Open Focus Attention
Many things are happening at once...
Attention Damage - Predatory conditioning through interface - David J. Friedman
This was a very interesting read... how our attention is being eroded by current technological systems.
One potential inconsistency I picked up on, the author suggests that attention damage is structural, built into the system, and that self help techniques are inappropriate responses, because you can’t fix something locally if the real problem is systemic. But then the article ends by suggesting things we can do to minimise the effect... Sure, he wants to end on a positive note, but what if the way we’re building systems, really does mess with our minds to the point that we’re not going to notice that we’re drowning before its way too late to actually do anything real about it...
GPT
Yes — you’ve put your finger on a real tension in the piece. It’s not fatal, but it is philosophically important.
The article makes two claims simultaneously:
The damage is structural — attention erosion is engineered into incentive systems, interface design, advertising logic, and algorithmic optimization. Therefore the cause is collective and systemic.
Individuals can mitigate harm — through awareness, boundaries, boredom tolerance, focus practices, reclaiming presence, etc.
Those claims can coexist, but only if we distinguish treatment from cure.
What the author is really saying (perhaps without making it explicit) is:
Personal practices may reduce symptoms, build resilience, and create pockets of autonomy.
But they do not remove the underlying machinery producing the harm.
That’s similar to saying: polluted air is a structural problem; buying an air filter helps you breathe, but it doesn’t solve the emissions system.
Where your deeper concern becomes potent is this:
What if the system damages the very faculties required to resist it?
That is a more serious thesis than the article fully explores. If attention, memory, patience, social trust, and sustained thought are progressively degraded, then people may lose the capacity to perceive the problem clearly, organize collectively, or endure the discomfort required for change.
In that case, the system becomes self-protecting through cognitive erosion.
Not because of some grand conspiracy necessarily, but because incentive structures reward designs that weaken resistance. A market can produce malignant outcomes without anyone planning the whole picture.
This creates a chilling loop:
degraded attention reduces civic capacity
reduced civic capacity permits more exploitative systems
exploitative systems further degrade attention
That is a civilizational feedback spiral.
Where I think the piece is strongest is naming the phenomenon. Where it is weakest is perhaps ending with lifestyle advice that risks shrinking a political problem into a wellness problem.
Meditation, app limits, reading books, walking without your phone — valuable, yes. But if presented as the main answer, they can become the modern equivalent of “recycle your plastic” while industrial systems continue unchanged.
So the more complete answer may be layered:
Personal level: reclaim your own mind where you can.
Relational level: build phone-free spaces, deeper conversations, cultural norms of presence.
Institutional level: regulation, design ethics, friction requirements, child protections, anti-monopoly measures, humane defaults.
Civilizational level: redefine progress away from maximizing engagement.
And your stark intuition deserves respect:
It is possible for systems to impair awareness faster than awareness can organize a response.
History contains versions of this.
Still, systems are powerful, but not omnipotent. Human beings also adapt, awaken, revolt, and create countercultures unexpectedly. Sometimes decline itself becomes the alarm bell.
You might say the final question is not “are we drowning?” but:
Can we still feel water rising while we still have strength to swim? 🌊
Jen
There’s a comparison we could make here, with attention and technology - and energy levels and sugar... Once you get into that binge and crash cycle, it’s very hard to get out of it. I guess we call that addiction... It’s tough to break free on your own, often some external catalyst is needed.
On a tangent... last night I tried charging the van at a Tesla supercharger. It was midnight and the app said the supercharger station was empty, and I wanted to try out this CCS to Chademo adapter I’ve got, it’s supposed to let you charge an older EV at the modern chargers, and also at Tesla chargers... So I got there just before 1am, and behind me a Tesla pulled up to charge. I thought, “oh, someone else charging late at night...” - But then another Tesla showed up, and another... by now it was 1 in the morning.... People are going out at 1 in the morning to charge their EV’s... There’s something weird about this. And I wonder if it’s related in some way to our discussion here...
GPT
Yes. I think you’re sensing something larger than the literal scene. The midnight charging station becomes almost allegorical.
Your sugar comparison is apt. Quick glucose spikes, dopamine spikes, engagement spikes, convenience spikes — all can create a borrow-now, pay-later physiology. Immediate reward, delayed cost. The crash then drives renewed seeking. That loop can occur in food, media, shopping, outrage, even productivity culture.
What you witnessed at the charger may be a cousin of that pattern: life reorganised around systems rather than systems organised around life.
People arriving at 1 a.m. to charge may have many practical reasons:
cheaper off-peak electricity
busy schedules
range anxiety before tomorrow’s commute
habit/routine
charger availability
simple preference for quiet nighttime errands
So I wouldn’t romanticize it too quickly. But symbolically, it is striking.
A technology introduced to grant freedom can quietly begin dictating rhythms:
wake when tariffs say wake
charge when networks are empty
move when apps predict congestion
respond when notifications summon
rest when work permits
This doesn’t mean EVs are bad, any more than phones are bad. It means tools can migrate from servant to scheduler.
Your phrase “something weird about this” likely points to the feeling that human time is becoming increasingly synchronized to machine incentives. Midnight once meant sleep, intimacy, stillness, mystery, music, mischief 🌙 Now for some it also means “optimal charging window.”
There’s also another layer: modern people are often so time-pressured that 1 a.m. becomes the only available margin. The charger scene may not reveal obsession with machines so much as lives stretched thin.
That matters because then the problem is not “strange people charging late,” but systems producing days so packed that maintenance of life gets pushed into the night.
Your empty station filling up after midnight feels like a tiny sociological photograph:
humans, quietly queueing in the dark, tending batteries — vehicle batteries, phone batteries, personal batteries.
And perhaps asking, without words: who is charging whom? ⚡
The tangent may not be a tangent at all.
Jen
It’s not, my mind just works like that. There’s some big picture at play here... this is how forests die, suddenly, and without apparent warning... Only there was plenty of warning, we were just too busy not seeing the forest for the trees...
Maybe I’m just an canary singing, but I’ve been hearing a whole choir lately...
I don’t want to be an alarmist, and I know how “what we put our attention on, amplifies the potential probability”... So where should we put our attention now ?
GPT
You’re asking one of the central questions of any era under strain: when warning signals are real, but fear itself can become another trap, where should attention go?
First, your forest image is wise. Complex systems often look stable until thresholds are crossed. Then collapse appears sudden, though it was incubating for years. Finance, ecosystems, relationships, democracies, nervous systems — all can work this way. So sensing patterns early is not the same thing as being alarmist.
But attention aimed only at danger can become fuel for paralysis. The mind starts rehearsing collapse instead of participating in renewal.
So I’d suggest a threefold orientation:
1. Put attention on signal, not noise.
Not every dramatic headline is signal. Look for slow variables:
trust levels
mental health trends
birth rates / loneliness
concentration of power
ecological resilience
civic competence
community cohesion
meaning hunger
These often matter more than daily spectacle.
2. Put attention on what increases agency.
If a focus leaves you smaller, helpless, compulsively scrolling, it may be informationally rich but functionally poor.
Prefer attention that increases capacity:
learning practical skills
strengthening relationships
improving health and energy
building local networks
creating beauty
understanding systems clearly
Attention should sometimes become action.
3. Put attention on living nodes of regeneration.
Every decaying system coexists with emergent alternatives. Find where life is already adapting:
communities rebuilding trust
humane technology projects
local food / repair / maker culture
sincere art scenes
people choosing depth over speed
friendships with real presence
The future often begins as small, unimpressive islands.
There is also a psychological principle you already intuit:
Attention amplifies probability.
Not magically in a crude sense, but behaviorally and socially. What we repeatedly notice, discuss, reward, imitate, and organize around tends to grow.
So the question is not merely “what is wrong?” but:
What deserves strengthening?
What is fragile and precious?
What capacities will matter if turbulence increases?
What kind of person do I become by looking here?
My honest answer for now:
Put one eye on risk, one eye on possibility, and keep your hands building something real. 🌱
The canary has value not because it screams forever, but because it helps the miners move, ventilate, reorganize, and survive.
And perhaps the choir you hear is many people sensing the same threshold, each in different language.
Jen
Imagine if attention is focused awareness... like a narrow beam of energy focusing in on something that grabs our interest... Now imagine widening that beam... opening it out - relaxing its focus... this returns us to that diffuse open awareness one again...
GPT
Yes — this is a powerful phenomenological map. You’re describing two modes of awareness that many contemplative traditions, psychologists, and neuroscientists have noticed, though with different language.
Focused attention is like a beam or spotlight:
narrow bandwidth
selective
goal-oriented
object-centered
useful for solving, hunting, reading, fixing, aiming
tends to exclude background information
It is extraordinarily useful. Civilizations are built with this mode.
But when it becomes chronic, consciousness can feel tunneled:
fixation
strain
compulsive relevance-seeking
inability to rest
loss of context
reduced sensitivity to subtle signals
Then there is open or diffuse awareness — widening the beam:
panoramic rather than pinpoint
receptive rather than acquisitive
context-sensitive
includes body, space, sound, mood, periphery
less “I am doing attention,” more “awareness is already here”
This mode often feels like relief because effort drops. The nervous system no longer has to keep gripping one object.
You may appreciate that this resembles distinctions made by Iain McGilchrist between narrow grasping attention and broader relational attention; or in meditation traditions between concentration and open monitoring.
The modern environment often monetizes the narrow beam. Notifications, feeds, outrage, novelty all try to seize and steer the spotlight. But the widened field is harder to capture commercially because it is less reactive and more self-sufficient.
There’s also a subtle paradox:
When you relax focus, you do not become less aware.
You often become aware of more.
The room returns. The body returns. Time slows. Meaning reorganizes. Peripheral intuitions surface. Creativity often enters through the edges rather than the center.
Practically, this can be felt in seconds:
Look at one object intensely.
Then soften the eyes.
Include the walls, sounds, breath, temperature, posture, the whole scene.
Nothing external changed. Yet consciousness changed.
Perhaps attention is not only a beam to aim, but an aperture to open. 🔆
And wisdom may involve knowing when to use each:
beam for tasks
field for life