When Iyer says “Do not surrender your focus to the machine,” he points beyond any single device to an entire system optimized to capture attention. The “machine” is the network of platforms, metrics, and incentives that reward what is clickable, immediate, and emotionally triggering.
Seen this way, distraction isn’t a personal failure so much as an engineered environment. The radical act, then, is to recognize that focus has market value—and to treat it as something you can protect rather than something that is endlessly available to be harvested. [...]
