We built systems
that feed on our worst impulses
outrage, spectacle, appetite, addiction
and in turn, they fed us back
until they became our nervous system.

We are the harvest,
and we are the harvesters.

There’s a strange intimacy to the way my phone can interrupt me and, in the same breath, narrate who I am. This morning it buzzed a mild, precise vibration, the kind that feels like a polite animal at the foot of your bed. I lifted the screen and the world had already been scored; headlines tuned to provoke, a thread that wanted me outraged, a feed that wanted me hungry, an app that wanted me curious enough to click but not curious enough to stay.

That little vibration is an engineering decision. Somewhere, an experiment ran (A/B test B won), an objective function optimized for retention, an engagement metric ticked up by 0.3%. Those decimal points translated into a million nudges across a million wrists and, over years, those nudges rewired thresholds. What used to be a private ache of boredom, curiosity, loneliness is now arrives pre-packaged with an industry-grade stimulant and a circled red badge.

I used to tell myself I was immune. I read papers about attention economics, I could name the algorithms, the ad auctions, the retargeting pixels. Knowledge felt like armor. Then I watched my hands become complicit; thumb learning the arc of infinite scroll, the body memorizing the small ritual of swipe; notification, peek, pinch, scroll, brief pleasure, empty. The machine had not only learned me; I had taught it how to be me.

There’s guilt in that. A quiet, domestic shame: I am building and living in the same mediated architecture. I write prompts and think in prompts; I debug systems whose success is measured in minutes spent, heartbeats raised, clicks landed. In meetings we iterate on hooks and retention strategies with clinical calm, and later I find myself reaching for an useless product because an ad remembered my midnight search three weeks ago. The irony is thin enough to slice.

Technology is not neutral in these moments. It is a co-author of my interior life. Notifications are not merely information they are invitations to feel. Recommendation algorithms are not neutral curators they are taste-makers with business models. A wearable whispers that last night I slept 6:40 hours; another app suggests a supplement to optimize that number. My sleep becomes a KPI. My anxiety becomes telemetry. The body that once signaled with ancient clarity of hunger, fatigue, contentment; now reports through dashboards, trend lines, and badges.

What I miss are the small messy, analogue interruptions that have no ROI; a phone call that lasts too long; a book left open forever; a conversation that goes nowhere and stays there. Those things taught me patience, boredom’s contour, the texture of a thought that isn’t optimized for sharability. Now my attention is a capital asset and I am the investment.

Vulnerability, for me, looks like admitting two things in the same breath; that the design choices of platforms shaped my habits, and that I was not merely a passive subject as I participated, celebrated, and sometimes engineered the very mechanisms that eat attention. There’s a cold humor in that complicity; laboring to build smoother funnels while secretly hating how smooth they make the capture.

So what does one do with this knowledge? Nothing as these are just notes now. Yesterday my nephew’s phone was taken away and he saw his mind expand by roughly the size of his bedroom room. He had so much time, he said, and brain began to generate its own curiosities again, small and ungroomed: the sound of rain against the balcony, a sentence half-remembered from a book, the way my hands remembered how to hold a pen and write something on paper.

There’s grief in losing the myth of being perpetually “in the loop.” There’s also relief. Turning off the red badge is not asceticism; it is choosing the threshold of my own attention. It is a tiny act of sovereignty: the API call I refuse to accept. I don’t have a grand plan; I have rituals and I will make more; away from the keyboard; as I am the tribal that evolution wanted me to be.

Technology will keep building incentives. Platforms will keep optimizing for hooks that land. That is not the only story. We are still beings who can choose the contours of our days. We are still capable of remembering how to be bored, how to sit with a persistent, ungamified feeling until its edges dissolve.

If the architecture of the present wanted us to be outrage, spectacle, appetite, and addiction, then the counter-architecture is minute and stubborn: a cancelled notification, a forgotten app, a handwritten page. These are low-bandwidth revolts. They will not show up on a quarter’s balance sheet. They will, slowly, change the interior economy of the way attention is earned and spent.

We built the systems that remade us. There’s culpability there. There’s also, faint and stubborn, the capacity to unbuild, to recompose our days like a poor but careful orchestra. The work is not heroic; it is domestic. It begins with a notification turned off and grows, quietly, into a life that remembers how to be human without metrics.