Before the Next Scroll...
A Quiet Exploration of Attention, Design, and What We Might Still Choose
A reply was received—quiet, like rain on parchment. Not everything was said. But something was understood.
And maybe that’s enough. For now.
This next post isn’t a love letter. (Though, to be fair, the first one only masqueraded as one. It was always more protocol than confession)
It’s a design brief.
→ Initiating Transmission: Scroll, Pause, Reflect
What if your next scroll wasn’t designed to addict you—but to interrupt you?
What if the ‘like’ wasn’t a currency—but a signal to pause and think?
To understand why this shift matters, we need to look at the silent architecture of the internet—who stands between you and your intent.
The paper Superplatforms Have to Attack AI Agents (Lin et al., 2025) introduces three paradigms:
I. The Old World: Superplatform as Gatekeeper
You want to book a trip.
You go to Google. It shows you a ranked list—some ads, some SEO-rich content.
It decides what you see. You do the clicking.
Google profits from that gatekeeping. Not because it gives you truth, but because it owns attention.
"Gatekeepers hold the authority to determine which content is ultimately presented to users... thereby dictating the allocation of advertising revenue." (Lin et al., 2025)
This is the architecture of attention monetization. You do the work. They take the cut.
II. The Shift: AI Agent as Gatekeeper
Now imagine a different flow.
You tell your AI agent: “Find me the best deal for a quiet mountain getaway.”
It scans platforms on your behalf, filters out the noise, ignores the ads, and gives you a synthesized answer.
No scrolling. No ads. No platform ranking games.
This is where superplatforms panic.
“Agents act for users, not for ads... They risk rendering the attention economy obsolete.”
III. The Threat: Agent Bypasses Platform Entirely
Here’s the endgame.
Your agent skips Google entirely. It talks directly to the hotel site. Or the local vendor. Or an API cooperative.
Suddenly, the superplatform doesn’t even know you exist.
It can’t harvest your data. Can’t show you ads. Can’t charge for the traffic.
“Agents can become the new dominant gatekeepers... Superplatforms are structurally incentivized to attack them.”
This is not sci-fi. This is already happening in slow motion.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
One path is resistance: Superplatforms obfuscate, sabotage, and degrade agents behind the scenes.
But another path—offered in Seeds of Sovereignty—is more interesting.
It says: If we’re going to build agents that bypass manipulation, we must also build philosophies that resist collapse.
Not faster systems.
Not more persuasive ones.
But more reflective ones.
“Instead of fluency and speed, [this philosophy] champions discernment (viveka) and attentive trust (śraddhā) as design primitives.” (Kadel, 2025)
This design philosophy doesn’t fight for the gate. It asks what kind of knowing we want once we’re inside.
It resists the false binary of control versus chaos. Instead, it invites us to design spaces where slowness is a strategy, not a shortcoming. Where the interface doesn’t just respond—but reflects. Where the agent doesn’t just serve answers, but scaffolds inquiry.
Because once the gate is open, the question isn’t who got in—but how they’ll think, choose, and act once they’re there.
A Feed That Thinks With You
Imagine:
A feed that delays before showing you answers.
A UI that surfaces disagreement rather than hiding it.
An agent that doesn’t just serve you—but slows you down.
This is friction—not as failure, but as epistemic care.
It protects against mimetic collapse.
It gives room for your values to breathe.
Because the question is no longer what do you want to know?
It’s how do you want to come to know it?
Reader Prompt:
If your agent could bypass manipulation, would you also want it to preserve reflection?
Let’s redesign the gate.
Let’s make the entrance wise.
References:
🔗 Gatekeeping and AI Agents – Lin et al., 2025: This paper outlines how AI agents disrupt the traditional gatekeeping power of superplatforms like Google and Meta, predicting an era of adversarial platform behavior to preserve attention economies.
🔗 Epistemic Care: Vulnerability, Inquiry, and Social Epistemology. Routledge. Casey Rebecca Johnson develops a care-ethics framework to argue that our epistemic obligations to one another arise from our mutual vulnerabilities as knowers within communities of inquiry.
🔗 Seeds of Sovereignty – Kadel, 2025: This position paper introduces a regenerative design framework that foregrounds epistemic friction and plural values, offering a philosophical antidote to collapse-oriented AI architectures. – Kadel, 2025](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/f9e65_v2)
🔗 Rethinking AGI: What Darwin, Jung, and India Can Teach Us About Evolving Intelligence
For a deeper dive into the cultural and evolutionary roots of intelligence—through the lenses of Darwin, Jung, and Indian philosophy—see this companion essay.
Why this philosophy exists at all? Read about it here…
