Your attention span didn't collapse. It was designed to.

Johann Hari opens Stolen Focus with a confession familiar to most phone owners: reading got harder every year. His instinct, and probably yours, was to blame himself — weak discipline, too many apps. What he found after interviewing dozens of scientists was closer to an indictment of an industry.

The major platforms make money two ways: from the ads you see, and from the profile they build by watching everything you do. Every scroll funds the company; every moment you look away costs it. So the product is engineered, deliberately and by some of the best-paid engineers alive, to make looking away as hard as possible. Hari's point is that this isn't a side effect of the technology — it's the business model working exactly as intended.

He doesn't let individuals off the hook entirely; sleep loss and constant task-switching do real damage on their own. But the reframe matters: you are not fighting a bad habit. You are fighting a system built by people whose salaries depend on you losing.