The dispute over attention is ultimately an argument about what constitutes our humanity

Evidence

So, too, with the frackers. They are harming us. But the lie in our case goes even deeper. This is not simply an argument about whether human fracking is bad for us (although that is an important fact, and a true one); it is a dispute about what attention is. And because attention is the way that we enter into the world and shape it, and the way the world enters into and shapes us, the argument about what attention is ends up being, in effect, an argument about our beings—about our very humanity. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 174

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that attention is the bidirectional interface between self and world resonates against the Frankfurt School’s account of how consciousness is shaped by industrial technique.
• DEEPTHINKING: The structural claim here is dense: that a dispute about the definition of attention is not merely descriptive but ontological, because attention mediates world-formation and self-formation reciprocally.