Summary
You should have a safe place on the internet where no one can steal your attention, especially when it comes to learning.
On my neighborhood walk today I passed a parked car with a Washington, DC license plate. The slogan printed in navy blue along the bottom of the bright white plate read “NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION”.
That phrase is from when roads were dirt paths and “on line” meant drying the laundry. But what if you drove through the internet with it now?
Online, folks make money off trying to get us to buy something by tricking our eyeballs and derailing our brains without our consent. If you scrolled down the internet freeway, it would be as if every fifth car wasn’t a car at all but one of those swaying blow-up noodle men standing in the middle of your lane. “Stop doing that and pay attention to this now!” it would say. Of course, you already are paying attention to it instead of what you were doing because of the eye-mind connection. But the worst part? You never had a say.
It tricked you.
But it’s not really a trick, is it? Tricks are for cards. This? This was an ambush.
Reading an article, scrolling a feed, or (gasp!) trying to actually learn something online is fraught with ambushes. You know what you want to do. You hone your focus. But then some random distraction reaches in and snips the thread of your focus. And it didn’t interrupt for you. Oh no. It cut in line just to make a fraction of a cent off an ad. Or to sell you jeans that won’t give you away as a Millennial. Or to tell you what weird thing Burger King’s doing with chicken now.
You came to learn but got ambushed by algorithmic salesmen.
The alternative to this experience is high-quality media you have to pay a la carte to get.
Say you’re reading the New York Times article your friends thread keeps talking about. You found a moment without distractions and you’re going to read it this time. You really are! But two paragraphs in you hit a paywall. You agree that the New York Times is worth paying for, but you just want to read this one article. You don’t need an annual subscription. If it took this long to get around to one article, what are the odds you’d get $25/month of value out of yet another subscription?
You found your focus but hit a toll road. Everyone resents a toll road.
The modern internet has come to feel like taxation without representation. Point your attention at something and someone will steal it.
Human minds deserve to focus. It shouldn’t be impossible to focus online.
No one should be allowed to steal your attention from you. The internet should be humanity’s greatest achievement in public works, not potholed streets littered with roadblocks and petty greed.
We’ve come to believe a few things over the years working on Pathwright. We believe learning should be clear, designable and uninterrupted. We think you should have a safe place on the internet for taking those steps. Somewhere where you run the show, with nothing else competing for your attention or the attention of anyone you invite there.
We built Pathwright to be that safe place. If you haven’t already, you can try it for free. Design whatever kind of path you want in a space of your own. No goons, no tricksters, no attention taxation. Just open road ahead.
