AbstractIn this chapter, we summarize the main arguments of the book. Our central thesis is that the moral weight of autonomy gives us reasons to restructure our relationship with mobile devices and the attention economy. In Chap. 2, we explain what autonomy is and why it matters morally. In Chap. 3, we present empirical evidence to justify our concern with mobile devices. We then turn, in Chap. 4, to Kantian moral arguments about the duty we owe to ourselves to protect and safeguard our capacities. We extend this argument in Chap. 5 by discussing duties we owe to others (especially parents to children, teachers to students, employers to employees, and developers to users). In Chap. 6, we explore the possibility of using government regulation to rein in the attention economy, and we justify these arguments by means of Kant’s political philosophy. Having exhausted our concerns with individual-level autonomy, we discuss group-level autonomy in Chap. 7, and we argue that the attention economy contributes to things like polarization which put a drag on democratic legitimacy. We conclude in Chap. 8 by taking stock of our arguments and offering some reasons for optimism.
