Alice Girard Guittard’s essay “Attention Is All You Have” turns a familiar memory—the Tetris effect—into a warning about modern digital life. After repeated exposure to Tetris, people may notice its shapes in unrelated surroundings or dreams. Girard Guittard uses that phenomenon as a metaphor: sustained exposure can shape what a person notices, expects, and thinks about. The comparison is memorable, but it does not demonstrate that recommendation systems produce an equivalent psychological effect.
The essay’s central claim is about agency rather than a specific algorithm. Girard Guittard argues that platforms increasingly decide what appears next, while users mistake continued scrolling for an intentional choice. She presents recommendations for cooking, art, finance, climate, war, and other topics as examples of attention being redirected toward engagement and advertising. Those examples illustrate her concern, but the essay provides no platform data, experimental results, or causal analysis showing that any named service designs recommendations for the stated effects.
The strongest practical distinction in the piece is between going to a known destination and opening a feed designed to supply the next item. A bookmark, RSS subscription, tutorial, or direct profile begins with a stated purpose. An infinite recommendation stream can blur the boundary between that purpose and whatever appears next. That difference matters operationally: a finite task has a natural stopping point, while an endlessly refreshed feed does not.
Girard Guittard’s historical contrast also needs limits. She recalls a web assembled from bookmarks and specialized sites, where disturbing or manipulative material generally required a deliberate search rather than appearing automatically after unrelated content. This is a personal account of how the web felt, not evidence about the prevalence of harmful material then or now. It also leaves out a useful reader concern raised by the shift away from feeds: direct discovery depends on remembering, maintaining, and finding sources, and the essay does not explain how to recover those functions at scale.
The proposed remedy is deliberately modest. Instead of treating attention as something that can be recovered through one app or productivity system, Girard Guittard recommends repeatedly choosing slower, bounded activities: reading blogs, following RSS feeds, finishing tutorials, and resisting the impulse to let every click generate another. The advice is compatible with a simple pre-commitment—decide what to do before opening a device, then stop when the task is complete. It does not show that this habit works for everyone, nor does it address accessibility, work requirements, or people whose online communities depend on algorithmic discovery.
The essay is most persuasive as an argument for designing friction into consumption. A browser history, a short reading list, a feed reader with a defined inbox, or a single open tab can make the next action visible. None of those tools removes persuasion or distraction by itself. Their value is that they replace an opaque ranking system with an explicit queue and make it easier to notice when the original purpose has ended.
The evidence also does not support a blanket conclusion that all recommendations are harmful. A recommendation can surface relevant material, help people find unfamiliar sources, or reduce search effort. The problem Girard Guittard identifies is not recommendation in the abstract; it is a system whose next-item logic is difficult to inspect and whose incentives may favor continued attention. Evaluating a particular service therefore requires asking what signals it uses, what choices it offers, and whether a user can stop or change the stream.
That distinction makes the essay useful beyond nostalgia. Its enduring question is whether a person can recover a sense of direction without pretending that the open web was uniformly benign or that individual willpower can overcome every design choice. The answer offered here is not a return to an imagined past. It is a smaller, more deliberate practice: choose the destination, define the stopping condition, and treat attention as a limited resource that deserves an explicit plan.