A rallying cry to fight the commodification of human attention, with the tools we need to reclaim our humanity, by a group of writers, artists, and activists in the vanguard of the movement We all feel it: something is seriously wrong. Our attention--that essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world--is being trapped, gutted, and sold out from under us by an industry of immense technological and financial power. The heedless exploitation of this vital capacity by a handful of tech companies is harming us all, reducing our very selfhood to that which can be quantified, bought, and sold--and shaking the foundations of our democracy. To push back against this “human fracking,” we need more than individual willpower or isolated efforts. We need a Drawing on a rich legacy of critical intellectuals and the creative wisdom of diverse traditions, <Attensity< calls on us to come together to defeat the greedy dehumanizing forces of brute instrumentalization--and re-enchant the world.

Autorentext

The Friends of Attention is a collective of activists, artists, and thinkers. Three editors and long-standing "Friends" helped Attensity! take shape: D. Graham Burnett is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of history of science at Princeton University. Alyssa Loh, a filmmaker, co-directed the short film “Twelve Theses on Attention.” Peter Schmidt is the Program Director of the Strother School of Radical Attention.