Hooked and Scrolled

Hooked and Scrolled: Fiction in the Age of the Feed

How do you think the publishing industry is adapting to the ‘attention economy,’ and how do you feel about those shifts? Are books an antidote to shortening attention spans?

Fiction might be the last quiet act of rebellion.

The publishing industry today is running its own campaign in the “attention economy,” and the product is still—miraculously—selling: books in all their formats, paper, digital, and audio. But the pitch has changed. In a world where we scroll more than we linger, publishing has borrowed tricks from Madison Avenue: tighter hooks, shorter blurbs, and a ruthless devotion to packaging. Every tagline, cover, and tweet is designed to create an infinite hunger for a hit of dopamine. Don Draper would’ve called it “the carousel,” except now it spins at TikTok speed.

As a writer, I feel this pull constantly. I write lean because I assume my reader is one notification away from leaving me for a push alert. Every sentence has to seduce you—to earn another line read, another turn of the page, another moment of attention. Each word becomes a small act of persuasion, inviting you to stay with me, to linger a little longer.

But there’s an irony here. Books might be the last long-form medium that still rewards deep focus. A good novel doesn’t shout; it hums softly, then lingers in your mind, like a quiet echo. It demands immersion—the slow, deliberate attention that scrolling never allows. In that sense, fiction both participates in and quietly resists the attention economy. This tension isn’t just a feature of literature—it mirrors the larger structures of desire, productivity, and control that shape our digital lives.

Some thinkers, like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, offer a way to understand this tension. They describe capitalism as a “schizophrenic machine,” which unleashes desire only to trap it again in predictable cycles of consumption. The feed works the same way: endless choice loops us back into craving and fatigue. Byung-Chul Han calls this the “achievement society,” where we exploit ourselves willingly, mistaking constant productivity for self-realization. Reading offers a quiet alternative. A novel demands nothing of us but attention. In giving ourselves fully to it, we resist these cycles and reclaim a form of freedom that the algorithm can’t touch.

Under such conditions, it’s difficult to sustain the kind of contemplative attention democracy requires. You can’t deliberate when you’re exhausted, or imagine alternatives when every spare moment is filled with debt, distraction, and the low-grade hum of performance anxiety.

That’s why reading—slow, sustained, unmonetized—feels quietly radical. To give a book your full attention is to reclaim time from the marketplace, to say: my consciousness is not for sale. Fiction, at its best, doesn’t compete for your attention; it transforms it. It doesn’t demand that you stay—it gives you a reason to want to.

So yes, publishing has learned to market its soul. But maybe that’s the paradoxical hope of art in a distracted age: even as the system sells us the simulation of desire, something real still gets through. Somewhere between the scroll and the sentence, the algorithm and the line break, the old human capacity for wonder flickers—briefly, stubbornly—back to life.