Intelligence Squared – The Trillion Dollar Battle for Your Attention

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

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

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