Writer’s Voice: Human Fracking and the Fight for Our Attention
A Conversation with D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt
Something feels wrong with our attention — and with the world it shapes.
In Attensity!, D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt argue that our distraction is not a personal failing. It’s the predictable outcome of a multi-trillion-dollar system designed to capture, commodify, and monetize human attention. They call it “human fracking.”
But this conversation isn’t about digital detox or nostalgia. It’s about movement politics — about reclaiming attention as the foundation of truth, beauty, goodness, and democracy. What would it mean to build institutions, technologies, and cultural norms designed for human flourishing rather than engagement metrics?
Listen to our conversation and consider what attention means in your own life — and what it might mean to liberate it. Or read the transcript below.
Interview Transcript
Francesca
This is a wonderful book, Attensity, A Manifesto Of The Attention Liberation Movement. You begin this book by saying something is seriously wrong, writing that attention is, in deep ways, the key question of our moment. Say why.
Peter Schmidt
Why is attention the key question of our moment? I think all of your listeners can start with just thinking about how they feel, how they’ve felt over the past few years, even over the past decade. What we’ve seen and what we’ve experienced is that the basic experience of being a human right now has changed over the past 10 years.
It feels bad and everybody has some sense that the badness is deeply tied to the technologies that have become such an important part of our lives. We’re part of a coalition of folks -- activists, educators, artists -- named “The Friends of Attention,” who’ve been watching this story unfold and have come to believe that a number of the struggles that people have encountered with basic experience, the basic challenge of getting up in morning, but also the more complex operations of being with other people and doing politics and trying to make the world a better place, have been hindered by an operation that basically hinges on our attention. Everybody has a sense that something’s wrong with their attention right now. Our contribution to the conversation has been to point out that this attention thing isn’t just a consequence of our devices that’s accidental. It’s actually right at the heart of how so much of our technology operates these days.
These phones are the final node in a business model, depending on how you count, a $7 to $14 trillion industry that’s all about maximizing the amount of time that we engage with these devices, capturing our attention and turning it into money. And we call that “human fracking.”
It’s a very rich metaphor. It’s a very powerful industry. It’s powerfully affecting what it means to be human in negative ways. And until we solve this problem, we’re not going to be able to solve all the other problems that we’re facing.
D. Graham Burnett
What we are, all of us, now coming to understand is that these new technologies across the last 10 or 15 years have created a historically unprecedented complex that has unprecedented power to make money out of the insides of our personhoods, out of our love and care and need for our friends, out of our curiosity.
It was not previously possible directly to monetize our interest and care and curiosity and our relationships with other people. But these new systems have made that possible. And as Peter put it so nicely, the hinge is attention because the way these systems work is by commodifying engagement. It’s eyeballs and it’s the data extraction that bootstraps the power and intimacy of that process of holding on to our eyes.
So that multi-trillion dollar industry makes money by getting us to look over here for an extra moment, holding us in a scroll. And those experiences of personhood are at odds with the beings we are.
[Baby sounds in bckground] And that’s a baby you overhear there and, as your listeners may or may not know, Alyssa and I, two of the co-editors on this, are partners, too, and we just had a baby. And so we look at this little critter and we’re like, “do we want this little critter to be in a world of human fracking?” And it gives a real urgency to the work we’re on. Do you want to throw anything else in, Mom?
Alyssa Loh
I would just say that it’s possible that attention has always been core to personhood and our experience of being and that it’s newly apparent now that our attention is being relentlessly captured, monetized and stolen because we are all feeling the effects of having our attention taken out of the places in our lives where it belongs. And now that we can feel intuitively how aspects from our national politics to our personal life have collapsed without our attention, we can see that it’s the essential question of our time.
Francesca
In the book, you say something that really struck me: that the more urgent our problems become, the less real they feel. How does the degradation of attention make reality itself feel unreal?
Graham
That question goes to the heart of the matter, which is “what is attention anyway?” And I bet a lot of your listeners hear that term and what they’re probably thinking is something like attention span, your ability to stay with some task, often a screen-based task. And one of the core arguments of our book is that that conception of attention, that narrow understanding of attention as a kind of operational, instrumental, efficiency-oriented capacity to stay on task and be productive, is actually a total misrepresentation of what attention actually is.
And we’re very interested in the book in how we came to all be persuaded that what our attention is, is this tracking and triggering durational vigilance on task. And we think there’s a really interesting story to reveal to people there. It turns out that didn’t just happen.
That was because the scientific research conducted on human attention was frankly largely funded by the military industrial complex, which was especially interested in humans’ capacity to track and trigger and stay vigilant to radar screens. It’s not as if the National Science Foundation or the Defense Department were giving large grants to Buddhist monks to explore contemplation in 1958. They were giving large grants to scientists who were figuring out how long a human person could stay with a small stimulus on a big screen because that was otherwise known as radar tracking.
So, to answer your question, “how is it that this kind of new compromising of our attention makes the world feel less real?”, we need to go back and say, “well, what is attention?” And we’re saying it isn’t just your attention span or your ability to focus on the task. True attention in its full humanity, in its human form, not its machinic cybernetic, tap the keyboard and swipe form, full wild human attention as we were evolved to give our minds and time and senses to the world and each other and to be open to what obtains, that kind of attention shared is a world-making force. It is nothing less than what constitutes our shared reality.
So, the way in which the compromising of our attention compromises our experience of the real is that attention is the way we make the real. It’s the way we come together with our minds, times and senses, our spirits, our hands, our care, to make the world and the relationships that matter. And they have messed with that and thusly they’ve messed with us.
Francesca
I think a key word was one you just said, which is “relationship.” You say that attention is in fact relational and ethical rather than simply cognitive.
Peter
This idea of attention as a world building relational tool, gets us to the stakes of the matter, because if it is indeed the case that attention is how we build the world that we all live in together and share, then the kinds of attention that we have available to perform that task are going to determine what kind of worlds we have to live in. And that is just like the highest stakes imaginable.
So if we’re all thinking about attention in terms of this very narrow track and trigger form of attention, what you can think of as machine attention, then we’re going to live in a world that treats humans like machines. And we’ve seen how that works out. It is bad. It is not good for us. And it’s not a fun place either.
So, a lot of the book is calling for a rewilding of our attention. A kind of return to the flowering diversity of all the ways that humans can engage with the world. Somebody we look to when we’re thinking about this is the mystic and political activist Simone Weil, who wrote a lot about attention. And she says, true attention is nothing less than truth, beauty, goodness, just like the deepest, purest water of human being.
And if we can return to understanding attention as the foundation, the stuff of truth, beauty, and goodness, and then we build a world with those tools, then the world’s going to be a much nicer place to live in.
Graham
I want to put one more thing on that, which is, Peter uses that term return. And I think that is very powerful. And Simone Weil, it’s quite amazing. You know, she was an exact contemporary of some of the most powerful researchers doing that track and trigger machine vigilance during World War II. And they were, in fact, all in London within a couple of blocks of each other in that period, with these two very different conceptions of attention.
On the one hand, putting naval cadets in front of radar monitoring devices to figure out how long they could pay attention to stimuli. And then right down the block, someone who was saying all attention aspires to the condition of prayer, it’s the essence of the human spirit.
But I guess I want to just make clear that, one, we really want people who pick up this book to see that we are not talking about their attention span. And we also want people who pick up this book to be really clear on the fact that we’re not trying to go back in some Pollyanna-ish way to a world in which we all did macramé and grew our own wheat or something like that. In fact, part of what’s exciting about this moment is that we can only see clearly now how central attention is to our lives as individuals in community and in political life because of the way that the human frackers have put it under this shocking new kind of pressure. And so it’s like, it’s a very forward-looking book.
We’re not anti-phones, we’re not anti-social media, we’re not Luddites. We’re actually saying, “hey, in the deep tradition of dialectical, emancipatory movement politics, this is a pivot point where we become aware of something in a new way because it’s come under a new kind of pressure and we can move forward together into a new world in which, collectively activated by the urgent need to protect and nourish human attention and the human uses of attention in the teeth of machinic quantified money attention, we can actually build the worlds we want to be in.
Francesca
Before we move on, I want to point out another side to this: it’s not just human attention as world building, but human attention as world taking in. We survived as a species up to this point because for most of our history and prehistory, we were connected to the world in which we lived. And that’s why when you say the degradation of attention makes reality itself feel unreal, that is the core of the matter to me, that we are unconnected, not only to each other, but to everything else that exists.
Peter
Just a thought on that, on the taking in of the world: we think there are really two great environmental crises of the 21st century. One is the external environmental crisis of pollution, the despoliation of the atmosphere and the water and the soil. And we see that obviously in climate change being the kind of biggest and baddest of them all. That’s obviously an extraordinarily pressing issue.
We also have the internal environmental crisis: our minds and senses, the intimate parts of ourselves that connect us with the world outside of us, have also been polluted, broken apart, extracted and sold in a very similar way to the external environment.
And this is not to place these two crises in competition with each other. Actually, it’s exactly the opposite. If we want to solve the problem of the world out there, we have to solve the problem of the world as it is brought into ourselves, as we connect to it. And so, the stakes of the attention conversation are our ability to be with the world and to care for the world, really. And that’s why we have to understand our inner environment to be in meaningful relationship to our outer environment.
Alyssa
I think very concretely, even speaking for myself, it matters that our friends have been replaced by our images of our friends and that our communities have been replaced by common threads. Across time, that concretely changes our relationship to the world and makes it feel much less real.
Graham
Yes, such a powerful and central idea. And yet, we always want your listeners not to think that what we’re denouncing is social media exactly, because the problem is the business model that monetizes commodifies attention. The problem is human fracking, not connecting people via digital platforms.
That’s so key because the biggest paradox of all of this is that we could be experiencing a global pandemic of loneliness and isolation and precipitous drops in the developed world in the numbers of actual friends that people believe that they have, which importantly actually tracks with socioeconomic status. So, people in the lower two thirds of the income distribution report more precipitous compromised social relations. And Bob Putnam and others have documented this so well in their work.
But here’s the irony. We’ve seen that extraordinary and historically unprecedented pandemic of severing of each from all at precisely the same moment that a system of technologies has arisen that puts every single human being in more complete and immediate contact with every other human being on the planet than ever before.
So, how can that be? And the answer is real simple: the problem is not the phones and it’s not social media. You know, we like to joke, if your grandmother had designed the smartphone, you’d probably be using it to call home, you know, and if social media had been designed by like two performance artists and a really cool Tibetan monk, we’d probably use it as a really interesting place to share our experiences of personhood.
But that’s exactly what has not happened. These systems have been developed by essentially heedless profit maximizers whose bottom line preoccupation is with maximizing return on investment. And as a result, they’re using these technologies in ways that are at odds with our ability to hang on to the truth and presence of the people we care about and ourselves. That’s human fracking. It’s not phones. It’s not social media. It’s human fracking.
Francesca
And just to supply maybe an example of that, in my conversation with Cory Doctorow about his book Enshittification, he presents a very simple alternative. What if we had the ability to freely move our friends from one social media platform to another? Right now, we can’t, so people are locked into one system that is this human fracking system rather than being able to bring their social networks with them.
Peter
Cory Doctorow is a good example. There’s a lot of really amazing technologists out there who are criticizing technology and showing that it can serve us in different ways.
And we really think of them as allies in the broad tent attention activism movement. Everybody’s tackling this problem from a different angle. We’re not exactly technologists. We came out of the art world, we’ve got poets and teachers, and so we have a slightly different sensibility. So, we like to hang out with those people so that we can learn from them.
What we’re really interested in is changing the culture around attention? We need to make attention a value, something that people understand in their bones -- that this broad notion of attention, this wilded notion of attention is deeply connected to what makes life good. And so that’s a conversation about the Good. And that’s a cultural conversation, because every person makes culture that every person can contribute to. And this is why it has to be as broad as possible. It’s a democratic movement.
We need everybody talking about what attention is to them, why it matters and how it makes their life good, because that’s how we come to form a kind of shared sense of why this stuff matters. And that’s the foundation of what we need in this movement in this moment, not individual discipline, but broad scale cultural change. What we need is a movement, like the movement of people that formed in 1961 in response to the mounting despoliation of the natural environment, people from duck hunters in Louisiana, and hippies out in San Francisco, and corporate executives, all got together and said, the environment is constitutive of like goodness. It’s how our bodies can be well in the world, you know, it’s like the air we breathe. It’s so obvious, or at least it was when we realized it.
That’s when people got together and changed the world of environmental regulation. That’s when culture changed. And that’s what we’re going to see right now with attention. In fact, that’s what we’re already seeing. And that’s the story that we’re telling in the book.
Francesca
So, let’s focus on the Attention Liberation Movement. Why must this be a movement rather than a private individual detoxing?
Alyssa
Thank you so much for that question, because it really gets to the heart of the book. One of the core ideas of Attensity is that we have to reframe the problem away from individual willpower and toward the question of a movement. It’s so easy to think about the problem as a “you” thing, like “you can’t get off your phone.”
And most of us have memories of moments that feel like that, like, I meant to do one thing, and now I’ve been scrolling on my phone for two hours and it feels so bad. And it even can produce this feeling of private shame. What we want to say to people is, “it’s not you.” The answer is not that we have to have some kind of superhuman personal willpower. We need each other. We need our friends.
There is a multi-trillion dollar industry using the most sophisticated military-grade technology, most highly capitalized companies in history, all toward keeping you on your phone. Individual people are not equal to that, and that’s okay.
Graham
And the Friends of Attention, now for years, we gather in the summer for really intense summer school workshops. We call them “The Politics of Attention Series.” They started back in 2019. The group came together on the cusp of 2018 to 2019 and began writing together back then.
And what Alyssa just said about the private shame, one of the things I think we’ve come to understand in our efforts to study previous movement politics and to theorize change, part of what has to happen is that we have to convert that experience of private shame into collective anger. And that might sound a little scary, but we mean it. It’s not that you’re a bad parent because your kid has ended up quite messed around and sleep habits are disrupted and there’s some eating issues there and some like attentional disorder stuff and collapse in school.
It’s not that you’re a bad parent or your kid is not doing the right things. That private shame has to be converted into collective public fury that there are nihilistic, unregulated, multi-trillion-dollar corporations that are actually making UI/UX decisions aimed at ensuring that it is effectively impossible for your 14-year-old kid to extricate herself from the device space and feeding that kid increasingly disruptive psychological and emotional content precisely because that’s what maximizes engagement.
I’m not telling your listeners something that they don’t know. We’re aware of large-scale class action suits that are being mounted for these kinds of issues. But take that feeling of private shame and start finding your friends and re-articulating it as collective anger. That’s how a political transformation starts. And it can happen.
We were in an interview not too long ago with someone. We could sort of feel that the interviewer was kind of like, this is just so pie in the sky. You’re just not going to change the world.
And we heard that interviewer and tried to be patient. But then you have to say, look, we would love to have been a fly on the wall for the interview you would have had with a 19-year-old African-American woman in Montgomery, Alabama in 1952. You would have been like, “well, yeah, you’re really not going to make much progress on this, are you?” Or for that matter, with a group of trout fishermen in Peekskill in 1952, worried about PCBs. “You’re just not going to get any traction on this. Companies are too big. It’s too entrenched.” Well, actually, no. You can actually affect change.
And it is starting to happen. This is our moment. We want this book -- all of the proceeds of which are going to support our ongoing nonprofit work -- we want this to be like The Silent Spring, that it catalyzes, because we’re in a super saturated moment. People feel the anger. And we’ve got these fighters who’ve come before us, Yohan Haris, Chris Hayes, Tim Wu; stuff’s out there. Now we need to concretize it as movement, political action. And we feel it’s on the threshold.
Francesca
I just want to put a pin in the fact that the tech lords are not just the richest people in the world, they are also people with an apocalyptic vision who think they will be the only ones who survive and are doing everything they can to destroy the world while they create sanctuaries for themselves -- and also do not let their kids use their phones until they’re like going to college. So that kind of tells you everything you need to know about them.
But now let’s talk about the different kinds of sanctuaries that you are calling for.
Peter
You’re using the word sanctuary there. And that shows up a lot in the book. And so maybe a word on what we mean by “sanctuary.”
Atttensity is laying out a vision of how we understand attention activism, which is this collective movement that Graham was just speaking to: the concerted political coordination of a lot of different people who understand that attention is the stuff of goodness and who are outraged that it’s been so heedlessly polluted.
We think of attention activism as breaking down into three categories.
One is study. We need to understand what we are talking about when we talk about attention, how have other people understood attention, and also study itself being a very particular kind of attention.
Another category is organizing. We need to get people together, we need to collect our friends, we need to combine our efforts and our sense of what’s right and wrong into something that can actually move the needle on a big scale.
And then the final category is sanctuary: first and foremost, we need spaces that are safe from these pressures, where we can just remember what it is to be a human insulated from the extraordinarily distorting influences of this technology.
But we also think of sanctuaries as portals: it’s not just to get away from the bad stuff, it’s also to get closer to the good stuff and imagine the future of the good stuff.
So, it sounds a little rarefied, but there’s some really simple examples of sanctuaries out there that everybody knows. At their best classrooms can be sanctuaries of attention, space specifically for a kind of attention that brings people together to think deeply and to learn.
Museums have a long history as sanctuaries of attention, they’re dedicated to the kinds of attention that we give to works of art to the past. Libraries are other sanctuaries of attention. You go there to read; when you think about a library, you think of a librarian shushing you to keep it quiet in there.
So these are examples of forms of civic infrastructure that have always functioned as sanctuaries of attention.
And that’s something we point to say, “hey, this is real. Our world has been built around these kinds of spaces for a long time.” There are also new forms of sanctuaries of attention that we’re seeing every day.
And the really important point is that you don’t need the Metropolitan Museum, nor their budget to build a sanctuary of attention. You can actually build one where you are.
And we’ve seen a lot of people across the country come to us and say, hey, I’m building my own sanctuary of attention.
They can take a lot of different forms.
Francesca
What do they look like?
Graham
One can even think of that coffee shop, the one where they won’t let you be on your laptop between 1:00 and 6:00, or whatever. And the barista is like, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to ask you to put that away.” That’s like the Degree Zero of the contemporary attention sanctuary.
And those aren’t spaces that are at present especially articulating their local regs or norms in this kind of high political language. But it’s a powerful index of how everybody gets that, “actually, no, we don’t want a coffee shop in which there’s 18 people all huddled using the Wi-Fi, in the Machine Zone. The guy who started the coffee shop and the folks who are running it, they don’t want to run that extension of the neoliberal gig economy.
When they started the coffee shop, they wanted to create a new kind of space, like in Portland; they put in these rules because they want those spaces to be those kinds of spaces.
So, we would point to that and part of what’s been fun as we’ve begun activating this language with others is to have folks who are doing that rebrand their commitment to a no laptop policy in their coffee shop as, “hey, we’re an Attention Sanctuary, in case you were wondering. It’s not just that we’re trying to annoy you by stopping you from slowing down our Wi-Fi. This is principled and it’s part of a commitment to a certain experience of community.” So that’s, again, one example.
Francesca
But what would people do in a coffee shop, if they can’t be on their computers or their phones?
Graham
It’s going to be a beautiful reaching back to reach forward. We say in French, “Reculer pour mieux sauter” -- “take a step back in order to be able to jump farther forward.” And so people will have to be like, “okay, what did we do before we did this?” And then there’ll be some kind of exquisite throwback stuff like, in Portland, Maine, there’s an awesome bowling league. Because people were like, “hey, our grandparents used to all be in bowling leagues” and actually bowling together is kind of fun, cue Robert Putnam’s great Bowling Alone book. And then they reinvented the bowling club for now.
So that’s kind of a little twee maybe or a little like retro. But there are also communities of techies who build carve-out spaces using pretty sophisticated technologies like brick and so forth to [turn] off devices within spaces. And we’re totally sympathetic to those sort of Brave New World ways of thinking about defending and holding space for the human.
Look, they’ve harmed us, so it’s going to take a little work. I think we all feel it.
It’s a little unsettling to ask everybody to put away the devices even for like a meal or whatnot, can’t show each other pictures, going to have to reach down.
And again, this is a revolutionary movement that doesn’t ask you to sort of eat your vegetables. All aspects of attention activism have to be fun, they have to move the spirit, they have to feel good.
So, it’s a question of noticing where you already feel good, where you’re doing stuff that makes you feel closer to the world and other people. And let’s say that’s rock climbing with your friends. You really cannot check TikTok when you’re hanging on a bouldering route.
So, then your little group of four friends, go ahead and like call it what it is: When we’re out rock climbing, that’s part of attention activism. We really want people to start with where they are and build from that.
And to go back to that point we made about how there’s an historical hinge here. Peter invoked museums, libraries, concert halls as attention sanctuaries, and that’s exactly right as we go forward. But it’s not exactly as if those institutions have always understood that that was their most important thing.
Libraries in the 19th century, public libraries as they were invented, they were thought of as democratizing information access. Well, that was really cool in 1857, but nobody needs democratized information access in anything like that way now because even unhoused persons as a rule, the last thing they hang onto is their smartphone and they have as much access to the information ecosystem, with some provisos, as anybody else.
So that’s why we’re interested in helping institutions like libraries stop thinking of themselves as information access points, which has passed its sell-by date as an institutional mission, and go back and get another aspect of their institutional identities. What [they] always were was also an attention sanctuary, but we only see the civic and existential importance of that now under the conditions of attention fracking.
Same thing goes for classrooms. I’m a teacher, that’s my job. I always thought that my job was to convey information, that’s why I wrote my lectures and stood at the front of rooms and delivered them.
That is not the function of the professoriate at this time. My students do not need to come to a classroom to hear me do 12 lectures. It’s much easier for them to just listen to those on YouTube or whatever, and they don’t have to be in a room to experience that.
The classroom as an attention sanctuary at different ages and stages and age-appropriate ways -- this is actually something that is both historically true, but newly true in an incredible way. I start all my classes at Princeton with that “Okay, why are we here in this room together?” I don’t say, “turn off your devices.” I say in Class One, “why have we gathered? There are 500,000 people who would like to be in this room and we’re not letting them in. We could just turn on the video conferencing monitor and they could all be here.
Why are we not doing that? Why have your parents and society invested gazillions of dollars to have you be the 14 people in this seminar room? Okay. We have to make some kind of magic thing happen because we’ve gathered that couldn’t happen any other way. Now, if that’s going to have a chance of happening across these 12 weeks, what should we do?”
And we begin with that conversation and then the students themselves are like, “okay, here’s what we’ve got to do. We’re going to restrict the use of our devices because I want to be in this conversation with you all, because this is more like jazz improv class where we’re going to jam together and make an experience that could never have happened if we weren’t all on our intellectual instruments playing together. And that’s what’s going to make it worth our having done this instead of the other ways we could have gotten this information.”
We’re speaking here to this movement being anti-nostalgic. We’re not talking about going back to the way it was before. We’re talking about going forward with newly widened eyes in discovering something that is deeply true and important: that our attention makes us open to the world, receptive to relations and to the experience of ourselves.
And that now we can kind of deepen our appreciation for that because we’ve discovered it. Now we’ve discovered it because they’ve come for it. And so we have to gather it up and protect it and reactivate it in new ways.
Francesca
Simone Weil said that attention is like prayer. So take this a notch even further: What are the spiritual dimensions of attention?
Peter
We were just speaking about attention sanctuaries, and there’s an example that we left out, which is places of worship. The places we already call sanctuaries in a kind of different context also function as attention sanctuaries. And that’s reflective of the fact that we really think of these spiritual traditions as repositories of attentional wisdom that can serve us in this moment.
Our coalition is made up of a bunch of people, many of whom have their own spiritual practices. There’s Zen practitioners and Catholic folks and Jewish folks who observe the Sabbath. And these religious traditions, rich, ancient, deeply connected to the question of what’s good, have so much to teach us about what attention is and what it can be for.
And so, when we’re thinking about our mission as a movement and building coalition, connecting people with lots of different commitments, we really want to extend the invitation to people who consider those traditions to be their own.
And we want our understanding of attention to be as capacious and as diverse and as deep as possible. And so we think that every single one of those traditions has lots to teach us about what attention is and what it can do.
Graham
Peter’s invoking the Sabbath reminds us that sanctuaries of attention are not just spatial, they’re also temporal. We can carve out times that are protected and we can create architectural environments that are distinctive. And both are really powerful.
Peter
Just to that point, Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish theologian and civil rights activist, called the Sabbath “the Palace in Time,” and it’s such a beautiful architectural language to think about how we can construct time to be in touch with what’s most important about human beings.
Graham
And the other thing I would just say on the question of religion is, it’s not an accident that our community of activists have now for coming up on seven, eight years operated under this banner of the Friends of Attention. That’s very much meant to invoke the great tradition of the Society of Friends, the Quakers, who are a religious community that, one, has an incredible history of progressive activism and anti-slavery work, and also is a community whose central ritual democratized the question of speech and consists, in its classical form, of people sitting together and holding space until someone wishes to speak into the space.
And I think that we were all very moved by that tradition.
And so although we, as Peter said, hail from all different spiritual traditions, and we are a secular, civic project, spiritual communities are one of the core places where values other than money value have been held, defended, transmitted. And of course, ultimately, our book is a book, and our movement is a movement, that tries to call out the perils of letting all value language become money value. Turning our attention into a money value is perhaps the most harrowing, the most savage, the most brutalizing, but only the latest project of displacing other languages of value by money value. And so that’s really at the heart of it all.
And I’ll say, too, that as it happens, I’m not afraid to call it out. I’m a practicing Christian. I’m actually a Roman Catholic. And so for me, prayer life is really important; there’s a daily practice there for me, although I don’t necessarily lead with that. But that’s true to me and my personal experience, for real.
Alyssa
I just want to say quickly that when we’re doing this work of trying to help people have an expanded sense of their attention, when we say, “it’s your attention, it’s not just your attention span, it’s not just the ability to execute tasks in like a timely and efficient way, it’s not just what you use to send more emails or to make it through your work day.” It is really valuable to have these other traditions that we can use to help people put concrete ideas about what other things their attention is.
And one of my favorite chapters of the book is about this poem called St. Francis and the Sow. And it’s about attention and care. And I would say it has kind of spiritual dimension to it about the kind of attention all beings deserve. And I think that is, at the end of the day, a spiritual concept.
Graham
Just a reference for folks who should check it out, Galway Kinnell’s great poem, “St.
Francis and the Sow.” It’s about the kind of attention that causes beings to blossom. That everything’s a bud and everything needs attention, in a sense, in order to come more fully into what it is. And it is indeed one of the places we land the book.
Francesca
Here’s the last question. Alyssa, you’re sitting there with your newborn in your arms, and Graham has talked about how this project has become even more salient since the birth of your child. If this movement succeeds, or let’s say, when this movement succeeds, what will human life feel like for your child?
Alyssa
Well, I love that question, because one key element of the book is that it’s not about saying “no.” There’s so many books or essays or think pieces in this space that are about describing the problem or saying what we don’t want. But this book is so much about having a positive vision for a world we actually want to live in and for lives we actually want to have. Because life goes on and we need to know what we do want, not just what we don’t want.
And so, as you say, having a five-week-old really drives home the importance of having that positive vision for a world that we think is equal to kind of the glory of what human persons are. But of course, what we want for her is what all parents want for their kids and what we all want for our friends and our parents, which is a world where they are free to have their mind and senses move in relation to the world in a way that isn’t hostile to their well-being.
You referenced earlier your guest [Cory Doctoreau] saying, “hey, why can’t I move my friends from platform to platform?” And one great thing about that question is that your guest was saying was, “hey, why are these technologies designed in a way that’s hostile to what I actually want? This isn’t the feature I would actually want this device or this platform to have. Why is it like this?” One thing that [Doctoreau] is saying is that it actually doesn’t have to be like that. It’s possible to have all of the same technologies we have, but to have them designed in a way that actually serves what we want or need. And so, I would say that what I would want would be a world that’s designed with our flourishing in mind.
Francesca
Well, this is a terrific start for people to find out more about the Attention Liberation Movement. The book is, Attensity, and we’ve been speaking with D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Lowe, and Peter Schmidt. Thank you so much for talking with us. This was a terrific discussion.
Related Episode: Cory Doctorow on “Enshittification”
If this conversation about “human fracking” resonates, you may also want to revisit my earlier interview with Cory Doctorow about what he calls the “enshittification” of digital platforms.
Doctorow describes how online spaces are systematically degraded as companies shift from serving users to extracting value from them. In that conversation, we discussed something simple but profound: What if you could take your friends with you from one platform to another?
That question goes straight to the heart of Attensity! Both conversations point to the same underlying problem: technologies designed not for human flourishing, but for monetization. And both suggest that reform isn’t about abandoning technology — it’s about redesigning systems so they serve our relationships, not exploit them.
Together, these episodes sketch a larger picture: reclaiming our digital world requires a movement for structural change, not just better individual habits.