The typical adolescent receives 237 notifications every day. We explore the attention crisis and how to regain control.
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June 24th, 2025 // Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up to receive your own copy here.

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How to flourish in a distracted world

 

Every semester in New York City, a quiet experiment unfolds: 19-year-olds gather in a classroom at NYU to explore what it means to live a good life. The course is called “Flourishing.” 

 

The premise of the course is simple: Your personal and professional flourishing is directly related to your ability to control your attention.

 

The course is taught by Professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation. When his students begin to reclaim their focus, Haidt sees transformational results: They excel academically, experience fewer distractions, and form deeper, more meaningful connections with their peers.


The Flourishing course taps into an idea that social media—and the constant stimuli of algorithmically engineered digital spaces—has fractured our capacity for sustained focus and presence:

  • Haidt told Ezra Klein on a podcast earlier this year that TikTok is “the greatest demolisher of attention in human history.”
  • A recent article in The Atlantic cited widespread lamentations by professors that today's college students don’t have the attention span to read books, let alone a brief sonnet.
  • A 2023 study by Common Sense Media found that a typical adolescent now receives 237 notifications a day, or about 15 for every waking hour.

Do we live in an unprecedented crisis of attention? There have been previous moral panics about attention in human history. Is this time different? In this newsletter, we zoom out and take a historical perspective to better understand today’s crisis of attention. Stay with us…if you can.

 

// New technologies → moral panics

A pattern has played out throughout history: The emergence of a new technology causes anguish and moral panic. At times, this moral panic is well-founded—the risks legitimate, the concerns real. At other times, the concerns were vastly overblown and comical in retrospect. 

 

The following is an incomplete history of tech-driven moral panics. Not all are related to attention, but the examples help place today’s concerns about our technology into a broader context.

  • Trains: In the 19th century, many worried there was a correlation between the rise of fast-speed train travel and declining mental health. As Edwin Fuller Torrey and Judy Miller wrote in The Invisible Plague: The Rise of Mental Illness from 1750 to the Present, trains were believed to “injure the brain,” shatter nerves, drive people to madness, and lead to violence.
  • Books: The 19th century also brought improvements to the printing press. Soon, the cost of books declined, and readership shot up. Now, books were no longer a luxury for the wealthy. Parents became concerned that cheap, plentiful books were seducing children into a life of crime and violence. Plus, such shallow writing could distract young minds from more substantive works. Perpetrators of crimes were even labeled as the victims of what books had done to them.
  • Radio: If printed books and magazines weren’t harmful enough, then came…the radio. In 1941, Mary Preston, an American pediatrician, published “Children’s Reactions to Movie Horrors and Radio Crime” in The Journal of Pediatrics. After studying 6- to 16-year-old children, Preston concluded that more than half were severely addicted to radio and movie crime dramas. Children were consuming radio dramas “much as a chronic alcoholic does drink,” she wrote.
  • Television: In 1972, the U.S. Surgeon General released a 3-year study into television violence and its effects on children. The study cost $1.8 million and comprised 40 separate studies, making it the largest study of media effects at the time. It found that violence on TV led to an increase in aggressive behavior among youth. The American Psychological Association has since acknowledged that causation is difficult to prove, and effects vary by individual.
  • Music: In the 1980s, the Parents Music Resource Center increased parental control over the music their children had access to, particularly music that was considered too violent, sexual, or harmful.
  • Video games: After speculation that the gunmen in the Columbine mass shooting in Colorado in 1999 had a history of playing violent video games, there were widespread concerns about their impact. In 2005, Hillary Clinton (then a U.S. Senator) said at a press conference: “According to the most comprehensive statistical analysis yet conducted, violent video games increase aggressive behavior as much as lead exposure decreases children’s IQ scores.” The analysis has since been discredited, and today, there is “scant evidence” of any correlation, but fears still persist.

It's tempting to look back at specific moral panics and regard them as histrionic overreactions. But dismissing them too quickly could blind us to the ways our attention can be captured again and again—both by technologies and by the moral panics that ensue. Today's digital approach to capturing attention didn't originate out of nowhere. It has technological ancestors in books, radio, and television. Understanding this history can help us better contextualize and address today's attention crisis.

 

// Today’s tech: Is this something different?

The Center for Humane Technology describes how extractive technology is damaging our attention and mental health:

 

“Anxiety and low self-esteem increase the desire for more social validation and connection. Social media provides an addicting platform to compete for social validation. Increased social media usage can worsen anxiety and self-esteem. Then the cycle continues.”

 

Is today's attention crisis fundamentally different? There are reasons to believe 1) this time is different, and 2) we are not powerless in the choices and preferences we make about where we direct our attention.

 

Consider the following points:

  1. We live in an attention economy where today’s technology is rewiring the brain for instant gratification. Critics like Julie Jargon of The Wall Street Journal have concluded that the short-form videos popular on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube have created “TikTok brain,” her term for a rewiring of the brain that is desperate for instant gratification. Jargon points to emerging research that has found that watching short-form videos “makes it harder for kids to sustain activities that don’t offer instant—and constant—gratification.” Unlike radio or television (which were also profit-seeking enterprises), today’s social media is personalized through algorithms that tailor our feeds to us—making it hard to stop scrolling.

    Social apps and AI-powered bots use variable rewards (ex. likes, notifications, & surprises) in frictionless environments to trigger dopamine cycles—a technique refined in slot machines and gaming that leverages the psychology of habit.

  2. Hyper-stimulating digital content increases a user’s cognitive load. Our working memory is cluttered with rapid information bursts, ads, and hyperlinks—a fast-paced media onslaught not present with books or television. This is what’s known as “popcorn brain,” a state of easy distractibility that, according to David M. Levy, Ph.D., a computer scientist at the University of Washington who coined the term, is described as “being so hooked on electronic multitasking that the slower paced life offline holds no interest.”

  3. Unlike past moral panics, teens themselves are raising alarms about social media. As Jonathan Haidt points out in a recent post on After Babel, the history of moral panics has a certain paternalism to it, with parents expressing concerns on behalf of their children. In today’s phone-centric world, it is parents and teens who are fighting against this technology and raising alarms. While the perception of social media by Gen Z is mixed, almost half of Gen Z wish social media platforms like X and TikTok didn’t exist, and 83% have taken steps to limit social media usage.

  4. But we are not powerless; our own preferences for where we direct our attention play a role. According to the American Time Use Survey, Americans are reading fewer books than they used to. Rose Horowitch, who wrote The Atlantic article about how college students no longer read books, reported that “Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to.” While readership of print books is in decline, the audiobook industry is steadily growing, vinyl is back, and many people find the time to listen to 3+ hour podcasts.

    // A human approach to attention

    The reality is nuanced: algorithms built on a business model of continuous engagement can make it hard to turn away. The constant barrage of notifications can make it hard to refocus (what is described as attention residue). Video-based, short-form content can rewire our brains and put us out of practice with other forms of content.

     

    And yet, we are not powerless. Similar to the claim that people were victims of the harm caused by books in the 19th century, we are not victims of a great robbery of attention by social media. To be clear, this is not to place the full burden on individuals—after all, there is real merit in legislation and by design changes that make the internet safer at scale—but our tech-based attention crisis can’t be fought solely through tech policy and tech fixes. 

     

    It demands our human agency. This is The People’s Internet that Project Liberty envisions: the confluence of a healthier tech ecosystem and empowered digital citizens.

     

    In the Flourishing class, the prescription to reclaim control over our attention is surprisingly offline:

    • Getting more sleep.
    • Developing prosocial and healthy personal habits.
    • Practicing stoicism and working to become more resilient.
    • (Re)learning how to play as adults.
    • Practicing input control and learning how to stay focused and do deep work.
    • Grounding oneself in spiritual reflection and personalized approaches to happiness.

    For more, also check out the Strother School of Radical Attention, an organization that offers educational resources, programming, and “attention activism.”

     

    Our attention is one of our greatest assets. Whether it’s a radio plugged into the wall, social media on a smartphone in our pocket, or whatever comes next, it’s up to us to choose how we shape and focus our attention. 

    Project Liberty news & updates

    // Project Liberty founder Frank McCourt spoke on Bloomberg TV about The People’s Bid. Project Liberty made the only bid that meets the law’s requirements, he said. Watch here.

     

    // An article in Fast Company profiled Project Liberty Institute's Senior Fellow, Audrey Tang, and her goal to save democracy with ‘pro-social’ media.

     

    // Join Project Liberty's Alliance for the launch of “How Can Data Cooperatives Help Build a Fair Data Economy? on July 9th at 10am EDT. This interactive session will explore how data cooperatives can offer a fair, democratic model for data governance, drawing lessons from legacy co-ops, emerging global use cases, and practical pathways to scale. Register here.

    📰 Other notable headlines

    // 🗣 “You sound like ChatGPT.” AI isn’t just impacting how we write, it’s changing how we speak and interact with others, according to an article in The Verge. (Free).

     

    // 📱 An article in Platformer reflected on how decentralized media is off to an agonizingly slow start, but there are glimmers of progress. (Free).

     

    // 🛡 More than 16 billion login credentials for Google, Facebook, Apple and other platforms have been exposed in one of the largest cybersecurity breaches of all time. Axios has the story. (Free).

     

    // 🏥 The Markup caught 4 more states sharing personal health data with Big Tech. Healthcare exchanges in Nevada, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island shared users’ sensitive health data with companies like Google and LinkedIn. (Free).


    // ⛪ An article in Politico reported on Pope Leo’s warning of AI’s dangers on youth. “Our youth must be helped, and not hindered, in their journey towards maturity and true responsibility,” he said. (Free).

     

    // 🤖 Yoshua Bengio is one of the godfathers of AI. Now, he has a bold new plan to keep us safe from it, according to an article in Vox. “I should have thought of this 10 years ago,” he said. (Paywall).

     

    // ❤️‍🩹 From remotely-controlled smart cars to menacing Netflix messages, an article in MIT Technology Review reported on the front lines of the quest to defend against tech in intimate partner violence. (Paywall).

    Partner news & opportunities

    // FLI Podcast examines AI copyright with Ed Newton-Rex
    Fairly Trained CEO Ed Newton-Rex joins the FLI Podcast to discuss how generative AI uses copyrighted data, why he left Stability AI, and what fair licensing could mean for artists. Listen here to learn about industry attitudes toward creators’ rights.

     

    // User Cooperative’s “Surge Browser” slated for fall launch

    User Cooperative will roll out an early version of “Surge Browser” for Mac this fall. The members-only browser will be a cooperative, channeling all profits back to users in proportion to their clicks, marking what the co-op calls the first “people-owned” browser.

     

    // Honoring young lives lost to online harm

    Amy Neville, President of the Alexander Neville Foundation, and fellow members of The Parents’ Network gathered on Capitol Hill yesterday to mark the first Social Media Harms Remembrance Day, honoring 245 children and teens whose deaths were linked to online dangers.

    What did you think of today's newsletter?

    We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas. Reply to this email.

    // Project Liberty builds solutions that help people take back control of their lives in the digital age by reclaiming a voice, choice, and stake in a better internet.

     

    Thank you for reading.

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