The Future of Thought

March 26, 2024

It’s become clear the tools we built to buy and sell our attention have learned more about us than we knew ourselves. Which is why it’s also the only way to defend ourselves against the bots and algorithms competing for our time.

We’ve learned that our streams of thought are vehicles carrying multiple agendas at different but changing intensities, joined by stimuli from both the world around us and the biological functions within.

If we want to control where we pay attention in an attention economy, we must see ourselves as the algorithms do, as nested threads of subject tags. Mapping these systems has become easy thanks to the expression of data from tech media, and makes us more relaxed, more in control, and on an even playing field with the synthesised forces of attraction around us.

Günther Skibbutz