THE REDACTED EDIT: how I learned that censorship is expensive but exhaustion is free

They didn't ban books instead they just made you too tired to read them...

You probably haven’t finished a book in months, or maybe it just takes you whole lot longer than it used in your current life flurry.

Maybe you started one. Got through a chapter or two. Put it down to check your phone. Forgot where you left off. Started another one. Same thing.

It’s not just you. The average person reads 12 minutes per day. 12!!!!

That’s half a TikTok scroll session.

You might be thinking this is an accident but it is far from it. It is much darker than that.

Nobody had to burn the books.

They just had to make sure you were too fucking exhausted to read them.

1953: The last year Americans could think

Okay, that’s a bit dramatic but stay with me.

In 1953, the average American adult could sit down and read for two hours straight. Not skim or half-pay-attention while the TV’s on but actually read.

By 2004, that number was down to 30 minutes.

By 2015? 19 minutes before people reported “attention fatigue.”

And now? Most people can’t make it past 8 minutes without checking their phone.

What the hell happened between 1953 and now?

The thing about attention spans is…

You’ve probably heard the goldfish thing, right?

“Humans now have shorter attention spans than goldfish: 8 seconds!”

That statistic is everywhere. TED talks. Marketing conferences. Your aunt shared it on Facebook.

It’s complete bullshit.

The study doesn’t exist. Microsoft cited something in a 2015 report that vaguely referenced “8 seconds” but it was about task switching in digital environments, not actual attention capacity.

There’s no peer-reviewed study. No methodology. Nothing.

Alas, here’s why the lie is useful:

If you believe your attention span is broken, if you think it’s just how brains work now, some evolutionary adaptation to the digital age, then you won’t ask the real question:

Who benefits from you not being able to focus?

The Frankfurt School saw it coming - sadly ignored as usual.

1944. Middle of World War II.

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer publish Dialectic of Enlightenment. There’s a chapter called “The Culture Industry” that basically predicts everything that’s happened since.

They argued that mass media so: radio, film, eventually TV wasn’t just entertainment. It was a manufacturing process for compliant consciousness.

The part that’s uncomfortably relevant:

“The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises... The promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu.”

Translation: You’re fed endless stimulation that never satisfies, so you keep consuming. You’re always hungry. Always scrolling. Never full. So you’re pretty much done for, for a really long time.

And a person who’s always hungry, always reaching for the next hit of dopamine?

That person isn’t reading Marx. Or Orwell. Or anything that requires sustained thought.

Adorno and Horkheimer weren’t just media critics.

They watched, in real time, how a population could be conditioned to not think critically, how mass media could replace thought with feeling, how propaganda worked best when people were too entertained, too distracted, too tired to read the things that would wake them up.

Then they came to America and saw the same mechanisms with better production value.

2007: The year everything broke

June 29, 2007. The iPhone launches.

I’m not going to do the “phones bad” rant. It’s deeper than that.

What the smartphone did and what it was designed to do was fragment your consciousness into controllable units. I mean how else could they have started one of the biggest revolutions and become something every single person knows the name of?

Before smartphones, you had uninterrupted time: waiting rooms, commutes, lunch breaks, moments where your brain was just... there.

Bored, maybe but present.

Those were the moments you’d pick up a book. Or think. Or daydream. Or process.

Now?

Every single empty moment is filled.

Waiting for coffee? Check your phone.
On the train? Check your phone.
Commercial break? Check your phone.
Waiting for water to boil? Check your phone.

You’re never bored anymore which sounds good until you realise:

Boredom is when the brain consolidates. Processes. Thinks.

Without it, you’re just in a constant state of reaction.

What the Internal Documents say…

2017. Frances Haugen hasn’t blown the whistle yet but inside Facebook, researchers are running studies.

One of them, later leaked, shows that the platform’s algorithm is optimised not for engagement (that’s the PR word), but for continuous partial attention.

The goal isn’t to make you focus on one thing, it’s to keep you in a state of divided focus where you’re sort of paying attention to everything and fully paying attention to nothing.

Why?

It is because continuous partial attention is the optimal state for advertising effectiveness!

You’re alert enough to see the ad but not focused enough to critically evaluate it.

You’re engaged enough to keep scrolling but not absorbed enough to stop scrolling.

You’re the perfect consumer.

On top of that, the same state makes you incapable of reading anything longer than 300 words.

The education system stopped teaching reading the same year smartphones launched… hmmm…

Coincidence? Maybe. Look at the timeline.

2007: iPhone launches.

2010: Common Core State Standards adopted by 42 states.

2012: “Close reading” becomes the dominant literacy pedagogy.

Now, close reading sounds good, right? Teaching kids to analyse texts deeply?

What it actually means in practice is:

Students read short passages, usually 1-2 pages, max.

They annotate. They answer comprehension questions. They never read a full book.

High schoolers are assigned excerpts of novels.

Chapters, not books.

PDFs with highlighted sections.

They’re training kids to read like they scroll.

So I remember I talked to a high school English teacher in 2023.

She told me:

“We can’t assign full books anymore. Most of my class can’t finish 20 pages in a sitting. It’s not that they can’t read the words, it’s that their brains literally won’t stay with it. They get what I call ‘the scroll itch.’ After about 15 minutes, they need to check their phone or they start to panic or fidget or distracting other pupils.”

She called it learned restlessness.

The constant stimulation has rewired them. Sitting with one thing, one thought, one narrative, one argument for an extended period now feels like suffocation.

She added:

“If you can’t read for 30 minutes, you can’t think a complex thought and if you can’t think a complex thought, you can’t resist a simple lie.”

I’m going to leave that line right there…

1984 vs. Brave New World

Everyone knows 1984. Big Brother. Thought Police. Books burned. Information controlled.

Orwell imagined oppression as violent suppression of knowledge.

Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, imagined something scarier:

A population so drowned in distraction that they don’t even want to read the books.

Neil Postman summarised it perfectly in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985 - before the internet, before smartphones):

“Orwell feared those who would ban books. Huxley feared there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

“Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.”

“Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

We live in Huxley’s world. This is my current thoughts so I’m running this past you.

The books aren’t banned. They’re on Amazon. You can get any book ever written delivered to your door in 48 hours. Well, mostly.

You won’t read them.

Because you’re tired, fragmented, because you’ve been conditioned to need stimulation every 8 minutes.

The algo doesn’t want you reading what you should be…

Every major platform is designed to prevent “dwell time” outside the app. If you don’t learn anything from my writing, remember that.

Instagram doesn’t want you clicking links. TikTok doesn’t want you leaving to read an article. Twitter (sorry, “X”) actively suppresses external URLs in the algorithm.

Why?

Because if you leave, you might not come back.

You might read something that takes 20 minutes.

You might think about it.

You might not check your phone for an hour. Fuck.

That’s lost ad impressions.

In leaked documents from Meta (Facebook’s parent company), executives explicitly discuss “time on platform” as the primary KPI (key performance indicator).

“user satisfaction?” no.

“meaningful connection?” noo.

Time on platform.

We are livestock. Our attention is the crop. They’re harvesting it!

So a person reading a book for two hours? That’s two hours they’re not harvesting.

There’s a concept in psychology called cognitive load basically, how much mental effort you’re expending at any given moment.

Your brain has a finite amount of processing power. like RAM in a computer.

Now, here’s what’s happening in 2025:

The average person is running 30+ browser tabs, 50+ apps, 12 messaging platforms, 4 social media accounts, email, text messages, push notifications from 40 different apps.

Your brain is in a constant state of task-switching.

(Side note: I wrote that list and had to take a breath, my goodness that is a lot!)

Every time you switch tasks, even just glancing at a notification, there’s a cognitive switching cost. It takes your brain 23 minutes (on average) to fully re-engage with a complex task after an interruption.

23 minutes.

Which means if you’re getting interrupted every 8 minutes (which you are), you’re never actually focusing on anything.

You’re in a permanent state of continuous partial attention.

What this does to reading…

Reading a book, really reading, deeply requires you to:

• Hold a narrative thread across hundreds of pages

• Track multiple characters, themes, arguments

• Build a mental model of what the author is saying

• Integrate new information with what you already know

• Think while reading, not just decode words

Did you realise this?

If your brain has been trained through years of fragmented attention to expect stimulation every 8 minutes?

It literally can’t do it anymore.

The military knew this in the 1950s

Want to know something fucked up?

The U.S. military figured out attention fragmentation as a torture technique in the 1950s.

It’s called sensory overload interrogation.

You bombard a prisoner with constant stimulation: lights, sounds, questions, interruptions so they can’t think coherently. Their cognitive resources are maxed out just processing the flood of input.

After a while, they become suggestible.

Compliant.

They’ll agree to anything just to make it stop.

Sound familiar?

Now look at your phone.

You’re doing it to yourself.

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The CIA’s MKUltra connection (Yes, really. Curb your eye roll.)

Okay, this is where it gets tinfoil-hat adjacent, but bear with me because the documents are declassified.

MKUltra, the CIA’s mind control program wasn’t just about LSD. A huge part of it was studying how to break down cognitive resistance.

One of the techniques? Disruption of thought patterns through continuous interruption.

From a 1963 MKUltra document (available via FOIA):

“Subject’s ability to maintain coherent thought can be disrupted through randomised external stimuli delivered at intervals preventing cognitive consolidation.”

Translation: If you interrupt someone’s thoughts often enough, they can’t form complex ideas.

Now, I’m not saying Silicon Valley execs read declassified CIA torture manuals and thought, “Hey, great product roadmap!”

But I am saying the underlying mechanism is the same:

Constant interruption prevents coherent thought.

And if you can’t think coherently, you can’t resist coherently.

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It’s not about specific books. It’s about types of books.

Books that require you to:

• Sit with discomfort for 300 pages

• Track an argument that builds slowly

• Understand historical context that contradicts the current narrative

• Think about power structures instead of individual morality

Books like:

• Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky)

• Discipline and Punish (Foucault)

• The Shock Doctrine (Klein)

• Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber)

• Anything by James Baldwin, Angela Davis, Silvia Federici

These aren’t banned. You can buy them right now.

However statistically, you won’t finish them.

I have read a few of these and honestly it was VERY difficult, and this is coming from a girl who used to read books over night and swap them with her friends the following morning.

It’s because by page 50, your brain will start to itch.

You’ll feel restless. You’ll check your phone. You’ll put the book down. You’ll forget to pick it back up.

That’s the point.

If books are slow, deep, coherent thought...

Social media is fast, shallow, fragmented feeling.

You’re not thinking about injustice. You’re feeling outraged (for 30 seconds, then scrolling).

You’re not understanding systemic inequality. You’re reacting to a video of someone being shitty (then forgetting about it).

You aren’t building a coherent worldview. You’re collecting vibes.

and vibes don’t threaten power.

Coherent analysis does.

Now we come to… “fix it then”

Everyone wants a hack.

“Just delete social media!” “Use an app blocker!” “Try the Pomodoro Technique!”

That’s not the problem, so shush.

The problem is you’ve been neurologically reconditioned.

Your brain now expects stimulation every 8 minutes. Sitting with boredom feels like pain.

You have to retrain your brain to tolerate sustained attention.

That’s hard. Really hard because the entire economy is designed to prevent it.

I’m an NLP trainer. I work with people on reconditioning thought patterns and I had to do this to myself first.

I’m a working progress but what is working is:

1. Start with 10 minutes. That’s it.

Not 30. Not an hour. Ten fucking minutes.

Set a timer. Read. When your brain starts itching to check your phone, notice it. Don’t judge it. Just notice.

The itch is a conditioned response. You’re teaching your brain it’s safe to ignore it.

2. Physical books only (at first).

E-readers are fine eventually, but early on, the device itself is a trigger. Your brain associates screens with task-switching.

Physical book = single-purpose object. No notifications. No other apps.

3. Boring books first.

I know, counterintuitive but …

If you pick a “page-turner,” you’re still chasing stimulation. You’re using narrative tension as a dopamine substitute.

Start with something dense. Academic. Boring.

You’re not training yourself to enjoy reading. You’re training yourself to tolerate sustained focus. Frame this.

Once you can sit with boredom, then you can enjoy complexity.

4. No music. No “background noise.”

Your brain needs to learn to be alone with itself again.

Silence is uncomfortable because you’ve forgotten how to be bored.

Boredom is the price of admission for deep thought.

5. Expect it to suck for 2-3 weeks at least.

You’ll feel restless. Anxious. Like you’re missing something.

That’s withdrawal. You will survive it.

Your brain has been getting dopamine hits every 8 minutes for years. Of course it’s going to protest when you take that away.

Sit with it. It gets easier.

This is about cognitive sovereignty.

If you can’t think for extended periods, you’re vulnerable to anyone who wants to manipulate you.

You can’t resist what you can’t understand.

The books aren’t banned.

But if you can’t read them, the effect is the same.

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So here’s the uncomfortable question:

When’s the last time you read a book that actually changed how you see the world?

Not skimmed. Not started and abandoned.

Finished.

If you can’t remember, you’re already controlled.

The good news?

You can take it back.

One page at a time.

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