exploring the inner workings and dynamics of companies building products engineered to hook us, addict us, and hijack our attention to sell more ad inventory
How we allocate our attention defines us even more than our purchases do. People have different amounts of money, so the things we buy don’t reflect values in the same way for everyone. The same purchase might represent a tremendous sacrifice for one person and a mere afterthought to another. But we all have the same widow’s mite of attention to distribute among the many things competing for it: family, friends, education, health, careers, church, politics, great books, lousy books, clickbait headlines, and viral posts about ridiculous people doing ridiculous things for no particular reason. Our limited attention budget forces us to make choices, and those choices both reveal our values and create our characters.
what if the apps you used helped you keep control over your attention and more intentionally use your time. how many times have we opened twitter/instagram/etc with an intention only to forget about it 15mins later, still sucked down the rabbit hole? sublime is an idea baby, but if we succeed, it's because we helped you live more intentionally.
The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more
One of the weirdest things about the Internet is that even though we’re just a click away from the greatest authors of all-time, from Plato to Tolstoy, we default to just scrolling Twitter
It is the business model of the internet, driven by ad revenue, that pushes companies to design their digital tools for compulsive engagement. This is, I think, true enough. The business model has certainly exacerbated the problem. But I’m far less sanguine than Hari appears to be about whether changing the business model will adequately address... See more