12. PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT, Jenny Holzer
Willpower is overrated
There are many reasons to look forward to graduation season, but one of my favorites is the commencement speeches. Not all of them are good, but some are truly great, evergreen springs of inspiration: Steve Jobs at Stanford, Zadie Smith at the New School, Roger Federer at Dartmouth.
This year, Angela Duckworth shone with practicality. Speaking at Bates College (in my home state of Maine), she kicked things off with a surprising request: give someone else your phone, at least for the duration of the speech.
A celebrated professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth shared insights from her extensive research on grit, resilience, and success, including the unconventional claim that willpower is overrated. What we want in life, she argued, has “very little to do with forcing yourself to act in one way or another” but instead requires “situation modification.” Rather than relying on your sheer force of will to resist the temptation to use your phone in bed, set parameters that remove the necessity of that feat of will entirely. Charge your phone in a different room. Use physical distance to create psychological distance.
Duckworth wraps this sound advice in a series of nice stories, but as I watched the speech, another set of words began flashing, all caps, in the back of my mind: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT.
That was the script of an art installation by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer. Part of her series called “Truisms,” PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT flashed across the massive Spectacolor board in Times Square in 1982. Holzer developed the series while participating in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum in New York. In lieu of academic papers, she distilled complex ideas about power, language, and American consumer culture into memorable one-liners, what she called “a survey of beliefs.” The phrases first appeared as anonymous wheat-pasted posters on Manhattan streets, designed to blend into the urban environment and catch passersby off guard.
The Times Square installation upped the ante, transforming a commercial space into a site of critical reflection. Displayed on an 800-square-foot array where advertisements typically ran, the message subverted the very medium it employed. The Truisms series included many related warnings about desire and consumption: ARTIFICIAL DESIRES ARE DESPOILING THE EARTH, PURSUING PLEASURE FOR THE SAKE OF PLEASURE WILL RUIN YOU, and MONEY CREATES TASTE. These phrases, displayed in the commercial vernacular of signs and billboards, pushed viewers to confront uncomfortable truths in spaces typically reserved for seduction and persuasion.
Holzer’s critique was motivated by the rising sophistication of advertising techniques in late 1970s and early 1980s. The fact that the average American home watched about 6 hours of TV per day in those years may seem quaint today–recent polls have found that Gen Z spends the same amount of time on their own phones in the same time span–but it was still a formative era in which consumer culture solidified as a core mode of self-expression. When asked about the meaning of the phrase in 2010, Holzer responded with characteristic dryness: it means protection “from myself and from the rest of the human race. From stupidity, cruelty, avarice.”
Artists and critics are essential allies in making sense of how attention is generated, captured, and monetized. Art historian David Joselit presciently connected Holzer’s investigations of information and power to what would become surveillance capitalism, a concept Shoshana Zuboff later documented in her book on the subject. Modern platforms, in her analysis, don’t just sell products; they sell influence by collecting behavioral data to predict and control human actions. That business model depends on maintaining engagement through any means necessary. And that process has become stratospherically profitable.
What Holzer identified in the realm of physical goods and advertising has grown exponentially in the digital age. Tim Wu, who coined the term “attention economy,” traces this model back to the 19th-century penny press, but notes that digital platforms have perfected the extraction process. In his book The Attention Merchants, he documents how the business model of capturing and reselling human attention has evolved from newspaper headlines to social media algorithms. It’s also the subject of a seminar my advisor Michael Marrinan and I taught at Stanford, titled “The History of Distraction, From Balzac to Facebook” (a course conceived before the US release of TikTok in 2018).
Since then, our attention economy has accelerated. Where Holzer confronted an advertising landscape measured in hours of television viewing, we now face what Wu calls “the industrialization of attention capture.” The average American checks their phone 96 times per day by some estimates, but as research from the University of Chicago has shown, it’s unintentional at best. In fact, most people turn to Instagram and TikTok out of a fear of missing out (FOMO) rather than a positive desire to participate. Economists call these platform dynamics “collective action traps,” or networks generate measurable consumer harms whether they use them or not. If you engage, you compare yourself against often unattainable standards. If you don’t, you’re shunned. As the saying goes, damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
This dynamic also connects to a recent conversation between New York Times journalist Ezra Klein and Kyla Scanlon, a popular commentator on economics and Gen Z, which explored the dangerous lack of friction in these digital spaces. Scanlon recounts a woman sitting next to her on a long-haul flight scrolling TikTok, almost unblinking, for 5 solid hours, demonstrating a frictionlessness that extends beyond individual apps to reshape entire economic structures. Attention has become “infrastructure,” in her estimation, a foundational input like land, labor, or capital once were. It is of course true that many artists and influencers have benefited from the exposure they’ve received on these platforms. Indeed, many would not be able to sustain their own financial stability or creative practices without the attention such platforms confer.
But with the rise of increasingly sophisticated generative AI video tools, the need for real artists–and all of the physical constraints their creative efforts entail–is becoming an open question. After all, if platforms can generate AI content that is indistinguishable from the real thing, that unlocks new reservoirs of personless opportunity. As Scanlon argues, the economic foundation of these models isn’t even capital itself, only attention. If attention is the new capital and narrative the new land, then these platforms have built the most sophisticated extraction machinery our species has ever seen.
The echoes of Holzer’s message today confirm that the tension between desire and self-control isn’t new; it’s a fundamental human challenge that each era faces in its own way. But because the sophistication and scale of systems designed to override our self-protective instincts has never been stronger, we also need to develop better tools and habits to save us from ourselves. Here’s to a little sand in the gears.
References
https://www.artforum.com/columns/jenny-holzer-and-consider-this-174399/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/512576/teens-spend-average-hours-social-media-per-day.aspx
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20563051221086241