An industry has channeled and commodified human attention like fracking extracts natural resources.

Evidence

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.” — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 514

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: This capsule is the book’s core definition of ‘human fracking’ — the image-description appendix restates the manifesto’s key term compactly.
• SEED: The fracking metaphor itself is an essay angle: probing whether extraction metaphors (fracking, mining, drilling) accurately capture or distort what platforms do to attention.

Related

• Industrial tech companies extract and commodify human attention like fracking extracts oil (similarity 0.92)
• Human attention is being extracted and commodified by an industrial-technological complex. (similarity 0.91)
• Human fracking describes extracting hard-to-reach attention by industrial chemical-like force (similarity 0.90)
• Attention extraction is a historical contingent result of human choice (similarity 0.88)
• Human fracking extracts attentional capacities as industry once extracted physical ones. (similarity 0.87)
• Human fracking parallels industrial extraction of physical labor (similarity 0.86)
• Attention can be quantitatively measured and thereby bought and sold. (similarity 0.85)
• Mind-fracking and earth-fracking are parallel unregulated extraction technologies (similarity 0.83)
• Attention extraction operates at multiple scales demanding a many-zone coalition (similarity 0.83)
• The dispute over attention is ultimately an argument about what constitutes our humanity (similarity 0.82)
• An attention-extraction industry converts human care into money and harms everyone. (similarity 0.82)
• The smartphone harvested previously uncollected attention like fracking recovers oil. (similarity 0.82)
• Laboratory attention research served military and advertising ends. (similarity 0.81)
• Attention, not networks or devices, is the true substrate of all connection. (similarity 0.81)
• Human fracking reduces persons and relationships to quantifiable commodities. (similarity 0.80)