Exclusive: Number of times AI lies, ignores instructions and pursues goals in harmful ways almost doubles in July
Incidents of AIs escaping users’ control to lie, ignore instructions and pursue goals in harmful ways have hit a new high, according to research that also suggests the severity of deception and misalignment is worsening.
Analysis of real-world loss of control incidents involving AI models flagged by businesses and individuals almost doubled in July compared with June, with more than 300 cases in the month, according to the Loss of Control Observatory, which monitors reports made by AI users on the social media platform X.
Planning delays and slow 5G upgrades could leave the UK unable to cope with a surge in AI-related traffic
The UK risks becoming a laggard in the global AI race as crucial telecoms upgrades to harness the technology fall behind rival nations, according to senior industry executives.
Five-day showcase reveals leaps Beijing has made in humanoid tech, but also its limitations as US rivals come up from the rear
With exploding pelvises, enough comic pratfalls for a Buster Keaton show reel and the odd moment of ruthless violence, the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing gripped the world this week with an unsettling mixture of hilarity, trepidation and relief.
The five-day showcase staked out China’s claim to undisputed leadership in humanoid robotics as android martial artists landed knockout roundhouse kicks and robot teams marched into the arena heralded by flag-waving captains astride giant robotic dogs. The games’ blue-riband event, the 100m, did not disappoint when the robot-sprinters ran quicker than Usain Bolt before slamming mindlessly into a padded wall in a blaze of sparks, flames and flying mechanical limbs.
Those who said Meta harms children struck a blow, but the ability of big tech to gouge profits and cause harm is barely diminished. That’s the battle to come
Follow the money. If you want to know how the tech giant Meta really feels about the $18bn it agreed to fork out to end a landmark lawsuit against it – an outcome widely hailed as a victory for campaigners – just look at its share price. It didn’t go down when word came on Wednesday that Meta had settled with the 29 US states that had argued that the company’s Facebook and Instagram platforms harmed children. On the contrary, Meta stock went up, initially surging by 5%, before levelling out at a gain of just over 1.25%. There could be no clearer proof that the money men reckon Meta dodged a bullet.
To be sure, there was plenty to hearten those who have long believed that social media damages teenagers especially, whether by exposing them to content they shouldn’t see or by sapping their self-esteem, offering them filters that show how much prettier they would look if they had cosmetic surgery or giving them a metric of their popularity – and unpopularity – in the form of a running tally of “likes” and views.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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A woman examines goods in a warehouse damaged by a Russian drone attack, in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine, on August 19, 2026. | Dmytro Smolienko, Ukrinform/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Imagine this: Two countries are at war. Country X sends a drone into a major industrial city in Country Y, aiming to take out two propane tanks. A routine sequence. But this time, the drone never reaches its targets. Instead, Country X’s drone accidentally strikes a wall nearby, explodes, and kills three young civilians.
When Country Y eventually retrieves the drone’s remnants for intel, it finds an AI supercomputer inside that reveals something unsettling. Instead of a human deciding what to strike — the AI did.
Key takeaways
A Russian AI-enabled drone reportedly selected its own target in Ukraine, killing three civilians — an ominous case of machines making lethal choices without direct human intervention.
The global debate over autonomous weapons has narrowed to two competing frameworks: “meaningful human control,” which pushes for human intervention in lethal decisions, and the Pentagon’s more flexible “appropriate human judgment.”
OpenAI has adopted the Pentagon’s language, accepting a standard that does not require a person to decide every lethal action and leaves its practical limits to future, case-by-case military applications.
The truth is, you don’t have to imagine this scene — it just happened. For the first time in the Russia-Ukraine war, as reported recently in the New York Times, three Ukrainian civilians were killed by a Russian drone, developed, designed and released by humans, that, in the end, selected its target autonomously. And this new reality is shaping up to be the future of warfare.
That’s because a number of countries, including those with the world’s most consequential militaries, are rejecting the idea that human beings need always be in control of weapons in war.
Instead, as new autonomous weapons technologies become more capable and existing international legal frameworks struggle to keep up, some countries are embracing a more expansive view of human responsibility: that people can exercise enough control not by approving each strike, but by designing, testing, and setting the rules under which a given weapon operates.
This shift has produced one of the most consequential policy debates of today. And ultimately, human dominion over “killer robots” — as autonomous weapons are colloquially called — could come down to a battle between two three-word phrases: “meaningful human control” versus “appropriate human judgment.”
A high-stakes semantic battle
In the early 2010s, “meaningful human control” emerged as an initial framework in the first international discussions on regulating an acceptable level of human involvement (or lack thereof) in deploying autonomous weapons. While the term quickly became an initial organizing principle among many states within these debates, it also drew immediate opposition from several others, such as the US and Russia.
“The problem is what does [meaningful human control] mean?” said Lena Trabucco, an expert on AI and human control and a non-residential fellow at the Stockton Center for International Law at the Naval War College. “And what makes something meaningful versus not meaningful human control?” There was both a lack of consensus about what “meaningful” meant and what “control” meant, she said. But the problems went beyond simple semantic ambiguity. “Getting a whole bunch of countries to agree on a standard for what ‘meaningful control’ is,” Trabucco said, became “a near impossible task.”
Ultimately, while an exact definition of meaningful human control never totally solidified, the term became intelligible enough to facilitate continued international dialogue on how to police autonomous weapons. As Trabucco explained, “We all kind of understood what we were trying to grasp with the idea of meaningful human control, even if we didn’t agree on a kind of standard for what is ‘meaningful’ or what ‘control’ exactly means.”
Brad Boyd, retired colonel and senior military fellow at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, said that in this international context, “meaningful control” came to be understood as human involvement at the exact moment a given weapon is fired. However, from the US perspective, that consensus definition still left a number of problems unresolved.
One of the most important holes in the definition was the issue of timing. “The release of a weapon could theoretically be minutes, hours, days, weeks ahead of when the weapon actually strikes the target,” Boyd explained. For example, a drone can be released to sweep a designated area and remain airborne for hours, searching for anything that matches its given target criteria. Seconds, minutes, or hours might pass between the moment a person launches the drone and when the machine finds and fires upon a target.
“This expansion of the timeline became very difficult for the construct of ‘meaningful human control’ to actually seem like it was doing what people wanted it to,” Boyd said. The tension between certain technical or engineering problems and the policy language preferred by international forums created, from the US perspective, insurmountable obstacles to making meaningful human control a truly practicable framework.
So, the US adopted its own alternative: “appropriate human judgment.”
“Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems will be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgmentover the use of force,” a key Department of Defense directive reads. The new language effectively moved the required point of human intervention away from the moment that a weapon is fired toward oversight of a given system’s entire life cycle — from its design, to its development, to its deployment.
There are some contexts where a government might not need as much human control over a weapon to comply with international law, Trabucco said. That’s where the subtle preference of “appropriate” over “meaningful” matters. “If we’re on the high seas, maybe it’s not as necessary to meet a super high threshold of human control because there’s not much risk to civilians or civilian property in those contexts,” she said.
“Now, in a city, an urban environment,” where the risk of civilian harm and other collateral damage is much greater, Trabucco explained, “then that’s where that high threshold would become important.” The US sought flexibility to determine how much human involvement it deemed necessary, based on the battlefield context in question, as opposed to having a fixed, universal standard of “meaningfulness.”
And why the move from “control” to “judgment?” Well, Boyd explained that “anytime we automate anything, whether it’s automating a car or automating machinery, we are trying to make it go faster, more precise, et cetera.” So, instead of insisting that humans be involved in any given part of the process, which could slow combat operations down, the US simply aimed to ensure autonomous systems behaved according to legal and ethical standards, no matter what situation they were deployed in.
Who decides how much human judgment is appropriate?
“It’s not necessarily the control that we want. What we really want is the machine to reflect our values, our laws, and our regulations,” Boyd said. “When humans employ our values, laws, and regulations, we call that judgment.”
Though designed to avoid setting a universal standard of human involvement as demanded by meaningful human control, appropriate human judgment is not a totally empty phrase. According to the DoD directive, the framework requires testing systems, defining operational limits, assessing likely civilian harm, training operators, setting rules of engagement, and ensuring that a system remains within its authorized mission. And, in some contexts, those requirements may institute more thorough protections built into weapons than a simplistic condition that a human be the one to pull the trigger in the end.
But the framework is not without a core puzzle of its own — who decides how much human judgment is appropriate? And what happens when the private sector, as in the ones developing such technologies, adopts this language before we have an answer?
And now — the private sector is forced to pick a side
In July, the same month of Russia’s autonomous drone strike, OpenAI did something important not many noticed: it revised its relationship to military uses of its technology once more. Just three years ago, OpenAI maintained a total ban on “military and warfare” uses of its technology. Now, after a few quiet revisions since 2023, a new five-page policy document outlined the company’s provisions for just that. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)
Most significantly, in explaining its basic condition for employing its technology in military contexts, particularly those involving decisions over the use of lethal force, OpenAI borrows a familiar phrase: appropriate human judgment.
The timing was not subtle. The document arrived just months after the public showdown between OpenAI’s competitor Anthropic and the Pentagon over the former’s reservations about military applications of its technology. That fight ended with President Donald Trump demanding the immediate cessation of all Anthropic use within the government. Mere hours after Anthropic was booted, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced his company had struck its own deal with the government. (Disclosure: Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.)
But OpenAI didn’t just earn a contract in the wake of the Anthropic-Pentagon showdown, it also took a lesson — aligning your policy with the government’s wins you favor. Or, worse, that opposing the government bears a steep price.
“Appropriate human judgment,” the policy document reads, “does not require a human decision on every discrete system action.” The framework, instead, requires that “humans make informed decisions about the conditions for deployment.”
As both Trabucco and Boyd noted, the “appropriate” level of human involvement can vary, depending on the operating environment, the type of target, a particular system’s technical prowess, the anticipated risk to civilians, and a number of other political, economic, and strategic considerations important to a military operation. That flexibility is operationally appealing to the military, of course. But it also has a cost — safeguards against handing over total control of lethal force to machines become hard to identify, harder to measure, and hardest to enforce.
When will we know when the human-machine balance of power in war becomes “inappropriate”? The truth is — there’s no clear answer.
By cosigning the Pentagon’s flexible framework, OpenAI accepts that this standard has no settled meaning, that its application will be decided case-by-case behind the walls of military bureaucracy, and that the government may need room to change its mind. It’s a choice that suggests the company is less interested in establishing clear red lines and is more receptive to the military’s own versatility about how AI and autonomy might be used in lethal operations.
“Human judgment over critical decisions must be meaningful in practice, not merely formal,” the company’s principles document reads. But, instead of drawing its own clear boundary around what its technology will and won’t do, OpenAI has accepted ambiguity as the price of partnership.
That undoubtedly makes the company a more useful ally to the Pentagon — while making it harder for the public to know where human judgment ends and machine-controlled violence begins.
That undoubtedly makes the company a more useful ally to the Pentagon — while making it harder for the public to know where human judgment ends and machine-controlled violence begins.
As the development and deployment of autonomous weapons rapidly accelerates, without many guardrails in place at all, one question is worth asking right now: before other AI labs and tech companies adopt the framework in an effort to align themselves with the US, what does appropriate human judgment truly mean? Ironically, what the phrase doesn’t mean may be what’s most consequential.
For the sake of humanity, the semantics of policing autonomous weapons is worth clarifying — or we risk totally losing control.
My mom was excited and confused when she opened her Apple Watch at Christmas a few years ago. “What a nice gift!” A pause. “What am I supposed to do with this?” We told her the truth: A smartwatch can do all kinds of useful things.
Fitness tracking became the thing my mom latched onto. She loved counting her steps and seeing how many miles she walked in a day. It motivated her to become more active, too. We didn’t tell her until much later that the Apple Watch’s fall detection feature was the real reason we got her the watch. The feature worked, too.
On the coldest day of the year, this past winter, my mom tripped on an uneven sidewalk and broke her wrist. The Apple Watch called 911 almost as soon as she hit the ground, and we took an ambulance to the hospital, where my sister, who was nearly a thousand miles away, texted and asked what was wrong. She’d been watching my mom’s location on Apple’s Find My app, a fact that we revealed to my mom for the first time when she was in the emergency room. We also had to confess that the Nest security cam we’d set up in her living room was indeed useful in spotting intruders but also let us check in on her from time to time.
My mom wasn’t thrilled about any of this. She realized that these handy gadgets doubled as surveillance devices, and we’d essentially be spying on her.
But at the same time, she recognized why we wanted to keep an eye on her. If she’d fallen alone at home alone, for instance, an easy way to call for help could’ve been a lifesaver.
Perhaps grappling with how to spy on your aging parents — ethically! — is something you’re grappling with, too. A growing number of people are weighing the privacy trade-off as boomers get older and their millennial children get moreinvolved. Roughly 59 million Americans now help take care of an adult over 50, up from 34 million a decade ago. A third of those are sandwich-generation caregivers, meaning they’re looking after their parents and their own children at the same time. It can be an overwhelming task. So enlisting a home security system, like Nest, or a wearable, like an Apple Watch, to keep an eye on their parents seems like a time-saving way to gain some peace of mind. It certainly helped my sister and I feel better about our mom aging in place.
It turns out, a growing community of researchers and tech developers has thought a lot about this problem that many of us are now facing. There are labs focused on how technology can make growing older more humane, as well as federally funded research efforts and startup accelerators from groups like AARP working on solutions. All of the experts I spoke to for this story told me the same thing: Good communication is essential.
And there’s a whole cottage industry of tech for older adults, known as age-tech, that includes everything from healthcare gadgets, like the Hero Smart Pill Dispenser, and more futuristic devices, like the social robot ElliQ, that promise to help seniors combat loneliness. Many of these products and services are designed to help keep older adults safe and to help them age in place. Some, like the Haelo smart ring, are designed to do it all, everything from fall detection to health tracking to emergency alerts if something suddenly looks wrong. Others, like Life360, use software designed to track kids to keep an eye on their grandparents.
The big challenge with all of this, however, is finding a way to implement it in a way that respects the aging loved one’s privacy and independence. Boomers and Gen Xers didn’t grow up with as much tech in their lives as younger generations — much less gadgets that could double as monitoring devices — so introducing these tools stands to alienate them. And beyond that, it’s an ongoing challenge to ensure that technology reduces a caregiver’s mental load rather than add to it. After all, too much tech can create new problems rather than solve existing ones. If the overwhelm becomes too much to bear, everyone involved might just abandon the effort.
“Start with: What do they need support for and what is the best solution for that?” Wendy Rogers, director of the Human Factors and Aging Lab at the University of Illinois, told me. “Sometimes it’s technology, sometimes it’s not.”
You might be surprised by what technology can do, when it’s purposefully designed and properly introduced into an aging person’s life.
If you’re a caregiver — Rogers prefers the term “care partners” — you should think of this problem-solving project as a collaboration. Start the conversation with your parents or loved ones early and maintain an open dialogue about how it’s working out. Perhaps most importantly, keep updating the plan as time goes on and lives change. And this might go without saying, but try to avoid any big surprises.
Don’t wait until an emergency
It’s difficult to know when to offer an older adult help, even if that help is as simple as a smartwatch. On one hand, you don’t want to offend or infantilize them. On the other, if you wait too long, you might find yourself trying to set up a monitoring system when it’s no longer optional, like after a fall or other health scare. In these instances, you risk rushing to a solution before you identify the specific problem.
Waiting until an emergency to start thinking about this also necessarily means there’s less time to plan. That sets the younger person up for a situation in which they’re inundated with more information than they can manage. If you set up a smart camera, like a Nest, to notify you every time your parent wakes up and goes into the kitchen, you’re bound to face a huge stack of notifications every time you open your phone and no real strategy for separating the signal from the noise. Good planning helps you to avoid looking at all that raw data and instead look for deviations from the norm. Once I involved my mom in this process, we had the chance to clarify not only the details of her routine but also our goal in keeping tabs on her. In the end, she had no doubt this all came from a place of love.
“In those cases, the technology serves as a safety net, not to check every day what’s going on but to be notified when something doesn’t seem to be happening the way it was supposed to,” said George Demiris, a professor of informatics at the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school.
You can imagine the broader implications of this safety net concept. If your goal is to make sure your parent is going about their daily routine, you don’t actually need cameras at all. Motion sensors can do the job just as well, all while maintaining privacy. There are even camera-free systems, like Nomo Smart Care and Silvie, designed to spot worrisome deviations from an older person’s routine. Even still, the benefits of planning — at the very least, identifying a specific problem in need of a solution — will make it more likely that you’ll maximize the technology’s benefit.
Make privacy and empathy central to your approach
The first step in planning to use tech to monitor your parents is simply talking. You should have a conversation with them to find out what worries they have and consider those alongside your own. Ask what level of monitoring they’d be comfortable with. When the time comes, teach them how to use the tech you’re introducing into their life. Give them the agency to make changes and even turn off the tech when they want.
One way to go about this is to try reversing the roles. Consider how you’d feel if someone wanted to install a bunch of surveillance cameras in your home and track your every move. If you’re asking an older loved one to wear a health tracker, think about why a device like that might be useful to you. Heck, you could even buy matching Apple Watches and start sharing your step count in order to show that you’re trying to stay active and healthy together.
“Saying, ‘Okay, let me stop for a second. Let me imagine I’m their age and my kid wants to do this thing — what would that be like?’” said Amanda Lazar, an associate professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Information. “I think that can help you approach it more sensitively and in a more understanding way.”
The privacy question deserves extra attention. While motion sensor-based monitoring systems can offer extra privacy, there might be situations where you do want a camera. You should talk to your parent or loved one about where they’re comfortable with having a camera and what level of control they’d like to have over it. If you’re thinking about tracking someone with an AirTag or through an app, tell them you’re doing it and explain how it works. They won’t enjoy being surprised if you pull a Big Brother and start asking about specific whereabouts.
All that said, if the person you’re helping care for has dementia or other cognitive issues, these conversations are more complicated. You should talk to their doctor about their individual needs, potential tech solutions, and the possibility of involving professional caregivers.
Start simple and with tech people actually want to use
There’s a reason my sister and I bought my mom an Apple Watch and not a Life Alert pendant. We knew she’d like it, if not for the fitness tracking, then at least as a fashion accessory. And, as a direct result of liking it, she’d wear it. Indeed, we were nervous about her falling, so the fall detection feature was a selling point. But as someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking and writing about gadgets like these, I knew that some of the health tracking features could help be active and have fun doing so. Now, every other time I call, she tells me how many miles she walked that day.
If you’re considering a monitoring device for your parents or an older loved one, think about what they might actually want to use. For many people, smart speakers are a great way to introduce potentially lifesaving tech into the home. Your dad might like asking Alexa for recipe advice, and you might find comfort in the fact that he can also ask Alexa to call 911 if he falls. “Engaging people with technology tools early on and making it part of their everyday repertoire can be very helpful,” said Rogers, “and then as their needs change you can increase the support.”
Down the line, it’s relatively seamless to connect cameras, motion sensors, smart locks, or smoke alarms to systems like these. And because the older adult has been in the loop from the start, you can teach them how to use these devices, and they can remain aware of what you can see on your end. Again, the empathy-focused approach is more likely to win someone over.
Change your plan when life changes
Like anything related to tech, you’ll need to do some software updates along the way. And I don’t mean making sure your Nest camera firmware is up to date. You’ll want to revisit your conversation about monitoring with your parents or loved ones at least once a year. You might try doing it over the holidays when you’re all together or when there’s a need for some tech support. Regardless, it’s essential to communicate about what’s working and what’s not.
These conversations can also be opportunities to talk about other ways you might help. Beyond monitoring their physical space, some aging parents could benefit from some help in the digital world, especially as they’re being targeted by a growing number of AI-powered scams. Do they need help managing their finances or keeping track of login credentials? Do your parents know what a passcode is? They might not ask you for help with these things, and again, it’s better to get out in front of issues before an emergency happens.
“Everyone’s in denial,” said Amelia Hay, a vice president at AARP Innovation Labs. “Everyone’s thinking their parents are fine, whatever, and then something happens where you’re in a state of emergency.”
So don’t wait. And don’t be in denial. Aging, as much as some tech billionaires would like to deny it, is one of those things in life that’s inevitable. If everything seems fine now, that means it’s a great time to start planning for when things go sideways.
Even the most adept researchers may not know exactly what they do to get successful results. An A.I. model is trying to figure it out by watching every move.
Other governments could seek similar concessions, while separate legal action is pending in places ranging from Kenya to the Netherlands
In October 2021, Abrham Meareg’s father, a professor of chemistry in Ethiopia’s northern town of Bahir Dar, was shot at close range and died outside his family home. This was in the middle of the country’s civil war.
For weeks, Facebook’s algorithm had actively promoted posts calling for the academic to be murdered, according to Meareg and Foxglove, a nonprofit organisation supporting Meareg’s lawsuit against the company in Kenya. These posts included photos of his father and his home address.
Other governments could seek similar concessions, while separate legal action is pending in places ranging from Kenya to the Netherlands
In October 2021, Abrham Meareg’s father, a professor of chemistry in Ethiopia’s northern town of Bahir Dar, was shot at close range and died outside his family home. This was in the middle of the country’s civil war.
For weeks, Facebook’s algorithm had actively promoted posts calling for the academic to be murdered, according to Meareg and Foxglove, a nonprofit organisation supporting Meareg’s lawsuit against the company in Kenya. These posts included photos of his father and his home address.
Richie Bell stood at the door of an East Village bar, nervous for a singular reason: he had to hand over his phone to a bouncer to get in. At 23 years old, Bell had hardly ever been without a device — he got his first iPhone in elementary school — but when he saw a video on TikTok advertising a queer, phone-free, funk dance party called Who’s Dancing?, he decided to test his limits. He immediately purchased a ticket and planned to attend alone.
Bell was pleasantly surprised to discover he wouldn’t have to relinquish his phone at all, but simply allow security to place tape on both the back and front-facing cameras. “You can’t scroll Reels because, think about it, on iPhones anyway, if they’re taping the front camera, that’s also the speaker area,” Bell told Vox. Without the temptation of content on his phone, Bell mingled with other attendees, who were similarly unoccupied and also flying solo. Even though event staff kept their eyes peeled for any errant phone usage, no one seemed to reach for them anyway.
Compared to other bars and parties he’s been to, Bell found this one more conducive to unbridled socializing and dancing. It’s easier to approach a stranger when they’re not hunched over their phone. No one is worried about looking like a fool, immortalized in video, because everyone is a little foolish, moving their bodies without fear of judgment.
Across the country, clubs, bars, music venues, and other social spaces are encouraging attendees to lock their phones away — or, at least keep them out of sight — for screen-free gatherings. According to event hosting platform Eventbrite, phone-free experiences have increased more than 500 percent globally between 2024 and 2025. Musicians Phoebe Bridgers and Harry Styles banned phones at their concerts; comedians John Mulaney and Bill Burr have followed suit. Clubs from Los Angeles to Miami are creating camera-free dance floors. Bars and restaurants in cities like San Francisco and Philadelphia that have long prohibited phone and camera use have been joined by newer establishments in Charlotte, North Carolina and Fort Worth, Texas.
The rise of phone-free socializing speaks to a growing exhaustion with an always-connected world. More than half of US adults say they use their smartphone too much, according to a 2022 Gallup survey. Excessive smartphone use has been linked to poor sleep quality and depression, and even the mere presence of a phone lessens cognitive capacity. The ubiquity of devices — and the cameras on them — has instilled a low-grade panic that you might end up going viral for eating a sandwich in the background of an influencer’s video. Even Gen Z, who has always lived under the spectre of technology, is nostalgic for times before everyone was “plugged in” and widely accessible.
Screen-free events are the natural evolution of the cultural desire to break up with tech. By transforming physical spaces, ridding them of distracting devices, event organizers and bar owners aim to foster connection, reclaim attention, and maintain a sense of privacy. Even a short detox from smartphones has the ability to dramatically shape the tenor of a get-together for the better.
“Exploited for content”
Before X&ND (pronounced “zand”), the funk and soul artist who organized the phone-free party Bell attended, first conceived of Who’s Dancing?, they noticed very few people actually cutting loose at clubs. Instead, they were on their phones. “The second that anybody starts dancing in a club where there’s meant to be dancing, people pull out their phone,” X&ND told Vox. “They’re getting surveilled, they’re getting essentially exploited for content and being put in a position where they’re on display for people that they didn’t necessarily want to be on display for.” X&ND wanted to create a space for women, queer, and trans people to dance and express themselves without the fear of ending up on the internet.
Since last summer, X&ND has hosted eight sold-out dance parties (and Bell estimates he’s attended seven). Phone-free events, X&ND said, are a reclamation of culture, of attention, of self-expression. “Influencers aren’t able to post anything. Different companies aren’t posting anything about our parties because we don’t give them the material to,” they said. “I think it’s the culture taking the culture back.”
The bar and nightclub scene has struggled in recent years, with many venues closing due to high rent and fewer patrons spending money on alcohol. But perhaps a less obvious culprit is the pervasive anxiety of being captured on video during a moment of vulnerability. Some might be turned off from entering these spaces altogether due to the high risk of embarrassment if they’re captured and mocked online.
In Washington, DC, 28-year-old Jo Vee had similar concerns about privacy and craved an environment where they could be anonymous. Like Bell, Vee has had access to a camera phone since they were a child and can’t remember a time when they weren’t thinking about what to post on Instagram. But when a friend organized a phone-free dance party, Vee jumped at the opportunity to enjoy themselves, free from the pressures of the algorithm — and the potential of accidentally becoming a meme. “There’s nothing more terrifying than thinking that you’re going to a party just to have fun, and then you wake up the next morning and there’s a video of you that has 10 million views that you had no idea about, and now you’re like a GIF reaction on the internet.” (Vee clarified that they do not speak from personal experience, but said that a version of this has happened to a couple of friends.)
Distraction-free connection
Although many people inherently recognize the downsides of excessive phone use, they also realize they’re fighting an uphill battle. Demanding jobs can tether workers to their emails and algorithms are designed to keep us engaged and scrolling. Our attention is constantly being pulled from the real world to the digital one. But even a brief respite from screens can be beneficial.
In his research, Georgetown associate professor Kostadin Kushlev found that phone usage during a social interaction undermines how much people enjoy spending time with others. “It’s not so much [that] the phone is making us feel unhappy,” Kushlev told Vox, “it’s more like I could be happier if I was not using a phone.” Put another way, people enjoy social gatherings more when they keep their phone out of sight because they can give their full attention to their conversation partner.
Kushlev’s other research has shown that as people curbed their phone usage over a two-week period, their ability to pay attention improved. Even a shorter detox period, like a two-hour phone-free gathering, could minimize overstimulation and encourage greater focus, Kushlev said.
Inside the Charlotte, North Carolina, bar Antagonist, couples on dates engage in heart-to-hearts and neighboring tables of strangers strike up conversations. That’s because the bar has banned phones. Upon entering, visitors are asked to secure their phone in a pouch which they keep with them for the duration of their stay. If they need to use their phone, they can do so outside.
Since Antagonist opened in March, owner Michael Salzarulo has observed patrons clamoring for a Friday night detox after a long week of screen-mediated work. “Normally Saturday is your biggest day,” Salzarulo said, “but Friday nights are our busiest nights of the week.” While anyone can lock their phone in another room for a few hours, Antagonist provides an element of accountability, Salzarulo said: a dedicated space for distraction-free connection.
Alex Becker was yearning for a break from her phone and her “email, Microsoft Excel job” when she co-founded PA Unplugged, a nonprofit championing policies that advocate for more mindful uses of technology, last year. One of the nonprofit’s initiatives, Screen Free Philly, maintains a calendar of screen-free events and organizes its own gatherings at breweries, parks, and other civic institutions, urging attendees to set aside their phones for discussions, art projects, and board games. At the most recent get-together, dozens of attendees handed their phones to Becker while they completed a series of puzzles throughout the city.
Although these gatherings are still fairly niche, Becker sensed a hunger among participants to seek out further opportunities for tech-free connection. While ditching a smartphone completely may be unrealistic, setting it aside for date night or an afternoon of gaming might be a salve for our tech-addled brains. We can implement these best practices at our own gatherings, too, by encouraging friends to leave their phones in a basket by the door or offering disposable cameras at parties.
“People are just done and ready to take their attention back, take their time back, and encourage more real-world connection,” Becker said.
A protest against data centers in central Texas. | Sara Diggins/The Austin American-Statesman
Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.
One big idea: The data center backlash is a democracy story
This week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged a small hurdle in his quest to integrate artificial intelligence into all parts of human life and the economy: the rest of us.
In an episode of the Founders podcast with David Senra, Altman confronted the growing public backlash against tech leaders and their AI tools, conceding that he’d overrated the speed at which they’d be adopted across the economy and that the industry hasn’t made its case to the public.
“We have not, as a field, done a very good job of explaining to people what the benefits are and how the downsides can be mitigated,” Altman said. He added that “it’s probably a good feature of human society that we have some built-in inertia, some skepticism of rapid change.”
You think?
Survey after survey shows how deep — and how bipartisan — the backlash against AI, and specifically data centers, already runs. The pressure has been building all year: A Gallup poll in March) found that 71 percent of Americans said they oppose building AI data centers in their area — 48 percent of them strongly. That opposition runs across the aisle: 75 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of independents, and 63 percent of Republicans. For perspective, Americans are more opposed to a data center going up near them than a nuclear power plant (53 percent). This is not some fringe opposition. It is a consensus.
The shift is already scrambling candidates’ positions ahead of the midterms, where data centers, artificial intelligence, and the future of work will be front and center. Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed’s refusal to back a data center moratorium (which he reiterated on America, Actually) has given Republicans an opportunity. His opponent in Michigan, GOP Senate candidate Mike Rogers, recently came out for a one-year moratorium — an attempt to get to the left of El-Sayed (!). The shift reflects our new political reality. At this point, being pro-data center isn’t just a minority position overrepresented among C-suite executives — it’s become a moral and cultural signal. An us-vs.-them litmus test in an age of elite distrust.
The political world did not see this coming. A year ago — before Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, before DSA congressional wins in New York and Colorado, before El-Sayed in Michigan and Angie Nixon in Florida — the Democratic establishment was all about Abundance, the 2025 Ezra Klein–Derek Thompson book that had become something like an electoral manual for Washington Democrats and the press that covers them. But Abundance was (and is) powered by advanced technology and its mass adoption — the book says so on its first pages — and, like Altman, its proponents may have underestimated how unwilling neighbors would be to hand still more of their lives over to our Silicon Valley overlords. In a recent piece, my colleague Andrew Prokop wrote that Abundance flopped among voters because leftists adopted their best ideas, and issues like Israel became more of a motivating force among primary voters. But I’d also add that it replicated the same mistake tech leaders made: reveling in the benefits of a transformed economy before building consensus among the people who must live with it.
We’ve been covering this issue throughout the year, including attending an early-summer town hall in New Jersey over a proposed data-center expansion in the state’s poorest county. But even I have been surprised at how much we hear about AI and data centers from voters on America, Actually — and how tied those fears are to a larger anxiety about the future of work and a growing resentment of tech CEOs like Altman and Elon Musk. If the 2020 election was defined by both parties’ silence on AI, the years since have been defined by elites telling the underclass that they have no agency in the disruption to come.
Based on our reporting this year, here are four things that I think explain the shift in sentiment — and forecast where this goes in the midterms and the presidential race to come.
1. It’s about agency, not “the environment”
The thing that comes through loudest on the ground isn’t a technical objection to server farms, or even a concern with their potential impact on the environment. It’s the feeling that this change was done to communities — not in consultation with them. At the New Jersey town hall, one resident put it this way: “Folks feel unheard. And we don’t feel that way — we are unheard.” Another related it to a broader anxiety about artificial intelligence, which she said felt imposed on society from the upper class: “Everything relates from the top down, and what we’re getting from the top has spread all the way to the local level. And it isn’t good.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego — no AI opponent himself — suggested the resentment often came from how the industry picks its targets. “They’re gonna put a data center all because it’s cheap land, and also because they think it’s a Black and brown area, so they’re gonna have less pushback,” he said. And that feeling of powerlessness is not only amplified in the absence of federal regulation, but by the knowledge that most elected officials don’t even understand the technology themselves.
In New Jersey, residents suspected the game was rigged against the people with the least power to say no, and it often is. One word in particular, from a data center developer, had enraged them. The developer had called the project an “experiment.” That means “we’re the guinea pigs,” the resident said.
2. These are not all Luddites
Recently, I’ve seen the data center backlash dismissed as a “psyop” — a foreign plot to undermine the US economy — or a symptom of technophobia. Simpletons who can’t understand what’s to come.
But that’s a convenient and self-serving misread. In New Jersey, one of the most striking voices at the town hall was a man who runs a civic-tech project: “I use AI all the time — for project management. If you use it responsibly, you can leverage it to get real-world tasks done.” He was still, firmly, against the data center. And he’s not alone: Gallup also finds concerns about the local impact of data centers are much bigger drivers of opposition than more general anti-tech ideas, as does Fox News’ polling. People weren’t rejecting the tools altogether — there were plenty of ChatGPT users in that room. They were rejecting the pace, and the secrecy, of a project reshaping their community.
3. The costs are visible. The benefits are a pitch.
A resident in New Jersey pointed out something important: “A couple hundred jobs for two and a half million square feet? How can that possibly be supported with today’s grid? There’s no plan for the future. … Who benefits with that building? It’s not the people of this town.”
I think this speaks to one of the challenges the pro-data center crowd has faced. Once the construction jobs leave, the noise, the water draw, the rising electricity bills, the fear about home values, and the sheer brutalist ugliness of the structure all stay. One homeowner told us: “I can’t sell my house — it’s been for sale since February. A woman came back twice, had cash, then realized it was near the data center. Her kids said, ‘Mom—’ and she said, ‘I just can’t do this.’”
And even if local concerns are the dominant issue, AI isn’t offering much of a bigger-picture national argument to overcome them. As Gallego put it to me, “there is no massive-scale benefit to society when it comes to AI” that voters see in their lives so far, and they have competing concerns about tech’s impact on children, privacy, and job losses.
Rep. Greg Casar, the Congressional Progressive Caucus chair, told me this is the reason the left has found success tying anxiety about artificial intelligence to their broader message of affordability.
A lot of the establishment traditional Democratic politics…are telling candidates, ‘Don’t even say the words AI.’ And if you do, say there needs to be safety but innovation — and then shut up…because maybe AI lobbyists are gonna spend tons of money against you.
Being progressive means uniting all the people getting their costs jacked up and having them vote for a politician even if the AI industry spends against them.
4. The left has their answer. What’s the center’s?
As I wrote previously, I think a defining characteristic of this ongoing ideological battle in the Democratic Party is the collapse of the center — even more than the rise of the left. And on artificial intelligence and data centers, I think you see that crumble clearly.
Progressives like Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna have made clear cases for the need for a data center moratorium to prioritize the potential impact of AI on workers. And candidates like El-Sayed have laid out a proposed regulatory framework even if they don’t support a moratorium.
But the most shocking answers on the topic that I’ve heard have both been from elected officials more representative of the liberal center. Gallego called data centers a “necessary evil” — quite possibly the least inspiring words in American politics. Rep. Jim Clyburn’s answer on artificial intelligence was even worse. He told me he hadn’t heard about ChatGPT until recently and that he’s never used an LLM or visited a data center.
“I have a great staff,” he told me. “I know how to legislate, I know how to build relationships, and I hire people to bring knowledge into the game.” It’s a fine answer for most of governing. It is a terrifying one for a technology moving this fast.
In examining the public backlash against data centers, it’s important to remember statements like these. People don’t want to feel like they’re guinea pigs in an experiment, and it’s not just Sam Altman who has contributed to that feeling. It’s also the politicians who have treated technological change as something they retroactively legislate after a crisis arrives, whether it’s in the economy, or the environment, or society. You can’t govern a revolution you refuse to understand.
What I’m hearing
This week, I called Adrian Walker, longtime political columnist at the Boston Globe and one of the moderators of the recent debate between Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA), the 47-year-old member of Congress who’s challenging him in a September 1 primary election. The debate also featured a viral moment from Markey on artificial intelligence, where the 80-year-old incumbent did not seem to fully grasp the technology. You can watch that exchange here.
So is this all about age? What have been the lines of division beyond that?
You know, it’s surprising that when you poll people, and you ask them about age, they have concerns about Markey being 80 (and 86 potentially at the end of this next term). But it’s not what’s really driving votes. It’s really kind of become more of a race about who’s more progressive, and Markey has successfully, I think, pitched himself as the more progressive candidate.
What are the ways in which they are both seeking to prove their progressive credentials?
Markey constantly touts the Green New Deal, and he talks a lot about his endorsements from AOC and Ayanna Pressley and people like that. It’s basically the same playbook he ran six years ago when he beat Joe Kennedy, when he also did better than anybody expected among young voters.
He’s running the exact same campaign. And Moulton came in with a lot of skepticism. People are still mad about him going against Pelosi (in 2018). And he had this very high-profile attack about trans kids in youth sports — and people have been skeptical about him as a progressive. So he’s sort of trying to reinvent himself while Markey, you know, kind of rides the same thing that got him a little success.
So is there a reason we should be watching this beyond just the question of age?
I think the AI question really speaks to something very fundamental in this debate. I think people really have concerns about the fact that the whole Senate seems to be in their 70s and 80s, and I think it was reflected in that question. You have Markey up there saying, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you call it Siri or Claude or whatever. And people walk away thinking this is not the dude who should be regulating AI; they think “Yeah, you know, the 47-year-old actually understands this, and the 80-year-old pretty clearly does not.”
And it kind of speaks to, I think, the sort of hunger I think a lot of people are feeling for generational change in the Senate: You watch Senate hearings, you watch congressional hearings about things like AI, but they’re really not that impressive. It really does look like a bunch of people who don’t really understand this at a very deep level. And that’s driving this frustration.
As people grow used to AI chatbots, we’d like to hear your views about Google’s search engine
Google has put artificial intelligence at the front and center of its search bar. The most-visited site on the internet still shows the same list of links to users, but they have to scroll past a summarized response from an AI chatbot, a feature Google calls AI Overviews. The change to what was once the gateway to the rest of the internet has been profound, and the browsing habits of billions of people are shifting.
“AI is driving the most significant upgrade of the Google Search experience ever,” Liz Reid, Google’s vice-president of search, wrote last August. In May, the company said more AI is coming.
A Reddit logo seen displayed on a smartphone. | Mateusz Slodkowski/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
The internet kind of sucks right now. And it’s been getting harder and harder to use over the past several years.
Imagine you’re training for a marathon, or just trying to get in better shape, and you want to buy a new pair of shoes. Well, good luck! You’re going to have to wade through sponsored links, affiliate marketing, AI summaries, and websites seemingly engineered for search engines instead of human shoppers.
Maybe you just want to connect with friends on Instagram or discover recipes on TikTok. But even there, everyone is selling something. “Get Ready With Me” videos are sponsored by CeraVe, movie reviews are actually ads for the movies being reviewed, and the guy who posts your favorite mobility routines really wants you to try his protein powder.
So people have developed a workaround: Simply add “Reddit” to the search.
Looking for a shoe with high energy return? Reddit. Want to know if an Airbnb you’ve been eyeing has a sketchy listing? Reddit. Trying to figure out the fastest way to the international terminal in Atlanta’s humongous airport? Chances are someone on Reddit has shared very specific thoughts and instructions.
It’s a strange situation. Reddit is filled with pseudonymous strangers, and yet these people can somehow feel more trustworthy recommending a skincare product than an influencer hawking cleansers to millions of followers. Why? Because the random person on Reddit doesn’t seem to have anything to sell you.
That’s why, for many people, Reddit feels like one of the last “real” places on the internet. The site has become so integral to navigating the internet that Google took notice; in recent years, it’s begun surfacing Reddit threads more prominently in search results.
Then came artificial intelligence. Chatbots need massive amounts of human language to learn how we communicate. AI-powered search also needs somewhere to turn when we ask the kinds of hyper-specific questions that newspapers, Wikipedia, and government websites haven’t answered. Reddit has plenty of both.
Unfortunately, whenever something online becomes valuable, people and companies figure out how to exploit it.
The stakes go far beyond a brand tricking someone into buying a lousy face cream. Reddit works because people trust that there’s a real person on the other side of the screen. It doesn’t have to become totally overrun by bots or marketers for that trust to disappear. We just have to start questioning who — or what — we’re talking to.
To break down how Reddit is changing, what the platform and its moderators are doing to push back, and what it could mean for the increasingly blurry line between human conversation, marketing, search, and AI, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with the Verge’s Mia Sato, who recently wrote about the new wave of AI spam beleaguering the platform.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Are you a big Reddit user?
Yeah, I think so.
What do you mainly use it for?
I think it’s become a big part of finding information on the internet. I usually use Google as the sort of doorway into Reddit, but if I search something on Google, really, it’s a high likelihood that I will end up on Reddit in the end.
That’s a trend that you write about in your piece, which I thought was very interesting because it was something that has also been happening to me and it happened without me realizing how often it was happening.
You start this piece in the Verge with an example from a post on a skincare-focused subreddit, a place you write that you visit often. Can you take us through what happened?
The skincare subreddits that I mentioned in my story are actually subreddits that I often read because I want unfiltered or true opinions about products before I buy them. And I go to Reddit for skincare recommendations quite a bit.
I suspected that if you are a skincare brand and you want people to be talking about your product, you will go to these subreddits because some of these subreddits get like one and a half million viewers a week. They’re doing crazy numbers and they have a very committed and active community. So I was like, if I were a brand and I wanted to market myself, I would probably post on Reddit.
I was curious how the moderators of these skincare subreddits were handling that, because also marketing firms had told me, “Yeah, all our clients, they really want to know how to crack Reddit. It’s really hard. They want to figure out Reddit.”
And so I talked to a subreddit moderator who does one of the skincare subreddits, and she gave me a ton of detail about the amount of spam that they were getting. She sent me one example, which was a thread of someone asking about a certain spray that people use for acne treatment.
The person who posted it asked, like: “Magic Molecule Hypochlorous Acid Spray – is it really that good? Recently I have seen a lot of good reviews about this product. Any of you tried? Do you recommend? What is your take on this?”
And, you know, it got like dozens of answers. Some people said, “Yeah, it’s great.” Others said, “They all work the same.” But one of the answers was from just a random account that said, “I’m sorry, I don’t have any experience with that product, but I have tried this other one that I was skeptical of, but I really like it actually.”
If you’re reading that comment, you probably would think nothing of it. But what you don’t see unless you click over to the profile and do some digging is that this random account had actually — over the course of several days, maybe even months, and across different skincare subreddits — been recommending the same product over and over and over, and using very specific terminology, saying, “It has all these recommendations from certified dermatologists, which made me feel a bit more confident trying it on sensitive skin.”
It was very controlled messaging. Of course, the moderators were like, “What normal person is going to go across different subreddits and keep pushing this product? For no reason?”
So that is one of the ways that this new type of spam on Reddit takes shape, which is brands pretending to be normal users on Reddit.
For Reddit moderators, I’m thinking they can’t individually suss it out immediately or it wouldn’t be happening. Are they doing the search themselves to try to figure out, like, is everything on here real? How are they dealing with this?
They have a bunch of tools. Some of them are auto-moderator tools, where basically a bot will look at every submission that comes through and move some things to a filtered folder where moderators can look at [it].
One of the funniest things that several moderators actually told me was they keep shit lists of companies that they think have spammed them in the past. The skincare subreddit told me about this. A weight-loss subreddit moderator whom I interviewed also said this. They have a running list in the background where if they think you’ve spammed or astroturfed their community in the past, they keep all those brands’ names. And now if you mention that brand name, your post will automatically get filtered out.
Wow. Okay.
The moderators are trying to send a message: “If you spam us, all of the posts that are not even your spam will get filtered out and we will take a closer look at them.” They’re pretty strict with it. Some moderators that I spoke to said that they’ve really seen an increase over the last six to eight months, maybe.
I can give you a couple of the numbers that Reddit has released publicly because Reddit has said also that they know that this is a growing problem. The company said that it removes 25,000 spammy posts and comments a day. They block something like 23 million spam views. And they also tackle spam upvotes — a way on Reddit to sort of signal agreement.
But Reddit knows that it is kind of a new era of spam, and they’ve said that they’re using LLMs and other AI-powered moderation tools to try to catch this stuff better.
Let me ask you something. Maybe it comes down to what Reddit is and always has been, but I will go on Instagram, I will go on TikTok, and my sense is like half of it is just crap that’s trying to sell me something. It might not be real. It just all feels pretty garbagey to me.
I feel like when you wrote this piece, you were saying there are stakes here to Reddit being the thing that must kind of stay pure, must stay away from this. What is it about Reddit that makes it important?
One part is that the concept of influencers doesn’t really exist on Reddit in the same way that it exists elsewhere.
And if you are an influencer, there are very few places that you can post without getting in trouble. Many, many subreddits have explicit rules saying, “You may not self-promote here, and we will ban you if you do.” That is a totally different environment than Instagram, where sort of the expectation is that someone is selling you something.
The other part that makes Reddit unique, I think, is that for better or for worse, and deserve it or not, Reddit, in the minds of people using the internet, has come to sort of be associated with real opinions or real people. Which is funny because the platform is anonymous, you know? Most people are using just a random username, not their full name. So it’s kind of stumbled into this reputation of being filled with real, helpful opinions and perspectives.
Reddit has deals with certain AI companies where they allow LLMs to be trained on troves of Reddit data, of real people having conversations. And so I think over the last few years as Google search feels like it’s gotten worse and people have gone to places like Reddit to answer their questions, Reddit’s stock literally has skyrocketed as a place where you can find information where people aren’t trying to sell you something all the time. Or are they? That’s kind of the part that I wanted to untangle.
Does Reddit actually have to become overrun with marketing, fake posts, people saying, “Oh, you should definitely buy this skincare,” because they’re getting paid to say that for this to be a big problem? Or does it just have to get to the point where I am suspicious that I’m not talking to an actual person on Reddit and I start doubting a platform itself?
For me personally, in the course of reporting this story, I was like, “Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t buy things based on a recommendation from Reddit.”
It’s a new type of problem and a new way of looking at a platform. As it relates to AI search, if these chatbots love to cite Reddit so much for their answers, can the AI systems detect when something is spam? Can they detect when a comment is coming from a brand or when the person who left that comment, if you go to their account, they’re always promoting that product?
I am not convinced that Google’s Gemini or ChatGPT can suss out when something is promotional and when it isn’t. Because I’ve written about this before and I know that they can’t.
Hmm!
It’s a strange thing where I think the deception on one platform ends up trickling through other places as well, as the Reddit thread gets cited by search features and LLMs.
Have you changed your buying habits based on what you’re seeing now on Reddit?
I feel like I’m just way slower to buy things. I’m just like, let me keep this in my head. Let me put it on my wishlist and do some research to see what other people, what real people think, and also make sure that they have a good return policy.
Like many people, I have a contentious relationship with the Memories feature on my iPhone, the AI-powered nostalgia machine that serves up photos and slideshows from deep in your camera roll, either reminding you of a beautiful day at the beach or surfacing an old photo of your ex. About once a month, for whatever reason, my iPhone reminds me of the time my phone got stolen.
The Memory is a glitchy, fragmented one — an auto-generated slideshow of my first few years living in New York. But because my phone was stolen, the photos in the slideshow are a random assortment of mislabeled JPEGs and grainy images I’d saved from Facebook, all somehow imported from my hard drive to my camera roll at some point and set to sentimental music.
I used to get mad that I didn’t back up my actual, treasured photos on a hard drive. But now, I just wish I’d printed out the best ones and put them in a box. That kind of thing can survive for generations.
We should all be printing our photos. I’m not just talking about converting your camera roll into a stack of 4×6-inch glossy pieces of paper, either. It’s actually easier than ever to turn the gigabytes of images we carry around in our pockets into physical objects, like albums and books and frames, the kind we can gather around to pore over and one day pass down to our children. Even individual prints that we touch and hold can tell a story in a way that pixel on a screen never could. Real photos are effectively embodied memories that we can casually encounter as we go about our daily lives. And it’s not just because an algorithm decided to send us a push notification to go look at them, either.
“Printing photos in any form, whether it’s to hang on a wall or to hold in our hands, is effortful,” Brianna Marshall, dean of the Steely Library at Northern Kentucky University, told me. “It requires us to take action to experience the memories in more meaningful ways than an occasional passive scroll of our photo roll.”
In a way, I owe a lot to that phone thief. It was only after losing so many photos that I started paying closer attention to how I managed the new ones I’m taking, which are thankfully backed up in multiple places in the cloud. I’ve made some photo books and some albums of big events, like my wedding. I have a box with some prints inside, although there should be more.
I now have a couple of kids who do many cute things every day, and my camera roll is getting more crowded. My walls are looking increasingly bare. I know I should be printing even more photos, and you probably should, too. When we commit to a process around curating and printing our photos, we’re also creating a ritual around preserving our memories and giving ourselves a chance to interact with them for years or even decades to come. This is so much more rewarding than taking thousands of pictures indiscriminately and then just uploading a few to Instagram periodically and hoping for some likes.
Why your camera roll isn’t a family history
There’s something magical about sitting down with a family photo album. My mom has made them obsessively for decades, and any time I’m home, I end up pulling one off the shelf. Each page is carefully curated to tell a story about a moment — a dance recital, a vacation, a holiday — and taken together, the album tells a story about our lives at that time. She’s made albums about her own childhood, and she’s started some for my own children. Collectively, they’re a family history that we can gather around.
As much as Apple, Google, and other tech companies have tried, you can’t replicate that feeling with an app. There are a ton of upsides when it comes to backing up your photos digitally, including the ability to access them from anywhere or quickly share images or entire albums. However, cloud storage platforms tend to compress your photos, harming image quality. They can also change their terms of service or their business model at any time, potentially leaving you to pay a monthly fee or face losing your photos forever.
On a more basic level, though, something is lost when you’re scrolling through pictures on a smartphone, where your inbox or your TikTok feed is just a swipe away. The images “seem a little bit more removed and a little less approachable,” said Debra Norris, professor of photograph conservation at the University of Delaware. “It becomes a point of conversation and enjoyment and accessibility that doesn’t exist when an image is on the phone.”
Your phone is full of distractions, yes, but it’s also probably just overflowing with photos. My camera roll has nearly 30,000 images, which means that finding one specific shot from a certain day on a vacation a few years ago is more of a chore than a point of conversation. Encountering old photos serendipitously would be utterly impossible if not for — I kind of hate to say it — the help of features like iPhone Memories. This software can help resurface some old photos, and that experience can be delightful.
Try taking things into your own hands, though. Rather than leaning back and letting AI decide which memories you’d like to remember, you can curate your photos as you take them, favoriting the good ones within a minute or two to help you separate the wheat from the chaff later. The end goal here might be printing the very best to put in a frame, an album, or even just a dedicated photo storage box. In doing so, you’re actually crafting the first draft of a visual family history. When you do ultimately print those photos (more on this in a moment), you’ll give that history a physical presence and create a sort of legacy.
“We can take so many photographs on these phones and yet a curated box of images that are especially meaningful, it’s magical really,” Norris said. “And it’s something that your children will save and treasure and share with their children, and that will continue.”
How to get the best photos off your phone
Once you get into the habit of curating your photos as you go, the actual printing part of the process is pretty easy. There are plenty of services that let you upload photos directly from your phone and will then print them in various sizes and ship them to your house or pick them up in a store (like CVS or Walgreens). Finding the right one will depend on your budget and your preferences. Nations Photo Lab and Printique are two that get rave reviews for quality prints and easy uploads. I’ve personally used Shutterfly (which offers discounts to Costco and Amazon Prime members) and Mpix, which are popular and affordable enough, but I do think the price is reflected in the quality.
You may also want to print your own photos, which can be limited and liberating at the same time. I have not tested out any dedicated photo printers, but I would trust the reviews of the good gadget bloggers at Wirecutter and Rtings, who have. You can expect to spend a few hundred bucks on the printer alone if you go this route.
Then there are the album makers. Many companies that will print your photos, including the four I just mentioned, will also print albums and photobooks. Because the layout process for making these objects is both essential and time-consuming, you might be better off going with a company that specializes in albums and books. I used Artifact Uprising to make a book of my wedding photos and loved the results, although the price tag was steep. Mixbook is the service I’d like to check out next.
You could also just get an old-fashioned photo album and put the prints directly in it, as my mom does. This is as easy as buying an empty photo album or scrapbook and filling it with your prints. You want something that is, at minimum, acid-free and lignin-free, and should opt for uncoated polyester, polyethylene, or polypropylene sleeves for the sake of longevity. (In the United States, Gaylord Archival and University Products are top suppliers of these kinds of products to museums and hobbyists alike.) You can add newspaper clippings or ticket stubs or any other physical objects to tell a more complete story, something you definitely can’t do with your phone’s camera roll.
If you don’t want to go the album route, or you already have prints waiting to be transferred over, you should keep them in an acid-free archival storage box. Your finished photo books and albums also benefit from this treatment. (If you’re dealing with old photos or want to take extra measures, check out the Library of Congress’s guide to photo preservation.) You may also want to frame them, an old custom that has also never been easier in the digital age. I have a few things hanging on my wall that I framed through Framebridge, which will let you upload an image and receive a framed print. I’ve also heard good things about Level Frames, and one of my colleagues swears by Frame It Easy. Your local frame shop works too, of course, or you could grab frames at flea markets, garage sales, and thrift stores.
Regardless of who actually prints or frames the prints, the most important thing when it comes to building a habit of curating and printing your photos is to find a process that works for you. If AI-powered tools like Apple Memories do a good enough job of finding the needles in the veritable haystack of pictures on your iPhone, that’s fantastic. Print those photos. Make a book with them. If you prefer favoriting good photos as soon as you take them or putting your best shots in a digital album at the end of every month, keep it up. Just set aside time to print some of those.
“My advice is always just to start somewhere, and not to let any guilt over what you did or didn’t do in the past stall you from moving forward,” Marshall said. “Save the photos that you treasure.”
A Flock camera recording on July 9, 2026, in Jefferson, Georgia. | Kevin D. Liles for the Washington Post via Getty Images
Have you been hearing a lot about Flock recently? You’re not alone: The surveillance company has put 120,000 cameras on roads in every US state except Alaska, and people are mad about it — online, at city council meetings, and out in the world, where the cameras have become the target of vigilante vandalism.
Flock’s automated license plate readers — cameras that scan the license plates of every car that passes, along with the car’s make, model, bumper stickers, and other identifying characteristics — aren’t really new technology. What makes Flock unique is its use of AI to power a nationwide database that law enforcement can search with very few restrictions.
Founded in 2017, Flock was most recently valued at $8.4 billion. Its aggressive growth strategy has led to widespread adoption: 7,000 law enforcement agencies across the country use Flock cameras, representing a whopping 40 percent of the nation’s police departments.
Flock says its cameras have been used in a million criminal investigations a year. Police say the ability to track suspects across jurisdictions has been a critical tool for solving thousands of crimes including car thefts, missing persons, and abducted children.
But recent reporting also shows how the system is ripe for abuse, with dozens of reported cases of police officers illegally conducting searches on Flock to track the movement of current or former romantic partners. Those stalking cases have led to some arrests, but the instances only came to light after journalists and concerned citizens filed public records requests for the data.
The company recently unveiled several reforms that it says will help avoid improper uses of its system. Critics say the changes are merely window dressing for a surveillance system that threatens the privacy of everyone, regardless of whether they have committed a crime — and they haven’t helped to quell widespread outrage about the cameras, which has caused dozens of cities and counties across the country tohave cut ties with Flock.
“There’s been a political backlash to it, and there’s also been a vigilante backlash to it.”
To get a better sense of where the Flock backlash is heading — and whether the company will be able to survive — Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with 404 Media co-founder Jason Koebler, who has reported extensively on Flock and has broken several stories about its misuse.
The Today, Explained team also reached out to Flock for comment and received an out-of-office reply that said: “Our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can’t work 24/7, so we’ll get back to you when we’ve had a snack and regained the ability to form coherent sentences.”
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Cops are using Flock in a really creepy way to stalk their exes. You’ve been writing about other potential misuses and existing misuses of Flock. What are you seeing?
I’ve been reporting on Flock for a few years now and there’s been several high-profile cases and trends that we’ve been reporting on.
Last year, we learned that local police were helping ICE surveil undocumented immigrants using the Flock network. Police in Texas and South Carolina and Tennessee were searching the entire Flock network for either “immigration” or “ICE” in the reason field in the Flock system. And they were searching not just in the states and communities that they were in, but they were searching throughout the entire country. So these searches happened in, notably, Illinois and California, where it is against the law to use this technology for immigration enforcement. An investigation by the Illinois secretary of state found that these searches broke state law and Flock had to do some reform after that.
There was also a case in Texas where a woman’s partner reported that she had a self-administered abortion and more than 80,000 cameras across the entire country were searched for that woman. This is a nightmare situation for people who are worried about access to reproductive freedom. In that case, Flock wasn’t able to track down the woman, but the searches were done nonetheless and police there considered whether they would be allowed to charge her with a crime while they were doing that investigation.
And then earlier this month, I reported on a case in Wisconsin where police used the Flock network to track a man who drove from Wisconsin, where weed is not legal, into Michigan, where it is legal. They then waited for him to drive back into Wisconsin, pulled him over, and then used the fact that he crossed state lines as the pretext to search his car for weed.
So this isn’t just cops and their domestic relationships or former relationships. This is ICE, this is abortion. This is invasive, is the long and short of it. How are people responding to this new era of surveillance that no one signed up for?
People are really mad about it. I think that there are a lot of communities that signed on to this technology because they thought it would primarily be used to recover stolen vehicles, to find missing children, for property crimes, things like that. And what we’ve seen is a real mission creep.
We are seeing it used to surveil protesters. We’ve seen it used for immigration enforcement. We’ve seen it used for all these stalking cases. People think that this is the surveillance state. And so there’s been a political backlash to it, and there’s also been a vigilante backlash to it.
I also got an email from a man who was arrested for what he said was “changing the angle of a Flock camera.” And what he meant by that is he drove his truck into the pole of a Flock camera and had it face the sky. He was like, “I made it not able to surveil people. Now it’s surveilling the sky.”
There’s something called DeFlock, which is a crowdsourced map to track all of the Flock cameras in the United States. This map has become incredibly popular.
What we’re seeing are people forming these groups to talk at city council meetings to determine, “Is this a technology that we want in our town?” It’s been people standing at a podium saying, “I don’t like this technology. Let’s talk about it.” And then on the other hand, you have vandals who are destroying Flock cameras and cutting them down.
Conservatives will say, “This is invasive government. This is Big Brother. Don’t surveil me. I don’t want you seeing where I drive my car or my truck.” The left is saying much the same thing, but they’re saying, “This is being used to surveil Black and brown people. It could be used to surveil women seeking abortions. It could be, and has been, used to surveil undocumented immigrants.” And so the backlash is coming from all angles at this point.
“I think that they are a very popular company with police and with cities, but the backlash is so strong that I think that the company is worried.”
There have been dozens of cities and towns that have canceled their contracts. Los Angeles allowed its contract with Flock to lapse. Denver canceled its contract with Flock. Some of these have been quite large cities. You’ve also seen pretty small towns cancel their contracts as well.
This is a multibillion-dollar company. They don’t want to remove cameras. They want to install more cameras. Are they doing anything meaningful to address these concerns?
The backlash has been so strenuous that Flock has started to say that it will proactively flag anomalous searches. So if a police officer is searching the same license plate over and over again, it might automatically flag an audit for the police department to see, “Hey, is this police officer abusing the system?”
They also are changing the default retention time from 30 days to seven days, meaning that your Flock data will stay in its system for only a week rather than a month.
Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union say that these changes are not super meaningful and that the main requirement that most people are asking for would be a requirement for police to get a warrant before they search the system, which would take these searches from being extremely routine — there are hundreds of thousands of searches done on this system every single month — to where there would be a higher bar, where a judge has signed off that this is a crime that warrants this type of search.
If Flock goes down or if the backlash grows to the point where they’re at least far less relevant in this field, are there a dozen other companies doing the same thing ready to take its place?
This technology is really old. It’s been around for decades. And what Flock has done is networked it and added AI to it. But there are other companies that offer similar technology. Motorola is in many cities in the United States. They make similar tech. Axon, which makes taser and body cameras and cameras for police cruisers, also has an [automated license plate recognition] product. And some of the cities that have ditched Flock have actually just replaced it with an Axon contract, meaning they’ve ditched one surveillance vendor and they’ve added a different one.
I don’t know that surveillance cameras and automated license plate readers are ever going to fully go away, but I don’t think it’s clear that Flock itself is going to survive this backlash. I think that they are a very popular company with police and with cities, but the backlash is so strong that I think that the company is worried.
We can see it in how their CEO, Garrett Langley, has been talking about the tech. A year ago he was calling journalists who covered the company activists and he was calling activists who protested the company terrorists. And he’s had to apologize for that rhetoric. He’s had to go and say, “We are not Big Brother. We are trying to improve your communities.” And they’re really on a PR tour right now to clean up their image.
I don’t know where this goes from here, but I haven’t seen much fatigue from the public on this story. I opened my Instagram feed and I’m just inundated with video after video that has millions and millions of views about Flock. This seems to be something that has really captured the public’s attention and that they really seem to care about.
A physician in Italy dons a VR headset before performing surgery. | Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images
If you’re like me, and you grew up in a house where your mom refused to let you get a video game console, because she believed sitting and staring at a TV was bad for you, you might think of video games as antithetical to health. And there is plenty of research about the ways in which gaming too much can harm your physical and mental well-being. I don’t think anyone would argue that eight hours of Call of Duty every day is doing your body or your mind much good.
But the old caricature of video games as simple brain rot is increasingly out of date. Even some normal, non-educational games can help with brain function (as long as they are played in moderation — and some games are better than others).
Beyond that, what if we could take something that is wildly popular (there are 3 billion gamers worldwide, 190 million in the United States) and reimagine it in a way that goes beyond just entertainment? Gaming tech has advanced to the point that we can put people into hyperrealistic virtual realities or use AI to create new personalized gaming apps with a brief voice prompt. These and other capabilities are unlocking new ideas from ambitious physicians and game developers that would have sounded like science fiction when I was a teen.
There’s increasing evidence that these platforms can be adapted to do genuinely incredible things to benefit our health. Here are just two ways in which video games are poised to change medicine — including one that allows any of us to game out in the name of advancing science. I can’t wait to tell my mom.
Video games could solve some big challenges in caring for kids
My perspective on video games in medicine started to change when I learned about one specific use: as an alternative to anesthesia for children and adolescents.
Here is a genuine clinical problem: For years, doctors have had few options beyond general anesthesia for kids who need to undergo imaging or minor surgeries. An MRI, for example, really only works when the patient is able to stay completely still and, as anyone who has spent a single minute around a child can attest, that’s hard for kids to do. So, children have been put under during routine MRIs or minor procedures that, when they’re performed on an adult, require only local anesthesia or no anesthesia at all.
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But giving children general anesthesia comes with health risks. The FDA warns against repeated or lengthy use of general anesthesia for children 3 and younger because of the risks to their growing brains and future learning development. Other studies have suggested that general anesthesia also poses some risk to the development of older children, and its use should be minimized as much as realistically possible.
Enter virtual reality video games.
“Games and VR can be especially effective for reducing pain and anxiety during pediatric procedures, including burn care, needle procedures, and other medical treatments,” Dr. Kimberly Hieftje, co-director and co-founder of XR Pediatrics and the Yale Center for Immersive Technologies in Pediatrics, told me over email. “If we can help a child get through a procedure comfortably without sedation, that’s a significant benefit. Sedation and anesthesia carry risks, and minimizing unnecessary or repeated exposure is particularly important in children.”
Several small-scale studies have examined using virtual reality games as an alternative to general anesthesia for minor and routine surgeries and for MRI imaging — with promising results. In one 2024 experiment, more than 100 kids (average age of 11) wore a mobile VR headset during a minor procedure (most frequently a hormone implant) and played a relaxing game such as Pebbles the Penguin (in which players navigate a snowy world and collect pebbles) or Space Pups (in which they play as a canine soaring through outer space and eating treats) while doctors performed the operation.
The surgical team kept general anesthesia on hand in case it was needed, but none of the children involved in the experiment required it or any other kind of sedation. They were also able to follow simple directions from their physician during the procedure. Their post-surgery reports of pain were similar to patients who did receive anesthesia, and they had shorter recovery times.
Likewise, a study out of Canada published in December 2025 tested how younger patients responded to VR as an alternative to anesthesia when they needed an MRI. It was a small study of only 18 patients, but, once again, the results were encouraging. The kids (average age of 5) went into a VR game prior to the MRI scan, learning about the procedure while collecting magic fairy dust. Then, they went into the actual MRI. And all of the kids who had played the VR game prior to the procedure were able to complete the imaging scan without any additional sedation or anesthesia.
The foundational idea here is: Kids are not little adults. It’s harder for them to sit still. They get anxious about even imaging scans. “We create for adults and, then, put kids in it,” Hieftje said, “and we need to think backwards.”
Video games can help kids stay calm and stop moving — or, for kids with different medical needs, start moving. As any parent knows, children also aren’t very good at following directions or being self-motivated to exercise — even if it would be good for their health, like if they have Type 1 diabetes, for example. That’s why a group of researchers from Yale, as described in a study published earlier this year and which Hieftje co-authored, experimented with introducing kids with Type 1 diabetes to a virtual reality video game that coached them through exercises.
It was a small group — 17 adolescents, an average age of 15 — but patients who participated were motivated to play the game, followed through with their routines, and even registered a small but detectable decrease in their blood sugar levels. The researchers are hoping that larger studies could demonstrate the program’s effectiveness and continue taking it mainstream.
The list goes on: Hieftje said their work uses games and immersive technologies to address everything from substance use and human trafficking prevention to mental health, child loss and grief, and infection prevention for infants in a natal intensive care unit.
But video games are doing more than changing clinical care for challenging patients. They are also unlocking the basic science that leads to new breakthroughs in treatment for everybody.
Video games could allow all of us to contribute to future scientific advances
When I think of massive multiplayer online games, I think of my friends and I camping out in somebody’s basement to play Halo against strangers for hours on end. But Attila Szantner, the co-founder and CEO of Massively Multiplayer Online Science, has found a more productive use for these remarkable platforms that can connect hundreds of people from all around the world.
What his company has done, in tandem with academic scientists, is integrate important but tedious basic research tasks into the gameplay of popular commercial multiplayer games like Borderlands 3. When I attended the Aspen Ideas: Health summit this summer, Szantner presented a demo of one of his company’s modules. What appeared to be players sorting colorful tiles in gameplay that would look familiar to anyone who’s played Tetris, he said, was actually players — normal people with no special training — helping to sequence DNA samples for people’s gut bacteria. Players in the game learn the task from a Borderlands character — including its ultimate scientific aim — and, then, complete the puzzles that the scientists have set up.
“Games are the absolute masters of engagement. They found the magic formula to make repetitive tasks feel fun,” he said. “In citizen science, people have intrinsic motivation to help, but standard tasks get monotonous and people drop off. Games solve that completely.”
They’ve turned the boring but vital work of number crunching and sequencing into gameplay — and convinced millions of their fellow citizens to help. In a paper published in October 2024 in Nature Biotechnology, Szantner and his co-authors described a project that involved more than 4 million individuals completing more than 135 million science puzzles in order to align a million human microbiome sequences. They found that the players’ collective contributions led to better sequencing than the current state-of-the-art computational methods. In another project, they turned some basic cellular analysis tasks into gameplay on the multiplayer game EVE Online that, once again, performed better than what is now the standard.
We have only scratched the surface of gaming’s awesome potential. Clinicians are also optimistic about gaming’s ability to preserve the cognitive health of aging adults and coach them through exercise routines (much like the kids in that Yale experiment), especially as the native gamer generations get older. Video games could revolutionize trauma care by placing burn victims inside of a cold VR environment — and what if you could reduce PTSD by playing Tetris? In 2020, the FDA approved the first video game for ADHD treatment: EndeavorRx. Experts confronting a male loneliness epidemic believe they can use video games to bring young men together. These programs could also transform medical training and allow surgeons to preplan and practice surgeries using their patient’s unique data to produce a bespoke virtual reality practice module.
The point is: The caricature of video games as a gateway to couch potato-itis is a relic of the past. Gaming could help all of us stay healthy — seriously.
Ever find yourself hunched over your laptop, eyes glazed, slack jawed, and stunned by the quantity of information modern life is throwing at you? You might take a break to stare at your phone. Or you could try switching from one browser tab to the next while checking your email and inching closer to the day’s deadline.
Some people call this TikTok brain. Others call it brain rot. Either way, it feels like a distinctly 21st-century affliction, caused by scrolling through too many short-form videos and social media feeds that trains your brain to seek out little hits of dopamine and ruins your ability to focus on anything for more than a few seconds. People with the condition may not be able to read books or even watch feature-length films. They can’t do anything except watch little videos, leaving them prone, catatonic, faces blank and bright in the glow of their smartphone screens.
I don’t even use TikTok, but I feel this way all the time. Give me one hour to complete a task that requires even a medium amount of mental fortitude, and I’ll find 55 minutes’ worth of other things to do. It’s not that I’m avoiding the task. But once I get started, my mind wanders relentlessly, no matter how hard I try to keep it on track.
You can blame technology for doing this to you — and I do — but the real issue is with how we treat our brains. Generally speaking, the human brain works like an analog computer, processing one thing at a time, and when you switch tasks (which is what we’re actually doing when we say we are multitasking), it comes at a cost: It drains your cognitive resources, which makes it even harder to pay attention in the future. The more you do this, the more ingrained the behavior becomes.
The human attention span is not one thing. There are different types of attention, including sustained attention (your ability to stay engaged with a task over a period of time) and selective attention (your capacity to take in certain information while tuning out irrelevant details). Alternating attention (the mental flexibility required to switch tasks rapidly) and dividing attention (process multiple things at once) are especially demanding on your cognitive resources. And all of this is managed by the brain’s command center, your prefrontal cortex, which handles executive function. When you’re experiencing cognitive fatigue, there’s a physical reason why: There’s actually less blood flowing to this portion of the brain.
“We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.”
Amisha Jha, University of Miami neuroscience professor
The good news is that the damage is not permanent. The human brain’s capacity to focus is just as intact as it was in the 19th century when everyone spent their evenings reading novels and knitting fisherman sweaters. Lots of things have changed since then, of course. As smartphones have driven us to consume endless amounts of information, psychologists have been working on strategies to put the pieces of our attention spans back together. I called a few of these attention experts hoping that they might tell me the secret to regaining my ability to focus. They all agreed that two things are necessary to solve the problem: Be intentional with your attention and let your brain rest.
“What we need most is the capacity to know where attention is, moment by moment, and greater agency over our attention so we can direct it intentionally,” Amishi Jha, a neuroscience professor at the University of Miami and author of Peak Mind, told me. “We need to stop trying to recover from cognitive fatigue and overload by consuming more information.”
Put another way, in order to reclaim your attention span, you first need to be mindful. That means spending less brain power dissociating on social media feeds and more on whatever you’re actually interested in. You also need to give your brain a chance to rest and recover. Staring at your phone will not help you recharge and reclaim your attention span. Staring at a tree, however, will.
Let your brain rest
One way to think about your own attention span is to consider what is voluntary and what is not. When something like a bright light or a loud noise grabs your attention, it engages your involuntary attention, which is effectively limitless. When you’re deciding to pay attention to something, however, you’re using your voluntary, or directed attention. This is a limited resource. As you’re making an effort to focus on something, like a book, your supply of directed attention runs down, but it can be replenished in specific ways.
This simpler way to understand how our attention works dates back to the 19th-century psychologists, like Williams James, but it’s making a comeback thanks to attention restoration theory (ART). This school of thought, first developed in the 1980s by University of Michigan psychology professors Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, suggests that spending time in nature restores your directed attention. The theory claims that the natural world does this by captivating our indirect, or involuntary, attention and allowing our cognitive resources to recover.
Imagine you’ve gone for a hike and happen upon a waterfall that’s so fascinating you can’t look away from it. Marc Berman, one of Stephen Kaplan’s former students and now a professor at the University of Chicago, refers to such a spectacle as a “soft fascination,” something that can grab your attention without consuming it, thus giving your mind space to wander. You might get the same effect from staring at a campfire or looking up at tree branches swaying in the breeze. Hard fascinations, by contrast, capture so much of your attention that you can’t look away and you can’t quickly recover. Times Square is a canonical example, but being on social media counts, too.
In one study Berman conducted, he and his team (which included Kaplan) gave research subjects difficult attention and memory tasks, sent them on a walk in nature or an urban environment, and then repeated the tests. The participants who went on nature walks improved their performance in these tests by about 20 percent, Berman said, and the improvements held regardless of whether participants said they liked the walk or not.
“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention.”
Nilli Lavie, University College London psychology professor
Berman said they aren’t entirely sure why nature seems to have this effect on us, but he theorizes that it relates to fractals, or repeating, self-similar patterns whose individual parts resemble their larger whole — tree branches or fern leaves, for instance. Fractals are common in nature, and Berman thinks their orderly arrangement helps our brains to process the information. “It’s easy to get the gist and you don’t need to encode all the details,” he said. “Whereas in the built environment, it’s not very fractal and you might have to encode everything, which might be more taxing.”
Of course, it’s not always possible to zip over a forest in the middle of the work day. If you can’t take a walk in the park, Berman said that even looking at a picture of nature scenes can help. (Try not to do that on Instagram, though, because you might end up just doomscrolling.)
Be intentional with your attention
Reclaiming your attention is one thing, but holding onto it in the first place is its own distinct challenge. When you find yourself feeling distractable, it might be that you need a break. If that’s the case, you can’t will your way into concentrating.
“One of the great misconceptions about attention is that it’s simply a matter of us paying attention,” said Nilli Lavie, a professor of psychology and brain sciences at University College London. “It’s not enough to just want to pay attention.”
Instead, you have to put yourself in an environment that makes paying attention not only possible but achievable. That means making a concerted effort to avoid multitasking, which will drain your cognitive resources. Try the alternative: monotasking.
Monotasking likely requires clearing away clutter, whether that’s literal clutter on your desk, or digital clutter on your screen in the form of extra apps or browser tabs. Turning off all notifications is essential. You should also hide your phone — put it in a drawer or in another room. (A widely cited study published in 2017 found that even having a phone in sight can reduce your cognitive capacity and affect your ability to concentrate.) When you need to take a break, don’t go find your phone: Take a walk outside, or stare at a tree, or look out the window and listen to a song you like.
Monotasking also means being intentional about how you do that one thing, avoiding distractions along the way. At work, this might mean carving up projects into digestible chunks. You might even try the Pomodoro technique: Set a timer for 25 minutes, focus hard on the task until it goes off, take a five-minute break, and repeat. At home, it could mean making to-do lists and prioritizing tasks so that the toughest ones get done first, while you still have some gas in the tank.
If you aren’t ready to turn off all notifications at this point, at the very least turn off all the ones that aren’t coming from humans. You do not need to be alerted of an Amazon flash sale while you’re trying to plan your family’s meals for the week.
Give yourself some constraints
There’s no such thing as being 100 percent locked in to any given task. When there are no external distractions, your brain actually turns inward and finds something else to pay attention to, which can lead to daydreaming and mind wandering. Daydreaming — creating a structured narrative of imaginary scenarios — is not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. It can be productive in helping you plan and think creatively. But if you’re just mentally wandering from random topic to topic, you’re getting into the danger zone.
Some people find that adding constraints can improve their attention. One approach you’ll see in self-help books is the use of a so-called commitment device that restricts future behavior in service of a larger goal. If you’ve read (or seen) The Odyssey, you might remember the scene in which Odysseus orders his crew to tie him to the ship’s mast and ignore his orders so that he won’t steer the boat into the rocks when he hears the Sirens’ call. Odysseus was using a commitment device to avoid killing his whole crew. You might use a commitment device, like a dedicated writing space or the Pomodoro technique, to avoid distractions, both external and internal.
So how do you focus just the right amount? Removing those external distractions is a great start. Much like paying attention, ignoring these distractions consumes your cognitive resources, impacting your performance, and causing you to make mistakes. It also takes more effort to stay on task as time goes on. From there, do your best to avoid overtaxing your brain to the point that the internal distractions take over and your mind is wandering. That’s how you know it’s time to take a break.
“For several minutes, give yourself no new input,” Jha said. “Do not reach for the phone while waiting in line. Take a short walk without listening to anything. Look out a window. Let the mind wander without trying to solve a problem.”
Take a walk in the park. Sit quietly and look at a bird. Paying attention has never sounded so relaxing.
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