"It’s just that you’re getting older, and as you get older, your mind deteriorates and you mistake your own deterioration for the deterioration of the world."

"We need to understand that our attention did not collapse, our attention has been stolen from us by these very big forces."

"And when attention and focus break down — and I think there’s persuasive evidence they are breaking down — your ability to achieve your goals breaks down and your ability to solve your problems is significantly diminished."

"My book is about attention at two levels."

"One is individual attention."

"It’s also true of collective attention: A society that can’t pay attention to problems together, that consists of people who are interacting primarily through mechanisms that make them angry, is a society that can’t solve its crises."

"I’m glad you went there because I think on the individual level, it’s easier to see the cost of losing control of our attention, but I do think there’s a buried political cost."

"What we’re talking about here is the manufacturing of mass distraction. And that to me is just another way of manufacturing mass consent, but it’s a passive consent that comes from a population that’s too divided and diverted to mobilize in defense of anything — and that’s a big problem."

"And what struck me actually in the research is there are aspects of our technology that are profoundly damaging our ability to focus that can be fixed."

"the way big tech wants us to frame this debate is, are you pro-tech or anti-tech?"

"The real question is, what kind of tech do we want and whose interests should it serve?"

"The heart of this is the business model. So you open Facebook or any of the mainstream social media apps and those companies begin to make money immediately in two ways."

"The second way is much more important. Everything you do on Facebook is scanned and sorted by Facebook to build a profile of you."

"The ideal way would be if somebody 200 years ago, even a century ago, had begun to administer attention tests to ordinary people and did every year since."

"But I think there are reasonable ways we can infer from other substantial bodies of evidence. So let’s look at something specific like sleep. There is overwhelming scientific evidence that if you sleep less, your attention will get worse."

"We also have pretty good evidence, although there isn’t a consensus, that we sleep significantly less than we used to. Only 15 percent of Americans wake up feeling refreshed."

"And that means the content it produces is increasingly designed for a distracted population."

"And the more we consume this content, the more attention-seeking and clickbait-y it gets. And therefore the more attention seeking and clickbait-y our minds get."

"“The medium is the message.” The basic point was that we start to resemble our dominant tools of communication."

"And all these human activities that play out on these platforms start to resemble them, too. The way we do politics now has become a reflection of TV and the internet and the commercial incentives that drive it."

"We need to just say that a business model premised upon discovering the weaknesses in your attention in order to hack it and sell it to the highest bidder is fundamentally immoral and inhuman like leaded paint, and we will not allow it."

"And we all have experience of two possible alternative business models. One is subscription and everyone knows how platforms like Netflix and HBO work."

"Another model that everyone can understand is something like the sewer system. Before we had sewers, we had shit in the streets, we had cholera. So we all paid to build the sewers and we all own the sewers together."

"But whatever alternative model we adopt, the crucial thing is to understand in this different model, your attention is no longer the product they sell to the real customer, the advertiser."