Accepting the narrative that attention spans are shrinking is dangerous. It can lead educators and creators to give up on encouraging deep, focused tasks like reading long novels, thereby causing the very outcome they fear by lowering their expectations and standards.

Despite competing with short-form content like TikTok, Ken Burns' long documentaries succeed because they are built on compelling storytelling. This challenges the myth of shrinking attention spans, suggesting instead that audiences demand more engaging content, regardless of its length.

Extreme online subcultures, however small, function as 'existence proofs.' They demonstrate what is possible when a generation is severed from historical context and tradition, connected only by algorithms and pornography. They are a warning sign of the potential outcomes of our current digital environment.

Critics lament declining focus, yet popular video games like Baldur's Gate 3 demand 75+ hours of intense concentration. This is over five times longer than Wagner's entire Ring Cycle opera, a historical benchmark for sustained cultural attention, quantitatively refuting the attention decline narrative.

Technology doesn't change the brain's fundamental mechanism for memory. Instead, it acts as an external tool that allows us to strategically choose what to remember, freeing up limited attentional resources. We've simply offloaded rote memorization (like phone numbers) to focus our mental bandwidth elsewhere.

The core business model of dominant tech and AI companies is not just about engagement; it's about monetizing division and isolation. Trillions in shareholder value are now directly tied to separating young people from each other and their families, creating an "asocial, asexual youth," which is an existential threat.

The concept of a universal "attention span" is a myth. How long we focus depends on our motivation for a specific task, not a finite mental capacity that gets depleted. This reframes poor attention from an innate inability to a lack of interest or desire.

While society now worries about distraction (ADHD), the 19th century’s concern was “monomania”—an obsessive, machine-like focus on a single task demanded by industrial capitalism. This shows that anxieties about attention are shaped by the economic structures of the era.

The 20th-century broadcast economy monetized aspiration and sex appeal to sell products. Today's algorithm-driven digital economy has discovered that rage is a far more potent and profitable tool for capturing attention and maximizing engagement.