For years, the most successful technology businesses have been in the business of keeping people engaged.
Every notification, feed, recommendation and autoplay is competing for a finite resource: human attention. The model works. It also produces a strange result: tools that were sold as time-savers end up consuming more of our time than the things they replaced.
We talk about this as if it were weather. It is not weather. It is a set of product decisions, business models and defaults. Defaults can be changed. Business models can be questioned. Products can be designed to end.
The alternative is not a world without technology. It is a world where technology is measured by what it gives back: attention, time, presence, room to think. A system that quietly handles the complexity and then gets out of the way is more advanced than one that demands to be looked at.
That is a design choice. It is also a political one, in the small sense: who gets to decide how the tools shape the day.
I do not think we can legislate our way to better defaults alone. But I do think people can refuse the premise. The attention economy is not a law of nature. It is an arrangement, and arrangements can be replaced.