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D. Graham Burnett is a professor at Princeton University. He is also a revolutionary in a movement aimed at protecting one of humanity’s most precious freedoms: our attention. For several years, he and his colleagues in the “Attention Liberation Movement” have been studying, teaching, and warning of the commoditization of human attention by tech companies who make trillions off their ability to capture and keep our eyes on a screen. What is at stake, according to the advocates, is human flourishing. 

The new book by Burnett and his co-authors — they call themselves the “Friends of Attention” — is called “Attensity!” It is a manifesto for attention activists (no training needed) to organize around what Burnett calls “the fight of our lives.” The book is both highly informative and surprisingly funny about a serious subject that appears to be hiding in plain sight. Everyone feels it, yet no one really calls it out, for reasons the book aptly explains. The prelude to each chapter affirms: “You are correct: something is seriously wrong.”  

In this interview with LearningWell, Burnett talks about how this movement came to form, how it is similar to social change movements of the past, what attention really means, and how we can band together to reclaim it. All proceeds from “Attensity!” go to the non-profit, the Institute for Sustained Attention, and its flagship project, the Strother School of Radical Attention. The book is available for preorder now.

Here is a preview of our conversation. To listen to the full interview, tune into LearningWell Radio on January 6.  

LW: This is a really important book, and it’s also really witty. I was literally laughing out loud. As a writer, I cannot help but ask: Was there a reason that you and your colleagues chose to write in this fun style on such a serious subject? 

DGB: Oh, thank you for that question. This book was literally written by a bunch of friends carving time out in the summers over a couple of years to take residency retreats and think and talk and periodically play wiffle ball, and then argue and talk and think more, and then draft, and then hammer it together. Some of what I think you’re referring to is the lively, uninhibited energy of the book, and I think we succeeded in capturing some of that rollicking vibe. 

LW: “Attensity!” is a call to arms. What is it that we are fighting against, and what is it we are fighting for? That’s a big question, I know. 

DGB: It’s big, but it’s also simple. I believe, and my colleagues and friends believe, we are in the fight of our lives. This is not a test. In the last 10 years, new technologies have made possible a new kind of human exploitation. It was not previously possible to turn the most intimate movements of the human spirit directly into cash. You could not monetize care, interest, or curiosity directly, but now you can with these extraordinarily powerful devices which we call phones, even though obviously they’re not really phones. They’re like little, mini supercomputers, highly networked in our pockets at all times. They’re cognitive prosthetics that have transformed the experience of personhood. 

"It was not previously possible to turn the most intimate movements of the human spirit directly into cash."

These devices and the market gains they have made possible have enabled a multi-trillion dollar new industry that is quite literally commodifying the essential characteristics of human personhood. You know those books about how we have to learn to put our phones down? This is not that book. We all know that the devices are a problem, tied in complex ways to a global pandemic and when it comes to youth and mental health issues. They are seriously compromising features of what we thought of as our educational systems and our lives as individuals and in community. We know all that. 

Our book wants to point to the underlying cause of all this, which brings us to the idea of human fracking. The problem is not the phones. The problem is not social media. Because if the phones had been designed by your mom, you would use it to call your mom; and if social media had been designed by two artists and a Buddhist monk, social media would be like a groovy place for us to express ourselves. The problem is the underlying business model, which has essentially permitted a small number of heedless and greedy rational actors to maximize their return on investment. 

Their goal is to create systems that maximize our time-on-device selectively to stimulate components of our cognitive processes in highly Machiavellian ways to enhance our engagement experience at whatever cost to our emotional state. It is a project that is profoundly harming us. It is quite literally at odds with human flourishing in the most basic ways, and we need increasingly and clearly to call that out. 

Here’s where the book really makes its big move. We need to have a positive vision for an alternative, and this book swings in hard with a simple assertion: What we need is a movement. We don’t need screen time apps to assist us in protecting seven additional minutes of time with our device. We don’t need pharmaceuticals to assuage our cognitive capacities in their increasingly intricate anguish, although we are certainly happy that pharmaceutical products are available to help those of us who are suffering. But Big Pharma’s not going to save us. 

Big Tech’s not going to protect us from itself. And frankly, it’s not as if a bunch of regulators are suddenly going to appear and reign in the deepest pocketed, most technologically sophisticated corporations on the planet. That’s just not going to happen. What we need is collective action. We need to join together — recognize that the goodness of what we like to do with our mind and time and senses and with each other needs to be protected and enacted by us. We need to push back. 

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.