A Firewall For Attention_

Maybe AI gives us our attention back.

Every social platform is built to take your attention and hold it for as long as it can. We showed up for good reasons once — to belong to something, and to learn. Somewhere along the way the bargain soured.

What you get now is one of two things. Content that inflates the bubble you already live in, often without you noticing you are in one. Or spam engineered to grab you, the kind you would never choose to see.

AI changes where you stand in that flow. A chat system like ChatGPT or Claude, or a personal assistant you run yourself, sits between you and the feed. It becomes a firewall. Now the toxic stuff sit on one side, you on the other. You ask for what you actually want, and the noise stays out.

We already do this. I get the news I care about from a handful of channels I trust, like our own Slack. Half tooling, half habit.

The habit is the hard part. The pull of the feed is real, and a quieter way of paying attention takes time to relearn. For once, though, the tools are on our side.