Big Tech Is “Fracking” Your Attention. These Activists Are Fighting to Get It Back.
It’s a blisteringly cold Monday night in February, and I’m sitting in an office building in Brooklyn trying to maintain eye contact with a woman I’ve just met. We hold each other’s gazes for several seconds, then I look away. My eyes return to her face, but I avoid her dark eyes, peering from under a ballcap, and instead stare at a spot on her forehead, maintaining the illusion of eye contact without actually holding it. I let my eyes wander and glance at the silhouette of the Manhattan Bridge looming through the nearby windows. My gaze returns to my partner, and we lock eyes again. She adjusts her hat. I give a slight, toothless smile. Her eyes flick away as she straightens her glasses.
Over the next few weeks, I’d find myself in similar situations—staring at something or someone for a prolonged period of time, taking note of where my mind wandered—at a series of evening “Attention Labs” hosted by the Strother School of Radical Attention in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
At these workshops, attendees explore “radical human attention” through various group activities, which might include studying a piece of music, talking with a partner, or observing the details of their physical surroundings. Whatever form the labs take, they all end with a call to action, inviting participants to join the School of Radical Attention in what it calls the Attention Liberation Movement.
The School of Radical Attention is one of several projects created by a group calling themselves the Friends of Attention, an informal collective of artists, scholars, and activists founded in 2018. Earlier this year, the group published Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, with D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt credited as co-editors. Attensity! is the latest in a recent boom of literature discussing the attention economy, including Jenny Odell’s 2019 How to Do Nothing and Chris Hayes’ 2025 The Sirens’ Call, among many others_._
If you’ve read one of these books, you might have been motivated to change your personal relationship to technology. Maybe you’ve repeatedly deleted then redownloaded social media apps, bought a Brick, or attempted a “digital detox”—only to fall prey once again to the attention-sucking powers of Big Tech. The Friends of Attention aim to remedy that, arguing that to truly reclaim our attention from tech conglomerates, we need more than individual action; we need a collective movement. Attensity! is framed as a political manifesto, full of fiery language and liberal use of capitalization that can occasionally elicit an eye roll. The authors refer to Big Tech as “human frackers.” Just as fracking drills into the earth and extracts hidden oil and natural gas, human fracking “breaks up our deep reserves of attention into smaller and smaller fragments,” selling those fragments for a profit. To fight that, we need to engage collective resistance on par with the modern environmental movement or 19th-century labor activism, the authors argue. “The movement of attentional liberation exists and has a name: ATTENTION ACTIVISM,” they write.
But what exactly is attention activism? To find out, I attended my first Attention Lab this winter, two days after a storm that left Brooklyn covered in about 20 inches of snow. On my walk from the train to the School of Radical Attention, I didn’t know what to expect. I had no idea what “exercises of attention” were, and the heated language of Attensity! made me half fear I was walking into a cult recruitment event. But I was curious. I already felt like my hours spent scrolling had made me less able to recall small details and information like I once had, so if someone was offering a solution, I was willing to listen.
That night, I entered a warmly lit room with a circle of metal chairs filling most of the space and a table stacked with oranges, cookies, tea, and water in the corner. It felt less like a classroom than a cozy basement cafe, with bookshelves lining the walls, art hanging in a makeshift gallery wall, and plants in every available space. No more than a dozen people gathered that night, each drawn to the lab for different reasons. Over the course of the three labs I attended, I met academics and artists, New Yorkers and vacationers, young and old, believers and skeptics. Some were scholars of attention with a wealth of knowledge on the subject, like the anthropology PhD student I met who had flown out to visit the school from California. Others were brand new to the field, like a young guy I saw at two separate labs who had heard about the school from a stranger in a bar and found himself in an Attention Lab only days later. One participant said reading Attensity! had changed her life.
Even the language we use to describe attention commodifies it: We’re conditioned to believe that attention is something to be paid, something owed to another person.
Each lab begins with participants turning to a partner and sharing their definition of attention. At my first one, I explained to my partner that growing up, attention always felt like something demanded from me by my parents and teachers. In school, we were always told to “pay attention,” and over the years, my math teachers frequently left notes about my “careless mistakes” and inattention to detail.
Even the language we use to describe attention commodifies it: We’re conditioned to believe that attention is something to be paid, something owed to another person. This definition of attention, rooted in focus and task completion, is itself indicative of the problem the School of Radical Attention is trying to solve. In a January New York Times op-ed, Schmidt, Burnett, and Loh describe this view as the “narrowest possible” perspective, which treats attention as “something that can be measured in terms of device-engaged, task-oriented productivity, then optimized and operationalized and profitably controlled.” Even our valiant efforts to remedy the problem by trying to improve focus or repair our attention span are a response to this narrow understanding. At work, the hours you spend focusing on a task will help generate profit for your employer; at home, the time you spend watching a movie on a streaming service or reading an article on your phone will be translated into ad dollars for Big Tech.
Attensity! asserts that there’s more to attention than focus and task completion. “Indeed, the WORLDS of human attention are innumerable—genuinely infinite, and full of infinite promise,” they write. I think what the Friends of Attention hope to emphasize is that attention isn’t something that can be quantified—it’s in everything we do. Looking out of the window of a car or bus and daydreaming—that’s attention at work. Taking a walk around your block and stopping to pet a dog or chat with your neighbor—attention. Going through the motions of pulling a shot of espresso—also attention.
When participants begin a practice at an Attention Lab, they receive a card with step-by-step instructions and an accompanying text excerpt or quote from an artist or scholar who inspired it—anyone from bell hooks to Langston Hughes to Yoko Ono or Karl Marx. The eye contact practice I engaged in during my first lab draws inspiration from Marina Abramovic’s 2010 “The Artist Is Present” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
Rather than focus one’s attention inward, like in many forms of meditation, these attention practices direct you to focus on an object or person. There’s actually not much that feels radical about the attention practices themselves, except that you’re taking the time to deliberately direct your attention to new things and to appreciate how other people might experience those practices during the group debriefs that conclude each practice. Quinn Marchman, a facilitator at the school, called this the “ritual of listening” and said that taking the time to hear what other participants experienced is a key component of the Attention Labs.
Like the distinctiveness of our fingerprints or eye color, our attention, too, is unique.
At one Attention Lab I attended, we did an exercise where we wandered through Dumbo alone, picked a spot, and took notes on what we observed. My tiny notebook is filled with notes from this lab, a very literal list of the sights and sounds of the block where I stood. “Overflowing puddles,” “dog poop but no dogs,” and “fake plants.” But in the debrief, others had written flowery, poetic lines describing the East River and the moon and the quietness of the street. Time and time again I learned that, while we each did the same practices, we experienced them differently. The practices manage to tap into each person’s unique interests and skills. Like the distinctiveness of our fingerprints or eye color, our attention, too, is unique. I didn’t notice the way the lights glittered on the water, but I did count the number of people on the street and watched as a puddle spilled over the edge of the sidewalk. Perhaps it’s my journalist’s impulse to compile small facts and details.
At the School’s Attention Labs, facilitators compare the work of attention activism to a house fire—a dire situation in which there are different roles with different priorities working together to put out the fire. “There are some people that are carrying out all the furniture. There are some people that have water and they’re putting out the fire. And there are some people that are on the phone calling 911,” Jahony Germosen, the partnerships coordinator at the School of Radical Attention, explains. “We think that the attention activism movement is exactly like this.”
The Friends of Attention identify the many different skills and talents needed to make attention activism work. In Attensity!, they argue that there’s room for everyone in attention activism because we all have distinct attention practices that we’re already doing. For example, rappers, poets, and stand-up comics—all people with unusually close attention to language—are “BARDS and RECITERS.” Meanwhile, people with a knack for bringing others together for shared experiences—dinner parties, game nights, etc.—are “GATHERERS.” It might sound a little cheesy, but the book captures something I felt intuitively at the labs I attended—that we all have something different to offer and learn when it comes to attention.
I realized the School of Radical Attention is right about at least one thing: it feels good not to have to do this work alone.
After reading the book and attending a few labs, I’ll admit that there’s something that feels slightly woo woo about this whole thing. One minute you’re staring deeply into a stranger’s eyes, then you’re staring at your hand and trying to “feel” it, and eventually you’ll find yourself listening to the same song four times in a row, searching for new details and feelings.
The latter exercise is part of a lab called “Deep Listening,” modeled after the work of composer Pauline Oliveros. The first time the facilitator played the song we were supposed to just listen. The second time we were to recall what we noticed the first time, the third time was to discover new things, and the final time we attempted hearing but “not listening.” By the third listen, hearing the tinny sound of the music, I found myself thinking about my middle school band class, remembering how it felt to practice a new piece of music until I’d committed it to memory. I imagined counting myself in and joining my classmates in an arrangement of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme song. Perhaps counterintuitively for a group so focused on collective action, the Attention Labs often offer a space for introspection. But I think what’s gained through that introspection is a longing for a community to share it with. During the Deep Listening exercise, one attendee remarked that the music helped decrease the noise in her head, to which several other people sounded off in agreement. “This exercise made me think of listening to my favorite albums,” another participant said. “Did anyone else feel that way?” Not everyone did, but they started peppering him with questions, trying to understand what he meant, or sharing how their experiences were different. When someone mentioned that the sound of the train rumbling outside the window distracted them from listening, a chorus of people piped up, detailing the sound of the train and identifying other distracting noises. It was in these moments I realized the School of Radical Attention is right about at least one thing: it feels good not to have to do this work alone.
But I also left the labs pretty unsure of what to do next. The School of Radical Attention offers plenty of ways to stay involved in its attention activism: you can take online courses, participate in “sidewalk studies” in public spaces across the city, study the texts from its suggested reading lists, or even follow its toolkit for starting an “attention sanctuary” in your own community. The ideas the school is presenting are valuable, but it seems like a stretch to argue that sitting in a room listening to a piece of music four times is activism—especially when there are sections of Attensity! that situate the authors’ project among the work of suffragists and civil rights marchers. (“These are disputes about human dignity—about the fullness of what people are and what they deserve,” the Friends of Attention write. “Attention Activism stakes a claim for human dignity.”)
I asked the school’s co-founder about this—doesn’t this all feel a bit abstract, I wondered, at a time when anti-ICEand pro-Palestine protesters are organizing for real political change? Schmidt, one of the co-founders, acknowledged that, because attention is hard to “nail down,” attention activism is different from how we think of activism otherwise. The school isn’t lobbying for antitrust laws that limit the power of the tech companies they call human frackers, or protesting AI data centers, or helping organize tech workers. Instead, they are pushing for cultural change, which Schmidt explained is about involving people and creating community. “The laws of a country cannot push through the people of a country,” he said. “You can’t have laws that protect something if you don’t have people who want to protect it.”
It’s the early stages of the movement, so Schmidt said this is the kind of work that needs to happen now to regulate the tech industry later. The school wants to model its work after other successful social movements which often have a pre-existing community and shared language that allows them to flourish. Schmidt said there’s no equivalent to that with attention activism, so creating the attention liberation movement will require building a shared language for the problem, a shared understanding of attention, and a community who cares about it all. That can happen through the school’s programming—which is being offered in New York City, across the US, and even across the globe.
I didn’t leave the School of Radical Attention newly fired up to take down Big Tech, but I did leave it feeling eager to connect with others who wanted to reclaim control of their attention.
Still, I ask if this isn’t a little like treating the symptom and not the cause. Schmidt resisted that characterization; the labs aren’t about “self-help” or having a group therapy session, he said. He makes what is a repeated distinction at the school and in Attensity!, which is that it’s not about fighting to improve our attention spans, but to enrich our understanding of attention in general. In this way, this work is about getting people on the same page, showing that attention is bigger than we think, and that the human frackers’ power is detrimental to humanity.
It doesn’t mean the School of Radical Attention might not eventually get into policy work or forms of activism that we’re more familiar with, but for now the work is about building community organizing to create a “critical consciousness around attention” in our culture.
I didn’t leave the School of Radical Attention newly fired up to take down Big Tech, but I did leave it feeling eager to connect with others who wanted to reclaim control of their attention, and with a more nuanced understanding of the many forms attention can take. That might not feel like much at a time when Meta is marketing discreet wearable tech and Google is training AI with your search data, but it’s a step in the right direction.
In the broader attention activism landscape, the School of Radical Attention’s work is more about hope, Schmidt told me. “Right now, with like four dudes in this AI arms race that’s just very destructive and hubristic and depressing, it’s just very easy to despair,” he said. “And the real spirit of all this for me, and what makes all the people who come here so wonderful is, we’re not exactly optimists, but I feel there’s a lot of hope.”
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Mother Jones
