Previous societies never required that 80% of the working population be scribes.

Being a scribe is hard. It was an unusual ability to such an extent that it reinforced the medieval notion of a "vocation" (a calling or duty to do this work).

Now we require every worker who wants to rise above the level of retail sales to be capable of spending hours a day going down columns of detailed textual data in Excel or Airtables, or managing a queue of e-mails, or smoothly transitioning between inventory and maintenance.

It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction.

We're being forced by the labor market to pretend that we aren't chimpanzees.