Attention Engineering
Social media companies employ “attention engineers” who borrow principles from Las Vegas casino gambling to make products maximally addictive. The designed use case is fragmented, compulsive checking — because profit is extracted from attention-minutes and personal data (“shiny treats in exchange for minutes of your attention and bites of your personal data” — Jaron Lanier, via Cal Newport).
Key Points
- Reframes social media as an entertainment product, not a “fundamental technology” — rejecting it is no bigger a stance than preferring magazines to newspapers.
- The slot-machine analogy: intermittent rewards all day long, which the brain isn’t wired for → background hum of anxiety.
- Directly adversarial to Deep Work.