I call them Weapons Of Mass Distraction
Poor human beings, put in charge of email inboxes but struggling to reply.
They suffer from the ruthless attacks of the (highly-paid) engineers of Weapons Of Mass Distraction. One particularly potent example is known as Instagram.
They have lost control over their own attention span.
The emails that they want to attend to, they do not.
But the Instagram feed that they don't want to spend hours scrolling, they do, spending day-time and night-time on it, wandering, lost, in the never-ending feed. The image is of an intravenous tube, feeding them... Feeding them.... (Feeding them what, exactly?)... And diverting their precious attention away from all the things that matter in life: their own children jumping up and down in front of them, just a few metres beyond the glowing screens of their “smartphones”, hungry for some parental attention; the birds singing wondrously in the precious parks; the clouds drifting cheerfully across the sky, going on their mysterious, ambiguous journeys, irregardless of whether humans notice such an idyllic scene, or not.
A reduction of magnificent, ineffable life, into mere, finite, pixels on a glowing rectangle that is the face of their smartphones, which they gladly fondle, helplessly, desperately.
And they love it that way. They love to be endlessly distracted.
Poor, suffering, miserable, creatures.