The Internet Doesn't Want Your Attention. It Wants Your Effort.
The ease of clicking flips physical doing into digital being as a sufficient basis for reward.
This is an excerpt from Andrey Mir’s The Digital Reversal. Thread-Saga of Media Evolution (2025). The future of the book is the blurb, said Marshall McLuhan. As the future arrives, this short book is written in tweets—each paragraph under 280 characters, 1,295 in total, which makes it a reversal of the treatise, the first tweetise in history. Structured in thread-chapters, the book explores and explains what media evolution has done to us.
Media keep doing more of our physical and mental work—faster and better—freeing up more of our time, so that we can spend that time on consuming and developing media even more.
It’s a form of symbiosis. As McLuhan said, humans become “the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world.”1 Media cater to user needs to make users develop media. In exchange for developing them, media offer us the “nectar” of conveniences of all sorts.
Every time we click a link, react to a story, or share it, we help the internet evolve, like bees pollinating flowers. Every click improves content relevance. Our day-and-night labor of clicks enhances the internet’s convenience for us—and strengthens its power over us.
This labor changes us. Digital media alter not only habits but also our brains. Even idle scrolling demands tons of micro-decisions. To like or not to like? Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer stupid claims or shatter them? To click, or not to click: that is the question.
This labor is not assigned by a boss. Yet merely being online makes users work for digital capitalism—without any explicit consent, but also without significant effort. The click decisions are tiny and require no physical strain. We do not notice how they change us.
The ease of clicking erodes the need for choice deliberation “in favour of trial and error,” as Michel Desmurget2 noted. In the physical world, choices have consequences, so you need to think before acting. In digital, you just click and see—if you don’t like it, click again.
Trial-and-error digital interaction takes seconds and usually has no consequences. The ease of the click rewires the brain’s decision-making circuits. Why think hard if you can just try and see? Quick, repeated attempts push us to seek solutions through clicking, not thinking.
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For making micro-decisions, clicks reward the brain with hormonal pleasures linked to curiosity and socialization, both crucial for the survival of social animals: curiosity helps in finding food and territory, while socialization ensures propagation and protection.
Digital media have “extended” these hormonal faculties. To get more of our time and engagement, the internet has appropriated our hormonal stimuli by offering so much material for curiosity and so many opportunities for socialization that we would never have found offline.
When a user sees a reaction from others, the brain gets a hit of dopamine—a neurotransmitter that induces pleasure to reward certain behaviors. Studies show that the brain’s reaction to a like is similar to seeing a picture of loved ones or winning a small amount in the lottery.
The internet offers a flow of such hormonal micro-stimuli for our activity. The pleasure received as a reward for digital curiosity and socialization is tiny and barely noticeable, yet enough to resettle humankind online.
Often, it’s not even pleasure itself but the hope of feeling it again when someone reacts. We want to get new likes, resembling a gambler who keeps pulling the handle of a slot machine in hope of the next reward. And the “slot machine” keeps rewarding, little by little.
“We seek high numbers of likes and ‘follows’ on social platforms because these metrics are the only way we have of gauging our social acceptance,” said Douglas Rushkoff. “We can’t know if we are truly loved by a few; we can only know if we got liked by many.”3
Tiny but instant rewards for online activity drive user engagement for platforms’ profit. Practiced for many hours a day, this behavior forms a neuro-disposition adjusted to certain interactions with the world. The brain rewires itself, seeking instant rewards for little effort.
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In the physical world, the brain was conditioned to delayed rewards that required greater effort. Delayed gratification was well deserved and provided stronger pleasure. Hormonal rewards from food, sex, curiosity, socialization, and creativity brought vivid, distinct excitement.
The link between effort and reward was often multilayered. If sex required building relationships, it could also bring love and the comfort of family life. Reading Dostoyevsky took mental effort but could deliver intellectual epiphany and the benefits of social status.
Unlike rewards in the physical world, the reward for a click is as trifling as the effort expended. The low quality incites a huge demand for quantity: sensing a hint of pleasure but never satiation, people spend more and more time online—to the benefit of media evolution.
The paucity of the click’s reward pulls users into more click mining, exhausting them physically and emotionally. More importantly, as the brain adjusts to digital rewards, it loses abilities needed in the “slow” physical world that rewards significant, persistent effort.
Millions get used to choosing smaller instant rewards over larger delayed gratification—a typical sign of a self-control deficit. Combined with constant but unsatisfying hits of micro-pleasure, this leads to a growing attachment to its source—what we call digital addiction.
Those avoiding the risk of addiction do not escape the larger risk of critical detachment from physical reality. Adapting to the digital world alters the effort–reward circuitry, diminishing endurance, diligence, and resilience required to succeed in the physical world.
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Instant rewards for little effort decrease cognitive capacity for perseverance, contributing to the so-called delayed adulthood of “snowflakes.” They have less or later sex, start fewer families, drive fewer cars, leave parents later (if at all)—partly due to the click effect.
Digital kids are not lazy or spoiled. They actually work hard—but they work for media evolution. The more time they spend online, the less they are attuned to physical reality. This is all a media effect, not a failure of character. That’s why parents’ media literacy is crucial.4
Shrinking attention span, weakened focus, and the loss of long reading are cognitive effects of the brain adapting to the click’s instant reward. At a social level, the click changes human worth. The physical world rewarded effort; the digital world—mere presence.
The moral laws of the physical world entailed a reward for what one does. The moral laws of the digital world entail a reward for what one is—basically, for identifying oneself to others and algorithms. The click flips physical doing into digital being as the ground for reward.
Indicating presence (which often takes just a click) is already sufficient “effort” to maintain engagement—the internet’s main asset. This is why digital society is refocusing to reward the effort of presence. Digital platforms need it as plants need the mere presence of bees.
In digital capitalism, users’ clicking is indeed their labor. The click transforms a user’s existence into presence and produces engagement that, in the form of data, is expropriated and commodified by the platforms. The first morning click is a clock-in for user-workers.
Thanks to digital media, the difference between effort and presence is fading. An individual’s mere existence is seen as an effort that deserves a reward. The click’s instant reward changes moral principles, extending its effect beyond digital platforms to society as a whole.
If mere presence grows into a legitimate claim for reward, recognition is demanded (or guilt assigned) not for merit but for identity, fueling identity politics. I click, therefore I am. This is not a social deviation; it is the way a society built on digital media must be.
Since clicks are so easy to make, the exposure of people’s presence to each other becomes enormous. The reward of recognition, promised by a click, gets lost in the overwhelming noise of all users requesting affirmation from one another. Overcoming the noise leads to more noise.
In the physical world, people competed through the intensity of effort; in the digital world, they compete through the intensity of self-identification. Extreme views, rage, and polarization grow in a society that rewards the intensity of self-identification more than effort.
Media evolution—from the stone axe to the remote control (a precursor to the click)—has always lured humans by reducing the effort needed to receive rewards. With the click, the reduction of effort has reached its limit and reversed effort into presence.
As media evolution reaches digital speed, it becomes all the more obvious that “media are extensions of humans” reverses into “humans are extensions of media.” We pollinate the lawns and meadows of the digital ecosystem with every smartphone bought and every click made.
SEE OTHER BOOKS BY ANDREY MIR:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
McLuhan, Marshall. (1994 [1964]). Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man.
Desmurget, Michel. (2023). Screen Damage. P. 22.
Rushkoff, Douglas. (2019). Team Human. P. 66
I covered the rules of media literacy for parents in the chapter “Eight theses on digital media literacy. A manifesto of cooperation with the inevitable” in: Mir, Andrey, (2024). The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology.
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clicking in at the clock factory
Interesting article. I liked the analogy of the bees pollinating plants. I wonder how that analogy interacts with dead internet theory and the proliferation of AI slop content.