Keep your eye on the road (Image: Solstock/Getty)

TOYS, toys, toys. We are deluged with new playthings that make ever more demands for our attention – many of them digital. How can we focus on anything true or beautiful amid the twitter and chirp of such constant, almost toddler-like demands?

Other writers have excoriated the distractions of ubiquitous technology and advertising. But Matthew Crawford seeks a deep philosophical perspective. He has a background in physics and political science, and is now at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. In The World Beyond Your Head, he explores how we got to what he calls a “crisis of attention”. His starting onslaught is no less challenging a task than an assault on the “Enlightenment self”, because, it seems, it is the isolated self that permits distraction.

Immanuel Kant is frequently taken to be the epitome of the 18th-century philosophical Enlightenment, and Crawford blames him for constructing its notion of the self as an isolated being for whom true knowledge can arise only from solo enquiry.

He spreads the blame to the 17th century – to John Locke, the font of liberal thought, and to René Descartes, who said that the only thing he couldn’t doubt was that there was something, a self, doing the doubting.

Oddly missing is any discussion of another key Enlightenment figure: Adam Smith, who theorised capitalism as an economy of atomised individuals making rational choices in a social vacuum. “Freedom” and “choice” are the mantras of capitalism. Even though “we often assume that diversity is a natural upshot of free choice”, Crawford says, “the market ideal of choice… tends toward a monoculture of human types: the late modern consumer self.” As an example, he describes how lobbyists for casino gambling “tap into the deep psychology of autonomy” to make it seem that submitting to the engineered attention-grabbing of gambling is a human right.

All this introduces us to one of Crawford’s key proposals for dealing with the crisis: to shift our focus from the lonesome atomised individual to truly shared attention. The current fashion for the “wisdom of crowds” is not true sharing, but rather the market mining individuals. As he writes, “there is a lot more money to be made as an aggregator of ‘content’ than as a producer of it”.

“Crawford proposes shifting our focus from lonesome Enlightenment individual to shared attention”

Crawford’s core message is that we should stop focusing on ourselves and move towards true sharing. “Involve your ass, your mind will follow,” he says. He commends to us the “flow” he feels when riding motorbikes, when his derrière is deeply involved in his need to pay attention. He feels it too in his workshop, making motorbike parts and solving problems with others. In particular, he says, we should value education as a face-to-face apprenticeship in the ways of investigating and of making, through attention shared in person. He gives as an example learning to build a pipe organ, with the person who has to repair it in 400 years’ time in mind.

You will find a much gentler and more literary exploration of the ills of distraction in the musings of Laurence Scott, who teaches creative writing at Arcadia University in London.

In The Four-Dimensional Human, Scott reaches out not into space-time, but into the 20th-century literary imagination’s grasping for something outside the mundane three dimensions.

His account of what is becoming of us is often beautiful even if unnerving at times, such as when he evokes the web pages that come alive on anniversaries of their owners’ deaths. It is certainly worth our attention.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Take a look at your self”

You may also like…our preferences are being reflected back at us (Image: Naresh Singh / Millennium Images UK)

As automation and the internet sweep away employment certainties even for the creative classes, three books explore the depth of our predicament

WHAT you are about to read was written by a human. Honest. In draft, this article included an array of self-referential flourishes designed to convince you it was not the output of a machine intelligence, but they were taken out by the team of human editors who insisted it be clear and stick to a point.

This assurance may be more necessary than you suspect in an age in which automation has penetrated everywhere and even the creative classes fear for their livelihoods. Take Rise of the Robots, one of a trio of new books addressing the future of both work and the online trend for everything to be “free”. Its author, software entrepreneur Martin Ford, asserts that websites such as are making more use than they admit of software like Quill, which generates news reports from raw data.

Whether or not this is yet true, it sharpens the question: what is to become of creative work? And why does it matter? This is the beef of Culture Crash, the second of our trio. Here, Scott Timberg, an arts reporter for the Los Angeles Times before the paper cut its culture coverage, explores the questions in engagingly written and thoroughly researched detail. Though just how much of his very wide reading was done online is, of course, a moot point.

“When city halls or statehouses… don’t get attention from trained, fair-minded observers,” asks Timberg, “what appalling developments will we not hear about until it’s too late? How will we learn about the next Watergate, the next Enron, if no one is paying attention?”

Could all this be the “creative destruction” declared as an engine of economic growth by the likes of economist Joseph Schumpeter? Or is the “winner-takes-all” economy – in which the dynamic of digital markets produces only one search engine, Google, and a few singers, say Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga – a deep threat?

Timberg thinks so. No field of creative endeavour is immune. Massively open online courses (MOOCs) are in fact a calculated attempt to have a winner-takes-all economy of teaching. If they ever work, every student will listen to the lectures of the best professor in the world; there will be no teaching income for the middle-ranking academic.

But the death of the “creative class”, Timberg acknowledges, has other causes, most notably the disappearance of the cheap accommodation and, in some places, the malleable employment benefits that allowed the artists he reviewed room to experiment.

As a reviewer, Timberg would naturally argue that criticism and review are also essential to a creative economy. He bemoans the unintended consequences of structuralist and post-structuralist scholars’ efforts, mostly motivated by a democratic urge to open up the discourse to non-professional voices.

These consequences helped to create a “critical school that did not want to distinguish between good and bad, better or worse, but to reflect people’s preferences – and the marketing that shaped them – back to them”. And that reflection is what we see in the nascent artificial intelligences of Google and Amazon when our purchasing habits trigger an unwelcome “you may also like… “

“Massively open online courses are an attempt to have a winner-takes-all economy of teaching”

Timberg champions the need for a “middle class” of creators who can make a decent, but not spectacular, living from their work – from the work itself, not from T-shirts and speaking about their work. He argues that this is necessary to support those “trained, fair-minded observers” that society needs: free stuff is so often worth every penny. Contrast this argument with the adviser who told a UK minister I was meeting last year – apparently in all seriousness – that all was well with the income of the creative classes by pointing to the average income (an average which, of course, includes J. K. Rowling and the Rolling Stones).

In The Internet is Not the Answer, CNN columnist Andrew Keen goes among the Silicon Valley hipsters – those who truly believe they are on the verge of joining the 1 per cent who own half the winner-takes-all economy – and he is not impressed. Keen is bombarded with sloganeering about “choice” and “media democracy”, and observes instead “the resurrection of a pre-industrial cultural economy of patronage determined by the whims of a narrow cultural and economic elite rather than by the democracy of the marketplace”.

His prescription for saving us from a monoculture is, basically, using anti-trust law to break up the monopolies. But such lawsuits take decades.

In Rise of the Robots, Ford coolly and clearly considers what work is under threat from automation. From reporting to composing film music to driving to doctoring: a whole new range of work will go the way of the assembly-line worker.

All three of these writers acknowledge their intellectual debt to Who Owns the Future?, a 2013 book by Jaron Lanier, the researcher who coined the term “virtual reality”. Once again, Lanier has started a trend.

But more sequels are justified than these books alone. In particular, I would like to see one that can comprehensively examine Lanier’s central prediction: that Google will eat itself.

Currently, Google stands as proxy for all the corporations that eke out a fortune by copying creative works and selling ads alongside them. But, as Lanier observes, if 3D printing becomes a practical alternative to mass production of physical goods, then everything will be distributed as a digital file. Google will encourage you to “share” – its favourite euphemism – the files that allow you to print the thingummy of your choice. What will then be left to advertise? And how will the industrial designers whose works are “shared” pay their rents?

“From composing film music to doctoring: a range of new work will go the way of the assembly worker”

Ford considers the spectre of economic collapse raised by the breaking of the bargain whereby workers who make stuff were paid enough so that they could buy stuff. His solution is startling: an unconditional basic income payment of $10,000 a year to everyone in the US.

Although he observes that this will be howled down as old-school “socialism”, he points out that economist Friedrich Hayek, darling of the anti-socialist howlers, strongly supported the idea of a basic income payment. And from a different political perspective, noted British TV economics correspondent Paul Mason promoted it in The Guardian newspaper less than two weeks ago.

In 1964, 91av assembled a pair of books entitled The World in 1984, containing many essays from the great and good of those times. Several contributors mulled over the “problem of leisure”: how would society cope with automation destroying most jobs? The matter is finally coming to a head for those who make a living by their brain as well as those who rely on their hands.

But what will the supposed leisure class read, watch and listen to? What will we know? And will we have food and shelter?

This article appeared in print under the headline “A creative accounting”

Counterfeit goods are rampant, but online piracy is a juggernaut (Image: Xinhua News Agency/Eyevine)

There’s more than one way to handle authorship and copyright in the digital age, according to The Copyright Wars by Peter Baldwin

“NEVER,” I once told a crowd of students, “take advice on copyright from a professor.” The professor next to me bridled. I continued: “Not if you want to make a living as a writer or artist. The professor’s economic interest lies in paying to be published.”

The professor nodded ruefully. They do pay – especially now that the internet has enabled the rise of online “open access” journals that live entirely from the charges they levy on their authors. An academic’s reward is in the hereafter – in future contracts and eventually in tenure.

“’Open access’ journals live off the charges they levy on authors. An academic’s reward is in the hereafter”

Such changes have inspired , professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, to produce an epic history of copyright and authors’ rights.

Other players brought in by the internet are the corporations that rake in fortunes by copying the works of others – often without permission and almost always without payment – and selling advertising alongside them. It is remarkable how little attention Baldwin gives to this, given how they can profit from his keenness on weakening the rights of authors to make a living from a fair share of sales.

The biggest new group the internet brings to the copyright fray, though, are the millions of people who distribute words, images or tunes online with no care for the consequences. Consider the blogger who railed against UK laws that stopped him copying other people’s music. He was eloquent about it: so eloquent that a newspaper pasted words from his blog into its pages. The blogger strongly objected to being associated with that particular paper. At this point, he turned around and asked for my help in enforcing his copyright.

What particular protection was he seeking? opens: “Copyright shall be a property right”. It says your creative work is a commodity that you can sell outright. Laws in and are similar.

While the blogger was mildly annoyed that the paper was making money from his words, he was much more distressed at being linked with that particular title. He should have been French. is about authors’ rights as individual humans: it is about their right to be identified (or not, as they choose) and to defend the integrity of their works against actions contrary to their “honour or reputation”. These are known as “moral rights”.

Producers involved in highly collaborative ventures say these get in the way. Scriptwriters are frequently required to waive them, for example, as are regular contributors to 91av. But for authors generally, and academic authors in particular, identification with their own work and integrity in its use are the only sure means they have to build a career. Such writers cannot be hacks for hire and still do their job. The history of science especially is gritted with tales of when this awkward lesson is forgotten.

Baldwin errs when he says that “most authors assign rights”. Most authors in English-speaking countries keep their rights intact. Elsewhere, authors’ rights are generally personal rights and cannot be assigned. But he is to be congratulated for chronicling the development of the authors’ rights system so fully: his enormous bibliography is invaluable.

In the “war” of his title, between tradable copyright and personal, inalienable authors’ rights, we know whose side Baldwin is on. In reporting lawsuits over Google’s scanning without permission of 20 million books, he dismisses most authors – except, perhaps, professors – as foppish ghosts of a Romantic dream. He declares that making a living from writing is passé, and prefers appearances and performances instead.

Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality who is on the list of the top 100 public intellectuals, is also a musician. He argued that we should abandon copyright – until he noticed ( for musicians who had given up on income from publication, spent the money from performances, and now couldn’t afford healthcare. If you read Baldwin, for balance also read Lanier’s

Baldwin reserves his strongest bile, though, for those pesky Francophone “moral rights”. He repeatedly alludes to a supposed connection between moral rights and fascism.

By contrast, in September the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale (the professional forum for authors’ rights) heard from Paul Goldstein, professor of law at Stanford University in California. He suggested that an author’s autonomy – expressed in the laws and norms of moral rights – was now as important a prerequisite of creativity as any promise of cash. He looked forward to an internet that connects authors with their audiences “in a bond of reciprocal responsibility”.

For my money, Goldstein’s is a much more congenial vision than Baldwin’s.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Copyrights and wrongs”

Thomas Hobbes shared the Jesuits’ objection to infinitesimals (Image: Getty Images/DeAgostini)

At stake in the fierce 17th-century debate over a mathematical concept was nothing less than our modern world, says Amir Alexander in Infinitesimal

DID you know that every time you use your cellphone, you strike a blow for republicanism against both monarchy and a fixed Divine Order? Historian Amir Alexander sets out why this is so in his book Infinitesimal, through two tales of struggles against the fundamental tool that makes almost all modern science and technology possible.

This tool is infinitesimals, small slices of continuous measurements that are the basis of calculus. They allow us to discover the areas under curves and to model systems and control them – offering immense power to shape many facets of our modern world, including cellphone signal processing.

“Infinitesimals offer immense power to shape many facets of our modern world”

The first of Alexander’s tales is of the Jesuits, a Catholic order of priests in personal allegiance to the Pope, founded to stamp out Protestant rebellion. During the early 17th century they strove to suppress the ideas of Bonaventura Cavalieri, a member of the rival order the Jesuats. His use of infinitesimals prefigured the fully fledged calculus of Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton.

To the Jesuits, only a theoretical system built from first principles along logical lines laid down by the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid could provide freedom from paradox and an absolute, approved truth. Pesky new mathematicians like Cavalieri were blatantly assuming the existence of triangles, spheres and so on, then researching them as objects. That way lay free-thinking and challenges to the authority of the Pope.

The 1633 prosecution of Galileo by the Inquisition for insisting that Earth goes round the sun has been better recorded in film and on stage. Alexander connects these two fights – and a 1651 list of 65 doctrines banned in the Jesuits’ colleges, including the atomic theory of matter – to the political struggles of the Jesuits within the Catholic Church.

His second story is of the dispute between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and John Wallis, a minister who had been appointed Savilian Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oxford in 1649, mostly because he was a sound Protestant and therefore politically acceptable at the time. Hobbes gained fame for his book Leviathan, in which he argued that the only alternative to a state of nature in which life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” was absolute monarchy. Though suspected of atheism, Hobbes shared the Jesuits’ fear of infinitesimals, defending kingly rather than papal authority.

His opponent Wallis took “experimental mathematics” to extremes, using methods of proof that were patently barking, depending on division by infinity, which is meaningless. Hobbes, meanwhile, died convinced that he had constructed a square with the same area as a circle using only Euclidian methods: he couldn’t accept that the nature of the number pi makes this impossible.

Those against infinitesimals had ammunition, however. Remember how you puzzled at your teacher’s insistence that as the number of slices you cut of an object tends to infinity, the sum of the slices approaches the volume of the object. An infinite number of slices with a thickness surely forms an infinitely tall stack? But if they have zero thickness, isn’t the total zero? And Euclid’s approach also has appeal, well expressed in the jibe that “the proposal is all very well in practice, but it’ll never work in theory”.

Infinitesimal is a gripping and thorough history of the ultimate triumph of the mathematical tool. But it is a shame that Alexander adheres to another doctrinal ban: in Western history, it seems, no mention can be made of Islam as a rival to the Catholic Church. What, for example, was the response to ibn al-Haytham’s use of proto-infinitesimals in Cairo and Iraq 500 years earlier?

If you are fascinated by numbers, Infinitesimal will inspire you to dig deeper into the implications of the philosophy of mathematics and of knowledge.

This article appeared in print under the headline “The smallest subversive”