They hijacked our flow state

Can't agree - I didn’t base my thoughts on that article. The idea came to me naturally while I was having lunch and realized I instinctively avoided using my phone. That moment made me reflect on the broader issue of being present in whatever we do. It led me to think about how addicted we’ve become to social media, including my own teenage kids, who often spend time just watching TikTok videos.

I’ve now read the article, and I see it touches on similar themes, but that’s expected - we’re discussing the same concepts from different angles. It’s a shared experience, because the issue is real and widely felt.

Re-looked. One small reference from 1998 about this language, about the war for eyeballs:

https://www.eetimes.com/infighting-is-enemy-in-war-for-eyeba...

The language of "war for eyeballs" in the wake of social media's success at weaponized attention/floe is revealing and distasteful in the same way as Coke's internal discussions of trying to maximize "stomach share".

That said, the addictive nature of the web was there early on even before it was commercialized. I distinctly remember a CS grad student warning me in 1993 that there was this new graphical web thing, but it was pretty addictive... So I ignored it for an additional semester before I got sucked in...