A letter about attention

San Francisco, early 2010s. I'm sitting in a room full of product designers.

The speaker is Nir Eyal, explaining the psychology of habit-forming products. The hooks. The variable rewards. The triggers designed to pull users back again and again. He's basically handing out a manual for hijacking human attention.

As the talk went on I began to feel an unease. Nir was delivering what could be considered devious tactics with genuine excitement. It was like he'd solved a puzzle, but the puzzle was people. Something shifted in me after that. I knew advertising funded the "free" web. I knew attention was currency. But I'd never seen the tactics laid out so plainly, in a full room, with a smile. It felt like watching a standard being set.

I didn't leave the industry. I still believe technology can genuinely improve lives; I've spent over a decade building digital products. But that talk became the thing I'd return to whenever the unease surfaced.

Because somewhere along the way, the tactics became normal. We just accept it now. The feeds. The notifications. The autoplay. We treat them like weather.

The algorithms that shape our feeds aren't neutral tools. They learn your weaknesses, predict your vulnerable moments, and adapt in real time to keep you engaged. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has said they compete with sleep. They're not just competing with other apps. They're competing with your relationships, your rest, your goals.

And because the content you consume shapes your beliefs, values, and worldview, letting algorithms control your attention means letting them influence who you become.

I decided social media wasn't for me. I deleted the apps and started reading books instead. When I felt the urge to pick up my phone and scroll, I'd reach for whatever I was reading. I kept Messenger to stay in touch with friends but stepped away from the feeds.

For a while, it worked.

I found Tristan Harris and the Time Well Spent movement. Installed browser extensions to hide YouTube's homepage. Killed the recommendation sidebar. Stripped out ads. The web became more usable. I felt like I'd carved out a small space of sanity.

But willpower erodes. Work pulled me back onto platforms. I'd be disciplined on my laptop, then pick up my phone and fall right back into the patterns I thought I'd escaped. The phone was always there, and it had no guardrails.

I tried every blocker and productivity tool I could find. None of them worked. They claim to sync between computer and phone. In practice, they don't. They treat all screen time the same, when thirty minutes of sustained attention and thirty minutes of fragmented switching are entirely different experiences. They block and restrict, but they never redirect you toward your own goals.

This wasn't a failure of discipline. I was fighting a system designed by the best engineers and behavioral scientists money can buy. Willpower isn't enough when the other side has infinite resources and your attention is their business model.

Two years ago I tried building something myself. Gave up. Realized I'd just be making another slightly nicer blocker that still didn't solve the problem.

I sat with that failure for a long time.

Then something clicked: everyone focuses on blocking apps. But apps are closed systems. You can't reach inside and hide the algorithmic recommendations while keeping the content you actually came for. You can't selectively remove the design patterns engineered to keep you scrolling.

But the web is different. The web is open.

And Safari, across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, gave me something no other approach had: one ecosystem with rules that sync instantly. No escape hatch. Real visibility into what you're consuming, not just how long. And the ability to modify what you see.

That's Algoasis.

The philosophy is simple. Think of it as a set of tools, we call them guardians. They sit between you and the internet and fight for you.

You can still block sites outright, by schedule, by limit, or permanently. But when you hit a limit, we don't just show you a wall. We point you toward something meaningful: your goals, your tasks, the things you actually wanted to spend your time on. Blocking alone is punitive. Blocking plus redirection is guidance.

We can't yet change the algorithm. But we can change what reaches you before it does.

And beyond blocking, guardians give you control over what you see.

Take infinite scroll. Aza Raskin, the designer who invented it, has spoken publicly about regretting it. The mechanism is simple: remove the pause, and browsing turns into drifting. One guardian, the Doom Stopper, brings the pause back. It adds pagination to feeds, restoring the moment of choice. You might miss some content. But you trade that for your time back. That's a decision you get to make on purpose.

Or take recommendations. YouTube's sidebar and homepage are designed to lead you from what you searched for to what the algorithm wants you to watch. Another guardian strips that out entirely. The platform becomes a tool you use rather than an environment that uses you.

Each guardian is optional. Deploy the ones that help you. Ignore the ones that don't.

Dark design is insidious. The whole industry is trained to remove friction, create strong hierarchy, guide users to the next step without thinking.

How many times have you sat down with a coffee, ready to work, and thirty minutes later you're confused about what you even looked at?

That's not an accident. That's the design working exactly as intended.

I do think certain design patterns are harmful. I think infinite scroll is harmful. I think autoplay is harmful. I think algorithmic recommendations optimized purely for engagement are harmful. I'm not neutral about this, and Algoasis isn't neutral either.

But I also know that what counts as a distraction for you isn't the same as what counts for me. So we're not here to dictate. We're here to give you tools sharp enough to actually help, and let you decide how to use them.

Right now, Algoasis only works on Safari, for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Other browsers impose limitations that make this kind of control unreliable. We believe everyone should have access to this kind of control but for now, Safari is the only place we can build it right.

If any of this resonates, you can sign up for the wait list and we'll let you know as soon as it's ready.

Christian