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
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
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.