Attention is all you have

你的注意力就是你的一切

The Tetris effect is one of psychology’s most easy to reproduce experiments. Simply spend a bit of time playing the eponymous game every day for a few weeks. After a little while, you’ll start recognizing familiar Tetromino shapes in clouds, buildings, and everyday objects. You might even see them appear before your eyes when you start falling asleep. “俄罗斯方块效应”（Tetris effect）是心理学中最容易复现的实验之一。只需在几周内每天花点时间玩这款同名游戏，过不了多久，你就会开始在云朵、建筑物和日常物品中识别出熟悉的方块形状。当你快要入睡时，甚至可能会看到它们浮现在眼前。

Attention hijacking

注意力劫持

There’s one lesson the Tetris effect teaches us: whatever you focus on long enough will end up shaping your thoughts. This can be a good thing since it’s how we learn new skills and discover new ideas. Sadly, less and less of our attention is focused intentionally. Instead of picking what we want to see we let other people decide what is supposed to be good for us. “俄罗斯方块效应”教会了我们一个道理：无论你专注于什么事物足够长的时间，它最终都会塑造你的思维。这本是一件好事，因为我们正是通过这种方式学习新技能、发现新想法。遗憾的是，我们主动投入的注意力越来越少。我们不再选择自己想看的内容，而是任由他人决定什么对我们“有益”。

Do you want to watch a video? YouTube knows you like cooking and art streams. But why not also recommend a few clips about the stock market bubble, global warming, and the war in Iran. Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads. 你想看视频吗？YouTube 知道你喜欢烹饪和艺术直播。但它为什么不顺便给你推荐一些关于股市泡沫、全球变暖和伊朗战争的短片呢？“末日刷屏”（Doomscrolling）会让你停留更久，并多点击几个广告。

Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists. 你想听音乐吗？打开 Spotify 播放列表，让算法来决定你喜欢什么。请忽略那些为了避免向真实艺术家支付版税而插入在歌曲之间的 AI 垃圾内容。

Do you want to know how your colleagues are doing? Too bad, LinkedIn will bury any relevant career news between the opinion of complete strangers. It is surely just a coincidence that those strangers happen to be shilling whatever Microsoft is invested in at the moment. 你想了解同事们的近况吗？真不凑巧，LinkedIn 会把任何相关的职业动态埋没在陌生人的观点之中。而这些陌生人恰好都在推销微软当前投资的项目，这肯定只是个巧合。

Do you want the opinion of strangers on a product? Well those Redditors you wanted to ask are probably just a bunch of LLMs talking to a bunch of Russian trolls now. I hope you didn’t value their opinion too much. 你想听听陌生人对某款产品的评价？好吧，那些你想要咨询的 Reddit 用户，现在可能只是一群正在与俄罗斯水军对话的大语言模型（LLM）。希望你没有太看重他们的意见。

If, like me and most people, you spend the major part of your day focused on your device, there’s no doubt it’s affecting you. And when you let someone else dictate what appears on your screen, it’s the same as giving them the key to your brain. 如果你像我和大多数人一样，一天中大部分时间都盯着电子设备，那么毫无疑问，这正在影响你。当你让别人决定你的屏幕上出现什么时，就等于把大脑的钥匙交给了他们。

Back to an intentional internet

回归“主动式”互联网

The internet wasn’t always like that. Before recommendation algorithms were a thing, you had to decide what you would be doing on the computer. You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind. A site for video game news, that one website with lots of tutorials, a blog about anime that didn’t update often enough, a wiki about a TV show from the 90s… 互联网并非一直如此。在推荐算法出现之前，你必须自己决定在电脑上做什么。那时并没有一个可以打开并命令它为你提供娱乐的“超级应用”。相反，你会有几十个网站书签，每一个都有明确的用途：一个看游戏新闻的网站，一个有很多教程的网站，一个更新频率很慢的动漫博客，一个关于 90 年代电视剧的维基百科……

Of course awful things existed on the web. We had Encyclopedia Dramatica and Rotten.com, but you actually had to put the effort to go there if you wanted. Nobody was going to put pictures of dead kids and far-right propaganda as a suggestion after a pancake recipe or a cat video. 当然，网络上确实存在糟糕的内容。我们曾有过 Encyclopedia Dramatica 和 Rotten.com，但如果你想看，必须主动去搜索。没有人会在你浏览完煎饼食谱或猫咪视频后，给你推荐死者照片或极右翼宣传内容。

The good thing is that this intentional internet is still around. It has just been a bit buried below the corporate web, but it’s not very hard to find. After all you’re on this blog, so you probably already have a good idea about it. 好消息是，这种“主动式”互联网依然存在。它只是被企业化的网络掩盖了，但并不难找。毕竟你现在就在这个博客上，所以你可能已经对此有很好的了解了。

The main difference between this time and now is you. When you want to get back to reading blogs, RSS feeds, and finish that tutorial instead of doomscrolling shorts, you have to get used to a slower internet. One where content is not infinite and doesn’t get updated every click. But like every habit, the only thing you have to do is to keep at it. And if you pay enough attention to it, something will click in your brain. 过去与现在的最大区别在于你。当你想要回归阅读博客、RSS 订阅，并完成那个教程，而不是沉迷于刷短视频时，你必须习惯一个节奏更慢的互联网。在这个互联网里，内容不是无限的，也不会在你每次点击时都更新。但就像任何习惯一样，你唯一要做的就是坚持下去。只要你足够专注，你的大脑终会产生共鸣。