You’re out with friends. The wine arrives. Glasses clink. Someone starts telling a story. Then—buzz—someone else checks a notification. A scroll. A chuckle. A like. A DM. The conversation stalls, then splinters. The moment, half-lived, drifts away. We’ve all been there. We are there, all the time.

Smartphones have rewired our attention. American tech critic Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows, argues that digital technologies are fragmenting our thinking, weakening our ability to sustain deep focus and understand complex ideas. He describes how the internet encourages a kind of skim-reading that makes long-form thought harder to sustain. Jonathan Haidt, an American social psychologist, explores in The Anxious Generation how the rise of smartphones and social media has reshaped childhood and adolescence, making younger generations more anxious, distracted, and socially vulnerable. And Richard Seymour, a British writer and political commentator, is even more radical: in The Twittering Machine, he portrays our digital compulsion as a trap—a cybernetic feedback loop where we become both the consumer and the product, chained to a device that manipulates our emotions in real time.

We are not just distracted. We are being distracted—on purpose. And what is attention, if not the foundation of memory, intimacy, and meaning? Without it, even a shared bottle becomes just another item in the content feed: aesthetic, performative, scrollable.

But what if we could take it back?

don’t waste time checking your notifications

Carr, Haidt, and Seymour don’t just complain about screen time. They map the erosion of something deeper: our capacity for sustained, meaningful attention. In The Shallows, Carr doesn’t simply note our distraction—he shows how digital media rewires the brain itself, making us restless, addicted to novelty, unable to read more than a few paragraphs without craving interruption. Haidt’s The Anxious Generation links this to a cultural collapse in childhood development, where constant digital engagement replaces risk, play, and face-to-face connection. Seymour, in The Twittering Machine, goes even further—arguing that the internet isn’t a neutral tool, but a system of control, a political and economic machine that thrives on emotional manipulation, extracting attention like capital. Together, their works sketch a portrait of a society slowly forgetting how to be with itself.

And yet, a bottle of wine, shared with intention, cuts through the noise. It reminds us what it feels like to dwell in the moment—to listen, to follow the thread of a thought, to lose ourselves in conversation. It’s not a solution, but it might be a start.

So maybe this is our quiet little uprising: two friends, one bottle, no phones. No screens, no updates, no half-listening while half-scrolling. Just time, unfiltered.

In an economy that trades in your every blink, sitting still becomes an act of resistance. In a world that wants you distracted, paying attention is revolutionary. This isn’t a return to the past—it’s a reclaiming of presence. The table becomes our protest. The bottle, our slow-burning manifesto. A pause. A joke. A silence. A slightly too-long story. This is how we remember we’re not data points, but people.

Carr warned us the internet is slicing our thoughts into fragments. Haidt showed us what that fragmentation is doing to our kids. Seymour called it a machine—and urged us not to become part of it. They weren’t being dramatic. They were mourning something. And maybe we are too.

There’s something poetic—tragic, even—about how the digital economy harvests us. Think of the vineyard: grapes picked by hand, with care, guided by knowledge passed down through generations. A harvest that smells of sun and soil, shaped by weather, time, and touch. Contrast that with the algorithmic harvesting of our attention: cold, calculated, relentless. It doesn’t care about seasons or ripeness. It doesn't stop when you're tired. It extracts, always.

Social media is the new plantation: endless rows of scrolling, workers turned users, users turned data. We are plucked for our reactions, our clicks, our emotions. What grows is not fruit but profit—harvested from the thinnest slices of ourselves. A vineyard is labour-intensive, intimate, and slow. The attention economy is frictionless, industrial, and fast. But the result is the same: something valuable is taken. And what’s left behind is often depleted.

And while the vineyard nurtures patience, the feed rewards reflex. One cultivates presence; the other consumes it.

In Latin America, revolutionary figures once gathered in cafés and courtyards to debate politics, liberation, the shape of a freer future. Not all revolution needs a manifesto. Some begin with a shared glass. In a time of overstimulation and digital fatigue, returning to the table isn't nostalgic—it's insurgent. It says: we are here. We are talking. We remember how to listen.

We’re not asking for utopia. We’re asking for ten minutes without a push notification. For the gentle intoxication of being fully present. For the radical idea that your attention belongs to you, not the machine.

So drink slowly. Talk loud. Laugh hard. And let the bottle be more than a beverage. Let it be a beacon back to each other.

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