There are many reasons to be concerned about the harmful effects associated with the attention economy. Critics of this market tend to be especially worried about the impact it has on children who have access to it via smartphones and social media. These concerns have sparked a lively debate about what ought to be done to protect children from these harms. Alarming as these concerns might be, there are pressing philosophical questions about the legitimacy of governmental action in this arena. Even if we agree with the critics about the harmful effects of the attention economy, further argument is needed to justify state intervention. The aim of this paper is to provide such a justification—one that is responsive to children’s distinctive autonomy interests and that recognizes the collective action problems that the attention economy creates and exploits.

Clinton Castro is an assistant professor in the Information School and an affiliate professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He specializes in information ethics and fair machine learning. His recent open access book—Kantian Ethics and the Attention Economy (co-authored with Timothy Aylsworth)—argues that we have moral duties, both to ourselves and to others, to protect our autonomy from the threat posed by digital distraction. He is currently working on a series of essays on the foundations of fair machine learning and is excited to be putting these ideas into practice through NIH-funded work with a team of addiction researchers on a project that sets out to understand bias in algorithms used to treat opioid use disorder.

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