I have recently started wondering about the nature of a very specific bullshit enabler these days, which is attention commoditization. It almost looks like in the pre-AI days, there was a surge of online marketers trying trying to learn about people and behavior, occasionally employing dark patterns to get you to click. Later, with the surge of social media use, AI models were used to recommend content incongruent with the user's best interest. And it worked as it becomes increasingly difficult to go out in the internet to get a particular job done, but the sheer amount of rabbit-holes ventured to must me astounding. And now the trend seems to be shorts/stories/tiktok, which only looks to me as means to groom human attention for even easier override with clickbaits and ads.
I wonder how many people daily fail to focus on what matters because of the attention problems induced by the modern tech and is there any research about it?
