3.1 - The Attention Crisis, Part 1: The Diagnosis
Infinite language, finite minds, why the mismatch between language production and human attention is destabilizing shared reality.
Part one of the audio edition of The Attention Crisis. Humanity now produces an estimated 15 to 70 trillion tokens of text every day, more language than human attention can ever process. This episode lays out the diagnosis: why language is humanity’s first and most foundational technology, what the Malleus Maleficarum and the Rohingya genocide reveal about what happens when language technologies outrun society’s capacity to adapt, the neurobiological vulnerabilities that infinite language exploits, and a personal inflection point that brought the crisis home. Part one ends where the diagnosis lands: the erosion of attention is a threat not just to knowledge, but to agency.
This is the audio edition of The Attention Crisis: Language, Meaning, and the Architecture of Augmented Human Intelligence, a whitepaper from Architecture & Attention, presented in two parts. Read the full whitepaper, explore the companion papers, and subscribe at jamesmaconochie.com.
Originally published on Substack.
