The Death of Attention

I learned to program on machines that made you wait. You submitted your code and you sat with a printout and a pencil, sometimes for an hour, sometimes overnight, because computer time was expensive and thinking was free. The machine was scarce and the mind was abundant. The industry has spent fifty years fixing that.

The professors have stopped whispering it. Students at selective universities, the kind that turn away nine of ten applicants, arrive unable to read a book. Not unwilling. Unable. The faculty responded the way institutions respond: they lowered the standards and assigned chapters instead of books, then excerpts instead of chapters, then a podcast about the excerpt. One literature professor reported students who had gone through their entire education without once being required to finish a book. These were English majors. They had come to study the thing they could not do. In Kansas, researchers sat English majors down with the opening page of Bleak House, where Dickens jokes that the London mud is so primeval you half expect to meet a Megalosaurus waddling up Holborn Hill. A quarter of the students took him at his word. They concluded that dinosaurs walked the streets of Victorian London, and they had the entire internet in their pockets, and they did not check.

Kids have always been lazy. I was lazy. Laziness is the natural condition of the species, and civilization is the long trick of talking us out of it. So this is not a story about kids. It is a story about what we built, and what it built back.