The Friends of Attention, "Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement" (Crown, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network – The Friends of Attention, "Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement" (Crown, 2026)

Date: January 20, 2026
Host: Chris Holmes
Guests: Graham Burnett, Alyssa Lowe, Peter Schmidt (The Friends of Attention Collective)

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Episode Overview

This episode of "Burned by Books" on the New Books Network centers on Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, authored by the Friends of Attention collective—Graham Burnett, Alyssa Lowe, and Peter Schmidt. Through a wide-ranging and passionate conversation, they explore the extraction and commodification of human attention by technocapitalist forces (dubbed "human fracking"), the individual and collective loss that ensues, and ways to reclaim, protect, and celebrate attention as foundational to our humanity. The episode highlights their activism, the historical roots of attention’s commodification, and practical strategies for audiences to join the movement.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Purpose of the Friends of Attention Collective

• Formation and Early Activities
  • The Friends of Attention emerged serendipitously during the 2018 São Paulo Biennial amidst rising concerns about democracy compromised by "attention fracking"—the extraction and commodification of attention through social media (04:13).
  • They began as artists and activists feeling the direct societal and political consequences of such extraction (04:13).
  • "We had to put our heads together and think about the collective political experience of attention." —Graham Burnett [04:55]
• Expansion into Educational & Activist Practice
  • Created the "Attention Lab," facilitating workshops for joint, durational attention across the globe—church basements, public libraries, Brazil, and Spain—responding to public hunger for language and tools (07:04).
  • This evolved into the School of Radical Attention, named after Matthew Strother, extending their community and influence (08:01).

2. Redefining Attention: Beyond Productivity

• Alyssa Lowe’s Expansive Concept
  • Attention is more than attention span or productivity; it is central to our capacity to care for each other and the world (08:56).
  • Common activities—gardening, cooking, reading, spending time with loved ones—are reframed not as distractions but as essential attentional practices (10:14).
  • “It’s at the center of our capacity to care for each other in the world.” —Alyssa Lowe [09:27]

3. The Manifesto Structure: Hypertext & Practice

• The Book’s Unique Format

  • The book unfolds from a one-and-a-half-page manifesto; each chapter expands a manifesto sentence, mimicking a hypertextual, interconnected reading experience (11:26).
  • Reading itself, like listening, is framed as a radical attentional practice (12:33).

• Live Reading of the Manifesto (13:29–16:19)

  • The trio reads the text, declaring “attention activism” as a collective, justice-oriented, study-and-coalition-based movement seeking “sanctuaries” for deep engagement (13:29–16:19).
  • “Attention activism is a fight for justice...” —Peter Schmidt [14:28]
  • “Join us in this heightened and heightening glory, or let us join you.” —Graham Burnett [16:09]

4. Why a Manifesto? Diagnosis, Action, and Solidarity

• A Call to Collective Action
  • The urgency of the “manifesto” genre matches the crisis of our “apocalyptic present”; moving from diagnosis to action requires collective solidarity, not just individual discipline (16:46).
  • “It’s not about getting your shit together. It’s about getting your people together.” —Peter Schmidt [18:43]
  • Attention has been reduced to a mechanical function; reclaiming the human richness of attention is central (19:22).

5. Human Fracking: Historical Roots and Contingency

• Revealing the Constructed Nature of Attentional Extraction
  • The idea that attention is now narrowly defined—and monetized—originates in mid-20th-century military-funded lab studies of “durational vigilance” (watching screens for anti-aircraft warfare) (23:16–27:08).
  • If attention had been researched in other contexts (e.g., mother-infant care, empathic practices), our societal conceptions would be starkly different (25:42).
  • “We’ve ended up with attention that was sliced and diced in these laboratories en route to being priced in our marketplace.” —Graham Burnett [24:53]

6. Overcoming the “Politics of Despair” (Deva Woodley)

• Restoring Agency
  • The collective draws on Deva Woodley’s idea of the “politics of despair”—a malaise where citizens have lost belief in agency (27:08).
  • Organizing around attention and reclaiming “practices of joy” are direct antidotes to despair and isolation (28:01).
  • “What’s hurting us is precisely what can heal us.” —Peter Schmidt [28:35]

7. Sanctuaries of Attention

• Reframing Public and Cultural Spaces
  • Libraries, museums, theaters, and schools are vital spatial sanctuaries for collective attentional practices and refuge from commodification (35:37–37:40).
  • Sanctuaries are not escape but “portals… to imagine and create the world that you want to live in.” —Peter Schmidt [36:10]

8. Embracing Technology—For Humanity’s Sake

• Not Anti-Tech, But Against the Business Model
  • The problem is not technology itself, but the “maximum engagement” business model that turns attention into profit, causing global crises of isolation and mental health (38:27).
  • “Phones are not the problem. Social media is not the problem…. The problem is the business model.” —Graham Burnett [39:16]
  • Historical analogy to steam engines: the harm emerges from unregulated, exploitative models, not from technology as such (42:30).

9. Building a Movement: Coalitions, Identity, and Everyday Practices

• A Movement for All
  • The way forward is coalition, building local communities around shared practices, drawing lessons from the civil rights movement (44:13).
  • Constructing robust, shared language and identity around attention is foundational; even small acts (attending to another, reading, dinner parties) are significant (46:09, 55:05–56:32).
  • “You already have the equipment in your life to be an attention activist.” —Alyssa Lowe [30:02]

10. Practical First Steps to Reclaiming Attention

• Tangible Suggestions for Listeners
  • Give intentional, undivided attention to someone who needs it; after a shared experience (movie, book), avoid immediate phone use—prolong the engagement with real conversation (55:05).
  • Host or attend device-free gatherings; foster explicit discussions and agreements about shared attentional norms (56:25, 56:32).
  • Experiment with “daydreaming” as a legitimate and recuperative form of attention (58:32).
  • “Let that be everybody’s like, attention homework: to find a half an hour to daydream this week.” —Graham Burnett [59:46]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It’s not about getting your shit together. It’s about getting your people together.” —Peter Schmidt [18:43]
• “We’ve ended up with a very thin slice of human attentional capacities with which we’re all obsessed. And what we need is to rewild our attention and remember all the other aspects of our attention that literally make life worth living.” —Graham Burnett [26:31]
• “If there’s a thing you love to do with other people… right now, there’s some guy leaving business school with a PowerPoint deck… proposing to get you and your friends on his platform so that you can be fracked…” —Graham Burnett [31:23]
• “The phones are not the problem. Social media is not the problem. If the phones had been designed by your mom, you would just call home…” —Graham Burnett [38:43]
• “You already have the equipment in your life to be an attention activist.” —Alyssa Lowe [30:02]
• “You’ve made a sanctuary, and it was a pleasure to step into it with you.” —Graham Burnett [63:37]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction to the Crisis & Origins – [01:32–06:13]
• Defining Attention Beyond Productivity – [08:56–10:57]
• The Condensed Manifesto Reading – [13:29–16:19]
• Why a Manifesto? From Diagnosis to Action – [16:46–20:22]
• Human Fracking: Historical Perspective – [23:16–27:08]
• Politics of Despair & Organizing Hope – [27:08–31:02]
• Sanctuaries of Attention Described – [35:37–37:40]
• Tech Paradox: Phones & Business Models – [38:27–43:23]
• Movement-Building & Everyday Resistance – [44:13–49:35]
• Analogies to Environmentalism—& Its Limits – [51:34–54:30]
• Practical First Steps – [55:05–59:51]
• Recommendations – [60:11–62:56]

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Book & Film Recommendations (for Further Engagement)

• Reckoning: Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements – Deva Woodley [60:11]
• The Attention Merchants – Tim Wu [60:29]
• Hale County This Morning, This Evening (film) – Romel Ross [60:41]
• Observer (film) – Ian Cheney [61:21]
• The History of Scientific Observation (book) – Eds. Lorraine Daston & Elizabeth Lundbeck [61:43]

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Actionable Takeaways

• Practice Joint Attention: Host a device-free dinner, read with friends, watch a film and actually discuss it for an hour after.
• Articulate Values: Discuss openly with friends, families, or colleagues what kind of attention you want to share and protect.
• Create/Support Sanctuaries: Frequent museums, libraries, and other communal spaces that promote deep, collective attention.
• Daydream: Dedicate time each week to unstructured, unfocused thought as a restorative practice.
• Join the Movement: Engage with the Friends of Attention (and similar groups) in workshops, discussions, or by reading the manifesto (Attensity!).

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Concluding Note

The episode is an invitation—equal parts diagnosis, scholarship, activism, and practical guidance—to see attention not as a resource to protect individually, but as a shared fabric of social, political, and existential possibility. The Friends of Attention advocate for new forms of togetherness, slow looking, and active reclamation of what it means to live “attentive lives,” centering care, solidarity, and pleasure in everyday acts.

“All our proceeds from this book support our nonprofit work…” —Graham Burnett [63:44]

Find more at: burnedbybooks.com

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Transcript

[Alyssa Lowe]

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[Marshall Po]

Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Chris Holmes]

I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Rahman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous [e-mail] and on Instagram and Twitter earnedbybooks. Let's start the show. You are correct. Something is seriously wrong. So begins Attensity, a manifesto of the attention liberation movement written by members of the Friends of Attention Collective. That something is that our attention is being captured and commodified by corporate entities that see our attention as a precious resource, perhaps as fundamental as water that can be mined and extracted. This new process of extraction, called human fracking by the collective, is not simply a time waster. With every minute introducing another TikTok video to scroll through. Rather, our attention should be understood as a fundamental aspect of what makes us human, an expression of our humanity and of love and attention to others. Faced with the daily loss of more and more of our shared humanity, the Friends of Attention are appealing for an awakening, a collective reclamation of our attention from the frackers. Atensity is a clarion call that sees collective solidarity as the means by which we can be a bulwark against those who would pilfer our attention. Atensity argues that a practice of study, coalition building, and a relationship to attention sanctuaries can be the answer to one of the great fundamental questions of our era. Why do we feel so disconnected from our own humanity and from the humanity of others? To introduce our friends and authors today, D. Graham Burnett is the Henry Charles Lee professor of the History of Science at Princeton University. Alyssa Lowe, a filmmaker, co directed the short film 12 Theses on Attention. And Peter Schmidt is the program director of the Strother School of Radical Attention. Welcome to Burned by Books. Graham, Alyssa and Peter, thank you.

[Peter Schmidt]

Hey.

[Graham Burnett]

Hi, Chris. Great to. Great to be here.

[Chris Holmes]

The three of you are standing in, in a way, as the representatives for the movement known as the Friends of Attention. Who and what are the Friends of Attention, and how did this movement come into existence?

[Graham Burnett]

No, thanks. This is Graham, and I'll jump right in. It's such a pleasure to be on the show, and thank you for that moving kind of summary of what we're trying to do in this book. So the Friends of Attention are just that, they're friends, a loose kind of coalition who emerged out of, really, a group of artists and activists. And a bunch of us were down at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2018. And that was kind of an art occasion around detention. But it was also a really powerful moment because Jair Bolsonaro was elected just a few days before the Biennial that year. And so there were like 50 or 60 of us down there thinking about attention as an aesthetic practice and all this kind of beautiful art stuff around detention. But we were shocked into awakened consciousness by the anger of folks in Sao Paulo. As they said, look, our ability to have democratic deliberative politics has been meaningfully compromised by an election that they felt had had its Cambridge Analytica moment, a kind of suborning of the democratic will as a result of siloing, misinformation, social media, this kind of thing. And so we, a bunch of us down there said we have to put our heads together and think about the collective political experience of attention. Now in this transformative moment. And the Friends of Attention were born there 2018-2019. And since then, uh, we've done a bunch of stuff, written, made films, and, you know, Peter can talk about this more. Even created a nonprofit school and. And ultimately worked for three years together to write this book, which is what we're here to talk about.

[Alyssa Lowe]

Hmm.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah. Peter, did you want to talk to the nonprofit a little bit?

[Peter Schmidt]

I'm happy to. So about four years ago, members of the Friends of Attention Coalition, who had been convening for summer schools, who had been writing together and thinking together and creating artworks together, decided that we needed to take our commitment to forms of attention conducive to freedom and get it out into the world, you know, get it out onto the streets. And so the. The form that. That took among a bunch of folks who identified, I think, primarily as educators, was a curriculum, a kind of workshop format where people would get together and practice forms of joint durational attention together, reflect on that experience, and then position it critically in relation to the larger kind of techno industrial context that has commodified our attention. And so that was the Attention Lab. And over the course of about nine months, we facilitated those labs all over the place. We did travel gigs. We were in church basements, we were in public libraries. We took it to Brazil, we took it to Spain. And we realized that there was this profound hunger among people everywhere to develop both a more acute vocabulary for what was going on with their attention, and also a set of tools, skills, gathering techniques that could help them kind of carve out a space of livability for themselves and the people that they loved. So we figured we were onto something. And In June of 2023, we. We got together as the Friends, and we said, hey, there's something bigger here. And we decided that we would expand that program into the School of Radical Attention. We named it after a dear friend of attention, Matthew Strother, who had passed away at an untimely age earlier that year. He was a kind of early dreamer of this stuff, and the past few years have consisted in our delivering on the promise of that name, the School of Radical Attention. So a good bit of the thinking that went into this book has come out of the community that surrounds the school, and that has now sort of spread across the country and internationally.

[Chris Holmes]

Thank you so much. Well, I'm fairly sure that most people, you ask will believe that they understand what attention is and what it is for. You have drawn a capacious definition of attention, which presents it as a resource, but Also something that can be taught. Alyssa, can I start with you and ask you to offer up a definition of attention and give us a sense of the stakes for how it is being stolen from us as an extractable resource?

[Alyssa Lowe]

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for that question, Chris, because that really is at the heart of the book. You know, when we start talking to people about. About intensity and about our school, so often people want to talk about their attention spans. And that makes sense because, you know, people feel like they can't focus the same way they used to, and that feels bad to them. But core to this book is the idea that attention is so much more than your attention span. It's so much more than the ability to execute a task in a timely and efficient way. It's much more properly understood as this thing that's at the center of our capacity to care for each other in the world. And we don't offer just one definition of attention. We sort of invite people to reconnect to all the kinds of attention that haven't gotten airtime in the last, you know, 50, 60 years.

[Chris Holmes]

Will you give us a couple of those so that we can think through them?

[Alyssa Lowe]

Yeah. So, you know, everybody has their own practices of attention, but we don't think of them that way. You know, it can be everything from, you know, rock climbing to cooking to gardening, to hanging out with your kids, spending time with your friends, watching a movie, reading. All of those things are forms of attention that we have started to think about as actually distraction, as things that are the opposite of productivity, when in fact they're kind of core to what makes our lives feel good.

[Chris Holmes]

That's really nicely said. Intensity takes the form of a manifesto. And I think it would be helpful for our listeners to get a taste of what that sounds like. Would you all be willing to do reading, a collective reading of what I would call the. Maybe the mantra of the book, which is its repeated condensed manifesto for a attending to our attention.

[Graham Burnett]

Oh, that'd be so much fun. And maybe I'll say a word about how the book kind of works.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, please do.

[Graham Burnett]

The book launches from this, as you just described it, condensed manifesto that we can read right now because it's really just sort of a page and a half. And then what happens is that each of the short chapters of the book is like an expansion of one of the sentences. So the book has exactly the number of chapters as sentences in this manifesto. And it's a little bit like a sort of old school pre digital hypertext. You could sort of Press on each of the sentences in this manifesto we're about to read, and we unfold them across a short essay of a couple of thousand words in the book itself. Does that make sense, Chris?

[Chris Holmes]

Oh, it sure does.

[Peter Schmidt]

Yeah.

[Chris Holmes]

And it. When I first looked at it, because I have, you know, a pre. A pre print arc, I was like, oh, they've made a. They've made an error, because there are. There are times when certain things are bolded and times when not. And then I. Then I understood, Ah, this is very much a hypertext. Even though I'm not clicking it, I'm being drawn back to the original manifesto to have it, as you say, unfurl before me.

[Graham Burnett]

Yeah, maybe. Maybe Alyssa will. Will launch for us. But as your listeners, like, listen to this. Picking up on what Alyssa just said. I mean, Chris, one of the major wagers of this book is that reading itself is an attentional practice, and we sort of are only becoming aware of that fact, as in some ways, we sort of see reading being pulled away from us by the damaging dimensions of this human fracking commodification of attention, which has so compromised our ability to stay with the things we care about. And so we are interested in raising our consciousness around the way that reading is an attentional practice and listening to is an attentional practice. So we're kind of in the work of attention activism when we bring those propositions to consciousness.

[Peter Schmidt]

Alyssa, take it away.

[Alyssa Lowe]

A manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. You are correct. Something is seriously wrong. It has to do with our attention, our essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world. This precious capacity has been channeled, captured, and commodified by an industry of immense technological and financial power. How? Call it human Fracking human is bad for people and for politics. It reduces our very beings and our relationship to that which can be quantified, bought, and sold. All this is the triumph of a catastrophic lie about what it means to be human. But deceit and exploitation are never inevitable. To push back, we need more than isolated individual efforts. What we need is a movement of collective resistance. This movement of attentional liberation exists and has a name. Attention Activism.

[Peter Schmidt]

Attention activism is a fight for. For justice. This emancipatory uprising takes our apocalyptic present, turns it on its head, and creates from the chaos and confusion new vistas of human flourishing. Attention activism is rooted in study, a commitment to diverse forms of teaching and learning centered on attention. What it is, what it can be, what it can do. Attention activism also requires coalition building, collaboration and solidarity across a range of Communities who see attention's essential role in human flourishing. Finally, attention activism means the formation of sanctuaries, spaces where people can gather, care for each other, experiment with different kinds of attention, and conceive brighter futures.

[Graham Burnett]

To discern the revolutionary possibilities of the present, we look to artists, thinkers and dreamers to bring those possibilities to bloom. We heed the countless attention activists who are already out there devising new and revising old ways of giving their minds and senses to each other and to the world. These attentionauts and attentionistas draw on the wisdom of diverse traditions across uncharted terrain. Emerging practices of joint attention illuminate new horizons of shared political power. Not only power, but beauty and grace too. This is our movement, the free movement of attention in its fullness, freely shared. We call that transformative goodness a tensity. Join us in this heightened and heightening glory, or let us join you.

[Chris Holmes]

Thank you so much. The manifesto is a tricky and these days, kind of rare genre. It, it must balance imparting some amount of knowledge with sending people to the ramparts. You aim for people to organize, to stand against human fracking, and that has to involve generating strong emotions. Why was the manifesto the best form for your movement?

[Graham Burnett]

Graham again, and I'll take a stab at that. I remember a number of years ago, a group of us got together for a night that was called the Manifesto Slam. So you've probably heard slam poetry. It was like a BYO manifesto evening with just everybody up there. So it's to say that we've canvassed the manifesto vibe of our moment. And I do think that the appetite for that kind of, to the barricades, citizens, you know, kind of energy. One sees the swelling of urgency around that kind of energy at moments that feel decisive and transformative. I mean, I think back to the 1930s, you know, from the progressive era, which was kind of a manifesto era as well. And I think ours is another of those moments. So this is the, this is the heart of the book. The diagnosis that there's something kind of wrong with the way we're living these days that is out there. Our book is about pivoting from diagnosis to action. It's about saying, look, we all know that something's wrong with the way these big tech companies, $17 trillion in market capitalization of big tech companies that are commodifying our attention and our data and this program of non stop human fracking. We know this is bad, but what do we do? And our message is, stop feeling like this is you failing. Stop feeling like you Went down a TikTok rabbit hole. You need to work on your discipline. Maybe you need better meds and shift to recognizing that this is structural, systemic, and what you need is your friends. We need solidarity. And maybe.

[Peter Schmidt]

Yeah, Peter, on that one way to pricey. That is, it's not about getting your shit together. It's about getting your people together. That is, I love that we're not responding with discipline. It's not a question of individual discipline. It's a question of community. Because what we're really about here is advancing an understanding of the tension that is thoroughly human. We've been sold a story about attention in which our attention has a basically mechanical function because it's been shaped over the past 100 or so years. And this is what a good bit of the history in the book gets at by an emerging industry that sought to quantify, capture, optimize, extract and sell our human attention. And what that has done is it has encouraged in us both in the way that we use our attention and the way that we understand our attention, a sort of transformation where we've become more mechanical in the ways that we give our minds and senses to the world. And so intensity. This book says, hey, remember that your attention is human. It's human. It has all sorts of different flavors and faces and functions, and it feels all sorts of different ways. And if we can keep our eye on that, we can understand what it is that's worth protecting. And as it happens, our lives are made of all the forms of attention with which we live those lives. And what we're offering is a sort of a guide, a call to say, hey, return to those forms of attention and. And construct your lives from those human forms of attention.

[Chris Holmes]

Can I. Can I ask a question about human fracking? Because you do give a. A kind of historical gloss of some of the things that you call human fracking. And maybe Alyssa can. Can speak to this. But how did you decide how much history, how much information was necessary? Because in a way, it's totally visible all the time that this is happening. And yet in terms of its construction as a. As a cultural, societal structure, intellectual structure, a lot of it is, like, behind the scenes and very much covered in darkness.

[Alyssa Lowe]

Yeah. Well, I think the decision to include so much history in the book is when we realized, when we began organizing, how much of our job is overcoming people's sense of. That the way things are right now is inevitable, that the present has a very powerful hold on people, that they receive the world as it is, and they feel like it has to be this way. And it's especially easy to feel that in this context, when the attention economy is so ubiquitous and so powerful. And it's also easy to feel that way because the way this problem gets framed as a. As like a you problem, like you can't get off your face, and that cultivates in people a feeling of kind of private shame instead of, I think, something more productive, like political anger, which is the midpoint between private shame and feeling a capacity for, like, hope and imagination and new lives we actually want to live. So the decision to do all of that historical work is to show people and to kind of call to mind, because we. We actually know a lot of these events, but we don't think of them always kind of off the top of our heads, that the world changes, and it changes all the time, profoundly, and it can change again. Graham, you know, we all bring different pro. We all bring different backgrounds to this project. I'm a filmmaker, Peter's an organizer, and Graham's a historian. And so, you know, he, I think, was especially interested in doing some of the work of kind of recovering how we came to our contemporary ideas about attention. And maybe I'll let Graham take it from there.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah.

[Peter Schmidt]

And.

[Chris Holmes]

And, Graham, can I kind of center that question a little bit and say, is there. Is there one event or one moment of. Of historical reckoning that you see as one that kind of tilted us in this direction?

[Graham Burnett]

Oh, yeah. I mean, so I teach on the history of attention at Princeton, and a lot of my passion for this work comes out of my archival historical work on the history of the scientific study of attention, because I'm a historian of science in the 20th century. So the answer to your question, like, is there a key thing where this changes? The answer is definitely yes. And it's so amazing that I want your listeners to hear it because it has authentically transformative importance. So we live in this world now where we, as Alyssa said, think all the time about our attention span, or where, as Peter said, we have this kind of machinic relationship to our attention. And part of what my academic history of science work has just shown so dramatically is that that way of understanding attention is totally contingent. Happens. It's not inevitable. Like Alyssa said, it's not inevitable. Where did it come from? Literally, it came from the laboratory study of attention in the 20th century. Who was funding that research in laboratories, and what was that research on? The answer is that research was on human beings as tracking and triggering organisms capable of following a stimulus generally in A screen based environment deploying some form of durational vigilance, meaning all those labs, people were studying attention in the 1940s and 1950s and 1960s by putting people in front of, in effect, screens and seeing how long they could look at them and respond to stimuli. Why were they doing that? Well, all of that research was basically being funded by the military industrial complex. I mean, not to sound too paranoiac, but authentically, who funded the majority of scientific research after, during and after the second World War? The military, the government. And what they were interested in was anti aircraft warfare and people's ability to stay watching radar screens vigilantly. So I sometimes joke with my students. I'm like, if the entire budget of the Defense Department in 1938 had been given to four Buddhist monks to study human attention for the next 50 years, do you think that the science of attention that we inherit would look different? And the answer is, yeah, it would look really different. And I don't mean to suggest it would be like some kind of woo thing. I mean, Buddhist monks are perfectly capable of empirical inquiry. It's just that we've ended up with attention that was sliced and diced in these laboratories en route to being priced in our marketplace. But you could have spent the time studying the way mothers care for infants, for instance, which is certainly an attentional behavior, or the epimeletic behaviors like how we assist the ill or the elderly. And those are deeply attentional practices, hugely important to human community and human well being. But they aren't digital. Whack a molecule. And it's pretty hard to make money out of them. And so we didn't end up with those because you can't shoot down an airplane with them either. It's. It's really intense. And so in a sense, what this book calls for is, is a recognition that we've ended up with a very thin slice of human attentional capacities with which we're all obsessed. And what we need is to rewild our attention and remember all the other aspects of our attention that literally make life worth living. And it's all right there for us because we're already doing it. But we forget that that's the goodness of our attention that's making the goodness of our lives.

[Chris Holmes]

That's so fascinating. And as you say it, it feels as though it would be inevitable that they would come to those conclusions about our attention. But that inevitability is, as you and Alyssa put it, contingent. Part of the problem is, as you all see it, is that we definitely Know something's terribly wrong, but yet we feel utterly powerless to do anything about it. And you helpfully draw on the political philosopher Deva Woodley to diagnose our present stagnation as the politics of despair, which characterizes a citizenry that ceases to believe in its own political agency. This seems like the perfect description for everything about our political moment. Crisis upon crisis is met with a despairing shrug. How are you putting forward a possibility to move beyond the politics of despair?

[Peter Schmidt]

Yeah. Thank you, Chris. Alyssa alluded earlier to that critical pivot from diagnosis to action. And we can locate that pivot in. In the claim that, you know, everybody's talking about attention. Everybody feels like their attention is messed up right now. And like that is the source of so much illness, so much conflict, such a sense of isolation. But what's hurting us is precisely what can heal us. That's where hope happens, is recognizing that this moment has called our attention back to our attention, revealed to us how inextricable it is from our flourishing, and proven to us that there's more there. There's more of our attention than we are currently using right now, than we currently understand. And so we. It's really a. Tim Wu, who's a legal scholar who's written really well about all this, has called it a human reclamation project. And so, to put it simply, we are endorsing a plan of action where people organize around their attention, right? They get together and they do the things that activate their human attention, that make them feel closer to each other and to the world. And that is straightforward. It's not abstract. It's do what you love. Because you have a practice of attention already in your life, whether it's caring for a loved one or throwing dinner parties or reading books, which is something, I think, that your audience is. Is pretty keen on. All of those things which were formerly just stuff we did together, have now become the object of this massive enclosure operation, where they've become the kind of soil from which the commodity of our attention is extracted violently. And so by by organizing, by creating communities with our friends, where we do that together in ways that are consciously opposed to human fracking, we are actually creating the conditions for a new social identity.

[Alyssa Lowe]

Yeah, just to jump. Just to jump quickly on that. You know, one thing that I think we've really found in our work at the school is that, you know, everybody already has the equipment in their life to be an attention activist, because all you have to do is kind of think about where in your life you feel in control of your attention or you feel kind of better, not worse, after you give your mind and time and senses to something and whatever that is for you to dig in there and to protect it, kick the frackers out when they tried to encroach upon it and share it with other people. And it's. It's already right there in all of our lives when we kind of properly reframe what the sources of attention can be.

[Chris Holmes]

I love the idea of centering all those things that are already points of joy in our life, but this, like, different, concentrated form of commodifiable attention has made them seem tangential rather than central. And it seems as though you all would really just like to center those things.

[Graham Burnett]

Yeah, I would. I would just throw in here. I mean, that is so right. And everyone, again, knows this. But let's just say it. If there's a thing you love to do with other people with your attention, right now, there's some guy leaving business school with a PowerPoint deck presenting to a set of venture capitalists proposing to get you and your friends on his platform so that you can be fracked and they can commodify your interest in whatever that thing is. And if that sounds too dystopian, let's just review the history of platform capitalism over the last 20 years. That is a description of the business model of Facebook, which noticed that people liked to look at each other in books when they were in college and be like, hey, she's cute, he's cute. Then it was a model for Pinterest. There were, like, ladies who liked to exchange patterns for knitting. And somebody was like, wow, if we got all these folks who like to knit and do macrame and sew onto a platform, telling them they could more efficiently exchange and access patterns and yarn types together, then we could begin to advertise to them as, like, crafty types. And that was Pinterest. So this is literally the, like, playbook for the Frackers, which means we have to actually be self conscious and aware that they're coming for us with all the things we love to do with our attention, with other people, and start actually saying, actually, no, we're going to keep doing this just with each other because we care about it. Which is a way of saying our attention is being brought to our attention in an exciting new way with political implications as well as these kinds of social and intellectual and existential implications. Right. Right now. And if I can say one more quick thing, you know, if you go around and say we really Hope people are going to come together in a movement to collect, protect, gather, seriously center the goodness of their attentional lives. Somebody might be like, well that might happen, but it doesn't seem that likely to us. And we just like to remind folks, you know, in 1962, the Hudson river right outside the window here, not far away, was like literally like on fire or whatever because there have been 15 years of toxic, volatile effluvians poured into that river. And everyone was kind of like, well there's not that much you can really do about it. But by 1968 a highly diverse coalition of people, duck hunters, hippies, executives at Alcoa had sort of come together and said no, no, actually the environment is a shared good. We simply cannot let heedless, greedy, unregulated exploitation destroy the shared good of the external environment. This moment is like that only what we have to come together protect now isn't just the external environment, although that's very important, it's the internal environment. Because capitalism has figured out a new way to exploit something that was previously out of reach. Our interest, our curiosity, our ability to care. And it's seriously messing up the shared good of our inner lives. And we are going to, I believe in the next years shift that, I believe in 20 years, I think we all believe this folks will look back at this moment and be like that was amazing. You all didn't take attentional wellbeing seriously. How is that possible that you, that you didn't understand how essential that was to, to human well being.

[Chris Holmes]

That's, boy, I, I, I really hope that's true. That sounds like a remarkable thing and a very hopeful thing to, to think about a, a changeable future. And one of the solutions that you all propose for protecting and, and reinvesting in our attention is something that you call sanctuaries. And I'm particularly interested in your notion of spatial sanctuaries. Like museums, theaters and libraries, these seem like the perfect visual models for what a different form of attention giving could look like. Could you describe these space, how these spatial sanctuaries fit into the overall movement of attensity?

[Peter Schmidt]

We use the term sanctuaries, which comes obviously out of primarily a religious tradition and which has strong connotation of protection. Right. That's typically what people hear when they, when they hear the word sanctuaries. And it's true that we need spaces that are protected from the pressures of the attention economy because it's impossible to think out here, you know, like you just cannot get a grip on what you want what you. What you want to do with each other when you're being bombarded all the time, when your eyeballs are literally being turned into cash. So we need to carve out spaces from those pressures. And there's a flip side to the sanctuary, which is that these are spaces, these are portals. Right? A sanctuary creates a space for you to imagine and to create the world that you want to live in. This is a really, really important part of the function of this pillar of attention activism. And we name museums, we name art galleries, we name libraries, we name schools, because those are all places that have long traditions of preserving particular kinds of attention. It's also an important moment for these institutions because in some ways, their obvious function of disseminating information in the case of museums or offering access to visual culture in the. Offering access to. I'm sorry, disseminating information in the case of libraries, offering access to visual culture in the case of museums has been rendered totally anachronistic by these little machines in our pocket. So they're doing a bit of soul searching right now and saying, hey, what are we for? And what we're saying is, you are a sanctuary of attention. You're a place where people can go and practice very important kinds of attention that we believe help people create lives where they can be well together. And so we've done a lot of partnering in our organizing work with classroom teachers, with museums, with libraries to reframe the work that they do as consciously in relation to the harms of human fracking.

[Alyssa Lowe]

Hmm.

[Chris Holmes]

That's such a nice explanation. I want to take a second and drill down on one seeming contradiction in the manifesto that you restructure as a possibility for more solidarity, more sanctuaries, more attention. It's striking that you say directly that you are pro technology, including phones, writing that quote, we embrace this world and the world heralded by these devices and the socio. Sociotechnical infrastructure upon which they depend. Smartphones now seem to exist exclusively for human fracking, and they are increasingly a dominant, intimate relationship in the lives of teens and young adults. Can you take me through what seems like a contradiction?

[Graham Burnett]

It's such an incredible contradiction. It is literally the antennae of our moment, meaning two true statements that are impossible to hold together. I was just speaking last week at an amazing symposium hosted by the UN and Dartmouth that all six of the living US Surgeons general on the stage at the same time, talking about the global crisis in youth mental health. Yeah, and Jonathan Haidt, too, spoke right after them, making a very compelling case that this staggering, unprecedented global Mental health crisis centered on loneliness, alienation, isolation, and the forms of anxiety and depression that come with that sense of being severed from each other. That that crisis is literally being caused by smartphones and social media. So you have the surgeons general saying there's a global crisis of catastrophic proportions. And then you have a very compelling social scientist showing you a bunch of slides saying, this isn't just a correlation. I can establish causality. This is what's causing that. Okay, now here's what's crazy about that. How can a global crisis of isolation be caused by the most extraordinary connectivity ever achieved on the planet, the devices that have made it impossible to disconnect from every other human alive, and the manifold of essentially everything that humans have ever created is causing isolation. I mean, what could be a weirder paradox, right? And so here's the answer. The answer is that the phones are not the problem. Social media is not the problem. If the phones had been designed by your mom, you would just call home on the phone. And if social media had been designed by three cool artists and you know, a Trappist monk, they'd probably be really interesting. Social media would be probably like a really interesting way to like share with each other our creative and spiritual urgings. But that's not how this stuff got made. The problem is the business model. The problem is that literally $17 trillion in capital and military grade technology and super intelligent AI algorithmically determines a maximum engagement, maximum time on device business model so that 78% of humans on the planet have a smartphone. And it turns out that at this point, depending on the demographic you choose, we spend between 5 and 11 hours a day looking at that little 5 inches of glass. And that's just so weird. That's not people doing something they want to do. That's success at literally a global enclosure act, monetizing human consciousness itself. And that's, I guess, how we would, I think, address the paradox you've raised, which is like, what does it mean that we're not like anti tech? Well, because tech isn't the problem. The problem is heedless, greedy, unregulated exploitation. And that's a business model. And, and to be sure, I personally am not a Marxist. I'm open to market based solutions to complex problems. And I want to again be clear that it's perfectly rational that these corporations are trying to maximize return on investment. It's just that there's a kind of sociopathy to the underlying commitment to maximizing return on investment. And we are seeing the result of that. If These corporations could liquidate humanity without confronting a liability issue. They would almost have like a legal obligation to do so in order to like maximize returns to their shareholders. But that's really bad for your kid, as we now know, and it's even bad for your like dad. And so we as a people have to rise up and say, you can't do this to us. Just like in the 19th century, new technology, the steam engine made possible new forms of exploitation, the satanic mills of Lancashire in the industrial revolution. The problem was not steam engines, which are not like a moral problem. It was unbelievably reckless, unregulated systems of exploitation that steam engines made possible. Then new revolutionary political movements pushed back trade unionism, union politics, solidarity. We need that again to make the world safe for humans like us. Like us.

[Chris Holmes]

So what do you. If we agree that all that attempt to maximalize profit and to draw as much humanness out of the fracking project is one that has been designed to a T and is so, so very addictive and, and has been made precisely for that, for that effect, what do we do with the fact that, you know, they're not going to regulate without a, without a political movement. We're stuck in the, you know, politics of, of despair. And in the meantime, you know, young people are, are on their phones for, you know, 12 hours a day. What's the in between thing that happens? I don't know if Peter and Alyssa, if, if you feel like you can take that on.

[Peter Schmidt]

Yeah, we'll, we'll tag team that you're asking a question about theory of change. And you know, one of the historical analogies we use is, let's think about the most successful movement over the last, over the 20th century that produced transformative political change. That was the civil rights movement. And what you find when we look back at that moment is that their success was attributable to a broad network of, of community institutions, of people who had a shared vocabulary, a shared sense of human flourishing and pre established relationships that allowed them to activate in an extraordinarily powerful way that turned the levers of power in ways that, you know, moved the federal government. Right. And so presently we don't have the kind of social infrastructure in this country to gain purchase on the machine, you know, and so what we need between now and then is to create communities all around the country of people who have a shared commitment to attention's role in human flourishing, who have an understanding of how attention brings them together and connects them to other people with different commitments. Right. That's the meaning of coalition, is that these are different people with different lives, different perspectives, and different positions in relation to power. And so attention activism is the opportunity to bring together a wide range of people who understand that whoever they may be, whether they're like the DSA kids in Brooklyn or whether they're folks out in Kentucky at the Republican National Convention, or whether they are, you know, kayakers in Seattle, they all have a relationship to attention that can form the basis for a national coalition of people pushing back against this at the highest level of levels of power.

[Alyssa Lowe]

Yeah, and I'll just. I'll just jump in there because I think, you know, we're. We're really all in this together. And in one sense, that's terrible because things have gotten very bad very fast. But that's also a opportunity because when you have a shared condition of exploitation, you also have the possibility of a new social identity and new forms of political power. And the first step is being able to speak with ourselves more clearly about attention and the value attention has in our lives. You know, part of what Graham was talking about when he was talking about, you know, sort of business school at all these corporations is that actually these businesses have an incredibly robust way of thinking and talking about attention. They just never call it that. They call it eyeballs or time on device or engagement. And most of us out here are sort of just beginning to think about attention, what it is and what role it has in. In our own flourishing. And so the first step is creating a much more robust way of thinking and talking about attention so that we can have a collective identity around it. And one thing that has been so sort of promising at our school is that it sort of takes absolutely nothing to bring people on board. Because when you give people a chance to have an experience with their attention, with. In one of our, like, attention practices, it actually just feels so good to people that it, like, it intuitively naturally feels like something they want to do. And they immediately think, huh, how can I have more of that in my life? And how can I give more of that to the people in my life?

[Chris Holmes]

I'm going to need to involve myself in the. In these very soon.

[Graham Burnett]

I just want to underscore that, which is like, if it were a big, heavy lift, you know, it would be kind of like, this is going to be hard, but it's like not a big, heavy, scary lift. Like, people are like, oh, my God, that just. It's awesome. It feels so good. And I'm not talking about any weird Specific woo. Thing that we do in a given Attention Lab, People feel good when they connect their attention to others and to the world. They're grateful for that. I mean, somebody came up to me after, you know, one of the sessions recently. I'm just like, this gives me hope in humanity, like in the species, which is sort of like, so dramatic. And in a way, it. It relates back to that idea that. That this has something in common, maybe with the environmental movement, where, like, one of the. One of the assertions there was, it feels great to take a walk in the woods. You know, hey, everybody, you really like this, don't you? Like a clean beach, don't you? To be able to take us. Wouldn't you like to be able to take a swim in that lake in your. In your park instead of having it be polluted? This is like that. People just immediately connect to how good it feels. And that's, I think, our. Our best hope when you let them get a little taste of it again.

[Peter Schmidt]

I have our. Just to add onto that, Chris, early on, we conducted one of our Attention Lab workshops at the Jersey City Public Library. And that was when we were kind of a roaming band trying to get into whatever basement would admit us. So we connected with their ESL program, right? And so we had scheduled two workshops each week apart, and we opened doors and said, hey, please, people show up. And the first week, a number of folks came, including a number of folks from Jersey City's South Asian immigrant population, because they have a really big. They have a really big presence there. And so we had folks with varying degrees of English and some very limited English who were participating in these practices of attention together, where we would go around, use our attention in some durational way, reflect on it, and then share it. During that share, each person spoke about their experience. They got to be the expert on their own attention. These are going to be identical workshops. So we said, thank you so much for coming. We're going to be back next week. It was so great to meet you all. The next week, this really lovely young woman was there a second time, and I was shocked to see her. She had told me that she had walked 45 minutes to get there. And I went up to her after that second workshop in which she participated with a ton of enthusiasm, just like a lot of generosity. I said, hey, it's so lovely to see you again. What brought you back? And she said, I liked being the person who knew the most about my own attention. And this was somebody who was in an ESL program who had very limited English, but for a time, she got to be the absolute expert in a room of other people about this very important issue. She was speaking from her own experience, and it was enough to bring her back two weeks in a row, walking 45 minutes each way, which was, I gotta say, pretty humbling as an organizer. And it just goes to show that when you get people together, it feels good and they want to be together. And what's happened is that our. The literal stuff of our togetherness has been turned into the basis of an extractive economy. And so we got to take that back.

[Chris Holmes]

I want to push back a little bit about. You've come back to the environmental movement a couple of times, and you. In the book, you cite Carson's Silent Spring and a series of environmental disasters that were the incitements to early collective action against environmental degradation. This struck me as a problematic analogy simply because the extractors and the despoilers of the environment seem to have won, and regulations that might have slowed. Are despoiling have been dissolved. And I wonder if that's the. If that's the analogy for you or if there's something to take away from there and also some. Some lessons to. To be learned, to not follow.

[Graham Burnett]

Yeah, that, you know, one. One receives that like a sock in the nose. And it's definitely true. I want to respond in sort of two ways. You alluded to there having been these sort of specific environmental catastrophes, disasters, DDT as. As exemplary with Silent Spring. I would just say we have those now with respect to our wellness in our attentional lives. So there's a good parallel, a positive parallel. If 90% of Americans at present feel we are in the throes of a mental health crisis, that's like. That's a DDT bird extermination kind of event. That's everybody saying, oh, my God, something really bad's happening. So the raise, the raise, the urgency. They're now, as it was then for that issue, now for our issue. However, your point, which is that, wait, we lost that fight, or it seems we lost that fight, I think is one that we all have to sit with. And I guess we would just say, look, the fight is ongoing. And when we liken these two fights, we say there are two environmental crises. There's the external environmental crisis and the internal environmental crisis. And if they win the internal environmental crisis, we're going to lose the external environmental crisis for sure, because none of us will be able to notice and attend to the way the physical world around us is Changing. And we think that's real. I mean, I think the way in which we've seen shocking and embarrassing backsliding on issues of climate control and climate care in the United States specifically is absolutely inextricable from the suborning of collective information and awareness by this new media ecosystem, which is monetizing attention. So we agree there's lots of reasons to be on the barricades if you're an activist now, but we don't think of ours the kind of central concern with attentional well being as separable from the external environmental crisis. We think of them as of a piece in real ways.

[Chris Holmes]

That's, that's very helpful. I know my audience will be really hungry for some practical first steps in thinking about their own fight to reclaim their attention. You, you make it clear that this isn't about increasing our attention span or feeling guilty about having a phone. So maybe you could give us two or three things that the average person might begin to do to jumpstart the process of finding solidarity in the search to regain our agency over our attention.

[Alyssa Lowe]

Well, I'll, I'll just give two quick ones. The first one, you know, that we do sometimes at the end of our attention labs is we say, hey, give your attention to someone who needs it. Think about someone in your life who needs some attention and gives them a call or spend an afternoon with them. You know, I think you can start really small, you know, for, for I think a lot of your readers or for a lot of your listeners. I think reading is like a key attention practice that they can dig in on. You know, when you're talking, we were talking about sanctuaries. I think books have always been an important sanctuary where you can kind of go into them and imagine other ways of being. For me, you know, it's movies. I, I love the opportunity to sit in a theater and spend time with the film and talk with somebody afterwards. And by just tweaking it a tiny bit, by saying, hey, I'm not going to turn on my phone as soon as this film ends, I'm going to take two hours with the person that I came with to, to talk about the film. That is the kind of small tweak beginning to, beginning to introduce more of this into your life.

[Peter Schmidt]

I'm a big dinner party person, you know, and that's something that brings me closer to my attention, helps me share it with other people.

[Graham Burnett]

And I would just say that I believe more and more in people talking about this stuff explicitly together and deciding what they're going to do so. I teach my classes now and I always begin my class with a sort of like, why are we gathering here? We could be doing this online. We could have recorded my lectures. Why have all of us gone to the trouble of getting up this morning to come to a classroom and close the door and not let a thousand people who would like to be at Princeton in this seminar in, but just be the 18 of us here in this room. And after having that conversation, we reached this realization, which is that the only thing that makes it worth doing this is if we can have a certain kind of experience together for this 50 minutes. A kind of improvisational music making in thought together that would make it appropriate to have like closed the door and to have come together and not let other people in and all to have come and done this. And I signal that because that's an example of, in a sense. And then of course, having decided that we agree we're going to like leave our devices out. So I don't ban devices in my classrooms. I have a conversation before every class at the beginning of the semester where I'm like, what do we want out of this together? And then what should we do if this is what we want? And I would point to that as an example of a kind of community guideline. We agree that if we have our devices, sure, we might be able to take better notes on our laptops, but we're also going to be tempted to like, check our email. We're going to be drawn out of the conversation. So this is what we all need to do now. It's a question of deciding in your family that you're going to take the first 20 minutes of dinner, just the first 20 minutes without anybody checking their phone. That could be that simple. Or that there's going to be a period when you get together. You know who out there has felt sad at some point when they were talking with a friend and the friend was like, oh, quick, I just got to check this message. Yeah, yeah, that hurts, that hurts. And I bet every one of your listeners has had that experience. Well, what if we all were just to like, begin to develop new norms and agreements where, okay, for this period we're gonna, we're gonna do right. And I think the young people are ahead of the older people on this. This is where, like, you know, we have boomers and endlessly being like, the kids have to get off their phones. But actually, you know, my 16 year old's much smarter about phone use when she's with her friends than my My beloved. I'm not going to name any names here, but some people in my family who are over 70, we're not so good with that, you know what I'm saying? So. So it's about very concrete. I want to be very concrete. Chat with your people and surface that there is enemy action trying to turn us into cash money. And what are we going to do to protect the goodness of our relations to each other, ourselves in the world, Our openness a little bit. That's just. That's how the revolution is going to start. And it's. It's a revolution that can. We can think of as like a kind of pleasure activism, really. It feels good to daydream, and daydreaming is a form of attention. Who out there let themselves daydream for half an hour in the last week? Pretty tough. Let that be everybody's like, attention homework to find a half an hour to daydream this week.

[Chris Holmes]

These are. These are wonderful. I know that my listeners would love to know a little bit since we've centered some engagement with cultural artifacts like films and, and books. I. I bet they'd love to know some things you've really loved recently and whether you have a recommendation for them.

[Peter Schmidt]

Yeah, I can start with two that we've brought up on this call. We've got Reckoning, Black Lives Matter and the Democratic Necessity of Social Movements by the political scientist David Woodley that's informed a lot of our thinking about the politics of despair and the central role of social movements in pushing back. And then legal scholar Tim Wu has this great book, the Attention Merchants, which charts kind of the history of American advertising and is a really, really useful prehistory to the era of human fracking.

[Alyssa Lowe]

Okay, I'll toss a film in there. There's this very beautiful documentary called Hale county this morning. This evening from 2018 is made by this filmmaker named Romel Ross. It just has this very unusual and gorgeous cinematography, sort of drawn to surprising details or unexpected frames in a way that for me, really captures some of the rewards of paying close attention to the world and that kind of funny way the world never looks the way you think it looks in your head when you actually spend time with it. Uh, so I would recommend that one to your. To your listeners.

[Chris Holmes]

That's great to have a film. Thank you.

[Graham Burnett]

And I'll do a book and a film I think I'll do. And they're related. We actually screened at the. At the Struther School. And this is a shout out for your listeners who are within within accessible distance of Brooklyn, New York. Come on down to the Strother School. Cause there's often good stuff going on there. We screened a film by a really brilliant documentary filmmaker named Ian Chaney. And it's a film called observer. And it's a beautiful feature length documentary on observation. He. He just centers people, hunters, scientists, poets whose lives revolve around sustained practices of close observation. And it's really lyrical and inspiring. So observer by Ian Chaney. It's a wicked delicate films out there. And then I'm a historian of science and there's a really great history of science edited collection called the History of Scientific Observation. So this is a demanding book. It's pretty academic, but it's edited by Liz Lundbeck and Lorraine Daston. University of Chicago Press, maybe 10 or 15 years ago now. The History of Scientific Observation. And it's a set of essays about the way sustained attention, particularly visual, optical, slow looking, durational looking, made it possible to create knowledge as well as to create new experiences. From the middle ages all the way to the beginning of the 21st century. Really great book.

[Chris Holmes]

These are a wonderful range and variety of recommendations. And I really can't recommend enough intensity by the Friends of Attention. And I'm hoping that my listeners will run out and grab it to see if they like. I are very anxious to form this collective movement to retake attention as one of the very fundamental qualities of our humanness and take it back from the very clear and present danger of it being fracked. So thank you so much Graham, Alyssa and Peter for coming on Burned by Books. It was really so wonderful to get to talk to you.

[Peter Schmidt]

Thank you, Chris.

[Alyssa Lowe]

Thank you.

[Graham Burnett]

Yeah.

[Alyssa Lowe]

You.

[Graham Burnett]

You've made a sanctuary and it was a pleasure to step into it with you. And, and just a last note to your listeners.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah.

[Peter Schmidt]

Please.

[Graham Burnett]

All our proceeds from this book support our nonprofit work. So kind of an unusual thing, collectively written book. And then we all agreed that the money from the sales that we got would support our school. So that's just so folks can. Can buy it and feel good.

[Chris Holmes]

Yeah, I love that. That's really wonderful. Thank you so much.

[Graham Burnett]

Take care.

[Peter Schmidt]

Thanks.

[Graham Burnett]

Bye.

[Chris Holmes]

Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to the Friends of Attention, the collective comprised of Graham Burnett, Alyssa Lowe and Peter Schmidt for coming on to talk about their co written manifesto, Atensity. You can find links to purchase attentity and all of the Friends of Attention's recommended books at the website Burned by books Dot com. There you'll find all of our previous episodes links to buy a podcast T shirt and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books.

[Alyssa Lowe]

Sam.