Your attention please

Did you know human attention spans are shrinking?

I recently came across a fascinating article about “Why Everything is Becoming a Game.” This led to going down a rabbit hole of reading and research on what is happening at the intersections of capitalism, technology, and the human brain. Evidence shows that our attention spans are getting smaller.

The Chinese Communist Party was among the first to apply the principles of social media to the real world. In several towns and cities, it began trialing social credit schemes that assign citizens a level of “clout” based on how well they behave. In some areas, such as Rongcheng and Hangzhou, there are public signs that display leaderboards of the highest scoring citizens. The lowest scoring citizens may be punished with credit blacklists or throttled internet speeds.

Meanwhile, in the West, gamification is used to make people obey corporations. Employers like Amazon and Disneyland use electronic tracking to keep score of employees’ work rates, often displaying them for all to see. Those who …