Attenspiration
Stuff other people made, that made me want to make Attention
Last week I announced that I’m starting a new publication, Attention, to make tech fun and make fun of tech.
Attention will feature three types of content:
Playful tech analysis and activism (make tech fun!)
Satire ridiculing the tech world (make fun of tech!)
And interactive mini-sites of the previous two (make fun tech!)
I’ve been thinking that this may sound a little abstract, so here, in no particular order, are a bunch of brilliant things that inspired me to make Attention — sort of like a mood board in link format:
This completely bonkers post about how to monetize a blog — by Modem
This historic magazine cover — from The Onion
This exploration of folk theories about how social media algorithms work — by Becca Ricks
This investigation into Twitter/X forcing competitor links to load more slowly — by The Markup
This sweeping look at how WhatsApp has taken over the world — by Rest of World
This interview with a Vietnamese grandmother who fights fake news — by The Markup
This campaign to uncover privacy abuses in products we use daily — by Mozilla Foundation
This campaign reminding us to pause before clicking dodgy links — Take9
This card deck to help you stop doomscrolling — by Mind over Tech
Life checklist — a game by Neal Agarwal
Spend Bill Gates’ money — another game by Neal Agarwal
The Password Game — yet another game by Neal Agarwal
This investigation into public Venmo data — by Hang Do Thi Duc
This street artist who (ab)uses official branding — Foka Wolf
This classic from the legendary internet cartoonist — by xkcd
This beautiful magazine about ordinary things — MacGuffin
Trust & Safety Tycoon: The Game — by Copia Gaming
This group of pissed off British campaigners who love putting tweets on billboards — Led by Donkeys
This stunning publication of visual essays — The Pudding
This long-established British satirical/investigative magazine — Private Eye
If you close your eyes, recall the three buckets of Attention content, and mentally squeeze all those examples into the buckets — that should give you some idea of what Attention is all about.
Finally, something by my younger self. In my mid-twenties, together with a team of people who also thought they were quite funny, I published Underground Magazine — a satirical paper like The Onion. We handed copies out for free to tens of thousands of London commuters, most of whom promptly deposited them into tens of thousands of London bins.
Little trace of Underground Magazine remains online, other than, for some reason, this Alamy stock photo of our 4th issue:
I’ll leave you with an Underground Magazine piece I found in the archive:
If you read the list above and think ‘Huh! I know something else that should be there!’, I’d absolutely love to hear about it, so please drop it in the comments. And I’ll be back soon with — hopefully — the first ever piece of Attention content!