In his new book, controversial UK writer Johann Hari sets his sights on Big Tech and the addictive platforms that are stealing our vital powers of concentration. By Sally Blundell

Read time for this story? About 16 minutes. Less if you are practised in the imperfect art of skim-reading. More if you attend to the ping or glow of a text, email, Twitter feed or Instagram post then take a few minutes to regather your thoughts and pick up the thread of … yes, an article on our plummeting ability to pay attention.

As London-based author and journalist Johann Hari writes in his new book, Stolen Focus, we are living in a haze of distractions. Our ability to focus is no longer screwed to the sticking place. We read books less, we scan stories, switch from one media platform to another, sift through a daily avalanche of news feeds, messages and posts, fall down rabbit holes of increasingly unrelated links, get outraged, forget what we were working on, lose the thread.

Danish computer scientist Professor Sune Lehmann likens it to drinking from a fire hose: "What we are sacrificing," he tells Hari in the book, "is depth in all sorts of dimensions."

Why have we lost the plot? In Stolen Focus, Hari ticks off the list: high-sugar and processed diets cause regular energy highs and lows and play havoc with our ability to stay focused; lack of sleep leaves adults drowsy and kids hyperactive; pollution – at every stage of your life, French scientist Professor Barbara Demeneix tells Hari, "different forms of pollution will affect your attention span". Meanwhile, we work ever longer hours in ever noisier workplaces, leaving us stressed and exhausted.

But worst of all, in Hari's view, are the "pings and paranoias" of social media and the constant lure of the phone or laptop screen that continue to drill into our attention span. Through no fault of our own, he argues, there never seems to be enough stillness – enough cool, clear space – to stop and think.

"If we continue to be a society of people who are severely under-slept and overworked," Hari writes, "who switch tasks every three minutes; who are tracked and monitored by social media sites designed to figure out our weaknesses and manipulate them to make us scroll and scroll and scroll; who are so stressed that we become hypervigilant; who eat diets that cause our energy to spike and crash; who are breathing in a chemical soup of brain-inflaming toxins every day – then, yes, we will continue to be a society with serious attention problems."

The extent of this deep-seated distractibility hit home when, on seeing his teenage godson fall into a life-draining morass of WhatsApp, Facebook and Snapchat, he decided to uphold a promise he'd made to the boy a decade earlier – a trip to Graceland, the home of the King himself, on the proviso his godson switch his phone off during the day.

The experience, even for someone as attentive to social media as Hari, was harrowing. An iPad is issued to visitors at reception, and in each room of the mansion it "tells you about the room you are in, and a photograph of it appears on the screen. So we walked around Graceland alone, staring at the iPad. We were surrounded by Canadians and Koreans and a whole United Nations of blank-faced people, looking down, seeing nothing around them."

His description evokes Australian cartoonist Michael Leunig's well-known image of a man watching a sunset on his TV with his son, while the real thing happens outside his window. But rather than triggering a sense of pathos, it drove Hari to action.

"I was so disgusted by what had happened to my godson," he says, on the phone from his Victorian attic flat in Crouch End, an upmarket suburb in north London not far from where he grew up after his family moved from Glasgow. "I was disgusted by myself, by this trend which seems to be consuming everyone around me."

And we all know it is happening.

"There's a level at which everyone does know it's a problem. You say to people, think about something you are proud of over your life – being a good parent, starting a business, playing the guitar. Whatever it is, that thing requires a huge amount of sustained focus and attention, and when your focus and attention are breaking down – and there is evidence they are breaking down – your ability to achieve your goals and solve your problems begin to break down. You can sense what you would have been if you had been able to apply yourself, but you don't quite get there."

Hari achieved his own goals against considerable odds. His childhood was difficult. His mother was ill, his father away, he suffered physical abuse from another adult. "I was brought up in a family with a lot of addiction and chaos. My primary way of coping was by reading and writing – it became this almost compulsive behaviour."

But he was one of those lucky kids who could switch off his surroundings to immerse himself in a book. As a young adult, he applied this skill to a journalism career, clocking up awards for his articles and columns in leading British and US publications – in 2009 he was described by the Daily Telegraph as one of the most influential people on the left in Britain. But two years later, he was found to have used other people's quotes and to have maligned his critics on Wikipedia under a pseudonym. He left his role at the Independent, apologised publicly and profusely, and turned to writing books.

In Chasing the Scream (2015), he exposed the manifest failure of the US-led "war on drugs" (he argued it actually created, and fuelled, the drug trade). The book inspired the 2021 biographical film The United States vs. Billie Holiday. In Lost Connections (2018), he offered a new way of thinking about depression, examining its social and environmental causes, and non-prescription treatments. It was described by the British Journal of General Practice as "one of the most important texts of recent years".

"With all my books, I start with a question I genuinely don't know the answer to," he says. "With Chasing the Scream, I had people very close to me who I loved with addiction problems, and it seemed like nothing was helping. I wanted to understand what causes addiction, why we had a war against people with addiction problems and what actually solves the problem.

"With Lost Connections, I wanted to understand why so many people were depressed [he himself was on antidepressants for 13 years]. With Stolen Focus, I wanted to understand, are we having an attention crisis? And if we are, what causes attention to deteriorate?"

To find a solution to his own apparent dependence on social media, he decided to "show some willpower and give up the phone".

This involved a three-month digital detox in Provincetown, Cape Cod, in the US summer of 2018. No smartphone, no internet, a borrowed laptop on which he could work on a novel and enjoy the slow rhythms of a disconnected, un-tweetable world.

But abstention was not the answer. Two years after leaving Cape Cod, Hari found himself in isolation, recovering from Covid-19: "I found myself in a weird mirror image of where I started this journey," he explains. "I began by going to Provincetown for three months to escape the internet and cellphones. Now I was shut away for three months in my apartment with almost nothing but the internet and cellphones. Provincetown had liberated my focus and attention; the Covid-19 crisis brought it lower than it had ever been. For months, I couldn't focus on anything. I skipped from news channel to news channel."

He discussed this experience with former Google strategist James Williams, now a University of Oxford researcher into philosophy, ethics and technology. Just as wearing a gas mask outside for two days a week isn't an answer to pollution, Williams told him, going offline "doesn't address the systemic issues" driving the pervasive hold of social media.

In Stolen Focus, Hari addresses these systemic issues, travelling the globe to talk to academics, businesspeople and software engineers to discover how the giant tech companies keep us hooked on these platforms, and why it matters.

Since Open Diary, one of the earliest networking sites, went online in 1998 (six years before Facebook), social media has been a way of connecting people and sharing information. Which it has done – brilliantly. But to keep the required advertising dollars rolling in, it needs to hold us there for as long as possible. This, says Hari, is where the problems begin.

In the book, he interviews Tristan Harris, the former Google "design ethicist" turned critic of the tech industry. As a student, Harris had studied at Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab (later called the Behaviour Design Lab), under behavioural scientist BJ Fogg. Fogg's course built on earlier experiments in behaviour modification pioneered by Harvard psychologist BF Skinner. The tricks and techniques devised in the course to keep users interacting online have served as a blueprint for tech companies. As Hari writes, the designers of Instagram, with its feel-good feedback of hearts and likes, took Skinner's core techniques "and applied them to a billion people".

At Google, Harris learnt success was measured largely by "engagement" – the longer people look at their phones, the more advertising they see, the more money Google makes. "The engineers were always looking for new ways to suck eyeballs on to their program and keep them there … more vibrations, more alerts, more tricks," he told Hari.

The personal cost of this "grab-and-raid approach" is becoming increasingly apparent. As argued in Jeff Orlowski's Emmy-winning 2020 docu-drama on the impact of social networking, The Social Dilemma, social media platforms that seduce us into spending more time and sharing more information are leaving a whole generation "more anxious and depressed".

And more outraged. The algorithms used by these platforms privilege the more inflammatory posts, those that keep people looking at their screen for longer. A study by the Pew Research Center in the US found that if you fill your Facebook posts with "indignant disagreement", you'll double your likes and shares.

This "negativity bias" is instrumental in feeding the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation, and diminishing the "depth" of public discourse, Hari says.

With Twitter, Hari writes, very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. "If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it's most likely going to be shallow and uninteresting." The times in his life when he has been most successful on Twitter, in terms of followers and retweets, "are the times when I have been least useful as a human being: when I've been attention-deprived, simplistic, vituperative".

Silicon Valley is aware of these negative impacts. Ex-Facebook president Sean Parker, speaking at an Axios news website event in the US in 2017, described the strategy behind the design of the tech giant's applications: "How do we consume as much of your time and attention as possible?" The goal was to deliver a "little dopamine hit" by way of a like or comment. "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," Parker said.

In September last year, Facebook documents leaked to the Wall Street Journal by former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen included the results of an internal investigation commissioned by the social media giant. The 2018 study found that the platform's notorious algorithms "exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness". If left unchecked, Facebook users would be served "more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform".

Facebook then announced US$2 million for independent research proposals on polarisation. But in a blog post last October, Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said the idea that the social network deliberately pushed content to make people angry for the sake of profit was "deeply illogical": "We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content."

But the endless hours we spend on social media platforms, Hari argues, also chip away at our ability to focus on the important stuff. As the world burns, we are fiddling with Facebook likes and emojis, and "the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media".

As Tristan Harris said, when he testified before a US Senate hearing on "Persuasive Technology and Optimising for Engagement" in 2019: "How can we solve the world's most urgent problems if we've downgraded our attention spans, downgraded our capacity for complexity and nuance, downgraded our shared truth, downgraded our beliefs into conspiracy-theory thinking, where we can't construct shared agendas to solve our problems? … If we can't focus, what possible hope do we have to solve global warming?"

In his praise for Adam McKay's darkly funny climate-change parable, Don't Look Up, a Netflix film about a comet hurtling towards Earth, Guardian columnist George Monbiot empathises with the frustration of the alarmed scientists confronted by media and politicians bent on downplaying the very real threat. "In fighting any great harm, in any age, we find ourselves confronting the same forces: distraction, denial and delusion … It's the obsession with generating noise, regardless of signal."

Stolen Focus isn't a book about self-improvement. Just as diet books are not solving the obesity crisis – a situation, says Hari, caused not by people being weak or greedy but by the massive increase in processed foods, cities that are hard to walk or bike around and increasing stress levels – so personal willpower will not resolve the manipulative pull of social media platforms.

"It is like someone pouring itching powder over us all day, then leaning forward and saying, 'You might want to learn to meditate, then you won't scratch so much.'" Or, as Harris told the Senate committee, "You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you."

Rather, says Hari, governments have to step up: ban the targeting of junk food ads at children; introduce a four-day week, "because people who are chronically exhausted can't pay attention" (in the book, he visits Perpetual Guardian's offices in Auckland to see the success of its four-day week); and ban any business model "that tracks you online then sells that private data to the highest bidder".

Under their current business models, he says, tech companies will find ever more sophisticated techniques to interrupt and distract us. He points to Metaverse, a future version of the internet using real-time 3D software heralded by Zuckerberg in October last year, when Facebook changed its name to Meta.

"These technologies," says Hari, "are only going to become more invasive." As an alternative, he suggests, social media could be run on a subscription basis: "Its job – for the first time – would be to actually figure out what makes you happy, and to give it to you, instead of figuring out what makes advertisers happy, and how they can manipulate you to give it to them." Or it could be run as a publicly owned service independent of the government akin to the BBC in Britain. "It's not perfect, but it is the most respected media organisation in the world."

But it is up to the public, he says, to demand these changes. He points to the movement to ban lead in paint and petrol. "It was led by ordinary housewives in Britain, Australia and across the world saying, 'No, you are not going to poison our children's lives'."

"We now need to do the same with the factors that are ruining our attention today," Hari writes. "We are not medieval peasants, begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for crumbs of attention from his table. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds and our own society, and together, we are going to take them back."

Hari has won numerous plaudits for his books, but, in Britain in particular, where his past transgressions still simmer away in media memory, such grandiose statements and sweeping assertions have riled some reviewers.

Of Lost Connections, critics argued that the so-called "biopsychosocial" approach to depression and anxiety, acknowledging the role of life events in such conditions, has been around for at least 20 years.

Of Stolen Focus, critics point to Hari's own statement that there are no long-term studies tracking changes in people's ability to focus over time. Yet the fears expressed by the gallery of experts interviewed for the book, and the small number of studies on related topics, show a widespread concern for our diminishing attention spans amid the cacophony of new media.

Anxiety about the negative impact of new developments on our concentration is, of course, nothing new.

As Hari notes, ancient Greek philosopher Socrates feared writing things down would ruin people's memories. In the 18th century, novel reading was blamed for immoral and promiscuous behaviour. US cultural critic Neil Postman raised these issues in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death – a prophetic warning about the corrosive effects of television oddly missing from Stolen Focus.

Giving unwitting evidence to Hari's book, one comment writer, responding to a blistering critique of Stolen Focus by psychologist Stuart Ritchie in online magazine UnHerd this year, wrote, "Here is another article I have saved myself reading by looking at the comments, which, as often is the case, are enjoyable, pithily direct and accurately informative."

Hari does not read reviews. "I never look at [them]. I have two very trusted friends who survey the scene for me and tell me if there is anything they think I ought to know. What you can't do is let it into your head and not let it affect you. Of course, you engage with critical disagreement – that is all very healthy. But I think it would have been absurd to have written the book I have written and then be on Twitter all the time clashing with people – it would be a complete negation of the whole point of the book."

For his next project, Hari is working on a new book about a series of crimes that happened in Las Vegas. This year will see the release of The Fix, a documentary series based on Chasing the Scream and narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. Longer-term plans include a biography of Noam Chomsky and the novel he started in Cape Cod.

As for those focus-destroying distractions of the internet, he still uses a kSafe, a small plastic safe in which you can lock away your smartphone for a set amount of time, and a program on his laptop that shuts down internet access for a time prescribed by the user. "Otherwise, I just couldn't get the stillness required for my job."

• Stolen Focus: Why you can’t pay attention – and how to think deeply again, by Johann Hari (Bloomsbury, $34.99)