The more people stared at their phones, the more money these companies made. Period. The people in Silicon Valley did not want to design gadgets and websites that would dissolve peoples attention spans. Theyre not the Joker, trying to sow chaos and make us dumb. They spend a lot of their own time meditating and doing yoga. They often ban their own kids from using the sites and gadgets they design, and send them instead to tech-free Montessori schools. But their business model can only succeed if they take steps to dominate the attention spans of the wider society. Its not their goal, any more than ExxonMobil deliberately wants to melt the Arctic. But its an inescapable effect of their current business model.

Stolen Focus by Johann Hari