My Humble Abode

With hyper-connection comes the ease of watching your attention span disappear. You glance down to scan your phone for a passing update and — before you even realize what’s happening — have lost 45 minutes browsing through feeds you can hardly recall. It’s not poor habit or willpower shortage, Johann Hari says in Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention. It’s designed.

In Chapter 6 and Chapter 7, Hari investigates one of the most insidious causes of our public attention deficit: the emergence of technology geared to manipulate and sell us our attention. He argues that the majority of the pages we browse on a given day — from social networks to news sites — are constructed with only one final goal in mind: to addict us. And worst of all, how they do it is more high-tech than we’re aware.
Think about the “infinite scroll,” a feature designed to take away pause points so you never actually get there. Or the dopamine doses we get from likes and notifications — little rewards that entice us in again. Hari interviews former insiders in the tech world, like Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin (creator of infinite scroll), now that they have turned critical of the very systems they used to work within. They’re not design flaws. They’re deliberate instruments in what Hari refers to as an “attention extraction economy.”

But harm does not stop here at the personal level. Chapter 7 steps back to look at the social effect. Algorithms don’t just show us what’s trending — they highlight more what provokes the most reaction. Anger, fear, and self-righteous outrage get viralled more than measured, reflective discussion. This warps our vision of the world and ravages our ability to pay attention to significant, systemic problems like climate change or economic disparity.

Hari’s message is clear: we need to stop blaming ourselves for being distracted. Personal solutions like turning off notifications will help, but the source of the problem lies in how our online spaces are set up. Attention, in Hari’s view, is being stolen from us — and retrieving it will require more than individual effort, but action and regulation on a large scale.

If your mind’s being attacked, then you’re definitely not dreaming. The so-called attention economy is real — and we need to start to fight back.