Attention Activism in Trump's Washington
Efforts to protect minors from digital harms are proliferating across the aisle
On a humid Wednesday in early June, the Federal Trade Commission convened a day-long conference on The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Kids and Hurt Families. Over six or so hours of cordial address, a markedly conservative cohort of FTC bureaucrats, think-tank directors, and anti-tech advocates in DC’s Constitution Center outlined a regulatory agenda that centered on child welfare, parents’ rights, and traditional family values. This is Attention Activism in President Trump’s Washington.
Things kicked off with a celebration of the recently signed Take It Down Act (a bill introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, criminalizing non-consensual AI deepfakes) followed by a few words of greeting on behalf of First Lady Melania Trump. Speeches from members of Congress began with Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee holding forth on the perils of social media, followed by Louisiana State Rep. Laurie Schlegel (R) citing bipartisan victories around age verification laws. Snacks and coffee were not permitted in the conference hall — this point was repeatedly stressed.
Several hours of presentations, testimonials, and friendly panel discussions amounted to a genuinely distressing rundown of the harms of the attention economy: cyberbullying, disordered eating, data privacy violations, sexual grooming, violent pornography, manipulative AI chatbots, and addiction — plus the (in our view, comparatively dubious threat of) “weaponization of our children’s data by agents of cancel culture.” But talk of actual attention was sparse, and the effects of Big Tech on children’s attentional capacities themselves went largely unremarked.
Instead, conservative values stood front and center. “The purpose of innovation and a just society is to promote the flourishing and success of ordinary families,” announced FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, asserting that parents have a “sacred charge to protect their children’s reputation and good name.”
That innocuous normative term, ordinary, seemed to obscure as much as it expressed. But there was no denying our genuine pleasure at Ferguson’s invocation of “flourishing,” and the day did reveal, by the standards of a regulatory agency, a heartening measure of humanistic richness.
“The point of technology is to actually help us become more human,” opined Chris Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, lamenting that today’s youth “can’t attend to something seriously. They lack the virtue of study.”
Michael Toscano of the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, called for an affirmative, values-based tech design paradigm in a similarly expansive spirit: “There are ways to encode your values into a technological design which can preserve certain things about, say, the political form of your nation or your view of what childhood should be like,” he said. “Give these kids the freedom, not just having their attention stolen away from them at every moment, but… to hear common words, to experience a common place together, to experience friendship.”
Friendship… collective attention… a shared world? Our ears perked. He was speaking our language!
The day’s nearly unqualified criticism of Big Tech chimed somewhat discordantly from an administration that was sworn into office atop a dais bearing a full cheerleading squad’s worth of tech executives.
Dissonance aside, though, the FTC’s emphasis on child welfare has the gleam of good strategy. After all, it was only when the effects of second-hand smoke on children became irrefutable that the tables began to turn in the fight against big tobacco. Protecting minors is one of American movement politics’ most reliable causes.
Speaking of minors: Apple’s iPhone celebrates its 18th birthday next week. The handheld smartphone — and the intimate incursions of attention fracking that it facilitates — hasn’t even reached legal adulthood! Perhaps, one hopes, this anniversary will occasion a coming-of-age. Could Big Tech finally grow out of its destructive adolescence?
Time will tell. But we’re not waiting around. And neither are the folks at the FTC. Here’s hoping that our efforts bear fruit. For the children! And for everyone else, too.
— Peter Schmidt, Editor-in-Chief & Danielle Bejerano, SSII Fellow, Princeton University