for the starlight at the little place back of
the shelf near the eaves. With the light to blind them,
they’d never make it. I had them. I reached my arm
carefully over in order to be ready to seize whatever
was there and I put the flash on the edge of the shelf
where it would stand by itself when I turned it on.
That way I’d be able to use both hands.
Everything worked perfectly except for one detail
-I didn’t know what kind of birds were there. I never
thought about it at all, and it wouldn’t have mattered
if I had. My orders were to get something interesting.
I snapped on the flash and sure enough there
was a great beating and feathers flying, but instead
of my having them, they, or rather he, had me. He
had my hand, that is, and for a small hawk not much
bigger than my fist he was doing all right. I heard
him give one short metallic cry when the light went
on and my hand descended on the bird beside him;
after that he was busy with his claws and his beak
was sunk in my thumb. In the struggle I knocked the
lamp over on the shelf, and his mate got her sight
back and whisked neatly through the hole in the
roof and off among the stars outside. It all happened
in fifteen seconds and you might think I would have
fallen down the ladder, but no, I had a professional
assassin’s reputation to keep up, and the bird, of
course, made the mistake of thinking the hand was
the enemy and not the eyes behind it. He chewed my
thumb up pretty effectively and lacerated my hand
with his claws, but in the end I got him, having two
hands to work with.
He was a sparrow hawk and a fine young male
in the prime of life. I was sorry not to catch the
pair of them, but as I dripped blood and folded his
wings carefully, holding him by the back so that he
couldn’t strike again, I had to admit the two of them
might have been more than I could have handled
under the circumstances. The little fellow had saved
his mate by diverting me, and that was that. He
was born to it, and made no outcry now, resting in
my hand hopelessly, but peering toward me in the
shadows behind the lamp with a fierce, almost indifferent
glance. He neither gave nor expected mercy
and something out of the high air passed from him
to me, stirring a faint embarrassment.
I quit looking into that eye and managed to get
my huge carcass with its fist full of prey back down
the ladder. I put the bird in a box too small to allow
him to injure himself by struggle and walked out
to welcome the arriving trucks. It had been a long
day, and camp still to make in the darkness. In the
morning that bird would be just another episode.
He would go back with the bones in the truck to a
small cage in a city where he would spend the rest of
his life. And a good thing, too. I sucked my aching
thumb and spat out some blood. An assassin has to
get used to these things. I had a professional reputation
to keep up.
In the morning, with the change that comes on
suddenly in that high country, the mist that had
hovered below us in the valley was gone. The
sky was a deep blue, and one could see for miles
over the high outcroppings of stone. I was up early
and brought the box in which the little hawk was
imprisoned out onto the grass where I was building
a cage. A wind as cool as a mountain spring ran
over the grass and stirred my hair. It was a fine day
to be alive. I looked up and all around and at the
hole in the cabin roof out of which the other little
hawk had fled. There was no sign of her anywhere
that I could see.
“Probably in the next county by now,” I thought
cynically, but before beginning work I decided I’d
have a look at my last nights capture.
Secretively, I looked again all around the camp
and up and down and opened the box. I got him
right out in my hand with his wings folded properly
and I was careful not to startle him. He lay limp in
my grasp and I could feel his heart pound under the
feathers but he only looked beyond me and up.
I saw him look that last look away beyond me
into a sky so full of light that I could not follow
his gaze. The little breeze flowed over me again,
and nearby a mountain aspen shook all its tiny
leaves. I suppose I must have had an idea then of
what I was going to do, but I never let it come up
into consciousness. I just reached over and laid the
hawk on the grass.
He lay there a long minute without hope, unmoving,
his eyes still fixed on that blue vault above him.
It must have been that he was already so far away
in heart that he never felt the release from my hand.
He never even stood. He just lay with his breast
against the grass.
In the next second after that long minute he was
gone. Like a flicker of light, he had vanished with
my eyes full on him, but without actually seeing even
a premonitory wing beat. He was gone straight into
Sparrowhawk
The Eurasian sparrowhawk
is a small bird of prey with
short, broad wings and a
long tail, both adaptations
to manoeuvring through
trees. Females can be up to
25% larger than males and
weigh up to twice as much.
Marked size difference in
this direction is unusual in
higher vertebrates but typical
in birds of prey.
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that towering emptiness of light and crystal that
my eyes could scarcely bear to penetrate. For another
long moment there was silence. I could not see him.
The light was too intense. Then from far up somewhere
a cry came ringing down.
I was young then and had seen little of the world,
but when I heard that cry my heart turned over. It
was not the cry of the hawk I had captured; for, by
shifting my position against the sun, I was now seeing
further up. Straight out of the sun’s eye, where
she must have been soaring restlessly above us for
untold hours, hurtled his mate. And from far up,
ringing from peak to peak of the summits over us,
came a cry of such unutterable and ecstatic joy that
it sounds down across the years and tingles among
the cups on my quiet breakfast table.
I saw them both now. He was rising fast to meet
her. They met in a great soaring gyre that turned
to a whirling circle and a dance of wings. Once
more, just once, their two voices, joined in a harsh
wild medley of question and response, struck and
echoed against the pinnacles of the valley. Then
they were gone forever somewhere into those upper
regions beyond the eyes of men.
I am older now, and sleep less, and have seen
most of what there is to see and am not very much
impressed any more, I suppose, by anything. “What
Next in the Attributes of Machines?” my morning
headline runs. “It Might Be the Power to Reproduce
Themselves.”
Ilay the paper down and across my mind a phrase
floats insinuatingly: “It does not seem that there
is anything in the construction, constituents, or
behavior of the human being which it is essentially
impossible for science to duplicate and synthesize.
On the other hand…”
All over the city the cogs in the hard, bright mechanisms
have begun to turn. Figures move through
computers, names are spelled out, a thoughtful
machine selects the fingerprints of a wanted criminal
from an array of thousands. In the laboratory an
electronic mouse runs swiftly through a maze toward
the cheese it can neither taste nor enjoy. On the
second run it does better than a living mouse.
“On the other hand…” Ah, my mind takes up,
on the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache,
hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of
hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does
it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce
passion of a bird. Far off, over a distance greater
than space, that remote cry from the heart of heaven
makes a faint buzzing among my breakfast dishes
and passes on and away.
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Neat.

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MIND
The
Attention
Economy
BY TOM CHATFIELD

How many other things are you doing right
now while you’re reading this piece?
Are you also checking your email, glancing at your Twitter feed, and updating your
Facebook page? What i ve years ago David Foster Wallace labelled ‘Total Noise’
— ‘the seething static of every particular thing and experience, and one’s total
freedom of ini nite choice about what to choose to attend to’ — is today just part
of the texture of living on a planet that will, by next year, boast one mobile phone
for each of its seven billion inhabitants. We are all amateur attention economists,
hoarding and bartering our moments — or watching them slip away down the
cracks of a thousand YouTube clips.
If you’re using a free online service, the adage goes, you are the product. It’s an
arresting line, but one that deserves putting more precisely: it’s not you, but your
behavioral data and the quantii able facts of your engagement that are constantly
blended for sale, with the aggregate of every single interaction (yours included)
becoming a mechanism for ever-more-i nely tuning the business of attracting and
retaining users.
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Consider the confessional slide show released in December 2012 by Upworthy,
the ‘website for viral content’, which detailed the mechanics of its online attentionseeking.
To be truly viral, they note, content needs to make people want to click on
it and share it with others who will also click and share. This means selecting stuff
with instant appeal — and then precisely calibrating the summary text, headline,
excerpt, image and tweet that will spread it. This in turn means producing at least
25 different versions of your material, testing the best ones, and being prepared
to constantly tweak every aspect of your site. To play the odds, you also need to
publish content constantly, in quantity, to maximize the likelihood of a hit — while
keeping one eye glued to Facebook. That’s how Upworthy got its most viral hit
ever, under the headline ‘Bully Calls News Anchor Fat, News Anchor Destroys
Him On Live TV’, with more than 800,000 Facebook likes and 11 million views on
YouTube.
But even Upworthy’s efforts pale into insignii cance compared with the algorithmic
might of sites such as Yahoo! — which, according to the American author and marketer
Ryan Holiday, tests more than 45,000 combinations of headlines and images
every i ve minutes on its home page. Much as corporations incrementally improve
This vision of puppeteers effortlessly pulling
everyone else’s strings — however much it
might fulfil both geek fantasies and Luddite
nightmares — is distinctly dubious
the taste, texture and sheer enticement of food and drink by measuring how hard
it is to stop eating and drinking them, the actions of every individual online are fed
back into measures where more inexorably means better: more readers, more
viewers, more exposure, more inl uence, more ads, more opportunities to unfurl
the integrated apparatus of gathering and selling data.
Attention, thus conceived, is an inert and i nite resource, like oil or gold: a tradable
asset that the wise manipulator auctions off to the highest bidder, or speculates
upon to lucrative effect. There has even been talk of the world reaching ‘peak attention’,
by analogy to peak oil production, meaning the moment at which there is
no more spare attention left to spend.
This is one way of conceiving of our time. But it’s also a quantii cation that tramples
across other, qualitative questions — a fact that the American author Michael
H Goldhaber recognised some years ago, in a piece for Wired magazine called
‘Attention Shoppers!’ (1997). Attention, he argued, ‘comes in many forms: love,
recognition, heeding, obedience, thoughtfulness, caring, praising, watching over,
attending to one’s desires, aiding, advising, critical appraisal, assistance in developing
new skills, et cetera. An army sergeant ordering troops doesn’t want the kind of attention
Madonna seeks. And neither desires the sort I do as I write this.
For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent
consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding
of what attention means. What are we actually talking about when we base

Attention is an inert and finite
resource, like oil or gold: a tradable
asset that the wise manipulator
auctions off to the highest bidder
both business and mental models on a ‘resource’ that, to all intents and purposes, is
fabricated from scratch every time a new way of measuring it comes along?
In Latin, the verb attendere — from which our word ‘attention’ derives — literally
means to stretch towards. A compound of ad (‘towards’) and tendere (‘to
stretch’), it invokes an archetypal image: one person bending towards another in
order to attend to them, both physically and mentally.
Attending is closely connected to anticipation. Soldiers snap to attention to signify
readiness and respect — and to embody it. Unable to read each others’ minds, we
demand outward shows of mental engagement. Teachers shout ‘Pay attention!’ at
slumped students whose thoughts have meandered, calling them back to the place
they’re in. Time, presence and physical attentiveness are our most basic proxies for
something ultimately unprovable: that we are understood.
The best teachers, one hopes, don’t shout at their students — because they are
skilled at wooing as well as demanding the best efforts of others. For the ancient
Greeks and Romans, this wooing was a sufi ciently i ne art in itself to be the
central focus of education. As the manual on classical rhetoric Rhetorica ad Herennium
put it 2,100 years ago: ‘We wish to have our hearer receptive, well-disposed,
and attentive (docilem, benivolum, attentum).’ To be civilised was to speak persuasively
about the things that mattered: law and custom, loyalty and justice.
Underpinning this was neither honour nor idealism, but pragmatism embodied in a
i ve-part process. Come up with a compelling proposition, arrange its elements in
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if contentment and a sense of control
are partial measures of success, many
of us are selling ourselves far too cheap
elegant sequence, polish your style, commit the result to
memory or media, then pitch your delivery for maximum
impact. Short of an ancient ‘share’ button, the similarities to
Upworthy’s recipe for going viral are impressive. Cicero, to
whom Rhetorica ad Herennium is traditionally attributed, also
counted l attery, bribery, favour-bargaining and outright untruth
among the tools of his trade. What mattered was results.
However, when it comes to automated systems for garnering attention, there’s more
at play than one person listening to another; and the processes of measurement
and persuasion have some uncannily totalising tendencies. As far as getting the world
to pay attention to me online, either I play by the rules of the system — likes, links,
comments, clicks, shares, retweets — or I become ineligible for any of its glittering
prizes. As the American writer and software engineer David Auerbach put it in n+1
magazine, in a piece pointedly titled ‘The Stupidity of Computers’ (2012), what is on
screen demands nothing so much as my complicity in its assumptions:
Because computers cannot come to us and meet us in our world, we must continue
to adjust our world and bring ourselves to them. We will dei ne and regiment our
lives, including our social lives and our perceptions of our selves, in ways that are conducive
to what a computer can ‘understand’. Their dumbness will become ours.
In computing terms, to do things in a way the system does not ‘understand’ is to do
nothing at all. It is to be incomprehensible, absurd, like trying to feed a banana instead
of paper into a printer. What counts is synonymous ymous with what’s being counted.
All of which seems to place immense power, not to mention responsibility, into
the hands of the system architects: the coders, designers, advertisers, professional
media manipulators and social media gurus devoted to proi table clicking.
Yet this vision of puppeteers effortlessly pulling everyone else’s strings — however
much it might fuli l both geek fantasies and Luddite nightmares — is distinctly dubious.
As the British economist Charles Goodhart argued in 1975 in an aphorism
that has come to be known as Goodhart’s law, ‘When a measure becomes a
target, it ceases to be a good measure.’ There are few better summaries of the
central l aw in attention economics. Attention-engineers are effectively distributing
printing presses for a private currency — and with everyone else desperate to
churn out as much as possible, by any means possible, what’s going on is more a
chaotic scramble for advantage than a rational trade in resources.

No matter how cunning the algorithms and i lters, entire industries of manufactured
attention bloom and fade around every possibility of proi t. As recent investigations
have suggested, achievements in the i eld range from ‘click farms’ of low-paid workers
churning out ersatz engagement to paid endorsements from social media celebrities,
via bulk-purchased followers and fake grassroots activists. Every target is continually
being moved, rei ned and undermined. Nobody is in control.
And who is to say that they should be? Seeing data writ large, relations spelt
out and chains of consequence snaked brightly across the recorded realm, we
confuse information with mastery. Yet this is at best a category error, and at worst
a submission to wishful bullshit: a mix of convenient propaganda and comforting
self-deception that hails new kinds of agency, without pausing to acknowledge the
speciousness of much of what’s on offer.
There’s a similarly reductive exaltation in dei ning attention as the contents of a
global reservoir, slopping interchangeably between the brains of every human being
alive. Where is the space, here, for the idea of attention as a mutual construction
more akin to empathy than budgetary expenditure — or for those unregistered mo-
ments in which we attend to ourselves, to the space around us, or to nothing at all?
From the loftiest perspective of all it is
information itself that is pulling the strings:
free-ranging memes whose ‘purposes’ are pure self-propagation, and whose frantic
evolution outstrips all retrospective accounts. Consider yourself as interchangeable
as the button you’re clicking, as automated as the systems in which you’re impli-
cated. Seen from such a height, you signify nothing beyond your recorded actions.
Like all totalising visions, it’s at once powerful and — viewed sufi ciently closely —
ragged with illusions. Zoom in on individual experience, and something obscure
from afar becomes obvious: in making our attentiveness a fungible asset, we’re not
so much conjuring currency out of thin air as chronically undervaluing our time.
We watch a 30-second ad in exchange for a video; we solicit a friend’s endorse-
ment; we freely pour sentence after sentence, hour after hour, into status updates
and stock responses. None of this depletes our bank balances. Yet its cumulative cost,
while hard to quantify, affects many of those things we hope to put at the heart of a
happy life: rich relationships, rewarding leisure, meaningful work, peace of mind.
What kind of attention do we deserve from those around us, or owe to them in
return? What kind of attention do we ourselves deserve, or need, if we are to be
‘us’ in the fullest possible sense? These aren’t questions that even the most i nely
tuned popularity contest can resolve. Yet, if contentment and a sense of control are
partial measures of success, many of us are selling ourselves far too cheap.
Are you still paying attention? I can look for signs, but in the end I can’t control
what you think or do. And this must be the beginning of any sensible discussion.
No matter who or what tells you otherwise, you have the perfect right to ignore
me — and to decide for yourself what waits in each waking moment. <
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FILM
Everyone gets the future wrong:
Lo and Behold movie review
Werner Herzog’s new documentary hits some sweet spots.
By Peter Opaskar
Hackers? Check. Driverless cars? Check. SpaceX? Check.
Robots? Check. Elon Musk? Check. ARPANET? Check.
Video game addicts? Check. Brainscans? Check. Internet of
Things? Check. All we’re missing is a Fitbit review. Lo and
Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is practically Ars Technica:
The Movie, with Werner Herzog as our guide.
You know about ilmmaker Werner Herzog, right? He’s famous
not just for making movies but for being a lunatic. Starting in the
‘60s, our mad Bavarian genius crazied his way into our hearts by
stealing equipment, forging permits, getting shot during an interview,
regularly endangering his cast and crew, and in the incredibe
Fitzcaraldo with Klaus Kinski, dragging a 19th-century riverboat
over a mountain. Even if you’ve never seen any of Herzog’s ilms,
chances are you’ve heard someone parody him by calmly and
precisely intoning how the universe is chaos, penguins go insane,
and forests are full of misery. And Herzog’s not above making fun
of his own image, as his appearances on The Simpsons, American
Dad, Rick and Morty, Jack Reacher, The Boondocks, and numerous
other appearences can attest.
Herzog tends to make documentaries about weirdos that
he views with equal parts admiration and baflement. The title
character of Grizzly Man thought he could live with bears, while
My Best Fiend is about actor Klaus Kinski, who starred in ive of
Herzog’s most critically-acclaimed ilms, even though Herzog
thought he was a “pestilence” who should have been murdered.
Through interviews and archival footage, Lo and Behold sticks to
this template, and it confronts the weirdest weirdo of them all: the
Internet. Herzog never anthropomorphizes the Internet, but sees
it instead as capable of one day becoming... well, something. I can’t
seem to inish that sentence without trivializing the thing that is
the Internet’s potential.
Lo and Behold is divided into 10 chapters with names like “The
Early Days,” “The Glory of the Net,” and “The Future.” Despite
some Wagner on the soundtrack and a snide remark about an

ugly hallway, the movie begins as more-or-less straight reportage
on how the Internet got started. Dr. Leonard Kleinrock, a
co-creator of ARPANET, bangs away on an early machine like a
maniac, while Bob Kahn talks excitedly about inventing some of
the Internet’s core protocols.
Somewhere along the way, in the midst of all the hackers,
roboticists, security analysts, cosmologists, brain researchers, and
astronomers, Lo and Behold turns darkly comic. Herzog loves
to leave his camera on his subjects long enough for obsession
to glimmer in their eyes, and an engineer doesn’t take much
prodding to confess that he loves his soccer-playing robot. The
dark side of the Internet — people struggling with video game
addiction and online humiliation — shouldn’t come as a surprise.
But what makes Lo and Behold more unsettling is that we have no
real idea what an Internet-driven future may look like.
With this in mind, it makes sense that Herzog is more subdued
than usual during Lo and Behold. The bizarre running commentary
that he typically uses to accompany his interviews with misits
and eccentrics is relatively spartan, as if Herzog can’t wrap his
head around the future the Internet will create. Herzog normally
gets to see a subject’s life in totality (the subjects of Grizzly Man,
My Best Fiend, and Into the Abyss died either before or during ilming).
But a future fundamentally built around electronic interconnection
won’t just outlive him. It’s immortal.
“No one ever gets the future right,” cosmologist Lawrence
Krauss tells Herzog. We never got our lying cars and Moonbases—we
got the World Wide Web instead. The future is daunting
because it’s something we haven’t thought of yet. It’s not going to
be a utopian interplanetary society of jetpacks, but it’s not going
to be The Hunger Games either. Even someone who says “we’re
all going to hell in a handbasket!” is trying to put the future into a
tidy little box. So it says a lot that Herzog, a ilmmaker who once
threatened his leading man with a rile and ate his own shoe on a
bet, can’t make up his mind where we’re headed. <
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Noise-cancelling headphones
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One character does it.
Please don’t text and drive.

EVENTS
7.11.17
Rachel Dretzin: AMA
reddit.com/r/AMA/RachelDretzin
5 –7pm|pT
Rachel Dretzin is an award-winning i lmmaker who
has been producing documentaries for FRONTLINE
since the mid-1990s, with a focus on i lms that
critically explore contemporary American life and
culture. Her latest project, Digital Nation, was a
year-long, multiplatform initiative investigating how
new technologies impact the way we live. Digital
Nation, which is a follow-up to Dretzin’s Emmy
nominated i lm Growing Up Online, makes use of
user-generated content and an ongoing, transparent
reporting process in a unique collaboration with the
online audience.
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Coming
August
VOLUME TWO
SECOND NATURE
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