The Friends of Attention

A rallying cry to fight the commodification of human attention, with the tools we need to reclaim our humanity, by a group of writers, artists, and activists in the vanguard of the movement “A stirring battle cry on behalf of our shared humanity against the forces that seek to diminish and degrade it. Downright invigorating. Just what the moment calls for.”—Chris Hayes, author of The Sirens’ Call We all feel it: something is seriously wrong. Our attention—that essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world—is being trapped, gutted, and sold out from under us by an industry of immense technological and financial power. The heedless exploitation of this vital capacity by a handful of tech companies is harming us all, reducing our very selfhood to that which can be quantified, bought, and sold—and shaking the foundations of our democracy. To push back against this “human fracking,” we need more than individual willpower or isolated efforts. We need a movement of collective resistance. Such a movement is beginning to bloom, and in this radical, first-of-its-kind guide, The Friends of Attention show us how to join the fight. We meet welders, nurses, poets, and surfers, all of whom are engaged in attentional practices. We learn to seek out sanctuaries—theaters and museums, houses of worship, dance parties—where together we can take refuge from the frackers. Attention Activism takes our apocalyptic present, turns it on its head, and reveals new vistas of human flourishing. Drawing on a rich legacy of critical intellectuals and the creative wisdom of diverse traditions, Attensity calls on us to come together to defeat the greedy dehumanizing forces of brute instrumentalization—and re-enchant the world.

A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement

Attensity!

A meditation on the ethics and politics of attention “True attention takes the unlivable, and makes it livable.” So say the Friends of Attention in their visionary and epigrammatic analysis of attentional freedom in our time. Directly confronting the pathologies of our attention economy, this slim text, authored by an underground collective of activist-critics, utopian dreamers, and peaceful insurgents, stakes out the terrain of a new politics—one that centers on the truly human use of our capacity to attend. It is widely recognized that unprecedented technologies, operating at unprecedented scales and with near-total ubiquity, continuously “frack” our faculties of eye and mind, extracting revenue by capturing our most precious and intimate resource: our attention. What can be done? Informed by the radical traditions of figures as diverse as Simone Weil and adrienne maree brown, and drawing on contemporary philosophy of mind no less than the eccentricities of slacker-surrealists, Twelve Theses on Attention offers a surprising and lyrical answer. The book is richly illustrated with stills from a set of related films by a diverse group of young filmmakers.

The Friends of Attention

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