Hey there! Are you paying attention?
What if you looked at the phone in your pocket — the device you may be looking at right now — as a “cognitive prosthetic” engineered so giant corporations can monetize your desires, your eyeballs, and your attention?
We just talked live with Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett and Strother School of Radical Attention director Peter Schmidt about Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, the new book they’ve coedited with filmmaker Alyssa Loh. The five biggest companies in the world, they told us, got that way by exploiting human emotions, eyeballs, and attention — and now is the time to pivot from studying that problem to finding a solution. Working as part of a collective called the Friends of Attention (the twenty co-authors who wrote the book) and through the School, they call for a new movement of attention activists, mobilized to recapture personhood from the technology oligarchs and build a more human future. We also talked about:
“Human fracking” — the way the attention economy hacks our brains at scale
Why it’s hard to get people to reject something that makes them feel good
How the tech oligarchs use the techniques of manufactured uncertainty that protected the cigarette industry from regulation
Why boomers may have a bigger problem with social media addiction than kids
How harm to children finally turned public opinion against smoking, and why we’re at a similar point with social media — a Silent Spring moment
Why rescuing healthy attention doesn’t mean rejecting technology, but the predatory economy behind it
Why it will take collective action — on the scale of the labor and environmental movements — to build a political force capable of taking on the attention economy
To get the politics we deserve, we need to remake ourselves — and learn to come together
Click on the video player above to watch the conversation — and don’t forget to pay attention!
Our live shows are open to all. Afterward, to access the full video of this interview and the transcript, become a paying subscriber.
Your support is how we keep the lights on, pay our staff a fair wage, and build the new media we all deserve. When you subscribe, you help us reach more people.
Join us today, or if you are already a member, give a gift or group subscription.
And to keep up with the Friends of Attention, subscribe to the School of Attention’s newsletter here on Substack
Join us for more Live conversations this week!
Tomorrow, Wednesday, January 21, at noon Eastern, we’ll join Priya Parker of Group Life and writer Anya Kamenetz for a talk about making friends as adults. Then on Thursday, January 22, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern, we’ll speak to literary agent Alia Hanna Habib about the craft and business of writing, and about her new book, Take It From Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch.
A note for Book Club members: Because of breaking news commitments, we’ve had to reschedule tomorrow’s conversation with journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis, the authors of Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America’s Justice Department. We’ll meet with them next week, on Wednesday, January 28, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.
To join and watch, download the Substack app (click on the button below) and turn on notifications — you’ll get an alert once we’re live, and you can watch, chat, and even participate in the conversation during our Book Club meetings from your iOS or Android mobile device. If you’re using a computer, you can also watch (and ask questions in the text chat) on our homepage.
