In “less search, more feed” style, Clive Thompson recently wrote about “rewilding your attention,” or avoiding what the algorithm is trying to push at you:

The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.

My phone keeps trying to autocorrect “rewilding” to “rewinding,” and I’m choosing to take it as a sign: rewinding can be a kind rewilding.

Rewinding your attention, for many of us who grew up in the wilder days of the web, means going back to older ways of attending. (Clive’s solution is also the solution of Rob Walker and some of my other more interesting friends: cultivate weird RSS feeds in Feedly. And read weird books.)

For me, it also means going back to my beginnings, remembering the weird interests that brought me to my work, re-discovering and maybe re-investing in those interests, and sharing them in the way that has brought me so much…

Update: Clive has dropped a list of 9 ways to rewild your attention!