A couple of weeks ago I broke something in my brain. Despite trying to ignore, avoid and reject the ‘news’ and media, some bullshit headline or other seeped through and “pop’, a screw or two popped out of place, a pressure valve failed. I had found the straw that broke the camels back. Something had to change. Trying to keep the flooded zone at arms length wasn’t working. I needed a strategy.

If you haven’t reached this moment, congratulations. If you feel the building pressure of the social ‘fracking’ but are dismissing it, let me tell you… You’re not imagining it.

That residual mental static after a scroll session. The uncanny sensation of being overwhelmed and underinformed at once. The reflex to reach for more content, even when you suspect it’s degrading your clarity. This isn’t personal failure. It’s a system functioning exactly as designed. The effects of digital overwhelm are all around us.

“We do not use social media,” Richard Seymour writes in The Twittering Machine, “Social media uses us.” The feed doesn’t exist to inform, it exists to capture. What appears to be a curated reflection of your interests is, in truth, a reactive engine: tuned to provoke, distract, and extract.

As Shoshana Zuboff put it in ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’: “The goal now is no longer to automate information flows about us, but to automate us.”

And the consequences are not subtle. A Microsoft study suggests the average attention span has shrunk from 12 seconds in 2000 to just over 8 seconds in recent years—shorter than that of a goldfish. Meanwhile, Pew Research reports that nearly two-thirds of Americans feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of news and information they’re exposed to.

This is not a glitch in the system. This is the system.

What we’ve mistaken for information is often stimulus. What we’ve confused with insight is mostly reaction. We are not being nourished—we are being fed.

And in the process, we are losing something essential: the capacity to choose what we attend to.

Curation is Sovereignty

In a media environment engineered for passive consumption, the act of choosing becomes radical. Curation is not elitism. It is self-preservation. “Clutter is costly,” Cal Newport observes in Digital Minimalism.

“The presence of low-quality distractions damages your ability to focus on the things that matter.”

When we rely on algorithmic platforms to decide what we see, we relinquish control over our inner world. We allow others (platforms, advertisers, predictive models) to define what is relevant, what is urgent, and what deserves space in our minds.

Curation, then, is not a luxury. It is a political act. A philosophical act. An act of participatory attention in a culture that treats attention as a commodity.

“You are free to do what we tell you,” Rage Against the Machine once declared.

The only meaningful freedom left is the kind we actively reclaim.

Rebuilding the Feed: A Practice of Deliberate Attention

This is not a detox. It is not withdrawal. It is not a romantic return to analog purity. It is, rather, the intentional design of an information environment that supports thinking, not just clicking.

Consider the following tools:

• Feedly or Inoreader: Curate your own sources. No more algorithmic middleman.
• Omnivore or Instapaper: Save longform writing for intentional reading sessions.
• The Browser, Aeon, Noema, Psyche: Sources that reward attention, not just trigger it.
• Trustworthy newsletters 2–3 subscriptions that inform without inflaming.

Don’t follow more. Follow better.

Adopt simple habits:

• Ten minutes each morning to read with intention—not to scroll.
• One longform article per week—read in full, possibly twice.
• One quiet evening free from screens and synthetic urgency.
• Protect the pause. Silence is not emptiness; it is space in which thought returns.

Rhythm Over Resentment

There’s no need to abandon technology. What’s needed is rhythm. Cadence. Deliberate thresholds between input and insight.

McLuhan reminded us: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”

When you rebuild your feed, you are reshaping the conditions under which your mind operates. You are no longer subject to an informational environment designed to fragment your attention. You are becoming its designer.

Participation is the Price of Freedom

The modern attention economy doesn’t steal your agency. It convinces you to give it away (or in some cases, pay to have it taken away).

Reclaiming it doesn’t require heroic effort. Just a first step: One curated source, one quiet space, one act of choosing what enters your mind. Because in a world that profits from your reactivity, to pay attention on purpose is the most subversive act of all.