Attention is all you have: how feeds capture our attention, and the case for a slower web

The tech blog alicegg.tech published an essay on September 21 titled "Attention is all you have" about how recommendation algorithms have taken over the choice of what we look at, and about what it takes to return to a more deliberate use of the web.

The text opens with the Tetris effect, one of psychology's easiest experiments to reproduce: play the game every day for a few weeks and you start to recognise tetromino shapes in clouds, buildings and everyday objects — sometimes even as you fall asleep.

Attention that other people capture

The essay draws a simple lesson from this: what you focus on long enough ends up shaping your thoughts. That is how skills and ideas are acquired, and it is why it matters who decides what appears on your screen. Increasingly, that decision is not ours.

YouTube knows a viewer likes cooking and art streams, the essay notes, and still slips in clips about a stock market bubble, global warming or the war in Iran, because doomscrolling keeps people watching longer and clicking more ads. Spotify will build a playlist from your taste, placing AI-generated filler between real songs — the author's reading is that this avoids paying royalties to actual artists. LinkedIn buries useful career news between the opinions of complete strangers who, according to the text, happen to promote whatever Microsoft is invested in. Ask Reddit for an opinion on a product, meanwhile, and the answers may already be a conversation between language models and trolls.

"When you let someone else dictate what appears on your screen, it's the same as giving them the key to your brain," the essay says.

What the web looked like before the feed

The second part recalls a time when there was no single app you could open and ask to entertain you. Instead there were a few dozen bookmarks, each with a specific purpose: a site for video game news, a page with tutorials, an anime blog that did not update often enough, a wiki about a 1990s TV show.

Unpleasant material existed too — the essay names Encyclopedia Dramatica and Rotten.com — but reaching it took deliberate effort. Nobody would suggest pictures of dead children or far-right propaganda after a pancake recipe or a cat video.

The slower internet is still there

The intentional web never disappeared, the essay argues; it was merely buried under the corporate one. Going back to blogs, RSS feeds and unfinished tutorials instead of scrolling short videos means getting used to something unusual: content that is not infinite and does not refresh with every click.

The difference between then and now is the reader, the text concludes. A habit changes only through repetition, and with enough attention something eventually clicks.