Attention Economy

The Real Threat of AI Books Isn’t Bad Writing. It’s Burying the Good Ones.

The real crisis of AI-generated books isn’t bad writing—it’s infinite supply. When content costs zero to produce, the mechanisms that once filtered quality from noise collapse. Readers are left drowning in a sea of polished mediocrity, unable to find the few genuinely good books that still exist. The solution isn’t to ban AI, but to rebuild our curation tools.

Technology Didn’t Make Things Better. It Just Made a Few People Richer.

We were told technology would liberate us, but instead, it trapped us in a faster, more anxious, and deeply unequal world. The gains of efficiency are captured by a privileged few, while the externalities—attention erosion, systemic inequality, and exhaustion—are distributed to the rest of us. It’s time to stop confusing optimization with human flourishing.

Typing Is Killing Your Best Ideas. Here’s the Antidote.

We type faster than ever, yet our thoughts have never been more fragmented. The real divide today isn’t between analog and digital, but between speed and depth. Discover why cutting-edge tech is fueling a revival of old-fashioned handwriting, and why slowing down is the ultimate act of cognitive resistance.

Why People Pay $8 to Read 20,000 Words of Gossip (It’s Not What You Think)

In a world drowning in free information, people are paying $8 for 20,000-word articles about gossip. But they aren’t buying secrets. They’re buying curated certainty—a coherent narrative that makes sense of chaos. This trend reveals a deep human need for understanding, a hidden demand for synthesis over noise, and a dangerous temptation to sell polished fiction as truth.

LinkedIn’s ‘AI Slop’ Button Is a Confession of Failure — And It’s the Best Move They’ve Ever Made

LinkedIn’s new ‘AI slop’ button is a public admission that AI-generated content has overwhelmed the platform. It signals a shift from engagement-at-all-costs to authenticity filtering, but the real battle is a cat-and-mouse arms race between AI content generation and human detection. The button puts the burden on users, revealing the platform’s failure to police itself. This is both a desperate move and a hopeful sign that the industry is finally acknowledging the problem.

Banning Phones in Schools Is a Lie We’re Telling Ourselves

Half of Americans support banning phones in schools, but the adults cheering the loudest are the same ones checking their devices 96 times a day. The ban doesn’t eliminate compulsive phone use — it relocates it to after-school binges. The real problem isn’t the device; it’s that we’ve stripped away every alternative for boredom, connection, and meaningful social interaction, then act shocked when kids reach for the only stimulation left.

AI Was Supposed to Save You Time. It’s Actually Stealing It.

AI was sold as a productivity revolution, but it quietly pulled off the greatest bait-and-switch in modern work: it made producers faster while making readers slower. Every AI-generated memo, report, and email externalizes a hidden cognitive tax onto the reader — forcing them to decipher, verify, and decode content that sounds plausible but carries no real signal. The efficiency gains are captured by the writer. The friction is absorbed by you.

The GitHub Repo With No README, No Docs, and 1,000 Stars: Welcome to the New Open Source

A GitHub repo with zero documentation, just a link to an npm package and a Twitter thread, is trending. This isn’t laziness—it’s a strategic shift. In the attention-scarce ecosystem, hype and distribution now outweigh code quality. The repository is the trailer; the social media thread is the movie. Learn to read the new rules of open source.