Indistractable by Nir Eyal

INDISTRACTABLE by Nir Eyal with Julie Li is subtitled “How to Control Your Attention and Choose your Life.” We all need this, right?  As I am typing, my phone is alerting me to a text and there are plenty of other distractions around, too. There is a certain irony in that Eyal is author of the internationally best-selling book titled Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, although he was primarily advocating for user friendly and easy to navigate products in that text. Having also lectured at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Eyal is obviously knowledge-able about the blending of technology, psychology, and business. In INDISTRACTABLE he advocates using four key strategies and addresses issues related to productivity, our habits/values and triggers, both internal and external. The structure of the book is very helpful – each of the roughly three dozen chapters has a boxed “remember this” section, plus, there is a summary list of chapter takeaways as well as templates for a scheduling tool and distraction tracker and notes. Eyal is a marketer at heart, too; he provides diagrams, acknowledges the many contributors who helped crowd-edit the book, and includes a book discussion guide. Portions of this text could be shared and discussed in advisory and would likely be of interest to Psych students (e.g., when exploring motivation or instant gratification), but Eyal’s writing is often geared to older tech users as evidenced by sections on stakeholders at work, email, and company culture, for example. Readers can also find additional resources, download materials, and get updates from NirAndFar.com/Indistractable.

Ghost Work by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri

GHOST WORK is written by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, senior researchers at Microsoft Research. Mary L. Gray is also a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and a faculty member at Indiana University.  Their book’s subtitle is “How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass” and deals with largely invisible human labor force who work to “make the internet seem smart.” These gig-economy workers complete tasks like tagging images, adding video captions, answering a web-based chat query, or editing a product review, essentially providing employment on demand in a “fusion of code and human smarts.” In this text, Gray and Suri explain the nature of ghost work and profile a number of individual workers, both in the US and India. They refer to a study by PEW Research showing that in 2015 roughly twenty million US adults earned money completing tasks distributed on demand. Thus, Gray and Suri’s work highlights a surprisingly big subset of the workforce that is being transformed due to automation and artificial intelligence advances. However, once this situation is described and it seems pretty clear what is involved, Gray and Suri go on at length with background (including historical context on piecework) which distracts from the book’s overall value. They do argue that the opportunity for exploitation exists, especially when a worker’s goal is twenty dollars (or five dollars per hour) without any kind of benefits and added cost of the time looking for work. This is also further explored in Mary Gray’s opinion piece published in early May by the Washington Post where she notes, “workers in the gig-driven ghost economy have no shared workplace, professional identity or voice to call for change.” Subsequent sections of their new book discuss the power of collaboration and the importance of paying attention to employee welfare and the “double bottom line.” Their conclusion offers a brief outline of several technical and social fixes (e.g., universal healthcare, paid family leave). Well-researched and documented, roughly twenty percent of GHOST WORK’s content is bibliography, notes, appendix and index.

Business and civics classes may find discussion prompts here, particularly in conjunction with more recent studies from PEW about concerns related to automation (2018) or contrasting views on the future economy and democracy (2019). Or, perhaps students could investigate some of the platforms for freelancing, like UpWork. Gray and Suri also write about the creation of “MTurk so that Amazon could not just offer a marketplace of books and other durable goods but make labor itself a service that anyone could find and pay for through the Amazon website.”  That seems highly relevant given yesterday’s announcement by Amazon of a $700 million investment in upskilling for its employees.