attention is sacred

A book is, we know, an unrivaled technology for living more life .

The contemporary internet-abetted image, on the other hand, is a highly potent yet f--ked-up technology for living more life. It comes with all kinds of strings attached, and it has a way of leaving us feeling lonely, lacking, unsatisfied, and jittery.

This is not thanks to creeping... See more

You’re doomscrolling because you’re looking for something to transform you but you can’t stay with one thing for long enough to be transformed by it. You have short attention span on an existential scale. You’re gliding past thousands of small worlds in minutes, laughing at one post, feeling dread at the next, tempted to buy something right after.... See more

At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people

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Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom

The hardest thing is making anyone care.

In the Renaissance, a Florentine merchant could sponsor an artwork that would matter for centuries. In the early days of the American republic, a pamphlet could catalyze revolution. Today, even the most earnest Substack post risks being skimmed between an AI-generated video essay and a TikTok about luxury... See more