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Bad Harvest

 Loved this essay about the fight over our collective inattention and found these lines very relatable: 

..maybe we have multiple selves who want different things—a self who wants to read, a self who wants to scroll. There’s a tension here between different aspects of the self that can be hard to reconcile. We contend with what our superego wants (to go on vacation and read novels) and what our actual self does (scrolls through Instagram). As is so often the case, our revealed preferences are different from our stated ones. And who is to say what our real and true desire is?

While I don't have social media to scroll through, I do have a RSS feed that spans everything I am interested in keeping up with. It does promote a lot of scrolling because I scan the title of the story to decide if I am going to spend time on it. What I choose to dive into is just as telling as what I choose to ignore. If there are forces at play that want me to be inattentive to certain things and they are successful in making me scroll past those stories, they have in fact won without getting my attention. I also like the argument that compares attention harvesting of minors to child labor and therefore prohibit it

We as a society can say that children’s attention should not be sold and commodified in the aggressive and alienating fashion of current social-media networks. Just as 12-year-olds can’t really consent to a wage contract, we could argue they can’t really consent to the expropriation of their attention in the way that, say, Instagram exploits it.

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