When I was a kid most shops were closed on Sundays. Society set that rhythm for us, far before I was born. A reminder of religion having more influence and cohesion.

Most shops are open on Sundays nowadays. There is no rest for the shop keeper, nor the shopper. Or the delivery people or anybody with a precarious job. No common equalising force of sacred Sunday not to mess with.

Even for people with cushy jobs, there is a second job they need to perform. I am talking about Yanis Varoufakis’ Technofeudalism concept of working for your digital lord.

Some digital lords are well defined, like Google or Apple. However even if you avoid them there are invisible forces that collect your data and try to keep you engaged into their website.

I can’t help but think that almost every newspaper, video provider, podcast, etc. is using many forms of engagement fine tuning. Thumbnail, headlines, paragraph structure, summaries. All of them attempting to fight for our attention.

Originally I thought that eliminating data collection would be an easy way to solve this problem, but reading the secret life of data made me reconsider it as a feasible goal.

Until we find which laws should we move forward so our attention are outside of market warfare, I thought that Martin Fowler’s idea on AI policy could also apply to us, attention serfs.

How would that look like? Imagine if everyone took Sundays off from any engagement algorithm. It is not an easy ask though; even news website use these techniques. But at least we could as a whole claim the Sunday so instagram, youtube, tik tok, linkedin they are all off.

Any website or service that we can’t know or understand.

I think this would be an effective way to avoid the depletion of decision points that we face from the attention work. I also think that the common society rhythms need to come back in the same way that 4000 weeks or Stolen Focus describe.