Sartre thought of the atomic bomb, ironically, as he watched the anniversary celebrations marking the liberation of Paris. For Sartre, the atomic bomb represents "the negation of man... above all because it makes the most human qualities—courage, patience, intelligence, the spirit of initiative—vain and ineffectual." What he saw and celebrated was the fight against these negations, a resistance "against the blind powers of the machine," even when "we had been shown often enough that we could do nothing against their machine guns and tanks."
Today, a different bomb is being assembled openly(!), designed not for physical but cognitive destruction. It doesn't vaporize cities; it atomizes attention, fragments thought, and colonizes desire. Where Sartre's generation faced tanks with bottles of gasoline, we face algorithms with... what exactly?
Bernard Stiegler named this phenomenon the "proletarianization" of our cognitive and affective lives. When thoughts arrive pre-formatted and desires pre-selected, when the boundary between authentic cognition and algorithmic suggestion dissolves, we become proletarians, lacking ownership over the means and products of our thought.
How do we continue to test and celebrate the "naked power of man," against forces threatening human autonomy—particularly our attention sovereignty; our capacity to attend deeply, obsess authentically, and exercise agency without algorithmic permission?
Attention Is All You Need, for humans, too.
When human autonomy is at risk on a cognitive level, it comes down to a simple questions: Can we govern our next 24 hours as we intend? Do I own my attention? Can I sustain my focus? Do I possess the autonomy to exercise cognitive power?
Ironically, the seminal paper that excelerated recent AI developement was titled "Attention Is All You Need." Transformer models suggested in this paper uses attentiion mechanism to dynamically focus on relevant parts of input, understanding complex relationships we increasingly cannot. Machines are advancing by learning where exactly to pay attention, and now they're learning to capture ours.
This crisis has been diagnosed from multiple perspectives:
- Herbert Simon called it a "poverty of attention".
- William James referred to it as the "scatterbrained state". (I need a t-shirt 'scatterbrained')
- Even the surge in adult ADHD diagnoses. "Can you pay attention?" is transforming from instruction to clinical challenge.
As a young developer building AI models at this pivotal moment, I bear a responsibility to create tools that guard and enhance human (and broader ecological) autonomy rather than erode it. Attention is the primary battlefield.
So I built what I needed: a jury-rigged tool to reclaim the first attention of each day.
AOA: Attention-Obsession-Agency
AOA is a simple web app presenting three daily questions:
- Where is your attention today?
- Are you obsessed with it?
- What acts of agency are you taking for it?
AOA helps you proactively set today's attention, check whether it aligns with your long-term obsessions, and reminds of your innate capacity to exercise agency (even when it’s not suggested by the algorithm or guaranteed with a logical optimization).
/Screenshot2 of dashboard showing my responses for the last 30 days
- Make your own AOA Page Here: github repo link
Attention
William James stated: "My experience is what I agree to attend to."
The simplest form of regaining autonomy; intentionally declaring one’s attention at the beginning of the day—ideally before being bombarded by contents and before the ChatGPT tab.
This isn't meditation or mindfulness—it's more fundamental. It's the athletic practice of cognitive sovereignty, performed before the day's first algorithm intervenes. Answering to ‘Where is your attention today?’—is a single, deliberate repetition, like isolating a muscle and stimulating it with repetitive movements in pilates.
Personally, I have set this page as my ‘home page’ that opens the first by default when I create a new tab. And thanks to a habit to close my laptop with a newly opened tab for privacy, I was able to first land on this page first the next morning.
Obsession
The next question--Are you obsessed with it?--is advocating for obsession as a form of deep personal inquiry that must be protected by social solidarity. Something so personal that it is deemed as an obsession with an irrational(Dionysian) degree of focus. The "social solidarity" I speak of, is a community that "allows and celebrates obsession" rather than demanding conformity. It provides the psychological safety needed for individuals to engage with their Dionysian energy productively.
I believe this is particularly important at this moment where we have to transition from the 20th century-selves who were trained for maximum productivity, corporate ladder, hacking and optimizing for systemized meritocracy. The future to come demands humans to retrieve and embrace our dionysian nature, somewhat irrational, chaotic and full of unexpected madness, which cannot be and shall not be replicated or automated by machines.
Sustainable creativity—which unlocks more humane side of us—requires both the Dionysian fire of individual obsession and the Apollonian embrace of a caring, supportive community. I am rejecting a system that forces the passionate individual into isolation and instead proposing one where the community is the crucible that holds and shapes the creative energy.
In our age of AI-generated adequacy, obsession becomes resistance. While machines optimize for the probable, human creativity springs from the obsessive pursuit of the improbable—what Nietzsche called the Dionysian fire that no algorithm can replicate.
Thus, "Are you obsessed with it?” can be translated into : Is the Dionysian fire present? Is this attention you set for today something for the long term? or is it just something you have to do or experimenting for now? (it is both okay, sometimes one have to do something else, but it will flag if/when you find the obsession or if you are spending enough time on it etc)
Agency
The third question, "What acts of Agency are you taking for it today?"
Every act of agency is a statement that declares, "I can put myself in the position of power before the approval of AI(algorithms) or systematically proven ways, and this is the (small, executable) action I will take today”
This question transforms Nietzsche's Will to Power from philosophical concept to morning practice. It’s a reminder that we have the capacity to impose one's interpretation and will(intention, power) upon the world.
It is a daily command to: Actualize your Will to Power by executing a strategic action derived from your future vision. It rejects Borgmann's passive device paradigm by making you the primary cause, the engine, of the change one wishes to see.
And yes, it does share a base with the more recent version of 'agency' is often discussed in the context of 'high agency' in the tech/entreprenurial world, first mentioned by Eric Weinstein, explained here.
Conclusion
The rise of generative AI demands a new discipline in human autonomy: Attention Sovereignty. Even more so when AI generated contents are churning our digital feeds into a 20-second blur of everything and nothing and the instant delivery of beautifully bullet-pointed, source-cited ideas are tempting us to outsource our thinking.
Builders and creators are co-experiencing the feeling of working with a breadcrumbs of focus, trying to build something, and falling back to a pile of failed desperate, lonely attempts of meaning making. How can we expect to exercise our minds when we've forgotten the feeling of deep, sustained thought? When we don’t have the tools to grab it, nor the system to reward it?
But "just log off" is like "just eat less" of our era: technically correct, practically useless. We need new tools and digital environments for sovereign thought. Private rituals, not public performances. Instruments for cognitive athletics, not passive consumption on autopilot.
Sartre reminded us of what we are truly celebrating, and should continue to defend for: our true strength as human beings asserting their agency despite overwhelming odds. AOA is my small, the bottle of gasoline type of, yet deliberate act of resistance against a tank. It is also a declaration of my attention and obsession: build for cognitive sovereignty, guarding human creativity, and making tools for conviviality.
So, Are you, or Can you pay attention?
Check out the repo and make your own AOA check in page to start your day with three questions: here
links to the related concepts(great reads, imo!)
- Jean-Paul Sartre "Is it not still our task today to defend the human, without great illusions and without too much hope, before the young and slightly inhuman forces which have just won victory?" THE LIBERATION OF PARIS: AN APOCALYPTIC WEEK, p.117
- Bernard Stiegler For a New Critique of Political Economy(2010) and The Proletarianization of Sensibility. Translated by Arne De Boever(2017)
- Herbert Simon "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World." In Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, edited by Martin Greenberger, 37–72
- William James "Every one knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.,...,a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.The Principles of Psychology(1890)
- Nietzsche's Will to Power... so grand I do not know which one to cite. Ask AI?
- Albert Borgmann "We feel uneasiness about our passivity and guilt and sorrow at the loss of our traditions or alternatives" Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry(1984)