Lead Children (Ołowiane dzieci) and the digital poison of attention
Originally published on Impl — Jaroslaw Michalik's newsletter on engineering, AI, and building software that lasts.
Industrial societies once treated lead poisoning as an unfortunate side effect of progress, until the harm became too visible to ignore. Attention engineering runs on a similar logic today — the manipulation is diffuse, the harm shows up slowly, and it's easy for the people building the systems to say it's not their department. When harm happens, "not our business" stops being a defensible position.