“Sorry, what were you saying?” Thirty years into life online and our collective attention-spans are now potholed and weathered. We find ourselves easy prey for algorithmic time-sinks (content) and predictive analytics (commerce); succumbing to cycles of instant disgust, instant delight, and instant tedium.

Research shows we read ever less deeply into the articles we open, glance at paintings in museums for ever shorter periods, and read ever fewer books. The solutions offered for this attentional crisis are varied, but equal in their severity. They range from the New York Times weekly dare to just spend ten minutes scrutinizing a single painting as a form of “slow looking,” through to the increasing ubiquity of the “one-unbroken-take” gimmick in prestige film and streaming series and the “one-unbroken-sentence” gimmick in contemporary fiction,not to mention the heady apparel of mindfulness apps, productivity hacks, noise canceling headphones,smart-drugs, and smart-beverages that keep the poly-working precariat on their A-game.

The e-flux Index has a slightly different relationship to contemporary distraction. It extols the playful and associative non-linearity native to the best anthologies and magazines, the absorbing zigzag journey from C to A to B and back again. In ethos the Index therefore sits within an artistic, literary, and philosophical lineage that has long celebrated the potency of, rather than prohibiting and punishing, the creative wandering of a digressive and receptive mind, and moments of reverie. It seeks to facilitate those epiphanic moments when a promising distraction catches wind: “Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker/ Over the strained time-ridden faces/ Distracted from distraction by distraction.”