The job of technology, Jef believed, was to lift people up and make it possible to achieve their higher goals.

When a child plays, he learns the skills that make it possible to cope with the unexpected.

Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.

What’s happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that’s with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.”

“surveillance capitalism.”

From there, the research shows, it gets worse. The second way switching harms your attention is what we might call the “screw-up effect.”

“your brain is error-prone. When you switch from task to task, your brain has to backtrack a little bit and pick up and figure out where it left off”—and it can’t do that perfectly. Glitches start to occur.

Signal back. Signal more. Now the signals were gone, and it felt like the world was saying: You don’t matter. The absence of these insistent signals seemed to suggest an absence of meaning.

there is an accelerating trend.” It is “faster to reach peak popularity,” and then there is “a faster drop again.”