John Black

“the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“The problem gets compounded by what’s called the “illusion of explanatory depth,” where we feel confidence in our understanding of a complex system, but in reality have just superficial knowledge.”
― Daniel Goleman, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

“To be driven by our appetites alone is slavery,” wrote Rousseau in The Social Contract, “while to obey a law that we have imposed on ourselves is freedom”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

“Here’s the problem: Many of the systems we’ve developed to help guide our lives–systems like news, education, law, advertising, and so on–arose in, and still assume, an environment of information scarcity. We’re only just beginning to explore what these systems should do for us, and how they need to change, in this new milieu of information abundance.”
― James Williams, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy