The Attention Economy and Us

Sick and tired of people screaming in your face with emojis and AI generated slop? Want out? Well, unless you have a time machine in the form of a phone box or a fancy 1980s dream car, you’re out of luck like the rest of us.

I mean, if you think about it, it isn’t really that different in every era of human history. There’s always been some news/media machine to rally the masses into a frenzied rush for some arbitrary thing. Snake oil peddlers, gold rush miners, hell even carrier pigeons were part of this whole mess at one point.

But why does it feel so heavy and extreme in this day and age? Is the proliferation of social media and cheap technology solely to be blamed? I think it has more to do with our evolution as a species rather than anything else…

Evolution of Science and Humanity

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When we were mere cavepeople, there was sticks, stones, and humanity’s greatest discovery: Fire.

From fire, humans learned how to melt stuff and mould stuff into other stuff, then cook, and so on and so forth…

graph LR
    %% Eras
    Stone[Stone Age 
 3.3M years ago - 3300 BCE]
    Bronze[Bronze Age 
 3300 BCE - 1200 BCE]
    Iron[Iron Age 
 1200 BCE - 500 BCE]
    Classical[Classical & Middle Ages 
 500 BCE - 1400s CE]
    Industrial[Industrial Revolution 
 1760 - 1900s]
    Digital[Information Age 
 1970s - Today]

    Stone --> Bronze
    Bronze --> Iron
    Iron --> Classical
    Classical --> Industrial
    Industrial --> Digital

Wow, that’s a pretty fancy MermaidJS diagram! I’m impressed. Thanks, Blowfish!

Anyway, humans grew smarter and evolved with new skillsets on each subsequent age…and with that our entire lives and society grew at a much faster pace.

This pace has grown frighteningly fast in the last few ages…

I mean, it’s no wonder everything feels so heavy. The pace at which we progressed in the last 56 years is literally INHUMAN

And now with AI in the forefront, our evolution has brought upon something we consider…a divergence.

ADHD and Neurodivergence

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I have to admit, I haven’t actually gone for a proper check to see if I have ADHD, but judging how my eldest son has it (officially diagnosed with ADHD + high functioning autism spectrum), I’m not surprised I’ve been running my life at full speed with this strange wiring in my brain. I mean, you can pretty much read it as I’m typing this blog…I literally am speed running this thing and the brainvomit is real.

Inconsequentially (I don’t really know what that word means but it sounds pretty cool and I’m fed up of using ANYWAY all the time) speaking, we’re literally turning into mutants right now. With all the high frequency radiation eating up our airways and the amount of neural processing that’s happening with every dopamine hit, that image of a genius hacker child in the 80s who has 4 screens on and a gameboy on the side, with some kind of device running in the background is a common picture in today’s world.

By the time AI takes over and we have at least Arificial General Intelligence (AGI) in every nook and cranny of our lives, the division of humanity into two distinct classes like how all those animes portray the future (Newtype vs Oldtype, Renans vs Dahnans, etc. You get the idea. If you don’t go watch any anime or JRPG with class-wars and you’ll get the idea faster than I can type this brain dump from my fingers at 240 words per minute…) will come full circle. We’ll have:

1. Humans who cannot cope with the mass flood of information at speed
2. Humans who can, i.e. ADHD, “extreme mental health issues” by today’s standard
3. Artificially Enhanced Humans (Cyberpunk much?) who are of the first kind with tech stitched up into them and look like a walking sci-firankenstein from 80s pop culture depicting the “future” lol

Neurodivergence is the future, and what is seen as a “neurotypical syndrome” today, is the norm of tomorrow.

So what can we do in the meantime?…

Follow My Substack

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No seriously. There’s so much information that I myself am trying to process all this and figure out a way to get everything in one place…to hold MY OWN ATTENTION!

I found out about substack recently and it seems like the ultimate all-in-one solution. I mean, at a glance it looks like Twitter, but digging deeper, its like Patreon, this website, OnlyFans, Reddit, and more all bundled into one. Like I’m kind of blown away at how it’s like an all-in-one but at the same time, “is it really needed?” in this overloaded landscape of attention seeking gratification.

With more and more of the interwebs now being a mess of screaming children, do we really need another outlet? Vibe coding ain’t helping either, since more duplicates and honestly, unnecessary platforms are popping up EVERY SINGLE HOUR ALL ACROSS THE GLOBE and to be honest, I don’t even know where to put MY OWN stuff anymore.

That’s why right now, I’ll be focusing my energy on this website itself, using substack to kind of link everything I hold dear together (up until it becomes irrelevant, as most tech does). Some updates on this site itself:

1. You can now subscribe to this blog via RSS either here, the main blog page or…
2. You can click on the new “subscribe” menu at the top (or in the hamburger button if you’re on mobile). I put the YouTube channel link neatly there too.
3. And on that menu itself, you can subscribe to my newsletter too!

Ok, seriously tho

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Thank you so much for spending time reading this.

If you could spare a minute or two and tell me how you feel down in the comments below, I’d be really happy. Even better, check out my socials in the fancy new “subscribe” menu ;)

Much love

-Fab