For the last decade I've been the kind of person who follows tech trends. I was an early adopter most of the time, and I liked testing new stuff, new software, new OSes... I saw the first generation of Android smartphones, I remember discovering Spotify and thinking, "wow, that's so cool, I don't need to manage my music library myself anymore".
Yet, there was this subtle feeling that something had changed in the mid-2010s: each innovation felt less and less useful, but I spent more and more time on it. Those update were designed to specifically retain my attention. But, that's not what I'm going to talk about today since the attention economy has already been extensively discussed. What I want to talk about is the consequences it has had on me, my mental health, and the path to recovery.
Neuro-atypical brain versus Attention Economy
The reason behind this worsening of those services was the monetization of our attention spans. The perceived enshittification I had was just a symptom.
I have ADHD thus I cannot easily fight against those traps that big tech puts all over the place to get my attention for their ads. For a little biology aside, ADHD is thought to be related to the dopaminergic circuit in the brain that controls executive functions. It's therefore no surprise that people with ADHD are more susceptible to "features" (those quotes matter) like infinite scrolling, shorts, reels, etc., since they give us dopamine shots all the time.
Yet, when I was younger, focusing on tasks was easier. I won't say it wasn't hard because the struggle with ADHD was real back then, but I went through a master's degree so it was clearly manageable. Yet, today there's this mental fog I cannot lift. Is it just me getting old? Is it long-COVID? I mean, that could be it.
I could not focus on anything. Even gaming felt not stimulating enough and that's when it hit me around the end of 2024: when the hell did gaming become not stimulating enough? Something must have happened to my brain.
On the search of stimulation
I realized that playing games that require me to focus for extended periods of time (like 4X, city builders, etc.) was not stimulating enough, but I've historically been able to play those games for hours (it even used to be an issue while studying, looking at you World of Warcraft). While playing, I felt the need to put a video on a second screen and talk with other people on voice chats. Why was I needing so much stimulation? When did it become normal for me to be this stimulated all the time?
I was not completely sure when that shift happened, but I was able to see its consequences. I started monitoring my habits and a pattern emerged: Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Discord, Bluesky, Reddit; I had hundreds of notifications a day, my smartwatch was vibrating all the time and I wasn't even noticing it. When my online life wasn't spamming, I was just cycling between those same apps in hopes of something new.
My brain had adapted to a consistent high level of stimulation: when I was not stimulated I was craving it, and when it finally hit, through a notification or a good short video, the good neurotransmitter was released, soothing me for a bit.
I felt the need to act, but I was not able to take that step yet. And then something happened to the world.
Trump, the EU, Privacy, Democracy and my brain
The orange man was back in the White House for the second time and sent the world into a tailspin that seemed to have no end. This time seemed worse than the first as it was shaking the foundations of the world.
I was already afraid for my privacy but this anxiety skyrocketed. US-backed services using their data against me became a tangible threat even as an citizen of the EU (with shady US surveillance companies providing software to spy on EU citizens). I saw all the Silicon Valley CEOs handing money to Trump. I started closing my accounts and cleaning up my data where I could, switching to alternatives in the EU.
And this switch had an unexpected secondary effect: I felt strangely bored, like something was missing. It was irritating because I had blocked my access to US social networks (so, almost all social networks) with DNS filtering to prevent me from opening a tab out of muscle memory. And god, my day was calm. I was not used to this: my phone was not vibrating all the time. Yet, I still received a few messages, here and there, from friends, but it wasn't the sharing of Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts: it was just casual conversations between two humans. Because I was cutting myself off from social networks, I was also cutting myself off from over-stimulating behavior.
I was readjusting to this level of stimulation, and my brain hated it. It left me clinically depressed.
Calming down was hard
Even with medication, the curve was still a bit steep. But I decided to refocus my energy onto two things:
- My studies, because being back at university takes time and requires a lot of commitment;
- Reflecting on my overall use of technology and how I can take control back.
I knew where I could find software that respects my brain and my privacy. It's the same category of software I use when I need to trust the environment I use. I needed FOSS. Nothing new as a long-time Linux user, but since I was also using a MacBook Pro and an iPhone, there was some space for improvement.
I decided to push this line of thought to the extreme, to the point where using open-source technology had to become a requirement for every piece of technology I use, and it was not an easy job. If I can't check it, and if it requires services from GAFAM, it doesn't make the cut (more on that later).
I was planning to include the how of this switch in this post, but I've decided to write a dedicated post on that topic later to cover it more extensively (I have time to do this now that I don't doom scroll for hours).
Closing thoughts
The tipping point that triggered the switch for me was when the cost of staying on those platforms outweighed the discomfort of leaving and the fear of fascists leveraging those tools gave me the will to act.
Retrospectively, I now have the conviction that the whole issue with today's technology lies at the intersection of multiple little issues that are polarizing the tech communities:
- Reclaiming the ownership of our hardware and our software (ease of use vs ownership of system);
- Reclaiming our mental abilities (staying on platforms where our friends are vs risking isolation by leaving those social networks);
- Fighting against the techno-fascist agenda;
- Fighting against the slop machine (using slop machines vs mobilizing our own neural network, which is way more efficient);
- Fighting for an ecologically sustainable computing infrastructure (using the latest hardware vs accepting less performance for more sustainability).
And maybe one of those points alone is not enough for one to accept the cost of switching their habits (it was my case), yet when they're added together, the effort can be accepted more easily. It'll require education. It'll require us, tech people, to build solutions that are friendly and welcoming: I'll talk about this in my next post but it's quite a rough path to apply those principles.