Any product or service that effectively captures our attention is susceptible to this dynamic: if it’s good at conserving our attention and sustaining our focus, then it’s also a good place to try to wrench away our attention for other purposes, which means it will eventually be a vector for spam.

The result is the Internet we see today, in which ne... See more

Unfortunately, advertising has been ingrained into the internet as the basic model for so long and to such an extent that it’s hard to envision online life without the systematic manipulation of attention and all its evils. So we’re bound to wind up here, at the bitter end of “content.” Which is a good excuse to withdraw deeper into books, movies,

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