The people who built the attention economy are now paying a lot of money to escape it. What that tells us.
The hottest product in Silicon Valley right now isn't an app. It's a $600 notebook. Not a laptop — a notebook. Paper. Pen. The kind of thing your grandparents used.
The people who spent the last two decades building systems to capture and hold human attention are now spending serious money to escape those systems. Digital detox retreats. Analog productivity tools. Dumb phones. The irony is not lost on anyone, least of all the people selling these products to the people who built the problem.
There's a version of this that's just rich people cosplaying simplicity. But there's another version that's more interesting: a genuine reckoning with what the attention economy has done to the people who built it. The engineers and product managers who designed infinite scroll and push notifications are now paying therapists to help them stop checking their phones.
The low-tech obsession is partly aesthetic, partly functional, and partly a form of penance. The notebook doesn't track you. The dumb phone doesn't know your location. The paper planner doesn't send you notifications at 11pm. In a world of frictionless digital everything, friction has become a luxury.
The question is whether any of this changes anything. Individual opt-outs don't fix systemic problems. But as a cultural signal — that the people closest to the machine are the most eager to step away from it — it's worth paying attention to.
Liam Park
Staff writer at The Daily Lens. Covering culture, ideas, and the stories that shape how we live.
