Pay attention: this is how they’re making you pay attention This podcast from the Center for Humane Technology looks into how tech is increasingly designed to seize your attention and keep it – and no, not for your own good.

Host Aza Raskin invented the “infinite scroll”, and later apologised for it, and host Tristan Harris worked for Google as a design ethicist where he disseminated a presentation titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention” and eventually left the company.

There’s been a lot of tech-bro redemption stories recently, as the men who got rich designing tech that manipulates us are now getting famous telling us why what they did was wrong. But the thing that sets the conversations on this podcast apart from other, honestly very dramatic examinations of social tech *cough* The Social Dilemma *cough*.

The first is that it doesn’t start from a point of “social media is the devil and big data is hacking your brain and your children will all end up arrested thanks to Facebook". It takes a really human approach, showing how smartphones and apps are addictive by design – the same design that’s been used to addict us and persuade us to form unhealthy habits for centuries (but yes, with more data behind it). The second is they frequently pause for breaks in the podcast to workshop ideas for how to make social media more, well, social. My favourite: set a group of “close friends” who, when you’re mindlessly scrolling, are sent an alert that you are free, have nothing worthwhile to do, and might want to hang out! There’s also a lot of discussion about ways to change social media for the better on their associated website, if you’re interested.

Imogen, engagement editor Center for Humane Technology: Your Undivided Attention (listening time: 40 minutes)


What we would have been if it weren’t for the war A nearby suburb which you used to visit as a child at the weekends, roaming free with your cousins through the orchards and "endless dirt roads". For Rasha Elass, this was Ghouta, countryside an hour from Damascus, Syria. Once, Rasha would be "picking wild figs and eating them until they made us sick" here. Now, she’s being smuggled across the border. Now, it is loaves of bread which a small boy on a rickety bicycle is not allowed to take back with him across the checkpoint.

Rasha knows Ghouta as the place where newlywed friends were moving to for its affordable schools; classes now take place underground. Ghouta is a site of rubble and spliced buildings. Its "night of Armageddon", as the locals call it, came in the form of a terrible chemical attack by its government, which killed 1,400 people in 2013. Elass was the only international journalist in both regime-controlled and besieged areas of Syria at the time.

Her writing is honest, as is the strong spirit of hospitality of those who welcome her back, who are rebuilding. I’m very curious to read more from this publication, which was launched recently as a spotlight on the Middle East and beyond. They say: "as political, territorial, and philosophical ‘lines’ have shifted, so too does the urgency of a new magazine to interrogate them".

Nabeelah, conversation editor Newlines Magazine: ‘The boy of the bicycle’ (reading time: 12 minutes)
A children’s book has become a symbol of LGBTQ+ resistance in Hungary I’ve been in Hungary the past few weeks, where I’ve spent a lot of time talking to gay rights activists. All of them are scared – there’s a general sense of foreboding that things are only going to get worse – and most mentioned plans to try to leave the country.

Orbán’s populist nationalist party Fidesz has been stepping up attacks on LGBTQ+ people, mirroring a trend in central and Eastern Europe. Amid all this worrying news, a glimmer of hope and resistance lit in a most unexpected place – a children’s book.

Dorottya Redai and Boldizsar Nagy’s A Fairy Tale for Everyone reimagines traditional fairytales with diverse and inclusive characters. Suyin Haynes has the full story in this article in Time.

Shaun, copy editor Time: ‘Why a children’s book is becoming a symbol of resistance in Hungary’s fight over LGBT rights’ (reading time: seven minutes)

The best of The Correspondent

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