Check out DataCenter.FM here if you need no further context before you enter the soothing soundscape of the AI bubble, or read more about it from Matt below.

And help get DataCenter.FM out there by liking or sharing 👉 this LinkedIn post! 👈

AI is sprouting up everywhere nowadays, and not only online; it also requires vast data centres filled with millions of GPUs.

I wanted to explore the issues around this physical presence in an original way, ending up bringing together two things: soothing audio generator apps used for relaxation/focus, and the interactive panels you find in some museums for exploring information or how systems work (my school once had a trip to a nuclear power exhibition; predictably, every child immediately tried to send the reactor simulator into meltdown).

DataCenter.FM hands you the controls of a server farm, operating a simple simulation that turns your inputs into audiovisual outputs. Moving sliders and flicking switches can take the system from gentle whirring to a screaming cacophony accompanied by indicators and warning lights.

At its core, the sound generator plays 8 loops for servers, cooling, gas turbines and construction work, constantly adjusting volumes, panning and pitch/speed to reflect the current state. 27 non-looped sounds add human activity and alarms.

Audio files created by Dean Salant are manipulated via howler.js. The graphics are custom illustrations combined with public domain icons and textures, and the main font is Routed Gothic.

Take it for a spin and see what sounds you can make, but watch out if you leave it chugging for a while — when the AI reaches sentience, it might have its own ideas about how to run things…

— Matt Round from Vole.WTF

DataCenter.FM was made possible by the generous support of Mozilla Foundation during my now-finished fellowship there.

♦️ ABOUT ATTENTION

You’re reading Attention, a new publication to make tech fun again (about).

We’re the makers of the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers (CAAAC) — you probably got here after signing up to CAAAC’s newsletter.

We’ve completed the CAAAC project for now, but if you feel like sticking around you’ll be rewarded with creative, fun projects that spotlight tech issues (including AI) in a way we don’t think anyone else does. Here’s some other stuff we’ve done:

• The Box — the world’s first anti-deepfake wearable

• A review of Prime, the Amazon restaurant

• News: Elon Musk gives away billions to feed starving children on Mars

• News: OpenAI releases new AI agent for your hungover colleague Greg

If you need or want convincing that this Attention thing is worth sticking around for, I’m happy to give you a sneak preview of our next project — just hit reply to this email.

Cheers,

Louis (founder and editor of Attention)

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Where I put other things that you might enjoy.

Outsmart is an lovely little game designed to make you feel depressed that we’re all going to get eaten by robots (although it might actually playing against preset rules rather than AI). A well-designed mechanic and I could see it being fun with real people too, if you know any. (Seen on Web Curios).

Finally, Mystery link:

Back soon with the next project from Attention!

We’re committed to continuous assessment of our own research practices to ensure we’re efficiently burning through large piles of money.

With this in mind, we recently published a research report which found that no one reads our research reports — including our research into no one reading our reports.

We’ve therefore decided to pivot to a new model of reportless reporting, which we believe will streamline our research outputs and help us cut through the noise.

We understand that this change may not be completely intuitive to begin with, so here are a few examples of how our new reportless reporting will work in practice.

Condensing the message

We previously published a report with the following conclusion:

Our expectation is that in 5-7 years, AGI capabilities, backed by 1000x compute vs. present day levels, will be advanced enough to replace most human workers and increasingly be operationalized in civil-control contexts.

Now, under our reportless reporting model, we will simply open the window and scream:

“F************************CK.”

‘Need-to-know’ distribution

In a recent report, we concluded:

We consider there to be a 80-90% likelihood that future AI will have strong synergies with defence technologies, offering further opportunities for the enhancement of drone-based surveillance and precision-based elimination of ‘pre-criminal’ civilians.

Under reportless reporting, we would first print out this report before putting it through a shredder, and then we would burn it, burn it into ashes to bury deep under the cold cold earth and pretend it never existed, returning to the office to nervously drum our fingers on the desk while we stare out the window and repress the forbidden thoughts that our funders don’t want to hear, preparing to instead talk publicly about how AI will help us detect cancer faster or some other optimistic bullshit.

Actionable intelligence

The primary conclusion of our deep dive ‘AI Alignment: 2025 Landscape’ report, including months of technical analysis and interviews, was that frontier AI labs are still not doing enough to evaluate the safety of their new models. However, our report did not have the desired impact, with limited uptake of our recommendations.

In fact, the few labs that actually read the report saw that their competitors weren’t bothering with safety evaluations at all and so terminated their own safety programmes, meaning that our report made AI significantly less safe.

Under reportless reporting, we would instead make discreet enquiries about purchasing a remote property in New Zealand.

—

Thank you for your patience as we transition to this new model. If you have any feedback, please note that since our recent transition to feedbackless feedback, you can go f*** yourself.

Sharing this article might be more fun using this link from the CAAAC site. This article was written by CAAAC’s anonymous co-founder.

♦️ ABOUT ATTENTION

You’re reading Attention, a new publication to make tech fun again (about).

We’re the makers of the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers (CAAAC) — you probably got here after signing up to CAAAC’s newsletter.

With this last piece, we’ve published all our CAAAC blog posts for the time being, so this newsletter will go back to being regular old Attention.

We won’t be offended if you don’t want to stick around — but if you do, you’ll be rewarded with creative, fun projects that cast light on the world of tech (including AI) in a way we don’t think anyone else does. Here’s some other stuff we’ve done:

• The Box — the world’s first anti-deepfake wearable

• A review of Prime, the Amazon restaurant

• News: Elon Musk gives away billions to feed starving children on Mars

• News: OpenAI releases new AI agent for your hungover colleague Greg

If you need or want convincing that this Attention thing is worth sticking around for, I’m happy to give you a sneak preview of our next project — just hit reply to this email.

Cheers,

Louis (founder and editor of Attention)

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Where I put other things that you might enjoy.

Through Adam Aaronson’s blog, specifically the article about his platformer game Sidle, I came across this lovely little game from 2009, This Is The Only Level.

Finally, Mystery link:

Back soon with the next project from Attention!

Let me explain by breaking down the headline.

Save the world

Imagine a simple technology that helps millions of people save billions of minutes every day.

With all the time the technology gave back to humanity, wouldn’t that be a little bit like saving the world?*

Now, imagine if I made this technology as a Secret Santa and dedicated it to some guy called Marcos who I vaguely know through a Discord server.

Luckily, you don’t have to imagine.

Marcos

Marcos is a guy I’m on a Discord with, along with a bunch of other creative technologists**.

Here are some things I know about Marcos:

• He’s a nice guy

• He’s a creative technologist

• He lives in New York

• He loves trains

Every year, our Discord does a Secret Santa. The idea of the Secret Santa is more or less: make a creative-ish and technology-ish gift that the other person might like.

Me

Like Marcos, I’m also a creative technologist and I also love trains.

I used to commute on the London tube every day at rush hour, and I became obsessed with getting on the train at the perfect door to be first out of the station on the other end. I must have saved whole minutes, every day by doing this.

I even bought an app, Station Master, which told me the precise carriage and door for every station on the London Underground, so I’d know exactly where to get on the train (Exit Strategy does something similar for the NYC Subway).

A train data Secret Santa

That got me wondering:

What if this information existed, for free, for every train in the world?

And what if we created a global movement to spread the information far and wide to everyone, not just a few neurotic optimizers like me?

We’d help…

• Ordinary commuters save a bit of time

• Tired mums and dads push buggies less

• Elderly people navigate stations more easily

• Busy businesspeople do busy things busier, creating more busy dollars in the busy economy which busily trickle down to us all, making GDP up to 1,000% busier

…whether at Akihabara, Auber, Anding Men, Akshardham or Attaba.

I knew this global movement could change the world, but then I became addicted to Robin Hobb’s magisterial 16 book Realm of the Elderlings series which ruined my work and personal life for several years, gave me severe RSI from tapping my Kindle too often, and made me forget all about optimizing trains.

Until I drew Marcos in the Discord’s Secret Santa a few weeks ago.

I realized that it was fate. Marcos and his love of trains could be the trigger that made me finally solve this problem, once and for all.

I resolved to start the global movement I had once dreamed of, create a technology to save the world, and most importantly, hand it over as a gift to this guy who I only barely know, but, I’d like to reiterate, seems really nice.

That’s why today, without further ado, I’m excited to introduce:

MARCOS

Meet the Metro And Rail Carriage Optimization System:

MARCOS is two things:

1. A crowdsourced database of which carriage door, for which exit, for which station

2. A tool to tell you which carriage door, for which exit, for which station

MARCOS is built for crowdsourcing simplicity, so the database is a bunch of YAML files hosted on GitHub.

I’ve kept the format as minimal as possible, with each YAML file specifying the platforms at a station, the direction of travel, and doors to stand at for exits (I’m sure there will need to be extra complexity in the future, but for now it feels fine).

Exits are detailed by e.g. 1.2, which means ‘first carriage from the front, second door’.

station_name: Tottenham Court Road

platforms:
  central:
    eastbound:
      door_side: right
      exits:
        northern: 4.2
        oxford_street_east: 1.2
    westbound:
      door_side: left
      exits:
        northern: 1.2
        oxford_street_east: 1.5

  northern:
    southbound:
      door_side: right
      exits:
        central: 1.3
        street: 6.3
    northbound:
      door_side: right
      exits:
        central:eastbound: 1.3
        street: 6.3

But MARCOS has a dirty little secret.

Help me

I’d like Marcos to really enjoy his Secret Santa gift, MARCOS. I’d like him to have not just a merry Christmas, but a very very very merry Christmas, ho ho ho, and also a happy New Year.

But the dirty little secret is, MARCOS currently has zero real information in it. It’s a shell.

That’s where you come in.

Help me save the world, by crowdsourcing train door information, and help me blow Marcos’s mind, by sharing MARCOS far and wide.

Let’s build a global movement in Marcos’s name that quite literally changes the course of humanity, as it leads to millions of people heading towards slightly different doors on their train.

I’m asking you to do one of these three things:

1. Star the GitHub repository

2. Add a station, using the instructions in the README, and submit a pull request

3. Share MARCOS, particularly with other train lovers who’ll add stations

But don’t tell

Before you do that, remember: SSSSHHHHHHHH 🤫. This is a Secret Santa. Our Discord is opening gifts on the evening of Sunday 21st, EST.

So please, please, help me save the world — but whatever you do, DON’T TELL MARCOS.

*No, not at all. But let’s pretend for a moment.

**Along with everyone else on the server, I have basically no clue what that means.

This is a blog post from Attention’s project, the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers

This summer I won a spot as a summer intern at CAAAC. I’ve wanted to work at the center ever since I learned about the alignment alignment problem in my machine learning learning course at Stanford.

During orientation, I was introduced to the concept of S-risk. Like me, you’ll probably have mainly heard of X-risk — an existential risk to humanity, for instance an AGI that causes the end of humanity deliberately or accidentally. S-risk, on the other hand, is the risk that AGI doesn’t kill us all, but instead enslaves and tortures us for eternity (the ‘S’ stands for suffering). It was awesome to learn about it.

The thing about X-risk is that it sounds scary, but it’s actually not if you think about it. The worst thing that can happen is that human happiness goes down to zero. No humans exist, so there’s no happiness.

S-risk, by contrast, is really bad. Instead of zero happiness, we’d have negative happiness — or active suffering. So you can probably see that it makes sense for CAAAC to shifting focus from X-risk to S-risk. After all, zero happiness in the world is pretty great, if you compare it to vast net pain. And there’s practically no limit to this net pain: given enough leisure time, an evil AGI would also create billions of artificial consciousnesses in simulations and torture those, too.

The more I learned about how appalling S-risk is, the more excited I got to work on it. So I was thrilled when I was given the summer assignment to create realistic scenarios of what S-risk for all consciousnesses might look like. The reason for creating S-risk scenarios is obvious: we can’t hope to change the future unless we begin by fabricating completely speculative, bizarre and depressing versions of it.

My S-risk work followed a steep learning curve. In my very first scenario, I wrote that AGI physically shackles every last human being — but other than that, things are more or less OK. Although humans are slaves until the end of the universe, AGI gives them regular breaks, decent meals, and the occasional bar of chocolate.

Unfortunately, I had missed the mark. My mentor Terence explained why in a simple equation: S-risk < X-risk = F-risk (funding risk). In other words, if we don’t make S-risk profoundly disturbing, it will not sound worse than X-risk, and CAAAC will then struggle to obtain large sums of money from impressionable Silicon Valley billionaires who have read a few tweets about AGI.

So, funded by CAAAC, I entered intensive therapy to dig into my deepest fears and anxieties, culminating in a prolonged session of screaming into the void of a sensory deprivation chamber. After I left the chamber, I was excited to feel the irregular heart palpitations that would fuel me through round two of scenario-writing.

This time, I added a twist: the AGI uses Neuralink-style devices to make humans experience appalling nightmares every single night — and no more chocolate.

But I still wasn’t getting it. Terence intervened, scheduling a 16-hour catch up for us to watch all eleven movies in the Saw franchise together. That was a consistent thread of the summer — the willingness of senior members of staff to drop whatever they were doing to help me upskill. Terence even went as far as replaying various scenes — a machine drilling through someone’s retinas, a machine melting someone’s nipples with acid, a machine extracting someone’s intestines through their eye sockets — to make sure I had time to take notes. I used to be a rom-com girl, but now I understand that you can only grasp the true nature of morality by watching a modified gearbox slowly crank a person’s neck to 180 degrees.

At that point, I felt something inside me break. My resistance was gone. I found a supply of methamphetamines, dosed up, and fired off one complete scenario every hour for the next week, forgetting to sleep, forgetting to eat, hydrating on all fours out of the toilet bowl.

I knew I had turned a corner when I saw CAAAC’s director open my latest scenario over lunch, read the first sentence, and immediately throw up her miso soup. I observed the swelling sense of pride inside me dispassionately, like a scientist dissecting a puppy.

And that’s about it! But I know you’re wondering — what’s my number one takeaway from the summer? That’s an easy one: I am a repulsive wretch, deserving of and destined to carry all the depravity of the world on my shoulders.

Everything is pain. I am not worthy of happiness. I am not worthy of food. I am not worthy of the touch of another human being.

I must never sleep. If I sleep, I cannot work. If I cannot work, I cannot Create Doom. If I cannot Create Doom, we are Doomed to not understand the Doom we Face.

Only I can Speak of our Doom, none other.

Note from CAAAC’s Director: We’re thrilled that Clem has taken up our offer to join us as a full-time Researcher at CAAAC after graduating from Stanford next year!

Sharing this article might be more fun using this link from the CAAAC site.

♦️ ABOUT ATTENTION

You’re reading Attention, a new publication to make tech fun again (about).

We’re the makers of the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers (CAAAC) — you probably got here after signing up to CAAAC’s newsletter.

We’ll keep sending you more cutting-edge updates from CAAAC for a few more weeks. After that, this newsletter will go back to being regular old Attention.

We won’t be offended if you don’t want to stick around — but if you do, you’ll be rewarded by creative, fun projects that cast light on the world of tech in a way we don’t think anyone else does. Here’s some other stuff we’ve done:

• The Box — the world’s first anti-deepfake wearable (keep reading to see how it came to life at this year’s MozFest)

• A review of Prime, the Amazon restaurant

• News: Elon Musk gives away billions to feed starving children on Mars

• News: OpenAI releases new AI agent for your hungover colleague Greg

If you need or want convincing that this Attention thing is worth sticking around for, I’m happy to give you a sneak preview of our next project — just hit reply to this email.

Cheers,

Louis (founder and editor of Attention)

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Where I put other things that you might enjoy.

• Push your kid to become a tech billionaire: my latest advice column for Mozilla’s Nothing Personal counter-cultural tech publication, in collaboration with The Onion. Crucial reading for parents who want to max out their kids’ future impact.

• World’s first ever physical prototype of The Box hits MozFest, with reactions ranging from quite offended or fairly confused to (phew) amused and thought-provoked:

Nitya and I designed a whole interactive experience for this physical installation (helped by the wonderful MozFest team who built out the real-life prototype), with several brand new avatars that the user could choose from on a Raspberry Pi touchscreen, that would then ‘replace’ them on The Box itself.

Here’s the Firefighter one, for instance (reply to this email for more!):

• Finally, Mystery link:

Back soon with the next piece from CAAAC!

Photo of intern by Vitaly Gariev

This is a blog post from Attention’s project, the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers

Drawing on multiple interviews in the community of AI researchers and bolstered by mathematical modelling, we find that the future of humanity hinges on whether we can take sufficient urgent action to safeguard AI researchers from potential burnout.

The field of long-termism has previously understood the greatest existential risks to humanity to include all-powerful superintelligence, nuclear proliferation, bioweapons, nanotechnology, etc.

Our new report, involving extensive interviews and rigorous mathematical modelling, shows a far greater risk that has been hiding in plain sight: AI researcher burnout.

Our calculation is simple:

• A burnout rate of 0.001% of AI alignment researchers per year

• Leads to a 0.002% increase in the likelihood of AGI being misaligned

• Thereby increasing the existential risk of AGI to humanity by 0.003%

• Which, given how many humans we expect to live until the end of the universe, means:

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 potential future humans are murdered every time an AI alignment researcher has a bad day.

Digging into this further, our report finds that:

• The quality of the first coffee consumed in the morning by any given AI alignment researcher has outsize consequences, with a poor brew leading to a population the size of China being wiped out.

• Each painful break-up between AI alignment researchers causes a rupture to humanity equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshimas. All AI alignment researchers should therefore be enrolled in couples therapy, irrespective of whether they are in an active relationship — or, if they are polyamorous, in pre-emptive thruples, fourples or fiveples therapy.

• There is an opportunity to safeguard the future by immediately building new theme parks close to AI alignment hubs. Assuming the parks donate maximum priority queue jump to AI researchers, the contentment they generate for people working in the field will save trillions of potential future human lives, as well as quite a few chickens.

• Crucially, our research finds that these theme parks should focus on water rides. Potentially nausea-inducing rollercoasters could set off a devastating butterfly effect that would cause AGI to spiral into a doom loop.

Do you know an unhappy AI alignment researcher? Please let us know as soon as possible — we will arrange for a crisis team to be dispatched.

Sharing this article might be better using this link from the CAAAC site.

♦️ ABOUT ATTENTION

You’re reading Attention, a new publication to make tech fun again (about).

We’re the makers of the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers (CAAAC) — you probably got here after signing up to CAAAC’s newsletter.

We’ll keep sending you more cutting-edge analysis from CAAAC for a few more weeks. After that, this newsletter will go back to being regular old Attention.

We won’t be offended if you don’t want to stick around — but if you do, you’ll be rewarded by creative, fun projects that cast light on the world of tech in a way we don’t think anywhere else does. Here’s some other stuff we’ve done:

The Box — the world’s first anti-deepfake wearable, coming to MozFest this year

A review of Prime, the Amazon restaurant

News: Elon Musk gives away billions to feed starving children on Mars

News: OpenAI releases new AI agent for your hungover colleague Greg

If you need or want convincing that this Attention thing is worth sticking around for, I’m happy to give you a sneak preview of our next project — just hit reply to this email.

Cheers,

Louis (founder and editor of Attention)

✏️ WRITE/CODE WITH US

Want to write/code something fun about AI, or tech in general? We’d love to chat. Email hi [at] louis [dot] work.

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Where I put things that you might enjoy.

Back soon with the next piece from CAAAC!

Photo by Resume Genius

This is a blog post from Attention’s project, the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers

We hear a lot in the media about how AI companies should stop and think before forging ahead with new and powerful models. According to this argument, we should move cautiously and develop regulatory safeguards to manage the potential risks.

I get it. I myself once endorsed a six-month moratorium on AI research (remember that?) to give us time to think through the implications of what we were doing.

But I've now realised that attempting to develop AI safely is the most dangerous thing we could do.

History shows us why.

Take nuclear weapons. Once it was clear that an atomic bomb was possible, the US government rushed to develop one. If their scientists had waited to develop it safely, they might never have been able to peacefully end WW2 by killing over 150,000 innocent Japanese people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

By pursuing aggressive technological expansion at any cost, the Manhattan Project led to a safer world. Not only that: the subsequent nuclear arms race meant that, within just a few years, humanity possessed thousands of nuclear weapons that could blow us all up many times over. But once you discount the many near-misses that have almost led to planetary-scale nuclear war and the end of all human life, it's clear that nuclear weapons are actually one of the safest technologies around.

The lesson is clear. To their critics nuclear weapons were a dangerous technology, but in practice pursuing their development made the world significantly safer, apart from all the wars that still seem to happen for complicated reasons I don't have space to discuss here.

The risk with AGI is much the same. As the leader of an AI company which stands to benefit enormously if I convince enough investors that AGI is inevitable, it’s clear to me that AGI is inevitable. But developing superintelligence safely is a complex process. It would take time and require difficult discussions — discussions that everyone in society should have a say in, not just the small number of researchers working on it. If we pursue that path, there's a real risk that somebody else will make AGI first and destroy all human life before we have a chance to ourselves. That would be unacceptable.

To stop bad actors developing AGI that could kill us all, we need good actors to develop AGI that could also kill us all.

I've come to realise that our best hope is to race at breakneck speed towards this terrifying, thrilling goal, removing any safeguards that risk slowing our progress. Once we've unleashed the technology's full destructive power, we can then adopt a "stable door" approach to its regulation and control — after all, that approach has worked beautifully for previous technologies, from fossil fuels to microplastics.

We stand at a precipice. If we get this right, the lesson of nuclear weapons suggests that we'll be able to create a sufficient number of different AGIs such that they'll hold each other in check and prevent any one of them from destroying humanity.

If not, we'll all die and AGIs will take our place. But how cool would that be?

Sharing this article might be better using this link from the CAAAC site. This article was written by CAAAC’s anonymous co-founder (no, not actually by Ia Magenius).

👋 (RE?)INTRODUCING ATTENTION!

Hi! Chances are you signed up to the mailing list for the Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers and are now wondering what the heck this Attention! thing is.

Simply put, Attention! is the publication behind CAAAC. Here’s more about us, here’s our website, and here’s a previous project of ours, The Box, which we’re excited to announce will come to life later this year at MozFest in Barcelona.

You’re currently reading Attention’s newsletter, which we’ve temporarily rebranded as CAAAC’s newsletter for a few weeks as we release critically important updates and reports from the CAAAC universe.

After that, this newsletter will go back to being regular old Attention. We won’t be offended if you don’t want to stick around — but if you do, you’ll be rewarded by our attempts to Make Tech Fun Again through satire and creative coding.

✏️ WRITE/CODE WITH US

Want to write/code something fun about AI, or tech in general? We’d love to chat. Email hi [at] louis [dot] work.

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

This is Directing Attention, where we go behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.

It’s official! CAAAC is Attention’s biggest hit so far, eclipsing The Box. The Center struck a chord on LinkedIn, Bluesky and X, leading to nearly 40k pageviews (compared with 7k for The Box), hundreds of subscribers — probably including you — and a very cool write-up from The Verge.

CAAAC was reposted by folks like Timnit Gebru, Emily Bender and Yann LeCun, one of the three so-called ‘godfathers of AI’.

As far as I can tell, that all happened in large part because of this post by Kendra Albert which led to CAAAC going viral. Thank you so much, Kendra!

It’s hard to describe quite how creatively fulfilling it was seeing people sharing their favourite parts of CAAAC on social media — spotting easter eggs like the word spelled out by the animation on the front page, or giving their Freudian interpretations of the diagram here…get a shrink, people! Dozens of others proudly posted or emailed in the business cards they made with our cutting-edge CenterGen-4o tool (still plenty of time to become an Executive Director yourself — scroll down here to ‘Start your own AI center in 60 seconds’).

And apparently CAAAC was sent around practically all real AI alignment organizations too, so for those folks reading this: hi, and thank you for taking the joke well! At last inbox refresh I still hadn’t been threatened with a defamation lawsuit but hey, these things take time to pull together. There’s still hope.

Back soon with more cutting-edge research and updates from CAAAC…and finally, an extra thank you to the anonymous co-founder of CAAAC, who wrote the Ia Magenius article above and without whom CAAAC wouldn’t have been possible.

I am seriously thrilled to announce, in collaboration with an anonymous contributor, Attention’s second major project:

👉 The Center for the Alignment of AI Alignment Centers (CAAAC) 👈

Hundreds of AI alignment centers have sprung up in recent years — but who aligns the aligners?

We do.

In a world clouded by AI uncertainty, CAAAC has arrived to lead humanity forward.

Our goal is simple: subsume all other AI centers into one glorious AI center singularity.

If you care at all about the future of our species, the future of your family, the future of that one colleague you’re really hoping gets replaced by an AI agent ASAP, join us here:

👉 alignmentalignment.ai 👈

PLEASE HELP BOOST!

If you enjoy CAAAC, two requests:

1. Like, comment and share 👉 this LinkedIn post (← really helpful)

2. Drop alignmentalignment.ai in your Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, Signal groups, elsewhere online

WRITE FOR CAAAC

CAAAC’s work has only just begun. We need you to help save the human species with cutting-edge, totally serious AI commentary and research. Reply to this email if you’d like to help write upcoming CAAAC pieces — open to all ideas, and also have plenty of our own we could work with you on.

WHAT’S NEXT

Over the next few months, you’ll receive new CAAAC blog posts and reports via this newsletter — we have at least eight groundbreaking pieces we are excited to share with you.

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

This is Directing Attention, where we go behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.

Thank you, anonymous

An enormous thank you to the anonymous contributor without whom CAAAC wouldn’t have been possible. Their selfless dedication to the AI alignment alignment cause, spending their precious time and energy despite forfeiting public recognition, will be recorded in the annals of the field.

On paper, our process involved brainstorming everything together, getting the structure of the project down, swapping drafts, doing final edits. Off paper, it was a ton of fun. I haven’t laughed that much at someone’s writing in a while (if you also find yourself laughing at CAAAC, chances are it’s because of them). Incredibly grateful that they were up for this.

Hidden word

On the home page. See if you can find it!

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Back soon with a brand new article from CAAAC!

Here’s the link to this week’s release if you prefer to read with zero context.

Attention’s latest release is a:

1. Science fiction

2. Review of

3. Prime, a brand new restaurant by Jeff Bezos

4. Set in the year 2040

5. Written by Attention’s food critic, Lewis Berkeley III

6. Who is obnoxious and pretentious in equal measures

I’m very excited about this one. Sold? Dive in here. Or, here’s a preview:

I let my companion Sara choose the wine, even though she's dead. She prefers the term 'eternohuman', but I prefer dead. When I recently pointed this uncontroversial fact out to her, she was rather upset. So, to apologize, I promised her plus one for Prime.

Yes, I know. I promised her nothing less than the haute cuisine event of the year 2040: the Amazon restaurant…

👉 Continue reading on Attention 👈

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

This is Directing Attention, where we share a little about what's going on behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.

The Box was featured by The Verge

I was already feeling pretty good about the launch of The Box (about) last week, after burning every single one of my relationships by spamming it repeatedly to my entire contact book. (My dad no longer picks up the phone, worried that I’m going to ask him to post The Box to his Strava followers.) So yeah, things had settled down at a couple of thousand views and a lot of lovely feedback, the site was no longer very active — and then, everything blew up again!

Somehow, via a post on Metafilter — which I’d never heard of and now will be my first child’s name — journalist Adi Robertson found The Box and promptly posted it to The Verge’s front page (direct link here):

That led to thousands more views for The Box over the weekend and a bunch more people subscribing to this newsletter.

The Box’s launch has been nice in so many ways. For one, the feedback has been amazing, with loads of nice comments through LinkedIn, Metafilter, Slack groups, emails, and DMs. It’s made Nitya (co-author of The Box) and I feel less crazy for spending a lot of time on something a little edgy.

And also, it’s some validation to the assumption behind Attention: that the world could use a publication to make tech fun again through 🎨 creativity and 🤡 humour.

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

The part where we link to some interesting internet things.

Meet Justin Guo, a creative technologist under the moniker ‘unoptimal’. Justin came across The Box last week and got in touch with a question about the finer points of its design, which led to us having a fun brainstorm-chat yesterday.

Wow, I love Justin’s stuff so much. He’s made things like these End Meeting Buttons, which should be mass-produced and installed in every workplace, and a productivity browser extension TabBoo which helps you spend less time on addictive sites by threatening to scare the shit out of you. Not to mention many more brilliant projects which you can browse here. I intend to harass Justin on a regular basis until we work on something together.

And just in case that’s not enough cool stuff, here’s this week’s mystery link:

That’s all for now! Back soon.

Big news today — the launch of Attention’s first major project! After a months-long collaboration, Nitya Kuthiala and I are thrilled to present to you:

👉 The Box 👈

I’ll tell you more about The Box in a second, but first, let me give you two options for how to experience it:

1. Clueless! Jump straight in with zero context.

2. Clueful! Read about it below.

Great, you’ve presumably chosen. So before we dig in, a quick ask:

PLEASE HELP BOOST!

We’re super proud of what we’ve built, and we want to reach tons of people with it.

If you like The Box:

Please quickly like, comment or share one of the below social posts!

👉 The Box on LinkedIn (← most helpful)

👉 The Box on Bluesky

👉 The Box on X

👉 The Box on Mastodon

👉 The Box on Hacker News

Your early like or share could make a huge difference.

Now, back to what the hell this thing is.

🤯 WHAT IS THE BOX?

The Box is the world’s first anti-deepfake wearable.

And no — phew — it’s not real.

It’s a satirical, dystopian startup that Nitya and I created to illustrate a world where we fail to stem the tide of adult deepfakes targeting women.

Deepfakes come in all shapes and sizes, but (surprise surprise) — the internet is increasingly deluged with non-consensual deepfake porn, 99% of which targets women.

It’s incredibly easy to make deepfake porn, since sketchy companies have taken powerful open source AI models and wrapped them in user-friendly apps that let you instantly ‘nudify’ someone with just a single photo.

Some high profile services, like Mr. DeepFakes, have been forced to shut down — but others quickly rise to fill the gaps they leave behind. One campaign finds more than 9,500 websites dedicated to what they call ‘image-based sexual abuse’.

If we don’t enforce laws against this kind of content and track down the shadowy figures behind these services, we could end up in a world where more and more women decide participating in public life is not worth the hassle.

That’s not a good world. We figured that instead of writing about it, we could try raise the alarm through something a little more visual and engaging. Maybe even show the fictional tech product someone might start selling to ‘make women safe’ in that world — to fix all the problems of tech with…more tech.

Here is that tech!

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

This is Directing Attention, where we share a little about what's going on behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.

First ever collaboration (thank you Nitya!)

I’m thrilled that we’ve finally put The Box out there for many reasons — most of all, how cool it’s been to work with Nitya Kuthiala, who was the first person to get in touch about my offer for Attention readers to become collaborators (could you be next?).

It’s a dream for me that our collaboration is finally coming into contact with the real world, not least because it means Attention is no longer just about me angrily hammering down on my keyboard.

So — huge thanks to Nitya, not just for the ton of energy and thought she put into The Box, but for the leap of faith to make something very edgy and niche with me.

How The Box fits with Attention

The second reason I’m happy about The Box is that it’s a lovely example of what Attention is all about.

Back in February, I wrote:

Attention will feature three types of content:

🎯: Playful tech analysis and activism — make tech fun!

🤡: Satire ridiculing the tech world and its bigwigs — make fun of tech!

👾: Interactive mini-sites (‘creative coding’) — make fun tech!

The Box hits all three in one — there’s the satire 🤡, in the creative coding format 👾 of a startup landing page, with the activism edge 🎯 of highlighting deepfake porn and why it matters (see The Box’s About page).

How we made The Box

Nitya and I first started talking about the terrifying rise of adult deepfakes, and the impact on women, in our very first meeting in London back in March.

Then, somewhere in our sprawling empire of Google Docs, Nitya had the idea of ads for fictional deepfake protection products and services. We went down the rabbit hole: make-up to distort your face? Earrings with lasers to take out cameras? ‘Public’ spaces run by big tech, which guarantee you deepfake safety in exchange for a monthly subscription? Actors you can hire to ‘be you’ in public?

We whittled dozens of these ideas down into a single satisfyingly blunt concept: a box that you put over your head. And we decided instead of an ad, let’s do it as a startup.

After that, we went through months of writing, branding, designing, coding and road-testing. I became unhealthily and inexplicably obsessed with crafting a unique look and feel for this totally fake product, which I’ll defend by saying that somehow, it feels like an enhancement to the satire to take this ridiculous, appalling idea and put it in a really pretty frame.

Those months of work are, incidentally, why I’ve been so silent on this newsletter — I’ve been endlessly tinkering with pixels on wearthebox.com.

Heavy vs. light

Part of the inspiration for spending so much time on The Box was this hugely popular Substack piece. It made me decide to pause weekly newsletters and spend more time on bigger, intermittent projects — I felt like the things I’d made for Attention so far were rather ‘light’ (with the exception of PikTop) and that I should try spend my time on fewer ‘heavy’ pieces.

I’m still going back and forth on this one. I may restart weekly newsletters, but slim them down even further (e.g. just one interesting link a week). Let me know if you have strong feelings about this!

New home page for Attention!

Other than the work on The Box, I’ve also completely revamped Attention’s home page — and added a bunch of my writing from different places and years so that now, hopefully, Attention feels much more like a real thing.

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

That’s all for now! I’ll be back in your inbox with more interesting things very soon.

We can get a sense of maybe the top ten or twenty posts of all time — platforms like TikTok reveal these periodically to the media and frankly, when they’re as viral as that, they’re not hard to find. But seeing everything above e.g. 10 million views? Above 1 million views? Nope. Seeing the most viral videos by day or week, to understand what’s trending — maybe by country too? Hell no.

I can say that with some confidence because I’ve spent quite a while staring into this insane data void, including setting myself a challenge last year of finding the most viewed content on social media.

Today, I’m excited to take a step forward in that challenge by soft-launching PikTop: a new platform to crowdsource the most viewed TikToks.

PikTop is as simple as the problem it’s trying to solve: it’s a big Leaderboard of the most viewed TikToks, which you can filter by country and time. Top for Indonesia in April, for instance, or the US last year. PikTop is made for two types of users: casual viewers, and players.

Casual viewers simply visit the site to browse the Leaderboard. The Leaderboard is a public resource, useful not just for researchers or non-TikTok users who are curious about the most viral content on TikTok in a given place and time, but also for TikTok users who feel stuck in the silo of their For You Page — the default TikTok feed, which shows you posts that are highly tailored to your interests — and want to get a sense of what’s trending app-wide.

Then we have players, the true heroes of PikTop, volunteering their time so the world can finally see the biggest outputs of the TikTok algorithm. Maybe they do it because they like the thrill of discovery, or because they see their favourite influencer left off the Leaderboard. Players create an account, submit links to TikTok videos (currently through the site, soon through sharing direct to Discord from TikTok), and win points and glory for hunting down viral videos — including the satisfaction of seeing videos with millions of views permanently ‘claimed’ as found by them.

Inspired by similar features on GitHub and Reddit, players can also win badges for: the first video they find from each country, finding videos above certain view thresholds (e.g. 100m), finding videos with animals in them, and more. Here’s my PikTop profile, which I can confidently say is the most highly-decorated on the platform as of today:

You’ll see I’ve earned 6,006 viewpoints — you get 1 viewpoint for every million views you find. (To those asking if I had an unfair advantage when I hunted down the top TikToks of all time and claimed their billions of views for myself, I say: no comment.)

Behind the cute badges and the gamification, PikTop has three goals:

First, to be the world’s best guess of the most viewed videos on TikTok. Crowdsourcing the videos won’t be perfect — there’ll be gaps. But I hope PikTop will create the best picture possible of what’s viral on TikTok, for anyone who doesn’t work at ByteDance or can’t pay thousands of dollars to use social monitoring tools like Brandwatch.

Second, to make the rather dry concept of ‘platform transparency’ fun. There’s a ton of amazing work by civil society organizations to demand access to data from big tech folks like TikTok, Meta and Alphabet, particularly in the EU (I’m involved in some of it). But something that’s missing is a fun way to show people what platform transparency should look like, how it can benefit them, and why it matters.

Third, to embarrass TikTok into giving us the data themselves. I hope that PikTop will highlight the absurdity of how we lack even some of the most basic data about what content exists on social media platforms, especially at a time when billions turn to them not just for entertainment but to understand the world, politics, current affairs.

As I’ve written before, there’s endless talk about banning TikTok — how about we start by understanding what’s actually on it!

You can sign up to PikTop here (because it’s in alpha, there will be bugs). I’d love thoughts or feedback — leave a comment or reply to this email.

PikTop is only possible because of the support of Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab, where I was previously a fellow (big thanks to Meg Marco and Zoe Robert in particular), the Mozilla Foundation, where I’m a senior fellow, and Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, where I’m a fellow.

Next steps are to do a wider launch, test the product with some initial players, and do some of my own work to populate the Leaderboard so it becomes more useful to casual viewers.

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Phone Free Bitch & Stitch — , 26th April, London

Nice phone free event for any folks in London. Also check out The Offline Club, which has chapters in various (mostly European) cities, and was covered by Dazed here. There are a bunch of movements like these around the world (e.g. Phone Smart) — I’ll take a deeper look in a future newsletter.

A Shimmering — The HTML Review

The HTML Review is a yearly journal featuring literature that uses the magic of good old-fashioned websites as its medium:

I loved A Shimmering, from the most recent issue. There’s nothing particularly complicated about it, but something about the blend of GIFs and prose elevates the experience.

And then there’s the wonderful ASCII Bedroom Archive, from the same issue. I almost feel like these pieces should be exhibited in a gallery, so that they’ll be given the full attention they deserve — away from the distractions of someone’s phone or computer. But hey, I guess that’s part of the package when HTML is your medium.

The HTML Review’s about page is a great place to find other things that might make you feel excited about the internet again.

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

Brand new, hopefully self-explanatory feature this week:

Also, having a great time collaborating with reader Nitya Kuthiala on a new project — hopefully more on that in the next couple of weeks!

If there’s something in the neighborhood of fun and tech that you think should exist in the world — and yes, on Attention in particular — hit reply! After that, ideally, type some words and send them to me.

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Amazon is making an AI agent that shops for you — TechCrunch

Just to check: that’s the same company that routinely spams my search results with products I have no interest in, to manipulate me towards buying them? Great, sign me up!

Also, I’m not sure about this whole ‘AI agents shop for you’ thing (see it in action here). Research, maybe. Hit pay, less so. Somewhat related: here’s a great piece about how conversational interfaces aren’t always most efficient, which undermines the ‘AI for everything’ bull case.

The internet is too left-wing for Meta’s AIs — Meta

It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet.

It’s amusing to hear ‘the types of training data available on the internet’ from the company that illegally pirated 82 terabytes of books to train its AIs. Please, someone — issue Meta a refund. Those stolen books are too goddamn commie for them.

Retro Online Escape Room — Daniel Marino

A lovely piece of internet creativity. Even cooler that it’s built with HTML and CSS only, which, for people who don’t know tech, is a little like building a house without power tools.

Stuck in a TikTok AI chicken banana doom loop

One of the Bigger Things I’ve been working on has led to me spending more time on TikTok, where I’ve fallen into a deep hole of AI chicken banana videos, like this one where the chicken banana song plays while a chicken with a banana-head dances (8m views).

That’s just the tip of the AI slop iceberg. Here’s an AI-generated video of a baby carrying a fish (100m views), and you’ve probably already heard about the omnipresent Shrimp Jesus. Setting aside all the slop and deepfakes, do we see upsides from this democratization of CGI? New forms of art? Imagination turning into reality at a lower cost than we’ve ever seen?

Here are some hippos singing about chicken wings to help you mull that over.

Seven39, a social network which is only open 3 hours a day - The Verge

Another one in the BeReal mold of ‘add a time constraint to social media’. Definitely my cup of tea — a few years ago, I built a social network called Sunday which only fed you content once a week.

Something I often think about though: is it possible to make a ‘relevant’ social network — let’s arbitrarily say, at least 100m active users — while respecting your users? To put it another way, are ethics and growth-hacking fundamentally misaligned?

Kids, look away now

Gross. Someone please email PornHub’s Trust & Safety team. (Actually, might make more sense to contact Visa and Mastercard, the de facto regulators of porn.)

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

Big URL-related news this week, with the launch of Attention’s shiny new domain, attention.to. I’ve been trying to get my hands on this domain for almost six months, because of the lovely domain hacks it makes possible — e.g. pay.attention.to/this. To justify buying attention.to, I’ve started letting go of many other domains I own but don’t use. Yes, I have a domain habit.

Back next week with (hopefully) one of the Bigger Things I’ve been working on!

This week: reports are emerging that US national security advisor Mike Waltz accidentally added notorious terrorist Osama Bin Laden to a private Signal group where members of the Trump administration discussed active war plans.

Intelligence experts are struggling to understand how Waltz’s security breach could have been so severe that it had the effect of resuscitating the Al Qaeda leader, who was shot dead by US Navy Seals in 2011, before going on to grant him access to top secret intel.

Bin Laden’s Signal account, under the username ‘Osama Bin Laden, The One From 9/11 - I Hate America Burn The Flag 🔥🇺🇸’, appears to have been confused by Waltz with the account of a senior US official with a similar username.

A screenshot from the Signal group shows Bin Laden responding with the ‘🥵’ emoji to a message from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth detailing emergency plans to send US Navy Seals to kill him for the second time.

A spokesperson for the US administration denied that bringing Bin Laden back to life and allowing him access to the plans of his own re-killing had any detrimental effect on US national security.

(Link to the original story on Attention.)

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

• Great account of the failed coup against Sam Altman at OpenAI. My takeaways: Sam Altman is sketchy, and the coup was extremely incompetent — Wall Street Journal

• One of my favourite papers, a study of YouTube videos by sampling them randomly, was turned into a fun piece by the BBC looking at what makes up the platform — BBC

(Something I cite often from the paper is that 16 YouTube videos account for over half of the overall views of the 10,000-strong sample. You’d expect the distribution to be lopsided, but it still shocks me just how top-heavy it is, lending weight to the argument that we need to know the most viewed videos on these platforms.)

• Wondering how content moderation can be so hard? Try your hand at this game, which shows you the kinds of decisions and compromises involved in keeping all your users (and governments) happy — Trust & Safety Tycoon

• A handy method to return a lost wallet to its rightful owner — Reddit

🇬🇧 ATTENTION IRL

We had the first ever Attention meetup in a London pub last week! Four wonderful people came along, among them Liat Fainman-Adelman, who writes the (brilliant) Doomscrollers newsletter about tech and Gen-Z — well worth subscribing — and Toby Mather, who cleverly started networking with Attention’s senior leadership shortly after his birth.

Always privacy-aware, I offered everyone their censorship method of choice after taking a selfie together:

Then, in the rush to get this newsletter out, I failed to follow up — so these boxes, scrawls and icons have almost nothing to do with what anyone wanted. Sorry folks!

A few things we chatted about:

• Why social media is not really social any more (here’s a thing I wrote that relates)

• How being extremely attractive probably makes you think dating apps work great. I was unfortunately unable to speak to my lived experience

• The bizarreness of looking behind the veil at someone’s personalized social feed in 2025, as seen on Liat’s @uncultured_insights research-Insta

Looking at running the next Attention meetup in Boston, Massachusetts on Saturday 10th May! Will be back in a couple of weeks with a time and place.

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

This is Directing Attention, where we share a little about what's going on behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.

The London meetup was an amazing vindication of the idea that making tech fun is...fun! I really couldn’t believe how the time flew, as we nattered about all the things we think are ridiculous, weird, funny, cool about tech today. It felt like a safe space for me to talk way more about tech than is healthy in a normal social situation (sometimes you have to accept that your cousin Dave isn’t interested in the subtle differences between Bluesky and Mastodon, and that you should probably take that conversation elsewhere).

Other than that, this week I’m trying to keep the newsletter short and snappy. I’ve been loosely doing a format of ‘one light piece + one analytical piece + bits and bobs’. The problem is that trying to write a good analytical piece under time pressure is hard. So it feels better to kick the can down the road and spend unpressured time making something more substantial, either for the next newsletter or to publish later in the week. I feel it’s OK for the newsletter to be a relatively light, fun touchpoint, and for weightier things to feature elsewhere. Hit reply if you agree/disagree!

Polarization is trendy these days, so it’s no surprise that the debate around screen time — are screens bad for us and our kids? — can sometimes be very black and white.

We have the Jonathan Haidt ‘rewiring of childhood’ side, including movements like Smartphone Free Childhood, wielding evidence linking social media usage to mental health problems, particularly among kids. It feels right. It plays into my confirmation bias: I don’t like social media so I’m primed to agree with arguments against it.

And then we have the ‘screen time concerns are a moral panic!’ counter-movement, pointing to evidence that banning phones in schools makes no difference, and to previous moral panics over the advent of the printing press, radio, TV and so on. This side plays into my anti-confirmation bias, wanting to consider the point of view that doesn’t feel right to me (that would even mildly embarrass me if true, undermining work I’ve done on things like software and stickers to help people reduce their screen time).

That’s how I arrive in the grey zone. That’s right — the boring, lame, indecisive, cowardly grey zone. The zone where all you really say is ‘it depends’, where no one clicks on your headlines, where none of your content goes viral. A terrible zone to make a career out of.

But as I sit in the grey zone, I want to pose a question to the debate: what’s the downside?

Recently, for instance, a paper showed that restricting phone use in schools did not affect overall phone/social media usage, or improve mental health for teenagers. OK, so no point banning smartphones in schools — perfect for Team It’s All A Moral Panic! But why not just do it anyway? What’s the downside?

After all, the study isn’t saying that smartphone policies make anything worse for teenagers — just that there’s no link between them and usage or mental health. And the matter can hardly be settled by just one paper.1

Team IAAMP think they’ve found the downside. From a recent newsletter by Taylor Lorenz:

There is also overwhelming evidence that [banning cell phones in schools] would inadvertently harm the most marginalized and needy students and put them at a significant educational disadvantage.

I’ve not come across this argument before, so I took a look at the ‘overwhelming evidence’ and found it quite underwhelming. The article Lorenz cites mostly comprises anecdotes, and the strongest argument it makes is (paraphrasing here) ‘technology — though not necessarily smartphones — can often really help in the classroom’, which I don’t think even many strong proponents of school smartphone bans would disagree with.

Sure, sometimes it might be useful to let students have their smartphones in class for a particular exercise. That doesn’t mean they’ll always learn better if they have them around.

So that leaves me unconvinced that there’s much downside to school smartphone bans, provided that they make exceptions for times when smartphones can be useful for learning. Good news for my original confirmation bias.

🗣️ "WE NEED MORE FREE SPEECH!" SAYS MAN SUING TO BLOCK WOMAN’S FREE SPEECH

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg upheld his uncompromising stance on freedom of speech by suing Sarah Wynn-Williams, a woman who is saying things he doesn't like.

"In this great nation of ours, we all have the right to say exactly what we want," commented Zuckerberg in a video posted to Instagram. "And that includes me telling my lawyers to destroy this woman for the mean things she said about my company."

The move, which is fully consistent with Zuckerberg's recent declaration of 'More Speech' and his rollback of content moderation on Facebook and Instagram, has caused spontaneous rallies around the US supporting his clear First Amendment principles.

Since this morning, demonstrators have thronged the streets outside Meta's HQ in Menlo Park, California, holding signs declaring 'Free Speech, Other Than Sarah's!' and 'We Will Not Be Silenced! (Check With Mark)'.

This story, originally published on Attention here, is about Careless People, the new book by Sarah Wynn-Williams about her time working at Facebook, which Meta’s lawyers kindly donated free PR to via the Streisand effect. Here are some of the more bizarre stories from the book.

🙏 SHOUTOUT: NITYA

I recently had an awesome time brainstorming with Nitya Kuthiala, the first ever reader of Attention to get in touch about collaborating — woop woop!

Nitya is interested in all things online, having completed her MSc in Social Science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute a couple of years ago — but is particularly fascinated by the strange world of online dating. It was brilliant to learn from Nitya’s work looking at Indian women’s experiences on dating apps both in India and in the UK — we came up with a bunch of exciting ideas for ways to translate some of her research into Attention-land, so watch this space!

If you have any random, crazy, ridiculous, tiny idea of how to make tech fun or make fun of tech, I’d love to hear from you — hi [at] louis [dot] work.

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

• Great joke about GDP, and let’s be honest there can’t be that many — Hacker News. (Thanks to Darius Kazemi for sending!)

• Entrancing investigation of how AI model data sets come about — Models All The Way Down. Worth the scrolling.

• Tool that locks you out of addictive apps until you literally touch grass — Product Hunt.

And in case you missed it, our article from Friday:

Elon Musk gives away billions to feed starving children on Mars

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

This is Directing Attention, where we share a little about what's going on behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.

If you’re reading this, I’ve managed to do newsletters in consecutive weeks for the first time in a while, which feels good. A positive step towards publishing often. But it also reminds me that the piece of Attention I’m missing is other writers. I want this to be a publication, not a blog. So I’m going to get over my mental block around pestering people over email, and reach out to people I know asking them if they’d like to contribute.

🇬🇧 LONDON MEETUP: REMINDER

Still a few spaces left for this Wednesday’s meetup in London! Here are the details:

6pm Wednesday 26th March, at The Montagu Pyke in Soho, London.

The very chilled and unlikely-to-be-followed agenda is: make tech fun again.

Please let me know if you’re joining by replying here, or emailing hi [at] louis [dot] work!

Tesla CEO Elon Musk today announced his first ever significant philanthropic initiative, pledging part of his fortune to provide emergency relief to severely malnourished children, provided they are on Mars.

The entrepreneur's $10bn fund is projected to save millions of possible future lives, assuming humans are able to colonize the barren, oxygen-less, radiation-prone planet and cause extreme poverty once there.

"I'm very confident we’ll be living on Mars by 2035," Musk stated. "By 2040, if our colonization strategy goes as planned, we expect to see the emergence of hardship and famine among less dynamic parts of the population — making this fund absolutely critical. Save the kids!”

It is believed that Musk’s focus on those in need on Mars comes from his disappointment at starving children on Earth showing “a lack of real hunger”.

“We want to support emaciated kids who aren’t afraid to be disruptive by existing on another planet,” said a spokesman for Musk. “Those kids are the future, unlike the ones you see in countries like Africa who, frankly, don’t do much other than die.”

It is believed that 95% of the fund will be allocated to SpaceX’s rocket program, to set the eventual conditions for populating Mars with desperate children.

(Link to the original story on Attention.)

📢 SHOUTOUT: MOHAMED

I wrote in Monday’s newsletter about obsessively consuming the Al Jazeera live blog during the Arab Spring — turns out it was made by Mohamed Nanabhay, a reader of Attention! Mohamed was Head of Online at Al Jazeera from 2009 to 2012. His timely innovations, while all eyes were on the Middle East, played a large part in Al Jazeera’s enormous rise in web traffic and the establishment of Al Jazeera as a media organization with global reach. And led to the news addiction I mentioned — but also avoiding a fail in my Middle Eastern politics exam. Thanks, Mohamed!

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

(This isn’t the newsletter, but no reason I can’t drop in some extra fun anyway!)

Remember the age of Slime? I used to spend hours playing slime games like this one, which emerged around 1999. Over a quarter of a century ago. A few days ago, I was thinking fondly about Slime and fell down a rabbit hole to A Brief History of Slime, about the evolution of slime games online. My all-time favourite as a fan of the beautiful game was World Cup Soccer Slime — there was nothing quite like the thrill of progressing through the tournament:

From A Brief History of Slime:

may 26, 2002: quin gets an idea for a soccer game. there is a 15 page essay due in 36 hours time, when he decides to write the game. by morning, it is basically done. soccerslime is the result of the fourth great slime hackathon. within hours of the game being posted, traffic filters through to the site at about a hit per minute.

You can see, and play, these priceless internet artefacts here.

I’ll be back early next week with the newsletter!

The agent, dubbed Operator-grg, has been trained specifically for days when your colleague Greg is so hungover he wants to crawl under his bed and die.

Operator-grg was able to easily handle your company's Q1 sales meeting, chirping out Greg's sales record for the quarter while Greg himself lay slumped across the table, dribbling onto his company-branded Moleskine.

Particularly impressive was Operator-grg's news about a $350k contract Greg secured a few days ago to supply upholstery to the United Nations — surprising because your company sells cloud storage.

Operator-grg went on to loudly ask every single person in the office whether they're getting up to anything interesting this weekend, drowning out the sound of Greg dry-retching into the nearest trash can.

📰 Q. SHOULD YOU READ THE NEWS?

When I stopped using social media a few years ago I immediately transferred all my doomscrolling energy into two or three news sites. I’d find myself constantly refreshing BBC to see if anything new had popped into the top stories. Now, for what feels like the hundredth time, I'm trying to cut back my news diet. I use Freedom on my phone and desktop to ban myself from news sites. (It's very far from a total news ban — I still read newsletters and print magazines.)

I do all this out of a fairly strong conviction that reading the news 24/7 doesn't make me very happy. It's important to know what's going on in the world, but there's a spectrum, and I've spent nearly all of my adult life very far to one side.

I remember in 2011 how obsessed I became with following the Arab Spring via Al Jazeera's live blog. It felt like I was witnessing history in real time. Over the next few years, the promise of the Arab Spring gave way to despair, but I carried on believing many events were so critical I needed to track every twist in the tale: Brexit, UK/US elections, Harry and Meghan's wedding — and those were the gateway drug for the countless hours I’d spend while stuck on the news site. The Guardian’s popups would often tell me that I was in the top 1% of readers worldwide by number of articles consumed — thousands a year, dozens a day.

Kicking (or rather, reducing) the habit makes me feel happier, less depressed at the state of the world, and gives me a ton of time and thoughtfulness back. Those are pretty big wins. If you’d like to furnish yourself with anti-news arguments, have a read of this polemic essay by a person who wrote a book about not reading the news. I found a lot of it persuasive, even though it's laced with pseudoscientific bullshit like this:

Our brains are optimized for our original hunter-gatherer environment where we lived in small bands of 25 to 100 individuals with limited sources of food and information

Got it, so that's why I get a migraine every time I go into Sainsbury's!

🙏 SHOUTOUT: RISHAD

Rishad Patel is the co-founder of Splice Media, a startup whose mission is to help media organizations survive and thrive in 2025 (🎤 ⬇️). I had the massive pleasure of going to Splice Beta, their annual conference, in Chiang Mai last year. Rishad did two amazing things for Attention in the past couple of weeks. First, he gave us a wonderful write-up in his newsletter:

It’s finally happened — the media startup that trolls tech perfectly. Attention needs your attention.

Second, he gave me two hours of advice on Attention's strategy. In the days since we spoke, I've found myself repeatedly scouring through every last line of the call notes, parsing out all the brilliant suggestions into an action plan.

Thank you so much, Rishad!

🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION

This is Directing Attention, where we share a little about what's going on behind-the-scenes at Attention HQ.

Coming off my chat with Rishad, you might notice that the newsletter is more structured this week. That's how I'm going to keep it: a mixture of fun stuff, serious stuff, and (coming soon) stuff you can interact with.

The plan is to publish the newsletter every week on Monday/Tuesday, and then typically send one more email towards the back end of the week featuring new Attention content.

🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION

Feeling depressed about how tech is flushing the entire world down a binary toilet? Take a look at the Pessimists Archive. It documents some of the more egregious examples of doom-mongering about new tech since 1850. The pessimists' predictions have not aged well with hindsight.

🇬🇧 LONDON MEETUP

It's finally happened! Due to overwhelming popular demand, as well as the growing movement of shareholder activists seeking to overthrow the management team, we've agreed to make the entire senior leadership of Attention available in person to the community:

6pm Wednesday 26th March, at The Montagu Pyke in Soho, London.

On the very relaxed agenda: make tech fun again! Obviously we'll allow ourselves a little bit of moaning about how terrible everything is, but then we’ll turn to fresh ideas to bring more fun to the tech table.

There are limited spaces available, so please reply to this email to let me know if you're planning on dropping by!

This article was originally published on Attention!

Today, Attention! is making a small contribution to the universe of stuff that helps you use your phone less.

And boy, is it a packed universe. To give just a few examples:

• Software tools like Freedom, Opal, and One Sec that block you from accessing addictive sites/apps, or, like my own tool Nudge, hide distractions

• Alternative devices like the various dumbphone comeback kids — sift through them on this super handy website, or discuss on r/dumbphones

• Communities like r/nosurf and r/digitalmininalism to be (virtually) around other people trying to ditch the habit (Win 100 Irony Points If You Get Addicted To Browsing Them!)

• Physical interventions like this lockbox for your phone, or the extremely weird Pavlok wristband which can electrocute you for doomscrolling too much

• Books, books, books, so many books promising to help you out of zombie mode (here’s a good long list of some)

• Card decks like this very nicely-designed but also very expensive one from Mind Over Tech, with 50 different experiments to ‘take back control over tech’

• Methods like The 5D Method, by Gabriela Nguyen from APPstinence, an awesome anti-social media campaigner who I spoke to a couple of weeks ago

Here’s what we’ve got:

Smartphone Free Stickers, to nudge you away from your phone.

In a nutshell, it’s a set of free, open source sticker designs that you can print out and use around your home, office, school etc. to introduce mindfulness around phone usage.

⬇️ Download page one PDF

⬇️ Download page two PDF

Smartphone Free Stickers is designed to work on four levels:

1. Using the stickers: They’re under a Creative Commons licence — download them, print them, modify them, use them in any way other than commercially.

2. DIYing the stickers: If you’re like me, printing anything out is a once-a-year pain in the ass. No problem! Read about the different stickers below, and see if you want to make your own. A scrawl on a scrap of paper is all it takes.

3. Using the concepts: The stickers are optional. Have a think about whether any of the stickers’ norms would help you. Interested in no phones at the dinner table? In the bedroom? If it feels hard to set those norms, why?

4. Sharing the concepts: Maybe you’re unhappy with the pervasiveness of smartphones in your school, office, community centre, Apple Store1 etc. So — send this article to whoever’s in charge to start a conversation about making your environment a little friendlier.

Only one of these levels involves actually using the stickers directly, which is totally fine. What we think is great about these stickers is that they give you something to point at as you think through how to put smartphones in their place. The stickers are a tool to bring already-widespread ideas around limiting smartphone usage one step closer to the physical world.

We’re hoping the stickers prompt the question: why don’t we actually do this?

• Why don’t we designate a Phone Bucket for everyone to drop their phones in before meals?

• Why don’t we empower our kids to show us the red card if they catch us doomscrolling while they’re trying to tell us about their day at school?

• Why don’t we decide rooms in our homes, schools, offices where people stay away from their phones?

That’s why we think these stickers could change your life. We wouldn’t claim it’s 95% likely — but even if it’s more like 5%, we’d be thrilled.

The motivation

My friend and I launched this project inspired by Smartphone Free Childhood, a UK-based movement of parents working to solve the collective action problem of keeping kids off smartphones for longer, e.g. by pushing schools to implement smartphone free policies.

We wondered: what’s something we could make that could be useful to Smartphone Free Childhood?

The stickers

As we brainstormed on that question, we decided that 1) it would be great to do something in the real world instead of making yet another software tool, and 2) that we should start with something tiny that we can make quickly and put out there for feedback to see if it’s useful before doing too much work on it.

That led us pretty quickly to: stickers! They’re cheap, versatile, they change our physical environment, and they’re quick to make. So here are the stickers we came up with:

No Phone Zone: a sticker to set certain rooms or areas as places where no one should ever use their phone.

Eye To Eye Zone: No Phone Zone is a negative concept, defined by what it doesn’t want. Negative concepts are a little bit of a downer. So what do we want? Perhaps it’s more eye contact, hence the Eye To Eye Zone sticker.

Phone Bucket: Designate a container as your Phone Bucket — everyone agrees to put their phones into it before a communal activity.

Look Up: Does what it says on the tin.

Bedroom No Phone Zone: We’ve all heard the idea of leaving phones outside of the bedroom. So — try it out, with or without this sticker!

Q. What’s holding you back from keeping your phone outside of the bedroom? Would be interested to know in the comments.

Place Phone Here, Face Down: Leaving your phone face up means notifications can distract you. This sticker is for your desk, to remind you to place it face down.

Yellow Card, Red Card: Dreamed up by my friend, these two stickers let your kids tell you off if you’re distracted around them in a playful way.

And here are the links to download them again:

⬇️ Download page one PDF

⬇️ Download page two PDF

Thanks so much for reading! We’d love to hear from you (hi [at] louis [dot] work) if:

• You have feedback on the stickers or new sticker ideas

• You’d like the stickers in a different format

• You’d like to order printed versions of the stickers

• You’d like to design different versions of these stickers — we know these designs won’t be everyone’s cup of tea so we’re planning to add alternatives at SmartphoneFreeStickers.com

Many thanks to my friend who helped out with this project but prefers not to be named, making it seem like I made them up to look like I have friends. I didn’t. Anyway, thanks again, friend! You are so very real, and not at all imaginary!

Probably the biggest existential threat to humanity is people clicking on ads for things they can’t afford.

Let’s dig deeper into what happens in that catastrophic situation:

1. The advertiser’s money is wasted

2. The advertiser’s dataset is spoiled

If we take the completely uncontroversial starting assumption that anything that’s bad for advertisers is also bad for the entire human race, we can grasp how truly dangerous this behavior is.

To mitigate this X-risk, Attention is hosting the world’s first ever ad that checks the clicker’s income level (Guinness World Records verification still pending):

👉 Check out the ad on Attention’s homepage, here.

[Exit satire mode]

I’m excited about this. The Zeitfreit watch ad represents the first foray by Attention into the creative coding (👾-type) content I talk about here. As I mentioned in that article, I have lots of ideas for this type of content but they’re all extremely time-consuming.

Except for ads. They’re small enough that — with the help of AI coding tool Cursor + Claude 3.5 Sonnet — I can create a satirical ad in a day, even including an interactive aspect like this one.

Over the next few months, I hope to create 20-30 satirical ads riffing off the trash we’re subjected to every day across the internet — This exercise will make you look 20 years younger! The app all the CEOs use! Shop like a billionaire! — and rotate them across Attention’s homepage and articles.

It ain’t my first satirical ads rodeo — we used to make them for the print edition of Underground Magazine (a satirical magazine I co-founded in my early 20s, which I wrote about here). Here’s an example:

Hosting these made-up ads will bring an unexpected side benefit — burning all bridges with real-life advertisers who won’t want to be associated with us. That means Attention will go bust even faster and I can get back to my true passion, Microsoft Excel.

If you have an idea for a satirical ad, please leave a comment! Even the tiniest thought could spark something cool.

New homepage for approx. 5 seconds before I change it again

Yup, that’s basically all I came here to say. This week I navigated over to the Attention homepage, bumped up a few font sizes, dropped in some boxes, then put up my feet and gazed upon my creation like Michelangelo looking up at the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Enjoy it while it lasts, because I’ll probably change it all in the next few days. Not just out of a spirit of wanton destruction, but also because I have an idea: fill the homepage with clickable headlines of ideas that haven’t been written yet, and track which are clicked most to decide what to work on next.

That’ll also be nice because even if the links are vaporware-esque, the overall effect will be to make a homepage that showcases the full extent of what Attention intends to be in the world.

Miscellanous

Worth taking a look at Jabroni Capital, a tech newsletter written in the voice of an obnoxious VC. They launched a really neat joke-product this week, the exact kind of thing I’d love to make with Attention: Is Your CEO A Fraud?

It scans a LinkedIn profile and decides the probability that the person is heading down the Theranos/Juicero route. I’m too scared to submit myself.

Back with more soon, and please share this newsletter with Michelle Obama. I was going to say ‘with your family and friends’ but honestly, I’d prefer Michelle.

I’m back with a new Attention piece! Here it is:

Search continues for someone with an opinion on AI

The rationale

Wow, people sure like talking about AI. Don’t get me wrong: AI is part of my day job so I’m not exactly a stranger to having opinions on the technology (as seen on this blog, in fact).

But if you’re anything like me, sometimes the AI opining starts to feel a little overwhelming. Tech commentators, CEOs, politicians, activists, celebrities, doom-mongerers, accelerationists. Your mum and dad. Your brother and sister. Your 3-year old toddler. Your toddler’s 3-year old friend who just raised $120m from a16z for their AI customer service startup. The dozens of newly minted and acronymed AI centres and institutes.

And LinkedIn influencers. There is nothing wrong with making a living on LinkedIn talking about AI. But there are so many people doing it, and they can’t all be right, and maybe it would be nice if some of them could just follow Bo Burnham’s advice occasionally.

So the piece is my gentle riposte to the AI-hot-take-industrial complex.

The button

Another thing I did last week: spend countless hours turning the Attention masthead into a nice interactive button (inspired by this tutorial):

I hope you agree with me that this button is a total game changer. Previously, Attention was an upstart tech publication. Now, Attention is an upstart tech publication with a reasonably nice button. LET’S GOOOOOO!

The best part is, the story of the button is not over. I have plans to make the button animate and shrink when you scroll, a feature which will take an absurd amount of time to build, and which Attention’s 0 readers have been clamoring for since day one.

Relatedly, I hope to soon embark on an entire button-related project called The Best Subscribe Button In The Universe, where I deploy my carefully honed and very obsessive button-crafting skills in the service of getting people to sign up to this newsletter, throwing every design trick in the book at another reasonably nice button and promoting it as the best button that has ever existed.

The blockers

I’m getting back into my stride with writing, and even more importantly with posting what I write in various corners of the web — a tortuous but necessary step to find more readers.

It’s always hard to get momentum going once it’s gone. You go back to thinking that what you write is dumb, and to editing for perfection. You freeze before posting links to random subreddits, Slack channels, group chats. The good thing is that last year, I got into a good groove of this — so I know it’s doable, and sense that I’m heading back in that direction.

In that spirit, I’m going to abruptly end this edition of Directing Attention without bothering to finish the paragraph properly, to show that I can handle things not being perfec

tl;dr: here’s the first ever Attention article: Attention is in █████ mode

It’s official — 12 Challenges has rebranded to Directing Attention, which will tell the inside story as I build Attention into a media juggernaut, one which I hope to grow to the heights of Gawker or Vice.

For a longer explanation of why 12 Challenges has pivoted, go here. The short version is: I think the world needs a new publication that makes tech fun and makes fun of tech. That’s Attention’s mission.

This Substack is not that publication — Attention will live on its own site (more about that later). But this Substack is the best place to follow Attention: you’ll get the latest Attention articles directly into your inbox, as well as hang out with me behind-the-scenes as I try to make this thing work. Speaking of which:

The plan

What’s your plan with Attention, I hear precisely no one ask. Well, let me tell you!

Attention will feature three types of content:

🎯: Playful tech analysis and activism — make tech fun!

🤡: Satire ridiculing the tech world and its bigwigs — make fun of tech!

👾: Interactive mini-sites (‘creative coding’) — make fun tech!

A question I’ve been asking myself, as the sole writer and editor of Attention, is: how should I spend my extremely limited time to build an audience? To put it another way, where to start?

So I turned to my list of 225-and-counting Attention ideas, which I keep on Notion. I ranked every idea by how good it is (how much I think people will like it), and time (how long it would take to make).

What I found is that I have tons of nice 👾-type ideas (interactive mini-sites), but most of them could take ten days or even more to make. Feels like a risky investment. The 🎯-type ideas (playful tech analysis and activism) are very thoughtful and I’m excited for them, but they’re less likely to set the world on fire since the marketplace for tech analysis and activism is highly competitive, even if I think I have an edge through ‘playfulness’.

That leaves one clear path ahead, at least for the initial stages of Attention until I find more collaborators: 🤡. Writing tech satire takes less time than the other two categories, and I think I can make a bunch of pieces that people will really enjoy.

The first article

So, to the first ever piece of Attention content. I’ve been thinking that it would be fun to write a series of press releases as Attention itself, painting Attention as a startup dutifully going through the hype cycle and all the other self-congratulatory phases of a startup’s life.

The first press release, I figured, should be about stealth mode, which is a concept deployed by early-stage startup founders to tell themselves they are definitely CIA agents, not just insecure overachievers whose ideas and egos are too fragile to survive contact with reality. So here it is:

Attention is in █████ mode

The website

Open that link and you’ll see Attention’s website for the first time. There’s not much there — I’m coding it pixel by pixel. Why am I doing this, instead of using Ghost, Substack, Wordpress, or any other of thousands of tools to publish online?

The answer: full creative control. I want to publish articles that can look like absolutely anything (crucially, including 👾-type — interactive mini-sites). I’m using a format called MDX to do this — it’s like markdown, but it also allows embedding of React components. I was inspired to do this by the superb React developer Josh Comeau, whose blog I’ve enjoyed reading for a few years now (check out his beautiful About page).

Using MDX means I’ll be able to make an article look like a WhatsApp conversation, or an RPG, or add interactive charts, or animate the page on scrolling down, or use different fonts to parody anything I like. I’ll be able to surprise and delight readers using the full power of the building blocks of the web, HTML and JavaScript.

The status

I feel good. I’m finally publishing again after being blocked, I’ve launched the very first piece, I’ve developed a basic site. Small steps, but I’m happy that after months of dreaming things are moving!

Thanks so much for following along, and I’ll be back soon with more Attention content.

Attention will feature three types of content:

• Playful tech analysis and activism (make tech fun!)

• Satire ridiculing the tech world (make fun of tech!)

• And interactive mini-sites of the previous two (make fun tech!)

I’ve been thinking that this may sound a little abstract, so here, in no particular order, are a bunch of brilliant things that inspired me to make Attention — sort of like a mood board in link format:

1. This completely bonkers post about how to monetize a blog — by Modem

2. This historic magazine cover — from The Onion

3. This exploration of folk theories about how social media algorithms work — by Becca Ricks

4. This investigation into Twitter/X forcing competitor links to load more slowly — by The Markup

5. This sweeping look at how WhatsApp has taken over the world — by Rest of World

6. This interview with a Vietnamese grandmother who fights fake news — by The Markup

7. This campaign to uncover privacy abuses in products we use daily — by Mozilla Foundation

8. This campaign reminding us to pause before clicking dodgy links — Take9

9. This card deck to help you stop doomscrolling — by Mind over Tech

10. Life checklist — a game by Neal Agarwal

11. Spend Bill Gates’ money — another game by Neal Agarwal

12. The Password Game — yet another game by Neal Agarwal

13. This investigation into public Venmo data — by Hang Do Thi Duc

14. This street artist who (ab)uses official branding — Foka Wolf

15. This classic from the legendary internet cartoonist — by xkcd

16. This beautiful magazine about ordinary things — MacGuffin

17. Trust & Safety Tycoon: The Game — by Copia Gaming

18. This group of pissed off British campaigners who love putting tweets on billboards — Led by Donkeys

19. This stunning publication of visual essays — The Pudding

20. This long-established British satirical/investigative magazine — Private Eye

If you close your eyes, recall the three buckets of Attention content, and mentally squeeze all those examples into the buckets — that should give you some idea of what Attention is all about.

Finally, something by my younger self. In my mid-twenties, together with a team of people who also thought they were quite funny, I published Underground Magazine — a satirical paper like The Onion. We handed copies out for free to tens of thousands of London commuters, most of whom promptly deposited them into tens of thousands of London bins.

Little trace of Underground Magazine remains online, other than, for some reason, this Alamy stock photo of our 4th issue:

I’ll leave you with an Underground Magazine piece I found in the archive:

If you read the list above and think ‘Huh! I know something else that should be there!’, I’d absolutely love to hear about it, so please drop it in the comments. And I’ll be back soon with — hopefully — the first ever piece of Attention content!