Before I dropped out of my PhD, I was

studying the attention economy.

Basically, how and why every app and

device you own is designed from the

ground up to be as addictive as possible

to consume as much of your time and

attention as it possibly can. It's why

my phone looks like this. It's why my

browser looks like this. Reddit, main

feed blocked. YouTube, a search engine

for educational content. Amazon, no ads.

Instagram, just kidding. I don't use

Instagram. Just call your friends, man.

Today, I'm going to talk about the

attention economy for the first time on

this channel. We're going to talk about

how it works, how you can and can't

combat it, and how I think self-hosting

and the home lab might be one of the

only ways to escape the attention

economy in 2025. So, let's talk about

it. One of the things that bugs me most

about the attention economy is we refuse

to use the word addiction. We call it

smartphone overuse, social media

overuse. These are the terms used in the

literature and were even discouraged

from calling it addiction. But here's a

reasonable definition provided by

psychologists and cited in digital

minimalism by Kell Newport. Addiction is

a condition in which a person engages in

use of a substance or in a behavior for

which the rewarding effects provide a

compelling incentive to repeatedly

pursue the behavior despite detrimental

consequences. Not to mention in 2013 the

DSM5 included for the first time

behavioral addictions as diagnosible.

That means we have precedents. We can

talk about this like it really is. Now

you may be wondering to yourself, but is

it really detrimental? Is my smartphone

and social media overuse detrimental to

me enough to the point where we can talk

about it like it's an addiction? Yes.

Yes, it is. Let me show you a talk I

gave just this summer. I'm not going to

go over this whole talk because it was

like 45 minutes. I'm not jamming that

all into a YouTube video, but we are

going to address the essentials. Now,

first off, we assess smartphone overuse

in really interesting ways. We ask

questions like, "How soon after waking

do you check your phone?" "How many

times do you unlock per day?" and "Does

not checking your phone for an hour or

more make you feel anxiety or

restlessness?" It turns out these are

the same kinds of questions we use to

assess if somebody has a nicotine

addiction. That's kind of interesting.

No. Now, you may be saying to yourself,

"Well, maybe it's like a harmless

addiction. Kind of like caffeine. Not

that big a deal." No. Doom scrolling and

the connection to mental health is

really strong. We've seen tons of

psychologically validated studies that

demonstrate higher rates of anxiety,

stress, and depression. And man, if

you're in Gen Z like me and you've been

raised on the smartphone, you're

probably feeling that stress and

anxiety, too. It's even neurological. We

see sleep disruption via amygdala

hyperactivation and cortisol

dysregulation. This is biological. We

see lower well-being and life

satisfaction. And we see in huge studies

of n equals 100. So we're not talking

about small studies with 20 people

talking about their feelings. We're

talking about hundreds of data points

linking smartphone overuse to

existential anxiety, mistrust, and PTSD

like symptoms through vicarious trauma.

Maybe, maybe it's not a good idea. It's

not good for you to wake up and the

first thing you see is a list of the

world's greatest atrocities today. Maybe

that's bad for you. Maybe that might

cause vicarious trauma. Can you really

tell me that this behavior doesn't meet

the criteria for repeatedly pursuing the

behavior despite detrimental

consequences?

Doesn't seem likely, does it? Now, you

may be wondering to yourself, well, why

do we have to call it addiction? This is

a serious problem and we can address it

as such. I think we need to call it an

addiction because then we get the

gravity of the law under us. If it's

causing minor behavioral problems for

people or potentially mental health

outcomes that are not so good, the law

doesn't get involved. People don't start

paying attention. There are serious

impacts to our mental health and

well-being caused by smartphone

addiction and social media addiction.

The attention economy is very bad for us

and we need the gravity of that word

addiction to be able to enforce real

legal and legislative change about what

kinds of things are allowed to be put

into applications and put in front of

children. Now, if you're really keen,

you might hit me with something like

correlation is not causation, Nathan.

Okay, but here's something really

compelling. It goes the other way, too.

When we look at studies that try to

reduce smartphone overuse, and they

work, we can see that people reduce

their smartphone use, those people end

up with better mental health and

well-being outcomes. So, this is

birectional, which is usually a good

sign that something is causation, not

just correlation. You may not be able to

say 100%, but that's the same argument

that the tobacco people gave back in the

90s when they were trying to claim that

cigarettes didn't cause cancer. It's

like, well, it's only really highly

correlated. So what?

So what? Even if you don't care about

the word addiction, even if you don't

care about those mental well-being

outcomes, I want to present an idea to

you. This is the attention economy. It's

about your attention. And when you love

something, what you do for it is you pay

attention. When you love a movie or

music, you pay attention to it. When you

love a person, you listen to them and

hear their thoughts. You don't check

your phone real quick and like tune them

out. You pay attention. When you love a

hobby, like playing guitar or something

like that, you become engrossed in that

hobby in that moment and you pay

attention to it. Attention is the

foundation of love. And when you are

robbed of your ability to pay attention

to something, you are robbed of your

ability to love something. More than

that, this is about time. Here's a fun

fact. You're going to die. Your time is

finite. This is not a resource. It's not

money. You don't go and get more and

just work a couple more hours and then

you can pay more time to something. It's

like, no, dude. You you just you just

die. You run out of life. And so when

you are robbed of your time, you never

get it back. The attention economy isn't

taking something as mundane as money.

It's your life and ability to love

things that's way more important than

your money. And I want to be clear,

you're not being robbed of your

attention and your ability to love and

your time by accident. This is

intentional and not because they care

about you and hurting your feelings and

taking up your life. just because it's

profitable. Let me show you how I know

how we know collectively the science of

this is intentional. It comes down to

basic psychology. The same psychology

that was used in Vegas to make gambling

addictive. Here's the deal. Once upon a

time, slot machines sucked. They made no

money. They weren't enticing. But today,

they're 80% of Las Vegas profits. How

Vegas mastered the art of the variable

reward rate. So, when you pair a couple

of things together, you can create

addictive behaviors or you can foster an

addiction. So, first off, you need a

stimulating cue. In this case, with new

slot machines, they have flashing

colorful lights and sound. Basically,

something to grab your attention. The

next thing they do is provide you a

really juicy reward. Money. Everybody

likes money. Now, last thing is they use

a variable reward rate. Your brain loves

it. When the reward doesn't come every

time for a behavior, it comes only some

of the time. Variably, when you pair all

three of these things together, a huge

flashing stimulating cue like colorful

lights and sound, a juicy reward like

money, and then you only give it

sometimes, you can create a behavior, a

really strongly, deeply rooted behavior.

And your phone does the exact same thing

to you. It's a slot machine in your

pocket. Let me show you exactly how.

Step one is you're cued. You're given

some sort of stimulus. Those are

notifications. There's a reason that

notifications are red bubbles, not blue

bubbles. Facebook actually intentionally

made the switch. Red bubbles grab your

attention more than blue does. It gives

you a sense of urgency and then you are

rewarded when you pull down uh just like

pulling the lever on your slot machine.

You sometimes get interesting articles

or somebody liked your post. But most

importantly, sometimes you don't.

Sometimes there isn't a new interesting

article. Sometimes nobody interacted

with you. That's a variable reward rate

in your pocket reinforcing the behavior

of pulling your phone out of your pocket

and taking a quick look. I wish that was

the end of it. Just a slot machine in

your pocket. Not so bad. But it's not.

There is an entire classification of

UIUX patterns designed to make you spend

more time in apps. We call them

attention capture damaging patterns. My

bad on the typo here. So things like

infinite scroll just keeps loading

content. So your default behavior is

just to keep going. There's nothing to

cue you to stop. The pull to refresh is

your slot machine lever. Autoplay makes

the default behavior continue going.

Time fog is another pattern. Any way to

make it difficult for you to tell how

much time has passed really helps you

from queuing yourself to stop. The same

thing happens in Vegas, by the way.

There are no clocks on the wall in Vegas

because they don't want you to know how

long you've spent there. Another really

sinister one is nagging notifications.

They will find any reason to send you a

notification because that's the cue.

That's your stimulus to get back into

the system. Even worse, they will send

you fake notifications. Twitter is

really big on this one. They'll just

send you notifications that somebody

sent you a message, but nobody sent you

a message. They're just trying to get

you back into their system. These are

not innocent design quirks. These are

builtin known mechanisms to foster

addictive behavior.

So, you are being taken advantage of on

purpose. And again, I want to remind you

this isn't personal. They don't care

about you and ruining your life. It's

just profitable to do so. Your mental

health is a side effect. But luckily, we

have a catalog of these attention

captured damaging patterns. We can just

strip some of them out, right? That's

the browser stuff I was showing you at

the beginning of this video. So, let's

talk about that. The browser is the

easiest place to start fighting back

because in your browser, you still have

control over what's fed to you. At the

end of the day, your browser just feeds

you HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. And so,

Chrome extensions or extensions on

Firefox or whatever you're using can

just remove stuff. That's how my Reddit

doesn't have a feed. That's how my

YouTube doesn't have a feed. Chrome

extensions. So, let me show you a couple

of ones I find really useful. Here are

four of my favorites. The first is unin

affects a couple of applications.

YouTube, Instagram, and Amazon. And it's

basically what makes YouTube and Amazon

into these nothing but a search engine

for products or videos. The impact here

is you don't get the infinite scrolling

feed of stuff. I don't get my

subscriptions or homepage or shorts.

None of it. It's just YouTube. Now,

YouTube does have useful content on

here. I hope that I create some of it

and a lot of people do. I don't want to

not have any YouTube whatsoever. What I

want is not an algorithm feeding me

stuff that it thinks will make me spend

more time. I want YouTube to be a

resource. And unin helps me do that.

Same thing with Amazon. Sometimes you

got to buy stuff and Amazon's the only

place to find it. But I don't want to be

fed a list of products so long that when

I look at it, I forget what I was there

to buy in the first place. This just

presents me a search bar so I can find

things that I need to buy. I don't use

Instagram, but blocking the feed lets

you participate in group messages and

things like that. If your friend group

communicates over Instagram a lot, there

is uninter. If you use Reddit,

especially as a technical person, as a

home lab, there are a lot of times

Reddit is like a great resource for

figuring out bugs or best settings and

features and best practices for whatever

you're building. I used it last night to

configure jellyfin. Lots of people talk

about that. But Reddit is also a

phenomenal source of distractions.

Getting rid of that infinite feed, the

infinite scroll and notifications makes

it a little bit easier to deal with, a

little bit less addictive. We're

stripping out attention capture damaging

patterns. Unhook is another fantastic

one that makes YouTube a little bit

easier to deal with. Now, unin does a

lot of this by default, but unhook gives

you a little bit more granular control.

So, you can just hide shorts, for

example, if that's really your vice. Or

you can hide explore and trending, but

keep your subscriptions if you're really

a big fan of the channels that you're

subscribed to. Unhook is a fantastic way

to get granular control over the

addictive components of YouTube. Strip

those out, but keep the things you care

about. And lastly, undistracted is kind

of a nuke all option. So, undistracted

lets you block Facebook, YouTube,

Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, LinkedIn,

Instagram, and Pinterest. Lots of

different tools. I've got a bunch of

these blocked as well. But in settings,

you can have more granular control over

when. So, for example, I make YouTube

videos. I kind of need access to

YouTube, but I want the default to be

nonaccess. And so, I can pause blocking

on a specific schedule, which is

fantastic for me. Not only that, I can

lock these settings. And now I need a

password to get access to these settings

to change this back. But I don't

remember that password. That password is

stored in Bit Warden. So there's

additional friction for me to go unlock

those settings and gain access to

YouTube and things like that because

this is a really strongly deeply rooted

behavior for me. I have trouble stopping

myself from going on to YouTube and the

additional friction makes it a lot

harder to just get that stimulus or cue

and feel like going on YouTube. But

let's be honest with ourselves, 80% of

the problem is not in your browser. Most

of your consumption happens here on this

guy or your Apple TV or smart TV OS

thingabob. It's where you consume apps.

Now, one of the great powers of your

browser is it is just HTML, CSS, and

JavaScript at the end of the day. You

can strip out attention capture damaging

patterns. We know what they are and we

have control over that environment. But

these things, they're locked down. You

can't strip out any features of an app.

That's closed source nonsense. And so

finally we return to the point of this

channel which has been like home labbing

and Linuxy stuff. I've come to the

conclusion that in these locked down

environments, your phone, your smart TV,

and the apps you use with them,

sometimes the only solution for

regaining control over your attention is

a form of abstinence. An abstinence from

the attention economy apps. But straight

up abstinence from all of modernity is

not really a practical solution, right?

YouTube really is a really useful tool

for learning new things. I mean,

university professors put entire

courses, entire lectures on YouTube. I

put my stuff on YouTube because I hope

that it's helpful to people. Same thing

with being able to call somebody from

your mobile phone. Pretty sweet. I mean,

if you're in trouble, it's really nice

to be able to contact somebody or using

Apple Maps or Google Maps or whatever is

really convenient. And even for the

things that aren't strictly necessary, I

like watching films and movies with my

friends and things like that. I don't

want to cut that out just because I'm

getting rid of Netflix. I like my

leisure time and consuming art in a

reasonable fashion. The importance is

control. control over how I do it, when

I do it, control over my data and where

it goes or doesn't go, and how I'm fed

new information. I don't want to be fed.

I don't want to feed. I'm not a pig at a

trough. I want to engage with art and

call my mom. This isn't insane. And so I

think self-hosting alternatives to a lot

of these closed source tools where we

can't strip out attention capture

damaging patterns is a viable solution

that doesn't require straight up

abstinence from everything modernity has

to offer. Of course replacing all this

stuff is a ton of work. I mean even

Windows is feeding you ads in the start

menu these days and in the install

process. Your phone is a closed source

thing whether you're on iOS or Android.

Netflix or whatever multitude of

streaming services you use, your

consumer/ISP router is another point of

access. There are a ton of things. Also,

a lot of us are using LLM these days.

We're using smart assistants like Siri

or Google. There's a lot of stuff to

replace and that is going to be kind of

the focus of this channel moving

forward. I'm going to be looking at a

road map and building out that road map

for how you can sort of free yourself

from these applications and host them

yourself. This channel has been about

Linux and home labbing and things like

that so far and it will continue to be,

but it's now also going to be focused on

homebing with a purpose. Homeabbing with

the purpose of freeing up your attention

from the attention economy. What kinds

of applications and tools can we use to

do that? to engage with art and learning

materials online or in your own lab more

meaningfully than just consuming

content. So, let's move on to a couple

of the things I think we're going to be

building out and then we'll wrap up the

video. Netflix and the streaming

services are one of the big things that

hits you. And so, I'm looking at

Jellyfin. Jellyfin is just a piece of

software, free open- source software

that lets you put your movies and your

TV shows and music on a server.

Everything that you own, legally

acquired on your own server that you

manage. And this means that there's no

Netflix algorithm feeding you the next

best movie that you might like. It's

just stuff that you care about cuz you

bought it. Like this. I actually built

out my Jellyfin server on stream last

night. You can take a look at that

stream and see how it goes. I'll be

making YouTube videos on this stuff as

well. Apple TV or Google TV or whatever

thing you've got going on is another

nightmare of ads and algorithmic feeds

and so I'll be looking at Kodi as a

replacement for that. You can build it

into one of those little N100 mini PCs

or a Raspberry Pi and that turns your TV

into a smart TV but without ads and

algorithms and nonsense. Also,

Windows is full of ads. Apple less so,

but it still kind of pokes you a lot. So

I think Linux is a very reasonable

alternative because it gives you

control. There's no ads built into Linux

unless you're using Auntu. Thanks

Canonicle. And so I'll be continuing to

talk about Linux. I'll also be looking

at the phones. Smartphones.

Smartphones. I'll be looking at

dumbifying your phone in all sorts of

different ways. Whether that's taking a

look at the Light Phone or Graphine OS

or just taking this guy and dumbfying

him down by removing features. I've

taken my iPhone 12 mini and made it

pretty dumb. There's no Safari, there's

no App Store. It's just messages, the

phone, Maps, and Uber, you know, cuz I

hate the DTC. What are you going to do?

We'll also be looking at things like

OpenSense because I think the router

being your point of access to the

internet is an important thing to look

at. I don't have a very great

understanding of how all that works yet,

but I'd like to. And so, we'll be

looking at managing your own router. So,

there you have it. We talked about how

the attention economy works, why it

exists, and it's so profitable. We've

talked about the psychological

mechanisms used to keep you hooked. And

we've talked about how to combat it. And

then we brought it all the way back to

the home lab, baby. We made it about

Linux. We found a way. I want to wrap

this up with a call to action. I think

you should read Digital Minimalism by

Cal Newport. I read this for the first

time in 2022 when during COVID my screen

time shot up from like 2 hours a day to

six. When you have nothing to do, it's

really easy to spend your time on your

phone. And this book basically handles

the behavioral side of things. I'm going

to be talking a lot about tech, but it

takes a lot of work to relearn how to

spend your time. And this book helps you

figure that out. And I also want to work

on this as a community. I'm going to be

going through this book again and doing

its little 30-day challenge at the

beginning and documenting it on our

Discord and in my newsletter. And I

think you should join me once a week. I

think it would be really great to have

check-ins on Discord to see how

everyone's progressing. If you're

interested in regaining control over

your attention, both through some less

technical means and through your home

lab, that's what this community is going

to be about moving forward. So, that's

all there is to it. Thank you so much

for watching this really lengthy video.

I think I haven't edited yet, but I'm

going to guess like it's going to be a

chunker. And I hope to catch you in the

next one and in our Discord.