Folks, just piping up to say I hosted a documentary series from China, India and Indonesia for Channel News Asia 🎬
This was my first whirl as a presenter so be gentle 🙏 I worked with a world-class crew, had a lot of fun & ate way too much Sichuan spice🔥
Episodes 🔗 in 🧵👇
Honored to receive the Gold Award for Best Emerging News Provider at the World Association of News Publishers Digital Media Awards South Asia 2026. ✨
A proud milestone for Spot On. We hold power to account!
Follow us for more accountability driven stories. 🙌
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🦔 A group of Princeton researchers is calling Big Tech's extraction of human attention "human fracking." The analogy: just as oil companies pump high-pressure chemicals into the ground to force out petroleum, tech companies pump endless streams of addictive content into our faces to force out attention, which they collect and sell.
70% of the world's population now has a smartphone. Globally, people spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens. Among young people in wealthy countries, the number is higher. The essay argues this is "a world-spanning land-grab into human consciousness, which big tech is treating as a vast, unclaimed territory, ripe for sacking and empire."
The authors point out that environmental politics didn't exist in 1950. By 1970 it was a global force. They argue a similar shift is coming for attention. People across the political spectrum, left and right, all agree something is wrong with a world where everyone scrolls endlessly through algorithmic feeds while trillion-dollar corporations deploy military-grade technology to keep children hooked.
My Take
The fracking metaphor captures the extraction mindset. Oil frackers don't care what happens to the land after they've pulled out the oil. Tech companies don't care what happens to your attention span after they've monetized it. The externalities get dumped on individuals and society while the profits flow to shareholders.
This connects to everything I've been posting. AI is supposed to deliver productivity gains and free up human time. Instead, the same companies are designing systems to capture as much of that time as possible. The product isn't AI. The product is us. Our attention is being fracked so that someone else can sell it. And just like with oil, we won't fully understand the damage until the landscape is already ruined.
Hedgie🤗
📣 Save the date - 22 November 2025
At a time when division and hate threaten India’s democratic fabric, our community is coming together to reimagine the India we believe in.
🎟️ Learn more about our 'Are You India' event and get your ticket with the link below 👇🏽
https://t.co/SR8bev92RS
Digital Media Shakers highlights bold voices shaping public interest and independent media. Up next: Sruthi Gottipati, journalist turned founder of Spot On, a video-first, social-native platform delivering news from India in 60 seconds or less. https://t.co/De1tgziKQX
Interview of me as a "digital media shaker" 💃
& how video-first, social-native storytelling can serve public-interest journalism
aka sneaking veggies into junk food 🙊
https://t.co/De1tgzid1p
“Journalists are having to act more like creators to disseminate the news effectively, and creators are increasingly covering news topics – and reaching a massive audience doing so.” My interview with @NewspaperWorld https://t.co/3fNRccKDle @Spotnews_media
India has never needed public interest journalism more.
And young Indians have never been further from it.
On #WorldPressFreedomDay, we’re fixing that.
Meet Spot On 🧵👇
“There is so much irony in it,” said Derk Sauer, founder of the Moscow Times. “Putin has been trying to kill independent media for God knows how many years now. Ironically the country that has this free speech is now about to give [it] the death blow.”
Folks, just piping up to say I hosted a documentary series from China, India and Indonesia for Channel News Asia 🎬
This was my first whirl as a presenter so be gentle 🙏 I worked with a world-class crew, had a lot of fun & ate way too much Sichuan spice🔥
Episodes 🔗 in 🧵👇
The owner of the Los Angeles Times, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, recently blocked an editorial weighing in on President-elect Trump’s cabinet picks. It was one in a string of his recent actions that have concerned many staff members at the newspaper. https://t.co/anN3plBL6z
We don't have an Albany reporter, we don't have a metro editor -- but the brain trust at Alden Global Capital saw fit to spend money on a "content intelligence program" whose artificial intelligence might be in the running for the worst editor we've ever had.
Got to love the news biz. @sarafischer asked tough and important Qs to CEOs (@meredith_levien@BLPeng Mark Thomson) of some of the biggest media companies in the Western world and they all gamely answered. Which other industry at #canneslions is so blunt and transparent?