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Here’s what attention lavished on scrolling feels like to me. There’s very little texture, or nap to it—it slides and skids. That brief rise or ping we now know is a jolt of delicious dopamine, feels good and soothing at the outset, but it’s not a sensation that sticks, physiologically or otherwise.

Lia Purpura Published • The Ecology of Attention

The homogenizing force of capitalism is incompatible with any inherent structure of differentiation: sacred-profane, carnival-workday, nature-culture, machine-organism, and so on. Thus any persisting notions of sleep as somehow “natural” are rendered unacceptable.

Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

In their struggle for more and more doses of this drug, the users develop a virtual presence at the expense of their presence in the real world. Society has not yet developed a code of Internet hygiene to control such risks.

Andrey Miroshnichenko • Human as Media. The Emancipation of Authorship

If you spend a certain amount of screen time playing yourself, you are no longer yourself but a version of yourself—a stereotype of you.

Sloane Crosley • Look Alive Out There: Essays

the attention resistance—a loosely organized movement of individuals who use high-tech tools and strict operating procedures to extract value from the products of the digital attention economy, while avoiding falling victim to compulsive use.

Cal Newport • Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media

Leonardo Bursztyn nber.org

If something as private and seemingly interior as dreaming is now the object of advanced brain scanners and can be imagined in popular culture as downloadable media content, then there are few restraints on the objectification of those parts of individual life that can be more easily relocated to digital formats.

Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

The casino floor is like our own extended focus group. We sit and play, participate, ask players what they think about our machines, and about other machines. The whole team does this—it’s as important for the sound engineers to know the customer as anyone else; even the math guy spends some hours observing, asking questions. You have to experience

Natasha Dow Schüll • Addiction by Design

By some measures you are lucky these days to get 47 seconds of focused attention on a discrete task. “Middlemarch” is tough sledding on that timeline. So are most forms of human interaction out of which meaningful life, collective action and political engagement are made. We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extract