The case for reclaiming your attention from recommendation algorithms

The piece opens with the “Tetris effect”—play the game enough and its shapes start intruding on your perception—to make a simple point: sustained attention reshapes how you think. The problem is that most of us no longer choose what we attend to. YouTube, Spotify, LinkedIn, and Reddit decide for us, optimizing feeds for engagement and ad revenue rather than intent. Along the way, the author argues, the content itself is decaying: AI-generated filler slipped between real songs to dodge royalties, and forums increasingly populated by LLMs and troll accounts rather than genuine human opinion.

The author frames this as a loss of agency—handing an algorithm control over your screen is like handing it the keys to your brain. As a counterpoint, they recall the pre-algorithmic web, where people navigated deliberately through bookmarks and a handful of specialized sites. The bad material existed, but you had to seek it out; nothing was force-feeding it to you between a recipe and a cat video.

The encouraging note is that this “intentional internet”—blogs, RSS feeds, personal sites—still exists, just buried beneath the corporate web. Reclaiming it requires adjusting to a slower pace where content isn’t infinite or constantly refreshed. Like any habit, the author says, the fix is simply persistence: keep at it, and eventually the shift in attention starts to feel natural.