2026-03-30 13:37:04
Here’s a familiar story we tell ourselves about our new inability to focus: screens bad, books good, civilisation circling the drain. It’s a seductive diagnosis – and also, probably, a lazy one.
Carlo Iacono is a librarian who spends his days watching how people actually engage with information, and in a recent Aeon piece he pushes back on that oversimplification. The issue isn’t screens, he argues. It’s habitat and design.
He first describes the kind of drowning many of us will recognise when trying to focus:
“Others are drowning, attempting sustained thought in environments engineered to prevent it. They sit with laptops open, seven tabs competing for attention, notifications sliding in from three different apps, phones vibrating every few minutes. They’re trying to read serious material while fighting a losing battle against behavioural psychology weaponised at scale. They believe their inability to focus is a personal failure rather than a design problem. They don’t realise they’re trying to think in a space optimised to prevent thinking.”
From here, Iacono makes a reframe I think deserves more credit than it usually gets:
“We haven’t become post-literate. We’ve become post-monomodal. Text hasn’t disappeared; it’s been joined by a symphony of other channels. Your brain now routinely performs feats that would have seemed impossible to your grandparents.”
“The real problem isn’t mode but habitat. We don’t struggle with video versus books. We struggle with feeds versus focus. One happens in an ecosystem designed for contemplation, the other in a casino designed for endless pull-to-refresh.”
The blame belongs somewhere specific, and Iacono is not shy about placing it:
“Expansion without architecture is chaos, and that’s where we’ve stumbled. The people who cannot sit through novels aren’t broken. They’re adapted to an environment we built. … We built a world that profits from distraction and then pathologise the distracted.”
What I appreciate most is that he refuses the fatalist’s exit ramp. The declinists often correctly identify the villains (you know who) – and then immediately surrender, treating the outcome as inevitable. Iacono is direct about what that surrender actually costs:
“To name the actors responsible and then treat the outcome as inevitable is to provide them cover. If the crisis is a force of nature, ‘screens’ destroying civilisation like some technological weather system, then there’s nothing to be done but write elegiac essays from a comfortable distance. But if the crisis is the product of specific design choices made by specific companies for specific economic reasons, then those choices can be challenged, regulated, reversed.”
The solution he proposes isn’t cultural or attitudinal. He’s not asking us to ‘try harder’:
“Reading worked so well for so long not because text is magic, but because books came with built-in boundaries. They end. Pages stay still. Libraries provide quiet. These weren’t features of literacy itself but of the habitats where literacy lived. We need to rebuild those habitats for a world where meaning travels through many channels at once.”
“The choice isn’t between books and screens. The choice is between intentional design and profitable chaos. Between habitats that cultivate human potential and platforms that extract human attention.”
I’d push back on a few of his points if we were at the pub, but these are quibbles around an otherwise solid argument. We didn’t drift into distraction – we were led there. The problem is architectural – which means the solution is likely too.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-03-23 13:36:58
Rebecca Solnit has this rare gift of making you feel like the mess we’re all living through is at least comprehensible, if not fixable. In time for the launch of her new book (see the Books section), she’s published a pointed, thoughtful long-read in The Guardian that I’ve been chewing on over the weekend.
The essay opens on familiar ground – Silicon Valley's decades-long campaign to convince us that going out into the world is inefficient, risky, a waste of time. Regular readers of this newsletter will recognise that territory. But where Solnit takes it is more interesting. Her argument isn’t really about AI; it’s about a deeper ideological project that predates any chatbot:
“...we are beset with the ideology of maximising having while minimising doing. This has long been capitalism’s narrative and is now also technology’s. It is an ideology that steals from us relationships and connections and eventually our selves.”
The ‘doing’ she describes is ordinary stuff – buying milk, chatting to a stranger, finding your way around somewhere new. Small, but important acts. And when we withdraw from them long enough, we lose the capacity to tolerate them:
“The resilience to survive difficulty and discord, to brave the vagaries of unmediated human contact, must be maintained through practice. Silicon Valley-bred isolation robs us of that resilience.”
Solnit calls out the sycophancy problem of AI companions – by design, they have no needs of their own and never push back. But real relationships involve friction:
“One argument for AI companions is that they are always there for you: on when you want them on, off when you want them off, with no needs of their own. Yet behind this lies a capitalist argument that we’re here to get as much as possible and give as little as possible, to meet our own needs and dodge those of others. In reality, you get something from giving – at the very least, you get a sense of being someone with something to give, which is one measure of your own wealth, generosity and power.”
The resistance she calls for is less political than it might sound:
“We resist the tyranny of the quantifiable by finding a language that can value all those subtle phenomena that add up to a life worth living. A language not in the sense of a new vocabulary but attention, description, conversation centred on these subtler phenomena and on principles not corrupted by what corporations want us to want.”
Solnit doesn’t pretend any of this is simple. Stealing ourselves back, she admits, is not as easy as walking out the door. There’s no app for rebuilding the social infrastructure we’ve been letting decay.
“Resisting the annexation of our hearts and minds by Silicon Valley requires us not just to set boundaries on our engagement with what they offer, but to cherish the alternatives. Joy in ordinary things, in each other, in embodied life, and the language with which to value it, is essential to this resistance, which is resistance to dehumanisation.”
Her argument isn’t really a call to action so much as a call to attention – to notice what we’re surrendering, and to decide, with some deliberateness, whether the convenience is worth it.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-03-16 13:28:30
In my Notes app, there is a graveyard of abandoned self-improvement projects: morning routines, book titles, names of journalling and meditation apps I downloaded with genuine conviction and opened twice. I am, it turns out, excellent at thinking about becoming better – less gifted at the actual becoming.
Sara Hussain has a super short piece in Vogue India (!) that cuts right to it. She describes the exhausting loop of modern self-awareness – the constant monitoring, the diagnosis of every mood, the reflexive therapy-speak:
“Everything began to feel like a diagnostic exercise. If I’m tired, it’s burnout. If I’m irritated, it’s dysregulation. If I don't reply to a message immediately, I’m either protecting my boundaries or avoiding intimacy. I am never simply annoyed. I am always processing.”
We’ve become so fluent in the language of our own interior lives that we’ve started living there permanently, renovating the same rooms over and over while the outside of the house – other people, the world, the actual stakes of being alive – slowly falls into disrepair.
Hussain is careful not to dismiss therapy or emotional intelligence altogether. Naming patterns helps. Awareness is genuinely useful. But there’s a point where awareness becomes surveillance.
“There are plenty of things in this world that demand seriousness and accountability. War, violence, the steady erosion of rights. But instead of broadening our focus outward, many of us have turned it inward, turning critical thinking into overthinking; hyper-policing our thoughts and language until having a personality feels like a risk assessment exercise. And it’s exhausting.
In moments when collective action is desperately needed, we’ve somehow built a culture that exhausts us before we even get there. If everything requires total moral coherence at all times, participation starts to feel impossible. Silence becomes safer than imperfection.”
This isn’t entirely our fault. Neoliberalism has spent decades insisting that everything – health, happiness, success – is a matter of personal responsibility and individual optimisation. Of course that’s going to produce a culture of compulsive self-interrogation. The system basically rewards it.
Alex Olshonsky pushes this further in a fascinating essay on thinking as addiction. His argument is that the same compulsive mechanism driving substance dependency – escape the feeling, reach for relief – is what keeps us locked in endless mental loops.
“The object shifts from opiates to Instagram to productivity, but the move is always the same: escape the feeling and reach for the next thing that promises relief. Thinking is just a higher-status version of this. It grants you the feeling of control.”
The answer here probably isn’t to simply stop reflecting. Some introspection is good and necessary. The question is whether looking inward has become so consuming that we’ve lost the habit of looking outward – at each other, at the mess we’re collectively in. Hussain puts it well:
“Turning every inner state into something that needs fixing has made life feel smaller, not more expansive.”
Which, when you think about it, is a strange irony. All this work on ourselves, and we’ve somehow ended up with less of ourselves to give.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-03-09 13:21:11
There is a special kind of gaslighting that nobody intends. It lives in the well-meaning question – ‘have you tried magnesium?’ – and in the friendly observation that someone looks well. It’s in the get-well cards we send, with their built-in assumption that getting well is, in fact, what happens next.
But for the chronically ill, it isn’t. And we’re incredibly bad at sitting with that.
Kristie De Garis has been ill since she was 21. She spent two decades doing everything right – cutting out sugar, gluten, dairy, alcohol, stress, late nights – accumulating an ever-longer list of restrictions that did not, in the end, produce the improvement logic seemed to promise.
In her short essay on chronic illness and meritocracy she reflects on the unintended ableism our system perpetuates.
“We tend to understand illness as something you either die from, or recover from. Those of us who are chronically ill live in the awkward inbetween space. Not dying, but not getting better either. Not an emergency, not something fully resolved.”
That inbetween space is where most ableism lives. Not through intentional prejudice, but through a belief system that treats effort as a moral virtue and outcomes as its rightful reward. Chronic illness is, by its nature, a rebuke to that belief:
“The idea that illness might be something you manage indefinitely, without progress, without reward, is deeply uncomfortable to a culture that has an ingrained belief that effort always produces results.”
“Chronic illness disrupts that extremely saleable, inspirational narrative. It produces people who do everything right and still don’t get better. In fact, I have never met a group of people who are doing more right than the chronically ill. And society, rather than question the belief, questions the person.”
Her strongest reframing is of ableism not as individual cruelty but as something with an economic logic behind it:
“Ableism isn’t just cruelty or ignorance. It’s the enforcement arm of meritocracy, which exists to protect the hyper-capitalist belief that ‘more’ always pays off. The existence of chronically ill and disabled people challenges this simply by the fact that they continue to be ill.”
The chronically ill aren’t just inconvenient to the story we tell about effort and reward – they actively destabilise it.
De Garis is careful not to fully exempt herself from this logic. She writes about still catching herself searching for the magic lever, the right supplement, the adjustment that might finally tip things. She knows it’s internalised ableism – knowing doesn’t dissolve it.
“Part of this is fear. Fear that if I stop striving, I will have no one to blame but myself. But also that other people will read any acceptance as giving up, or laziness, or self-pity.”
If I’m finding the counterweight here, it’s something like this: The belief that effort matters isn’t wrong. The problem is the assumption automatically attached to it – that outcomes will always match. As a framework for understanding human bodies, it falls apart.
Her reflections are well worth a read, particularly if you have someone in your life navigating this terrain. It won’t give you the magic question to ask them. But it might help you retire a few of the unhelpful ones.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-03-02 12:47:49
Reading is dead. Attention spans are toast. We are, collectively, heading toward a post-literate wasteland of reels and soundbites – our once-curious brains reduced to dopamine-seeking mush. At least, that’s the general vibe online.
I’ll admit I’ve sort of subscribed to this thesis. You probably have too. It feels intuitively right in the way that a lot of decline narratives do. But they are often a little too tidy, a little too satisfying, which should probably be our first clue that something’s off.
In Text is King, Adam Mastroianni (see also DD305) argues that the death-of-reading panic is mostly vibes, not data. Book sales in 2025 were higher than in 2019. Indie bookstores are booming. And actual reading time data shows a dip – but a modest one, concentrated mostly around the arrival of broadband internet in 2009, not the smartphone era we love to blame.
“If the data is right, the best anti-reading intervention is not a 5G-enabled iPhone circa 2023, but a broadband-enabled iMac circa 2009.”
His more interesting argument, though, isn’t really about the numbers. It’s about human nature. The ‘death of reading’ hypothesis assumes that people were only ever reading to fill time – that they never truly wanted it, and that Instagram and TikTok simply revealed their real preferences. But he calls BS:
“Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation.”
“Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. There are no replacements for these feelings. Videos can titillate, podcasts can inform, but there’s only one way to get that feeling of your brain folds stretching and your soul expanding, and it is to drag your eyes across text.”
He also makes a more general point about the influence of books. You don’t have to read a book for it to shape how you think. Ideas that get written down are like an invisible scaffolding of culture, and tuning out doesn’t protect you from them:
“Being ignorant of the forces shaping society does not exempt you from their influence – it places you at their mercy.”
To be fair, the declines in reading, however modest, are real. Not everyone who used to read has simply swapped it for something richer. After eight hours of having dense information beamed into my eyeballs, picking up a book at the end of the day is often the last thing I feel like doing. What that does to a society (and especially younger generations) over time isn’t a trivial question, even if the panic has been overdone.
But Mastroianni’s broader point holds. Text has outlasted radio, TV, dial-up, broadband and most likely TikTok. Yes, soundbites and reels hit the spot – fast food always does. But there’s a reason people keep coming back to the longer, slower, more nourishing stuff.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-02-23 12:39:49
By the time you’ve finished reading this sentence, seventeen new big things have happened on the internet. Most of them will be forgotten within the hour – including, probably, by the people who posted them. Spend 10 minutes on any feed and try to recall what you consumed. Speed turns out to be a surprisingly effective substitute for substance.
Veteran tech journalist Om Malik has a nice diagnosis for this feeling. In a recent essay, he argues that the organising principle of our information ecosystem used to be authority: you earned attention by being right, by being credible, by being worth reading. What replaced it is velocity.
“What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.”
“Networks compress time and space, then quietly train us to live at their speed.”
It’s more of a structural argument than a moral one. In other words, nobody woke up one day deciding to make the internet worse. The platforms built incentive systems that rewarded speed above everything else, and rational people – writers, reviewers, newsrooms – responded accordingly. Malik believes that the algorithm is not some toggle you can flick off; it is the culture. (Worth noting, though: the algorithm has owners. It isn’t a force of nature.)
He uses YouTube tech reviews as a case study. When a phone embargo lifts, dozens of polished reviews drop simultaneously – same talking points, same mood lighting, same conclusions. The reviewer who spent three months actually living with the product? Mostly gone from the feed before anyone finds them.
“The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The ‘review’ at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.”
This dynamic extends well beyond tech reviews:
“People do what the network rewards. Writers write for the feed. Photographers shoot for the scroll. Newsrooms frame stories as conflict because conflict travels faster than nuance. Even our emotional lives adapt to latency and refresh cycles. The design of the network becomes the choreography of daily life.”
The result is a culture optimised for first takes, not best takes.
To be fair, the authority-based media of the past wasn’t exactly a golden age of truth-telling – gatekeeping had its own distortions, its own capture, its own blind spots. Malik, to his credit, has no romantic attachment to the old days. What we’ve lost isn’t some pristine past, but a slower metabolism that at least gave an idea time to be wrong before it was replaced by another one.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
