Agree disabling entirely is a total cudgel and not a great long term solution, as it sets us up for the equivalent of crash diets or cold turkey substance use followed by almost inevitable relapses.

I think the root cause is that our digital environments do not provide adequate tools to manage and audit how we spend our attention. Tech favors 'offense' right now, not 'defense'.

The example of social sites and following is one that just about everyone faces. We see someone we like in the moment, we follow, and over time its death by a thousand papercuts. Could be substacks, podcasts, youtubers, whoever. Social sites are not incentivized to help us with this problem as reengagement drives revenue. It's laborious to go back and unsubscribe because it's a one-by-one process and often we want to keep these ideas somewhere in orbit.

I think the solution is invest in 'attention defense'. We need something on our side at the OS level that can audit what we're signed up for, let us get a big picture view of these, aggregate and filter them, make suggestions for what to continue to follow and to what degree, all packaged in a way that lets us retain our initiative. I think the enabling technology for this is language models, because they can sufficiently understand the content to compress and parse out the preferable.