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James Williams

Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

Hay Festival 2018, Friday 1 June 2018

The former Google advertising executive, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams, launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. (At the time of going to press the Cambridge Analytica data mining scandal has been a top story for 72 hours.) As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming scarcer is our attention. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new award for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues.