On Attention and the Internet

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

There was an interesting note in Alexander Obenauer’s lab notes about notifications, and this line stuck out to me: “fundamentally, the way notifications work in modern OSes is backwards: someone else decides when (and how often) my device wakes up to interrupt what I’m doing.” In the earlier internet days, you went to a fun website or read the... See more

And I do think there is this way in which I would love the thing where I can kind of pay for the algorithm I want. And it does feel like we’ve backed into an internet now that is corroding. And I wonder how long that is actually sustainable for. It’s hard and it’s frustrating. And you’re a little bit locked in because you’ve built a million... See more

One such protection would be a Social Accountability Act stipulating that every corporation be graded according to an index of social worthiness, to be compiled by panels of randomly selected citizens, the equivalent of juries, chosen from a diverse pool of stakeholders: the company’s customers, members of the communities it affects, and so on. If... See more