Time Theft
Aemula Writer Spotlight - 8.14.25
The internet contains an incomprehensible amount of information, which we spend trillions of hours collectively scrolling through each year. Yet, why does it feel as though our time spent online has divided and isolated us rather than lived up to the promises we hoped to achieve with such collaborative technology?
We have outsourced the role of content curation to black box algorithms that have been optimized to keep us engaged and continue scrolling. The average U.S. adult spends over 7 hours a day looking at screens, largely on mobile devices (3.5 hours) and scrolling social media (1.5 hours). However, most people underestimate the amount of time they spend online.
If these were meaningful interactions, we might be forming new connections and developing new ideas as we leverage our curiosity to explore what interests us. In reality, we are at the whim of social media corporations that farm our attention to sell ads. Our feeds are full of slop engineered for hacking engagement metrics. We walk away drained of our energy with little benefit to show for it.
However, we don’t have to accept this as the reality of our new digital age. Social media algorithms are relatively recent developments, and it is clear we have started down the wrong path. Fortunately, we can take back our attention by being more intentional in what we consume.
It is with this intentionality that Aemula confronts the problems that plague our media attention spans. Our article recommendation algorithm is open-source, human-readable, and freely explorable. We don’t use deceptive design to manipulate users and lock them into the platform. In fact, we don’t even store your email address.
Our focus is on supporting independent writers, providing impactful recommendations to readers, and maintaining full transparency so everyone can trust that our community-governed protocol is verifiably neutral and aligned with our mission.
You should not have to hand over control of your attention to corporate social networks. Aemula gives you back this control. Read without distraction, form your own opinions, and put down your phone when you’re done.
This week, we highlight writers who discuss how our current media systems waste our time and the negative consequences this has for society. We encourage you to explore their work and consider subscribing directly!
If you want to be a part of the new media ecosystem, subscriptions are now live on aemula.com! The first 5,000 paid subscribers will receive voting rights on Aemula at the launch of our governance protocol. As we grow our community, having a say in our protocol’s governance could be both fundamentally and financially valuable.
The Prism
Written by Gurwinder, a British-Indian author whose work has been featured in The Free Press (including the below post), Areo, Quillette, The Humanist, and The Sunday Express, and previously featured in our spotlight, “Evolving Landscape”.
“Sean Parker, Facebook’s founding president, said: “The thought process that went into building these applications … was all about: ‘How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’”
Parker and other tech executives employ “attention engineers” to design interfaces and algorithms that warp your sense of time. To understand how they do this, we must look to the history of casino floor design.”
Yascha Mounk
Written by Yascha Mounk, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Persuasion, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of five books, including The People versus Democracy, The Great Experiment (which was included on Barack Obama’s list of recommended books) and The Identity Trap (which was featured as one of the best books of 2023 in The Economist and the Financial Times, among others), previously featured in our spotlight, “Divergence”.
“It was easy to imagine that, in a world of costless communication, most people would choose to connect with people in faraway locations who are very different from them. Society would, the hope went, grow to be far more cosmopolitan: far more interested in the well-being of people unlike ourselves, and far less likely to prioritize those who share our group identities.
The truth, as we now know, turned out to be very different. Given the opportunity to communicate with anybody they wish, most people are spending their time on social media connecting with people they already know, with those who share their identities, or with those who share the exact same political views. The greater ease of communication was supposed to help the human species transcend its traditional boundaries and expand our collective horizons; instead, it has amplified our tribal instincts and turned every aspect of our politics and culture into a fevered battle between the in-group and the out-group”
The Signal and the Learning
Written by Mandy McLean, an education and AI researcher with experience across classrooms, exploring how technology, human development, and meaningful learning intersect in a time of rapid change.
“When my version of the world and yours no longer overlap much, it’s not just that we disagree on solutions, we often can’t agree on what the problem is.
That gap plays out in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Maybe it’s a tense family holiday where politics feels like a live wire. Maybe it’s noticing a neighbor’s yard sign and suddenly feeling less comfortable making small talk. Research from the Pew Research Center shows that partisanship in the U.S. has deepened dramatically over the past two decades, with fewer people holding mixed political views and more expressing highly negative opinions of the other side.”
Are you writing on Substack? You can easily set up automatic cross-posting with Aemula to instantly:
Increase your earnings
Expand your audience
Verifiably own your work
Plus, you will have opportunities to access community resources and grants to support the content you want to create!
Easily link your Substack to your Aemula account using this link or send a quick email to writers@aemula.com to get started!
Cross-posting comes with no costs, no obligations, and you can stop at any time.
The Aemula platform is live at aemula.com! Claim your 1-month free trial today! Learn more here!
If you want to support any of the writers we spotlight in our Substack, we highly encourage you to subscribe to their individual publications.
If you want to support independent journalism more broadly, start a subscription on Aemula!
To stay up to speed on platform updates and the writers we are adding to our community, Follow us on X or subscribe to our Substack!
Any writers you want to see featured here? Send them our way! We are always searching for great new publications.
