Attention activism is a reclamation project to defend against reduction to salable data

Evidence

As Attention Activists, we are committed, then, to what the legal scholar Tim Wu calls a “human reclamation project.” It is a project that actually seeks to protect our non-inhumanity by asserting, over and over, that we cannot be reduced to mere salable data. It is a justice that refuses to see the world by the terms in which it has been presented to us: as an exhaustive (and exhausting) inventory of solitary, mute objects waiting to be counted, priced, and sold. In the face of the relentless, blinding quantification of being, we close our eyes, and listen, instead, with close attention to those around us. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 252

Categorization

• DEFINE: Pins down what the movement names itself, borrowing Tim Wu’s phrase: a human reclamation project against data-reduction.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the essay against quantification-as-justice; the refusal of ‘an inventory of solitary, mute objects’ parallels grafting’s refusal of trees as mere timber.