Attention capture exploits ordinary pleasant content, not just violence or shock

Evidence

It is indeed a race to the bottom of the brain stem, as the philosopher James Williams has pointed out, but what seizes our eyes isn’t always violence or pornography. Sometimes it’s a viral dance video, or a suggestive headline, or a simple like from a friend. But it never stops coming, and it comes at us all the time: always surprising, always bright, always loud, always grabbing the gaze. We like a lot of this stuff. We choose it (or feel like we do—at least until we look up, hours later, and feel weirdly ill). But we cannot forget: We are, all the while, pawns in a money-game of literally inconceivable scale. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 88

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to James Williams on attention and to the reader’s wider ‘human fracking’ diagnostic. — connects to: Even benign content exploits attention through relentless flow
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Even benign content exploits attention through relentless flow