Even benign content exploits attention through relentless flow

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: The ‘feel like we choose but look up hours later feeling ill’ line directly answers the reader’s standing question about whether choice under extraction is real — resonates with A Visit From The Goon Squad’s time-clouding attentional drift (the pauses and skips in Egan’s narrative, and the literal time-skip structures).