Introduction
The subway car is in motion. A dark tunnel rushes by the window. A man sits with an open book in his right hand and his left hand in his pocket. Three minutes have passed on the same page. His left hand slowly emerges from his pocket. He grasps his phone. The screen lights up. A finger swipes, bypassing the lock screen. No notifications yet. Still, the finger keeps swiping. He taps the Instagram icon. The screen refreshes. Nothing appears. The man lifts his head. For a moment, he realizes what he’s doing. Then he looks down again. The book remains on the same page. This is not a story; it is a diagnosis revealing the silent collapse of attention. Not a personal failure, but the result of a design.
On average, we touch our phones 2,617 times a day. This figure comes from a 2017 study by Dscout. One day has 24 hours, or 1,440 minutes. These touches amount to nearly two per minute—more frequent than a breath. This is not a habit; it is a physiology. The biomechanics of behavior. Muscle memory of the fingers has overtaken the mind. Will has become a myth. Attention has ceased to be a personal resource; it has transformed into an externally governed input.
The counterargument is simple yet ruthless: The phone is a tool. You are the one using it. If you can’t control it, that is your weakness. The essence of neoliberal morality lies here. Everything is reduced to the individual. The system becomes invisible. The distractions of attention are your own choices. This argument seems logical on the surface, like a fisherman telling the fish caught on his line, “You came here.” Did the fish come of its own free will? Or did it respond to the bait’s design, the position of the hook? When we pose the question this way, the argument of weakness crumbles. Because what we call choice is a selection made within a prearranged menu. Who wrote the menu?
Thus, our daily attention distractions stem not from personal weakness but from the intentional design of digital environments. There is no need to enter a lab to confirm this claim; just look at the subway car. In other words, all those people are in the same position: heads slightly bowed, hands holding glowing rectangles. This is not a coincidence; this is synchronization. A collective response to the same design principles. What Byung-Chul Han calls “psychopolitics” is precisely this. The disciplinary society exerts pressure from the outside. Others watch you. The performance society exerts pressure from within. You watch yourself. The constant urge to produce, participate, consume. Every “swipe” on the phone is a small affirmation of this internal surveillance. You think you are free, yet you voluntarily reproduce your own slavery.
The fundamental contradiction of the digital age lies here. In moments when we believe we are making free choices, we are actually responding to systems optimized by behavioral psychology. This is not a synthesis;…