What if we built a strong culture around actively avoiding advertising? What if we educated the general public about adverse effects of time after time giving up your attention, without getting anything in return besides a short lived dophamine kick? What if we showed how it's only in those moments of paying attention a person has a chance to exercise agency over their own life, and spending that scarce resource on doomscrolling is a catastrophic-group-mind-suicide, sadistically prolonged over the lifetime of an entire generation? That the illusion of community in the comments is just that, an illusion that dispels the moment the user clicks the dreaded "logout" button spitting them back into a gray heroine-withdrawal-like reality, isolated from their peers, all means of human connection monopolized by the attention sharecropping farms? That every moment a jingle on the radio captures your mind it's distracting you from something necessarily more important? That we are all in effect trapped in that externally-perpetuated procrastination loop, with all the neon-lit arrows pointing us further and further away from what truly matters -- our very lives?
Stay away from the algorithmic feeds, instead get to know your authors and choose them explicitly. Stay away from the personalized ads, pay for content you care about, block what can be blocked, avoid the rest. Learn active banner blindness: catch your attention drifting and look away. Uninstall reels, tiktok, youtube, sanitize your life from short term attention grabbers. Turn off that TV. Mute your car radio. Practice focus: take a book and set a timer. Lock yourself up in a room with a hobby project. Meditate. Set up a ritual with a friend or family, as long as you still got any. Make smalltalk to strangers. Get to know your neighbors. Plan that getaway. Choose your life!
While laudable, this seems significantly harder to implement than banning advertising. Not that either are particularly feasible policies but this one seems harder.
Stay away from the algorithmic feeds, instead get to know your authors and choose them explicitly. Stay away from the personalized ads, pay for content you care about, block what can be blocked, avoid the rest. Learn active banner blindness: catch your attention drifting and look away. Uninstall reels, tiktok, youtube, sanitize your life from short term attention grabbers. Turn off that TV. Mute your car radio. Practice focus: take a book and set a timer. Lock yourself up in a room with a hobby project. Meditate. Set up a ritual with a friend or family, as long as you still got any. Make smalltalk to strangers. Get to know your neighbors. Plan that getaway. Choose your life!