How can we fight back against the way big tech is exploiting humanity for the monetary value of our attention — and harming us in the process? It starts with understanding the true nature of human attention. We are part of a coalition of activists, educators and artists known as the Friends of Attention. Over the past two decades, our community has monitored the harmful effects of mounting pressures on human attention from a nexus of platform technologies, financial markets and corporate interests. We’ve come to think of this unholy operation as “human fracking”: a $7 trillion industry that captures and monetizes human attention, converting our most intimate selves into profit and leaving our kids, our families and ourselves the worse for wear. The threats to our attention are systemic, and the only effective response is collective action at all scales of society. What we need is a movement. But to push back,we need to understand exactly what kinds of attention are worth fighting for. We wrote a guest essay for Times Opinion today that looked back at the deep origin of the attempt to quantitatively measure, optimize and capture our attention. It started — far from Silicon Valley, in a spirit greatly removed from profit maximization — in laboratories where scientists were earnestly engaged in the effort to advance understanding and improve lives. But the narrow, task-oriented view of attention they advanced has, decades later, delivered us to the current moment, when we are under relentless attack by devices designed to keep us engaged. Revisiting the history of this way of thinking reminds us that we are so much more than attention machines, and that the full range of our minds and senses is far wider (and wilder) than our ability to perform tasks in front of a screen. As the French mystic and political activist Simone Weil wrote, an “application of the full attention” amounts to “the authentic and pure values — truth, beauty and goodness.” This is an attention worth fighting for. Indeed, we believe that the protection of this kind of attention will be one of the defining political challenges of the decades to come.
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