Scribbling Back at the Attention Economy

Are you a fidgeter?

Were you the kid at school who couldn’t sit still? The one who drew on the desk, shaded in the margins of the worksheet, or carved patterns into the wood instead of keeping their hands neatly folded?

Fidgeting has long been seen as a discipline problem. People who fidget are told they cannot pay attention, control their bodies, or manage their impulses. More recent research shows the opposite: that for many people with ADHD, fidgeting is not a failure of self-control, but a way of regulating attention and making an environment bearable enough to stick with.

Today’s internet is barely tolerable. The contemporary web is an enshittified, overly commercialised environment where ads sit on every surface, feeds are tuned for maximum stickiness, and ‘engagement’ is carefully measured and sold.

We are told to worry about our screen time, but far less attention is paid to the kinds of spaces our screens now are: who they are built for, whose attention they try to capture, and how people who are bored, overwhelmed, or neurodivergent improvise just to stay online on their own terms.

How might we make the contemporary internet more bearable?

Introducing the Screen Space Defacer: an experimental response to this modern distracted online condition. The Defacer is a browser extension that lets you scratch, smear, and scribble over digital advertisements instead of merely tolerating or hiding them. Where standard ad blockers make the commercial layer invisible, this tool makes it tangible. A banner ad stops being a one-way demand for attention and becomes something closer to a school desk again: a surface you can touch, mark, and slowly wear down as you figure out how to stay in the space on your own terms.

The key ideas behind the Defacer come from crip technoscience. Crip technoscience is a framework from disability studies that starts with a radical premise: disabled and neurodivergent people are not just patients or users to be fixed, but experts in making unlivable worlds more livable. It focuses on disabled hacks, workarounds, and everyday tinkering as forms of knowledge and world-building in their own right. It also refuses cure as the default goal and resists folding everything back into ‘normal’ productivity and function.

Our hope is that the Screen Space Defacer honours this tradition. It does not try to correct ADHD behaviours or train users into cleaner, more ‘disciplined’ screen habits. Instead, it designs from neurodivergent practices themselves – fidgeting, doodling, defacing – and treats them as valid ways of inhabiting digital space. It bends the interface to fit ADHD bodies and minds, rather than asking those bodies to bend to the interface.

Platforms like to describe their interfaces as frictionless: infinite scroll, autoplay, one-click, tap to continue. This smoothness is central to the attention economy’s fantasy of seamless engagement, where every delay is a problem to be engineered away. But ‘frictionless’ for whom? Smooth for which bodies or minds? For many users – especially neurodivergent ones – the constant flow of stimuli, prompts, and demands can be overwhelming and exhausting.

Crip technoscience introduces a different idea: access as friction. Sometimes the thing that makes a space more accessible is not smoothing everything out, but adding the right kinds of bumps, pauses, and textures that allow different bodies to find their own rhythm. In this sense, the Screen Space Defacer is crip technoscience: it creates productive distance between a non‑compliant, fidgeting user and the interface, turning time‑wasting into a way of surviving, and resisting an enshittified commercial interface.

Digital advertising is no longer just a few images on the side of a webpage; it is a core part of how online space is financed, measured, and organised. Ads structure the layout of feeds, shape which content is promoted or buried, and provide the metrics that decide what counts as “successful” attention. Behind each banner or sponsored post is an entire apparatus of tracking, valuation, and trading in human focus – what Tim Hwang calls a “subprime attention” market built on wildly overoptimistic assumptions about how much real human attention ads actually receive.

By inviting users to scribble on ads instead of ignoring them, the Screen Space Defacer politicises these commercial surfaces. It treats them less as invisible infrastructure and more as something like a billboard in a city – a piece of contested public space that citizens have long histories of defacing, parodying, and reclaiming. Turning ads into canvases for fidgeting and refusal makes the economic organisation of the interface visible and interruptible, even if only at a small scale: the user is still “engaged” according to the metric, but that engagement has been bent toward their own regulation and satisfaction rather than the advertiser’s goals.

The Defacer also opens a different way of thinking about attention beyond raw screen time. Instead of asking only “how many hours are you online?”, we hope using this tool will prompt users to ask “what kind of space are you in when you are online, and what is your body doing to make that space bearable?” For some users, that might mean opening a second window with a familiar TV show to keep the main task tolerable. For others, it might mean continuous scrolling. For the Screen Space Defacer, it means transforming the interface into a site of micro-resistance and sensory regulation.

In this sense, the tool is less about improving focus and more about legitimising different ways of inhabiting commercial digital environments. It honours the fidgety, scribbling, desk-defacing kid as an expert in managing attention under conditions not designed for them – and carries their techniques into the design of a browser extension.

Let’s be honest. The Screen Space Defacer will not topple the attention economy, and it will not stop advertising from trying to “shit in your head.”

But it does offer a small, repeatable way to scratch back. It makes resisting the attention economy tactile, playful, and available as a daily ritual rather than a one-time decision to install an ad blocker and forget about it. It says that your wandering, defacing, fidgeting attention is not a failure to be fixed, but a way of knowing that digital spaces could be otherwise.

And we hope to leave users with a question: if you were the kid who drew on the desk, what might it mean to start drawing on your newsfeed?