SriLanka, May 24 -- The average person will unlock their phone 96 times today. They will remember perhaps three of those moments.

The rest will vanish into a neurological fog that the industry quietly calls "engagement" - a word clinical enough to obscure what it actually describes: the systematic dismantling of your capacity to concentrate on anything at all.

This is not accidental. It is engineered. The attention economy - built on the insight that human focus is scarce, tradeable, and monetisable - has spent two decades refining its extraction techniques. What began as banner advertising has evolved into an arms race of algorithmic precision in which the prize is not your money, but your mind.

"The platforms did not steal your atte...