The Trillion Dollar Battle For Your Attention, with Peter Schmidt and D. Graham Burnett

Summary

Intelligence Squared – The Trillion Dollar Battle for Your Attention

With Peter Schmidt and D. Graham Burnett
Aired: February 9, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode investigates how the attention economy – driven by a handful of massive tech companies – has transformed human focus and well-being into a commodity, precipitating what the guests describe as a generational internal crisis. Peter Schmidt and D. Graham Burnett, two of the authors behind A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, join Intelligence Squared head of programming Connor Boyle to discuss the origins of this new economy, the harms of “human fracking,” and why merely relying on individual willpower isn’t enough. They lay out a vision for a collective movement to reclaim and protect attention as a public good, comparable to environmental activism.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Core Problem: The Commodification of Human Attention

• Tech companies have built a business model around extracting and monetizing human focus (02:16–03:20).
• This “attention industry” uses sophisticated technology and vast financial resources for what Schmidt describes as “squeezing money out of our eyeballs.”
• The scale? Schmidt says, “On the other side of that little patch of glass, there is a $14 trillion industry, the five or six biggest corporations in the world…expending all of their firepower to keep you on your device” (05:17).
• The hosts argue that seeing this as only a matter of personal discipline is both misleading and harmful; the real fight is system-level and unwinnable alone.

2. From Diagnosis to Action: Demanding a Collective Response

• The book and movement’s novelty is their pivot from “diagnosis to action” (06:15).
• Schmidt: “We need to come together with movement power to protect...the internal environment, our minds, time and senses, which are being heedlessly and kind of recklessly exploited by underregulated firms...” (06:25).
• The analogy to environmental activism is foregrounded – just as society mobilized to protect nature, it must now band together to safeguard minds and attention.

3. Rethinking What 'Attention' Means

• Burnett, a historian, traces the evolution of “attention” as a concept (07:28–10:48):
  • Our contemporary understanding was shaped by military and industrial needs; laboratory science defined attention as measurable, task-oriented, machine-compatible.
  • “If all this research money had been given to a bunch of Buddhist monks and three performance artists over the course of the 20th century, we would have inherited a very different conception of what attention is” (09:37).
• Peter Schmidt expands: “Attention is time, mind and senses. Attention is staring out the window, daydreaming, baking, taking care of your child, sitting with the dying” (14:44).

4. The 'Fracking' Analogy: Human Beings as Extraction Sites

• The guests use “fracking” to describe the extraction of attention (15:25–18:23):
  • Burnett: “Hydraulic fracking...pumps huge quantities of yucky detergent deep down into the earth...the pressure breaks up the earth’s deep structures...A really useful way to think about what the tech companies do to us. It is, if you like, a homology.”
  • Tech companies pump “huge volumes of high pressure, mostly yucky, low quality content out of our screens...where the pressure...breaks up our attention into smaller and smaller bits.”
• Schmidt: the consequences are societal, affecting politics, selfhood, and even childhood development: “We are seeing the consequences. And our tech overlords are laughing their way to the bank. $17 trillion in market capitalization...all deeply staked in human fracking” (18:23).

5. Beyond Personal Willpower: The Need for Communities and Movements

• Burnett: “Get your people together. We're talking about collective movement politics...being with other people” (23:31).
• Schmidt compares it to the Industrial Revolution: just as laborers organized to counter new exploitation, so too must people organize against attention commodification—“creating communities of solidarity around the protection of our attention” (24:13).
• “Anything you do with others that protects you from being fracked, that is a component of what we call attention activism. Nurture it, call it attention activism” (27:40).

6. Types of Attention Activism

• Three zones of attention activism (34:28–37:21):
  1. Study: Reflecting on and giving time to understand your own attention (35:57).
  2. Organizing/Coalition-Building: Building power by forming communities that value and protect attention (36:24).
  3. Sanctuary Spaces: Creating protected spaces—physical or social—where attentional values are prioritized (37:21).
  • Schmidt: “If your coffee shop has a barista who won’t let you use your laptop between four and eight...that’s a form of attention sanctuary” (38:05).

7. Success: A New Politics of Attention

• Success is “a total cultural reorientation to attention and its relationship to human flourishing” (41:53).
• Burnett: “We want people to understand the relationship between the movement of their minds and senses, the well-being of themselves and their communities, and the quality of our politics” (42:13).
• Schmidt: “This is what we hope for from the language of atensity. Atensity is itself an old science word...We use it as a slogan for a transformed relationship to our attention experience” (43:37).
• The ambition is to move beyond “the politics of spectacularity” that dominate today into a positive, healthy politics of attention.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “That is a tug of war that you are never going to win in isolation.”
  — Peter Schmidt (05:22)

• “If all this research money had been given to a bunch of Buddhist monks and three performance artists...we would have inherited a very different conception of what attention is.”
  — Graham Burnett (09:37)

• “We are seeing the consequences. And our tech overlords are laughing their way to the bank. $17 trillion in market capitalization of the six largest corporations...all deeply staked in human fracking.”
  — Peter Schmidt (19:43)

• “Get your people together. We're talking about collective movement politics. And the first condition...is being with other people.”
  — Graham Burnett (23:32)

• “Anything you do with others that protects you from being fracked, that is a component of what we call attention activism.”
  — Peter Schmidt (27:46)

• “You begin to use this language and the activist movement grows.”
  — Peter Schmidt (28:23)

• “If your coffee shop has a barista who won’t let you use your laptop between four and eight...that’s a form of attention sanctuary.”
  — Peter Schmidt (38:05)

• “We want people to understand the relationship between the movement of their minds and senses, the well-being of themselves and their communities, and the quality of our politics.”
  — Graham Burnett (42:13)

• “We think...rethinking together of our attention is constitutive of the forms of change we need. And that’s the highest ambition of this book.”
  — Peter Schmidt (48:38)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening statement and problem overview: 02:16–06:15
• Redefining attention, historical context: 07:28–10:58
• The fracking analogy and its consequences: 15:25–19:43
• What can individuals do? Building attention activism: 23:31–28:23
• Explaining attention activism and sanctuary: 34:28–41:30
• What does success look like? The new politics: 41:53–49:35

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Summary: Takeaways for Listeners

• The attention economy is a global, system-level phenomenon that is deeply shaping individual and collective well-being.
• Our dominant understanding of attention is narrow and technologically shaped; reclaiming broader, richer, humane senses of attention is crucial.
• Individual willpower is insufficient against trillion-dollar industries devoted to capturing attention; only collective, political, and cultural responses can address the scale of the problem.
• ‘Attention activism’ is flexible and inclusive—everything from group hobbies to rethinking institutions like libraries and coffee shops can become loci of change.
• The guest authors call for a “politics of attention,” aiming for a societal reorientation in how we value and steward our collective focus, akin to what occurred with the environment in the 20th century.
• The tone throughout is both urgent and deeply hopeful, emphasizing small beginnings but pushing for real, systemic transformation.

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Recommended: For anyone concerned about distractions, tech overreach, or the health of modern democracies and communities, this episode offers remarkable clarity and actionable optimism.

Transcript

[Peter Schmidt]

I'm Alex Honnl, professional rock climber and founder of the Honl Foundation.

[Graham Burnett]

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[Connor Boyle]

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Our attention is under attack. A handful of powerful tech companies are extracting and monetizing our focus, reshaping our inner lives and threatening the foundations of democracy. Many proposed solutions rely on individual willpower. But can we really outsmart supercomputers on our own? In this episode we're joining joined by Peter Schmidt of the Strother School of Radical Attention and D. Graham Burnett, professor of the History of Science at Princeton University. They are two of the authors of a manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. This book is written collectively by 25 academics, activists and artists known as the Friends of Attention. And all royalties from the book are donated to charity. In this episode they speak with Connor Boyle, head of programming at Intelligence Squared, to explore the origins of the trillion dollar battle for our attention and how we might begin to recl our minds. Let's join Connor now with more.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

Thank you both for joining us on Intelligence Squared today. I think the first question is maybe an obvious one, but an important one. What's the big issue that Intensity is trying to address?

[Peter Schmidt]

So yeah, thanks for having us on the show. It's a pleasure to get to talk about this stuff. I mean, the big issue at stake in this book is a book that I bet a lot of your listeners are already going to be feeling. I know from your past lists of guests you've had people like Tim Wu and Tristan Harris, and these people are allies and friends of what we think of as the Attention Liberation Movement. We think of those folks Jonathan Haidt, others. These people are attention activists in our coinage, meaning they're folks who understand something that a lot of us feel, namely that over the last 10 to 15 years, a radically new business model, radically new exploitative industry has arisen, deeply financed, technologically sophisticated, and it has at its heart the commodification of human attention, meaning eyeballs, squeezing money out of our eyeballs. So if our book goes to that question again, as it does, I think the next question is, what makes this book novel, since we've heard a dozen diagnoses of that kind of catastrophic problem over the last 10 years. And to talk about what makes this book, this collectively authored book which worked on pardon, different new distinctive. I'm going to give you Peter Schmidt, my colleague and friend.

[Graham Burnett]

Yeah, as Graham said, there's lots of really great allies out there who are writing about the problem, the consequences of the commodification of human attention, squeezing of our eyeballs for cash. What attentity does is that we, the friends of attention, myself, Graham and our co editor, Alyssa Lowe, we wanted to make a concerted pivot from a diagnosis of the problem to a blueprint for action. What the hell can we do about it? Right? And the summary of what we say is this new form of exploitation that hinges on our attention, our minds and senses, most often in relation to, to our screens and our technology is a systemic issue. Most people experience it as a kind of first person, individual encounter with the device in their hand. And it's easy enough to construe that encounter as, you know, a sort of issue of personal discipline or an issue of kind of your ability to parent your kids. What we are saying is on the other side of that little patch of glass, there is a $14 trillion industry, the five or six biggest corporations in the world that are expending all of their firepower to keep you on your device and to capture your attention in ways that they can then sell to advertisers. That is a tug of war that you are never going to win in isolation. And so the big move that we make is to push back against this new form of exploitation. We need movement politics. We need an understanding of attention that is capacious and rich enough to organize a vast coalition of people around. And we need to forge ahead and imagine together what it looks like to have a politics of attention, what it means to, to mobilize around the protection of our attention as a precondition for the common good. And so intensity sets out into that unknown and charts, of course, and talks about People who are already doing this work.

[Peter Schmidt]

Yeah. So the first thing would be to say pivot from diagnosis to action. And then what's the action? It's going to take a movement. It's going to take a movement like the environmental movement of the 1960s, where people came together to protect a common good in the external environment. At this point, we need to come together with movement power to protect another common good, the internal environment, our minds, time and senses, which are being heedlessly and kind of recklessly exploited by under regulated firms that are just doing what rational actors in a capitalist marketplace do. They're just maximizing return on investment, but with full scale indifference to human flourishing. And we are human. And so that doesn't do.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

Yeah. And I think one of the really interesting things you start off with in the book is trying to expand what our understanding of attention is. And you talk about the way in which even the idea of an attention span is somewhat misguided. Can you kind of elaborate on why you think attention is more than us? Just, you know, how much time we spend on our phones?

[Graham Burnett]

Yeah. One of the big ideas that's, you know, hidden in the book is the simple idea. And Graham, being a historian, is deeply acquainted with this idea as there are many members of our coalition that the ways we think have a history. Right. And so the ways that we think about attention right now, and as a consequence, the ways that we use and practice and share attention has a very specific history. At a time when we're very interested in transformational politics, it's always worth it to say, okay, what exactly is the history of the ways that we're thinking right now? Many people, when they're talking about attention these days, they think about it in terms of attention span. Totally understandable. This, this sense that our ability to give our attention to something for an amount of time has diminished is very real. That said, we tell the story of how we came to think about attention in these terms. And in summary, it's in the book. You can go find it there. This notion of attention developed over the past 130 years, the long 20th century, you might say, and it emerged from a lineage of laboratory psychology. So these were scientists who were being tasked with figuring out how attention works. Now, you always have to ask, who are they working for? And in this case, a lot of those laboratory scientists were working for the military industrial complex. They were being tasked with figuring out how to properly equip, how to best equip young soldiers to shoot down airplanes or to sit in front of radar screens for as long as they could with their eyes on the screen in order to detect a little radar blip that might constitute an incoming danger. So our understanding of attention was largely produced by scientists in the library, in the laboratory, who were slicing and dicing attention in order to maximize people's ability to stay with their machines. If that sounds familiar, it's because that's the world that we're living in now. As we like to say, if all this research money had been given to a bunch of Buddhist monks and three performance artists over the course of the 20th century, we would have inherited a very different conception of what attention is. However, that's not the case. We've inherited an understanding of attention that is task oriented, based on track and trigger analysis. So you can sort of measure it by looking at where people's eyes are focusing. And it's mostly cybernetic. That is, it has developed out of a series of experiments that put people in relationship with machines. Why is this important? Because if we're going to have a movement around attention, we need to have a conception of attention that's sufficiently rich and compelling and connected to the goodness in life worth organizing for. And I think Graham can swing in here to talk about the vast range of ways that people have thought about attention that aren't this extremely narrow, already. Instrumentalized machine attention.

[Sponsor Voice]

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[Peter Schmidt]

Part of what's super exciting about this emerging movement is that people come to it from a variety of different backgrounds. So Alyssa Lowe, the third co editor of this book, is a filmmaker who went to business school, as it happens. So she comes to this stuff both from her familiarity with the early projects to commodify attention, straight in business school case studies, and then out of her experience as a narrative artist committed to certain kinds of directions, rational attentional experiences in the interests of creative expression. So I come to it, as Peter said, as a historian, and I've been teaching at Princeton for years, a kind of course on the history of attention. And some of what Peter was just sketching there, some of that comes out of archival work that I've been doing and others have been doing to show how we ended up with this narrow, quantified, instrumental, operational, cybernetic form of attention, is our central preoccupation. And the first move in this emancipatory movement, attentional liberation, is to, as Peter's just said, remind ourselves that we don't want to have a fight over that kind of attention. We don't want the sort of 18 additional minutes of that kind of attention. That we can get if we put a screen time monitor on our phone, because it's going to give us back a kind of attention where we're already in the ring of a narrow instrumental track and trigger operational kind of attention. But what is attention? It's so much more than that. And we could go all the way back to deep thinkers in the Western and in Eastern traditions from St. Augustine, who in book 11 of the Confessions has a staggeringly rich account of attention as the core of the effort to reconstitute constitute the human relationship to God. It is about defeating our splayedness in time. So human attention, for Augustine, is about literally solving the problem of existing simultaneously in the past, the present and the future. When you read that, you're like, okay, wait a second. That's really different from the kind of attention that TikTok is monetizing. But I'm sure you have listeners out there who've taken time with Buddhist traditions. A remarkable philosophical book that a lot of us care about by John Erdogan Gueneri called Attention Not Self, which is a kind of philosophy of mind using the Pali canon as a set of key Buddhist texts that argue that subjectivity itself within that tradition is constituted without reference to a kind of bounded personhood because attention is itself the dynamic experience of being. That there isn't a kind of vessel of a person that then sort of like uses a searchlight of attention on the world. That attention is the frame through which existence passes, and we are an aperture through which that dynamic of attentional flow is continuously occurring. So those are just a couple of examples of the richness, practically speaking, your listeners, to be part of the movement, do not have to go out and try to read Attention not Self, which is an exceptionally difficult work of analytic philosophy of mind. They only need to remember that literally attention is time, mind and senses. Attention is staring out the window, daydreaming, baking, taking care of your child, sitting with the dying. We constitute our experience of life out of our attentional experiences. When our attention is understood in that richest and most capacious sense rather than in this narrow, quantified, instrumental, monetized sense.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

I want to try and put name to the harm that's happening. And you use the term fracking, that we're being fracked. Why do you use that term? And why is that a good analogy for how our attention is being exploited?

[Graham Burnett]

I can kick us off here. Fracking phrase that comes out of hydraulic fracking. I think many of your listeners will be familiar with it, but it's Worth doing a summary of how this works. Hydraulic fracking. New form of petroleum extraction that allows oil companies to get tiny bits of petroleum that are deep down in the earth, otherwise irrecoverable, and get them out and process them and sell them. The way that it does it is that they pump huge quantities of yucky detergent deep down into the earth, where the pressure of that fluid breaks up the earth's deep structures and pumps those little bits of petroleum up to the surface where they are aggregated, refined and sold. This is a really useful way to think about what the tech companies do to us. It is, if you like, a homology. It is structurally identical to the forms of extraction that tech companies exact on human beings. Which brings us to human fracking. What these companies do is they pump extraordinary con, extraordinary volumes of high pressure, mostly yucky, low quality content out of our screens, into our eyes, into our brains, where the pressure of all that stimulation breaks up our attention into smaller and smaller bits that are then more easily brought to the surface and captured in the form of an extra tenth of a second of my eyes on the corner of my screen, right where the company that runs Instagram is able to put an ad. So that process of pumping and sucking and monetizing is human fracking. And the reason this is such a useful metaphor is because hydraulic fracking has very profound consequences for the environment. It causes structural instability. It's known to pollute the groundwater. It's, of course, related to the broader global crisis of climate change. Likewise, human fracking has been shown to be very destabilizing for our psyche. It pollutes our sense of self, it breaks up our attention. And we think it constitutes, as Graham said earlier, a sort of generational crisis of the internal environment that is in sort of perfect troubling symmetry to the crisis of the external environment. And it conveys the violence of what's going on right now.

[Peter Schmidt]

Sometimes when we talk about human fracking, we get a little pushback from people who say, well, actually, I don't feel when I'm on Instagram that it's some kind of Clockwork Orange thing where my eyes are being held open and some horrible thing is being pumped into my face. So why is that? And our response there is to say, look, just like Connor, you said, we all kind of feel something's off. We look around in a room full of people we love, nobody's looking up. We look at our politics and we're like, how do some people believe those things when other people believe these things? How could there be these confurulent experiences of polarization and siloing? We look at the rates of suicidal ideation among teenage girls and we're going to say, how can evolved beings like us, under conditions of such affluence, long to off ourselves at that scale? We recognize that we have diagnoses of attentional disorders which are very serious. And we're not saying those aren't absolutely real, but we think of folks who are struggling with those kinds of things as canaries in the coal mine of how deeply wrong the conditions are. And when you look at all that stuff going on, you have to say to yourself, hmm, there's AI driven super powerful algorithms which have been set. The problem of maximizing time on device, keeping you in that flow no matter what you actually want to do with your day and your life and your time. And while at any given moment the next thing feels good and you're getting that dopamine hit, what we have to keep remembering is that you are being defeated by the same machines that can beat every human at go or chess or any other game you want to play. They're beating you at what you are going to do with your day. Even if it feels good, the next one feels good. The best way to think about what's happening right now, and we are not alone in saying this, is that this is a biohack at societal scale. And in another 30 or 40 years, people look back at the way we lived across this 15 years and they will, our grandchildren will do face palms as they ask us, how could you have thought it was okay to give an iPhone with streamed content from one of the three or four largest corporations in the world to your two year old and then just kind of chill out and have a coffee and hope for the best with respect to what would happen to the formation of personhood in your child. And we'll all have to be like, well, but the kids are very annoying and they kind of cry and they're very quiet when you just like it's, look, I get it, but we are seeing the consequences. And our tech overlords are laughing their way to the bank. $17 trillion in market capitalization of the six largest corporations by by market value in the world at this point. And all six of those companies are meaningfully staked in the hardware or the software or the datafication of precisely this industry. They are all deeply staked in human fracking. From Nvidia down through Apple, Meta Alphabet, Amazon. Those are the companies. And none of those companies were in the top 20 companies in the world 25 or 30 years ago and even exist. So, like, this is the biggest global thing happening, and it's money being made out of our human personhood, and we are paying the price in our beings. And that's the message of the book. The book says that. And the book says something that. Again, it's kind of an awkward thing to try to say because all your listeners already know this. I want to apologize to your listeners lest they be like, I can't believe someone's lecturing me about this again. I know this. We all know this. The point is we all have to start saying it together and say, we're going to keep letting this happen. We're going to change the language around attention because this is a watershed moment in which you push the people to a certain point, and then they say, actually, no, you can't further exploit us. We have to change the game on you. That's what we're saying. It's time for that to start. And again, we're not alone in saying that. Other people are saying that too. Now we really need it to start.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

Absolutely. And I think there's a lot of people who think, yeah, the world's messed up, but what the hell can I do about it? So, you know, if someone's listening to this now and they're like, I feel I resonate with what you're talking about. What should I do?

[Graham Burnett]

We have a line on this and we spell it out at great length in the book. But if I were to summarize it, the first step is get together. Get your people together. We're talking about collective movement politics. And the first condition of that form of world making is being with other people. And at this moment, I think it's. It's helpful to draw on one of the historical analogies we make in the book. The last time that new technologies entered the world at a scale that created a globalized system of new forms of exploitation was the Industrial Revolution. Those steam engines, the factory model, all of these fabulous new machines which were not in themselves exploitative or evil, created the conditions for a business model. And this is historically how it developed a business model that exploited people, that alienated them from their labor, from the movement of their bodies, and created new forms of human suffering and extraordinary wealth for a new. For a generation of capitalists who ran the machines. We're in a similar moment. These new machines, these devices, which are not in themselves evil or necessarily exploitative, are serving a business model that's exploiting the movement of not our bodies, but our minds and senses. This is an. A useful analogy because people back then said, no way. This does not work for us. We cannot be exploited like this. We cannot see our life ways dissolved, and we cannot see our families broken up by this new form of abuse. So what they did back then is in some ways a kind of model for what we might be stepping into right now. People got together, the laborers, they said, we need to create. We need to create communities of solidarity around the protection of our labor. And this produced a whole new form of politics. Labor politics, the strike, all the rest. We're at a similar moment. We need everybody everywhere to form communities of solidarity around the protection of our attention. And we think that that will produce new forms of politics, New forms of gaining purchase on the levers of power that we're only just now beginning to sense. And that can all be quite abstract. And, you know, we are gesturing out into the unknown here. But it can be quite simple as well.

[Peter Schmidt]

Yeah. And just to pick up, like, very concrete. So Peter set up the kind of theoretical analysis of what's needed. But part of what's exhilarating, kind of for me in this work is that let a thousand flowers bloom. I mean, just as in the moment of the environmental movement, what did that consist in from 58 to sort of 72? Well, a lot of different things. Groups of scouts going out and picking up rubbish in the park. Did that really kind of solve the problem? Not exactly, but it was part of it. Alcoa executives being like, you know, we can actually encourage people to recycle aluminum. It would actually be better for us as a business model, and we could look good on this. Did that really help? Well, not exactly, but it was part of the movement. And a bunch of hippies being like, let's not kill all the whales. Well, they had only some success on that. But out of all those different elements, somewhat idiosyncratic, people doing what they cared about, A shared collective recognition of a joint commitment to shared good emerged. And though we would hardly declare the environmental movement a success, given where we are, it does still represent one of the most powerful collective global movements within the last hundred years. It's significant, and it certainly set us up to understand the scope of the challenges we continue to confront. So concretely, what can be done? A wide range of things we say in the book, look, anything you do with others that protects you from being fracked, that is a component of what we call attention activism. Nurture it, call it attention activism. When we put out A call saying, hey, are you an attention activist? Get in touch with us. Three years ago, the term had no traction whatsoever. And so what we watched as the spreadsheets filled in, as hundreds of people wrote in from all over the US and beyond saying, I've never heard this term before. But yes, I'm a rock client climber and I rock climb with five or six of my buddies here in the Central Valley. And we all put our phones in our cars and we don't take pictures when we're climbing. It's like part of like our culture, I guess. We're attention activists. Yeah, absolutely. You are. I'm a math teacher and I like create these like math odysseys for my kids where we go on math expeditions together. And it's because I want them to immerse themselves in a math problem. So I think of the math problems that I build for them as like a choose your own adventure story that they explore together. Am I an intention activist? You are if you say so. That's part of it. So everybody from bonsai clubs to macrames to parents groups, the answer is you begin to use this language and the activist movement grows very concretely. We also have built out an international coalition. And so you can jump on the website of the school that we've created in Brooklyn and join the coalition. We have a toolkit which we are happy to pass around to folks, which comes with the book in a way that says, you want to get going in this in a more kind of direct and engaged and organized way. Join us. But the short answer is this is a movement that has its origin in doing the good stuff that we love. We say that your attention is being well used when you feel closer to the world and the things you care about. So it's a very easy index, a check. You don't need a screen time monitor. You can just ask yourself, did what I just did for the last hour bring me closer to the world and the people and things I care about and to myself? If the answer is yes, you were using your attention in the ways that conduce to human flourishing. Share that. Build it out. So, Connor, as a beginning of answers to those questions for like what we can do, how do those sound? Do you want to kind of follow up on that? Because it's so important.

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[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

I think it's really helpful for people to see that there's a low bar to entry. You know, doing a jigsaw with your friends can be a way of fighting back from the kind of endless pull. And we all have that itch while you're doing something. Well, I could just check, I just check an email, I'll just check one. And just resisting that and actually being present in the moment is, is really helpful for people to.

[Graham Burnett]

It's. You're exactly right. And whenever we're talking about this, we also make very clear that there's a kind of, there's a negative move. They're saying we're keeping the bad stuff out, but we're also inviting the good stuff in. So it's very much, if you like, a world building project, because we think that attention is a world building faculty. And there's a useful framework that we'll, we'll share with your listeners here that we use to think about attention activism, to break it down with a little more specificity, we think of attention activism as comprising three zones of activity. And to be clear, any single activity can hit all of these three targets at once. But it's a helpful framework. The first attention activism is study. What do we mean by that? You study. Your attention doesn't need to be a bookish form of study, doesn't need to be scholarly. You are giving your attention to your own attention and the ways that it interacts with the world and understanding how it works. So you can. We have people in our coalition, they're surfers. They say, when I'm out on the water and I'm looking at the waves, my attention behaves in a very special way I don't give that kind of attention to almost anything else in my life, but I love it. It. They started reflecting on that form of attention and understanding how it fed their life and what it did and exactly how it worked and connected them to the dynamics of the water.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

That's a form of study.

[Graham Burnett]

The more that you can give your attention to your own attention, the stronger a sense you will have of what it is that you are trying to protect and nourish and share. So study. That's the first zone. Second zone, organizing or coalition building. This is. We can't do this in isolation. To build power, we need to get together. So you figure out the attention that you love that brings you closer to the stuff you care about, and you get together with other people, figure out what kinds of attention they value, what enriches their lives. If we start to build communities around this shared sense of the value of attention, and they're already out there, even if they don't call themselves this, then we can have what social scientists call mobilization structures, which is a funny. Which is a. A term of art in the study of movement politics that basically says when everything goes wrong and people get upset and they. Their sense of personal shame or powerlessness is converted into political anger, then these existing social structures give people a channel to direct that anger into meaningful political change. So we need organizing. And then the last category for attention activism is the formation of sanctuary spaces. And I know Graham has a particular personal relationship to this zone. So, Graham, tell us about sanctuary.

[Peter Schmidt]

Yeah, thank you. So when we talk about sanctuary as an element of attention activism, we're talking about collective commitments to creating protected spaces. So on the one hand, yeah, like, the idea of sanctuary can seem like very kind of holy temple, kind of all that kind of stuff. But let's bring it down. If your coffee shop has a barista who won't let you use your laptop between four and eight in the coffee shop, that's a form of attention sanctuary. There are sort of some rules in place that. That, look, we just don't want you doing your gig work here. We want this to be a space where people, like, sit and talk and see each other and have a different kind of experience. So attention sanctuaries already exist. They're out there, and people who care about their attention find them. And many legacy institutions like museums or libraries or for that matter, classrooms or concert halls, these are attention sanctuaries. They haven't necessarily thought of themselves that way. It's not the language that your library has mostly been using. Because the Libraries of Victoria, Victorian institution, it's preoccupied with a Victorian problem, really, of information access. That's not the problem anymore. So we're really interested in working with those institutions. We've done a lot of that to help them kind of rethink about another aspect of their inheritance upon which they can draw. That makes them very, very important and relevant at this moment. Museums, which are in some sense the rapacious hall, the booty of spoil, of the age of empire, well, that's not something that a lot of us are especially celebrating these days. Nevertheless, museums have sheltered very particular traditions of durational, immersive, attentional experience, study of works and the contemplation of works. That's really powerful. Museums are attention sanctuaries. And for that matter, many of us have some relationship to a spiritual tradition, one sort or another other. Maybe it's your zendo, maybe you're a churchgoing person. Whatever else those spaces are for you, they are also attention sanctuaries in ways that are really important. And the last thing I'll say about this, we've done some peer reviewed sort of academic writing on this. There's a piece in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences on the ways communities can in a sense, do little mini constitutional conventions to draft the rules that they're going to use so that there are sort of principles guiding the way they'll conduct themselves. We think this is very important in classrooms now. We think it's important in families. You want to begin to claw back some protected space, sit down and talk about there being half an hour, an hour where we're just all going to actually literally put the phones aside. Not because it's some boomer old guy with white in his beard telling the kids to get off their devices. At this point, the parents are bigger problems than the kids, but because we actually recognize that there's a positive good we want to experience together. And that's the last thing I'll say about sanctuary. One way of thinking about sanctuary is like protection from the bad stuff that's out there. But just as Peter said before, our movement is a positive movement to make the good worlds we want. So when we talk about sanctuary, we often talk about it less as a sheltering and more as a kind of portal. There are things that can happen when you create a sanctuary. You can go places with others. And that's the aspect of the creation of sanctuary we really love to emphasize. So those are the three elements of attention activism. We hit them in the book study, not just the study of Attention, although that's good, but also just study, because study is a way of mingling yourself with the world and making yourself attentionally organizing, getting together with your friends, because that's going to take community to do this. And then sanctuary, the creation of sanctuary.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

I think that's a brilliant summary. And towards the end of the book you talk about this becoming not just an awakening of consciousness, but actually moving towards a politics of intensity. So, you know, my final question really is, what does success look like for you? If you're thinking sort of where the intensity movement is leading towards, do you have a kind of a sense of what success would look like?

[Graham Burnett]

Yes, we believe that 50 years from now people are going to look back on this moment and wonder how on earth we ever let ourselves get into this pickle. But they're going to reflect on this moment as an example of the ability of movement politics, of a sense of common solidarity to affect change at a fundamental level. So they're going to say, how did you. I'm sorry, I'm going to start over again. The point is, what we're looking for is a cultural shift, a total cultural reorientation to attention and its relationship to human flourishing. So in the same way that over the course of 15 years in the mid 20th century, people came to understand at a visceral level the relationship between the natural environment and human well being, we want people to understand the relationship between the movement of their minds and senses, the well being of themselves and their communities, and the quality of our politics. So as we step into this really exciting, mysterious moment that we refer to as the politics of intensity, that's going to breathe new life into all of our inherited traditions, we want to see people everywhere creating communities of solidarity around the protection of their attention, and coming to understand that attention in the new light of this troubling moment is what makes life good.

[Peter Schmidt]

Yeah, I'm going to try to just complement that with a kind of a fork. I'm going to go very, very big and I'm going to go a little bit more kind of near and close. Let's go big for a moment. Large scale transformations in collective consciousness in the language we use for talking about our lives and in the character of our politics. Those are real, they happen and they are difficult to predict. But ideas matter. New ideas can radically transform our collective experience. And just as those environmental activists of the 1960s went and got a science term, ecology, and put it on flags and said ecology now, by which they meant we aspire to a transformed relationship to the natural world. Even though the scientists over on the side were like, that's not really what ecology means. Ecology is about very specific, specific dynamics and trophic exchange within predator prey relations. So it was a slight bending of the word into a kind of new slogan for a political movement. This is what we hope for from the language of atensity. Attensity is itself an old science word from the early 20th century. It hails from a sort of renegade group of experimental psychologists who are more interested in introspection, more interested in sort of studying attention by thinking about it, rather than by simply the kind of input output experience of the human machine. And so we get that term as a term for the experiential reality of our attention. And we don't use it in that kind of 1909 science way. We use it as a tensity now, meaning a slogan for a transformed relationship to our attention experience. Now, what does the new politics of intensity actually look like? I think if me, Peter, Alyssa, the 25 or so other people who participated in the writing of this book, if we had a doctrinaire ideological position on the future politics of our attentional lives, I would encourage everyone to back away from us because we would be dangerous ideologues. We do not have such a substantive account of the future of our politics. Rather, what we are issuing in this book is a kind of aspirational invitation saying we think what needs to change lies over in this sector of our attentional experience. We think, we see that human beings have been reduced to attentional subjects in a new way by. By the human fracking ecosystem, by the politics of our moments, by a host of technological dynamics, which in one way is like a catastrophe, but is also dialectically an opportunity for us to seize this new power that has been given to us as we understand ourselves attentionally anew. So we are inviting people to help us understand what a politics of attention can look like. And. And without sounding melodramatic, I don't know when this is going to run, but I'm speaking with you all from the United States in late January of 2026. And this is a very unsettling time to be an American and a person who loves America. We are witnessing a spasm of political division and forms of internal political violence which are unprecedented in an old guy. I think it's reasonable to say what's occurring now is historically unprecedented in American deliberative democracy. It has something to do with the shifts in our information ecosystem. It's not unrelated to the dynamics of human fracking we are operating in a sort of society of, of spectacularity which goads us to rage and which permits profiteering on that rage. The politics of attention we dream is a preparation for a politics that can rise from the ashes of this monstrous and squalid politics of spectacularity which is shaking the foundations of my experience of the United States and which. Which, as you know, in the UK we could point to a half a dozen European countries and countries elsewhere which have had similar kinds of unprecedented reactionary dynamics and new forms of unsettling populism that feel like they're at odds with established traditions. So that sounds pretty ambitious. But all is not well existentially for us as persons, in our relations to other persons and in the manifestation of those relations that we call politics. And we believe that a rethinking together of our attention is constitutive of the forms of change we need. And that's the highest ambition of this book.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

Well, I think that's a brilliant place to end and I'd like to thank Peter here and Graham again for a fascinating conversation. The book again is a manifesto of the attention liberation movement. It's available now. Get it from your local bookstore. Buy it, Buy it physically. It's beautifully illustrated as well, divided into nice little chapters. And I want to say again that it's a really hopeful book. As Graham has pointed out, there's a lot of dark things happening in the world and a lot of us feel that our information ecosystem is feeding into the problem rather than and finding solutions. And I think this book is a really great place to start for anyone trying to think of a better and a more conducive world to human flourishing. So thank you again to Peter and Graham and thank you for listening to Intelligence Squared.

[Graham Burnett]

Thank you, Connor.

[Connor Boyle]

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Conor Boyle and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member@innigration squared.com and to join us at future live events, head over to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

[Peter Schmidt]

Hi everybody, it's Andy and James here from your next favorite podcast, no Such thing as a Fish.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

That's right, we do fun facts.

[Graham Burnett]

Yes, we do.

[Peter Schmidt]

James, give me a fact.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

Did you know that there is an extinct bandicoot whose official scientific name is Crash Bandicoot?

[Peter Schmidt]

Lovely. I didn't know that. Did you know, James, that Upper Egypt is technically below Lower Egypt?

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

Incredible. Absolutely amazing. I would love to hear more about that.

[Peter Schmidt]

Well, all you have to do is go and listen to no such thing as a fish.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

Where will I find it?

[Graham Burnett]

Oh, all over.

[Host (Intelligence Squared)]

Okay. Bye.

[Peter Schmidt]

Bye.