The Tech Industry’s Role in Brain Rot

I have spent years designing products that make people click a button faster.

That’s the job of a product manager, after all. Reduce friction. Shorten time to action. Make sure the user gets from point A to point B in as few steps as possible. I’ve thought obsessively about conversion rates and micro-interactions, all in service of making the digital experience effortless.

And for a long time, I believed that was good design. I thought the best product was the one people used the most with the least amount of effort, the one that fit so seamlessly into their lives that they didn’t even have to think.

Now, I’m starting to wonder if that was the problem all along. It would seem that we have designed for addiction, not intelligence.

If you pause for a minute and look around, you might notice that the world is full of apps, platforms, and interfaces designed to hijack human attention. Every notification, every font, every design, all engineered to keep users engaged for as long as possible.

We built a world where people consume more and think less. Where attention spans shrink, deep work disappears, and nobody reads past the first paragraph. We optimized everything for speed, simplicity, and efficiency.

And what did we get in return?

A generation that can’t focus.
A society addicted to distraction.
A culture that confuses engagement with value, clicks with knowledge, and efficiency with meaning.

The collective effort of product degisners have stripped away all the friction and consequently stripped away all the effort.

But we realise now that effort is where the learning happens. Where critical thinking happens. Where depth happens.

But that’s not what today's world is designed for. In our quest to make everything seamless. We have optimized people out of the equation, and now we’re living with the consequences.

The problem is systemic. It’s not just me. It’s not just one company. It’s an entire industry built on making people act without thinking. And breaking that cycle means questioning everything we’ve built so far.

But is it too late?

I think the right question to ask is: Can we now design technology that makes people more intelligent instead of less?

If we care about preserving human intelligence, we need to rethink how we build the next generation of tech products.

The goal of every product team is to keep people on the platform for as long as possible. We measure success by time spent, daily active users, and retention rates. But what if we flipped the script?

What if we measured success by how much value people got in the shortest time possible? What if we optimized for meaningful interactions instead of endless scrolling? Imagine a social media app that encouraged users to log off once they’d engaged meaningfully. Imagine a news platform that prioritized depth over clicks.

The best experiences in life require effort. Reading a great book, mastering a skill, having a deep conversation, none of these things happen in an instant. So why do we make everything in tech effortless?

What if we introduced intentional friction? What if, instead of making everything one-click simple, we built systems that encouraged deliberation, reflection, and depth? Maybe a search engine that forces you to compare sources before giving you an answer. Maybe a learning platform that rewards time spent thinking, not just consuming.

Most products today fight for attention. They use notifications and behavioral triggers to pull people back in. But what if we built technology that protected focus instead? What if we designed interfaces that encouraged deep work instead of constant context-switching? What if we stopped trying to steal people’s time and started respecting it?

I'm not sure how we can make all of these possible right now. I won’t pretend I have all the answers. I’ve spent years thinking one way and the process of unlearning something is as painful and deliberate as learning something new.

But one thing's for sure, we didn’t get here by accident. We built this.

And if we built it, we can change it.

The next generation of tech products will either push us further into unthinking automation or help us reclaim what we’ve lost. The choice is ours.

So, to every product designer, engineer, and founder out there: what are you building? and is it making people smarter?

Sonam Pelden

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