The Friends of Attention — Attensity!: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement

353 published claims from this book.

• A catalytic idea can unlock dormant collective generosity in a community
• A century of individualism plus devices destroyed collective shared attention
• A lie about attention has become invisible by embedding itself in everyday institutions
• A named class of attentional caregivers exercises care-as-attention
• A new kind of political being, homo attentus, will reshape politics.
• A school for attention activism was founded in Brooklyn in 2023
• A scientific consensus can still rest on a misleading historical inheritance
• A scientific framework’s presuppositions are culturally and historically conditioned
• A successful attention movement needs dramatization, denunciation, and mass
• A technical scientific word can become a mass political slogan within a decade.
• A three-part program of study, coalition-building, and sanctuaries forms the proposed response.
• A veteran coder turned against the tech industry’s growth ethos
• Advertising must saturate entire populations to surface biddable attention
• Advocates must manufacture collective attention before issues reach ballots
• AI chatbots are the ultimate escalatory tool in the war for attention
• Algorithmic attention extraction monetizes love and the need for love.
• All art is a request for and record of attention
• All five largest world companies are data-extractive tech giants
• Amateur practice turns attention into a durable antidote to commodified quick-twitch culture
• American fitness club membership grew 2500 percent between 1972 and 2006
• An artwork can consist solely of directing attention to existing things.
• An attention-extraction industry converts human care into money and harms everyone.
• An industry has channeled and commodified human attention like fracking extracts natural resources.
• Any shared hands-on practice qualifies as attention resistance
• Art and the humanities are special zones for practicing emancipatory attention.
• Art creates a mobile sanctuary protected from utilitarian extraction
• Art suspends ordinary operations and provokes productive puzzlement
• Art’s core function is holding open contemplative space against distraction.
• Artistic activity is a distinct training ground for free attention
• Artists, thinkers, and activists already practicing attention are the movement’s vanguard.
• Artists, thinkers, and dreamers supply the revolutionary possibilities of the present.
• Attempts to reach sustaining people heighten felt isolation
• Attensity is a reclaimed scientific term for direct study of attention itself
• Attensity names the free, shared movement of attention treated as transformative good.
• Attensity was an early-twentieth-century term abandoned when introspection lost to mechanist psychology.
• Attention activism began as an organized collective response to a perceived crisis.
• Attention activism can be screened by whether activity builds shared, owned connection
• Attention activism is a reclamation project to defend against reduction to salable data
• Attention activism is pro-technology and rejects retrenchment
• Attention Activism operates through study, coalition-building, and sanctuaries.
• Attention activism reframes a catastrophic present into flourishing by contesting attention capture
• Attention activism requires collectively building attention’s public meaning
• Attention activism requires dedicated spaces for collective experimentation and care
• Attention activists are defined by a sustained practice connecting them to the world
• Attention activists can weaponize inherited everyday tools nonviolently
• Attention can be defined beyond action and receptivity
• Attention can be quantitatively measured and thereby bought and sold.
• Attention capture exploits ordinary pleasant content, not just violence or shock
• Attention creates a shared space beyond both instrumental logic and endless suspension
• Attention economics is a behaviorist arms race won by the most stimulating content
• Attention economy pits financialization against alternative forms of value
• Attention exceeds any measurable property, so exchanging it for money always entails loss.
• Attention extraction is a historical contingent result of human choice
• Attention extraction is coercion and theft, not a trade-off
• Attention extraction is fundamentally a denial of human dignity.
• Attention extraction operates at multiple scales demanding a many-zone coalition
• Attention extraction reaches people before they can reach their communities
• Attention extraction reduces people to quantifiable commodities and demands collective remedy.
• Attention extraction shapes even our intimate access to other people
• Attention extraction thrives on gratifications we must relearn to want against
• Attention extraction unjustly commodifies the self and requires collective rather than individual remedy
• Attention frackers capitalized on pre-existing civic decline rather than creating it
• Attention frackers profit by covertly dominating attention formation.
• Attention fracking preempts people’s own intentions to seek communal contact
• Attention functions as the ground for ethics, not merely for personal satisfaction.
• Attention is a fundamental life resource, not a discretionary commodity.
• Attention is a shared common resource, not private property.
• Attention is an essential precondition of life on par with water
• Attention is culturally recognized yet not as an activist cause
• Attention is diverse cognitive engagement, not narrow focus
• Attention is judged by its blooms, not its duration
• Attention is learned rather than innate, always and for everyone
• Attention is learned, not innate, so it can be retrained
• Attention is the defining political and existential question of the current era
• Attention is the fundamental medium of all human connection
• Attention is the mechanism by which we reteach things their loveliness
• Attention is the substrate of care for self, community, and planet.
• Attention moves through shared systems just as bodies share material systems.
• Attention politics begins when activists reframe private distress as collective injury
• Attention practice can take craft forms like welding rooted in childhood apprenticeship
• Attention research was canalized into a visual, durational, cybernetic paradigm by its industry funders.
• Attention sanctuaries exist now but hide because they are endangered.
• Attention sanctuaries require explicit written community agreements
• Attention science defined attention as visual, durational, and cybernetic to fit its funders’ tools
• Attention science never actually studied lived experience, only task performance.
• Attention was studied in deep ways before military deoxygenation experiments standardized it
• Attention-activism art has a half-century lineage from Fluxus through Ono to Abramović
• Attention-extraction rose from side hustle to center of plutocratic profit
• Attention, not networks or devices, is the true substrate of all connection.
• Attention’s goal is anthesis, an irreversible flowering into communion
• Attentional disorders and constant device use are epidemic among American youth.
• Attentional exploitation can be transformed into a basis for collective political identity
• Attentional exploitation now reaches from legislators to young children at unprecedented scale
• Attentional practices of great spiritual traditions constitute waiting on the infinite
• Audience attention is generative of greatness in performers
• Augustine framed distractibility as a mark of the Fall and attention as redemptive.
• Augustine treated human distractibility as sin and attention as redemptive
• Awareness infrastructure converts real crises into felt distance
• Both civic groups and apps train attention, but in opposed directions
• Calling someone distracted means accusing them of unauthorized attention.
• Care work exercises a live, relational attention that readouts cannot capture
• Challenging expert claims requires refusing the expert’s framing language entirely
• Choosing what to attend to is itself the core political and ethical act
• Choosing what to value is the actual substance of ethics and politics
• Civic community thinning in America predated the commercial internet
• Coalition building begins with an explicit inventory of members’ skills
• Cognitive neuroscience officially defines attention as selection for a task
• Coined description of the attention economy as extraction of users’ minds
• Collective effort itself, not a found solution, creates self-governance.
• Collective outrage from shared clear truths is a catalytic transformative force
• Collective practice anchors and sustains attention activism
• Compulsive phone use stems from engineered coercion, not personal willpower failure
• Concern about attention span misdirects effort from recovering deeper attentional modes
• Contemporary attention art descends from a lineage of score-based performance and happening traditions.
• Contradiction detection is the method for predicting when attention extraction becomes unsustainable
• Contradictions signal when a tactical flip becomes possible
• Corporations buy science to protect financial interests, distinct from ambient cultural bias
• Corrupt science flows from paid capture rather than ambient cultural bias.
• Cultural preoccupations canalized attention research, pathologizing kids via a game
• Cultural revolutions can arise from mixed state, market, and individual drivers
• Debates about attention are ultimately ontological, not political
• Deep attention occurs in a relational space that extraction systems partition and plunder
• Defining attention as action-catalyzer reduces attentional life to a cascade of incitements
• Democratic stability and wealth inevitably produce bureaucracy, oligarchy, and stagnation.
• Digital platforms extract money by tapping core human desires for connection
• Distraction is actually unauthorized attention, power-determined
• Diverse attentional practices form a common arsenal against attention extraction
• Early industrial capitalism created homo economicus, a new market-defined subject.
• Ecology transformed from obscure science to utopian battle cry within a decade.
• Environmental activism identity took decades of work to construct
• Environmental activism’s birth offers a template for building an attention movement
• Environmental damage has three independent root causes that all need addressing
• Ethics begins with stories, not dictates, and demands patient listening to others
• Even benign content exploits attention through relentless flow
• Every major social movement began by demanding collective attention
• Everyday communal practices of attention are living alternatives to attention extraction.
• Everyday domestic objects become weapons when oppression drives people to resistance
• Everyday gathering groups constitute schools of attention against fracking
• Everyday observation can substitute for pending scientific proof of attention harm
• Everything and everyone is being made into a standing reserve in blockchain ledgers
• Expert disagreement persists on any aspect of social-media harm data
• Expert dissent persists on social media harms despite strong evidence.
• Explicit advance pacts about gathering intentions resist attentional extraction.
• Face-to-face organizing that escapes capture constitutes resistance to the Attention Economy.
• Fitness participation grew 2,500 percent across five decades
• Formal ceremony can be engineered to re-sanctify everyday sights.
• Free, shared attention is named and offered as a transformative good.
• Funding and institutional context channel what attention science can discover
• Genuine attention is centripetal distraction, bending thoughts back
• Genuine attention is the repeated return of wandering thoughts to an object.
• Great art creates attentional situations, not just artifacts
• Haidt’s team compiled hundreds of studies documenting social media harms.
• Healthy attention feels controlled, replenishing, and non-monetizable
• Healthy human cognition is dynamic and incapable of static focus
• Healthy humans cannot sustain unwavering focus on a single object.
• High school suicide attempts and hopelessness rose 40 percent in a decade.
• Highly skilled durational attention materially builds and maintains society’s infrastructure
• Homeless people primarily wanted conversation, not books, from a street library
• Human attention has been reduced to a monoculture like American farmland
• Human attention is being extracted and commodified by an industrial-technological complex.
• Human fracking describes extracting hard-to-reach attention by industrial chemical-like force
• Human fracking extracts attentional capacities as industry once extracted physical ones.
• Human fracking parallels industrial extraction of physical labor
• Human fracking reduces persons and relationships to quantifiable commodities.
• Human reclamation asserts that people cannot be reduced to salable data.
• Human self-interest drives us to invent profit schemes heedless of lasting harm
• Humanity’s irreducible truth cannot be proven by scientific methods.
• Humans reliably develop new exploitative techniques heedless of consequences.
• Identity labels signal shared projects across wildly varied specific work
• Individual attention is low-grade ore needing massive aggregation to be profitably mined
• Individual fixes cannot solve attention extraction because the problem is structural
• Individual remedies reinforce the attention-extraction regime rather than escaping it
• Industrial attention farming displaced diverse attentional modalities with one mechanomorphic species
• Industrial attention farming originated in military-industrial screen-vigilance and cybernetics.
• Industrial attention research served military, advertising, and factory needs only
• Industrial capitalism defined workers by the very labor it extracted
• Industrial tech companies extract and commodify human attention like fracking extracts oil
• Industrial usefulness explains how one narrow attention concept colonized all domains.
• Industrialized attention extraction despoils the shared human spirit as pollution despoils water.
• Industry-funded science long obscured the smoking-cancer link despite strong early evidence
• Inherited everyday tools can be rearmed for resistance
• Inner and outer environmental damage are causally linked and inseparable
• Inner attention damage blocks the political work needed to fix outer environmental damage.
• Issues become political only when enough public attention first lands on them
• Joint attention practices generate shared political power.
• Joint attention practices open up shared political power alongside beauty and grace.
• Knowing a webcam broadcasts transforms bystanders into image-checking performers within minutes.
• Labor unions transformed industrial exploitation through collective action
• Laboratory attention research served military and advertising ends.
• Laboratory psychology definitions shaped how everyone conceives attention today.
• Laboratory-defined attention was designed for instrumental task selection from the start.
• Laypeople hold equal authority with scientists over their own attention.
• Laypeople know as much about attention as scientists do
• Legal redress treats justice as restoring balance of what was taken
• Managerial definitions reduce attention to a tool for action
• Manual-blindfold walks can restore attention to place through deliberately paced reveals
• Marx’s dialectic is a form of conceptual jiujitsu that flips thought
• Marx’s inversion reveals workers coveting their own labor in commodities
• Measuring attention as data enables treating it as a monetizable resource
• Mind-fracking and earth-fracking are parallel unregulated extraction technologies
• Mindfulness has been weaponized by employers to extract labor focus
• Modern ‘attention’ is a narrowed, instrumentalized construct far removed from lived human attention.
• Modern attention science was forged as a military-industrial discipline
• Most people equate attention with screen-based task focus
• Movement politics has always depended on formal study groups that trained collective attention.
• Museums and libraries may pivot from access to attention-sanctuary roles
• Nineteenth-century wage labor displaced chattel slavery as the most efficient exploitation nexus.
• Non-monetized radical attention vastly outnumbers fracker-engineered attention.
• Nothing about screen-based attention testing is natural or inevitable
• One historically contingent model of attention colonized all others via advertising and military uses
• Oppression’s present conditions themselves point toward the way forward
• Ordinary schooling trains the workforce that sustains the attention economy
• Original Luddites resisted industrial labor exploitation, not technology itself
• Parasitic haustoria are the biological template for the attention economy’s extraction mechanism.
• Parasitic haustoria mirror digital extraction as continuous IV-in-reverse siphons
• People accept any suffering they believe is inevitable, blocking political outrage
• Performance and Fluxus artists retroactively read as fighters against commodified attention
• Phone addiction stems from engineered infrastructure, not personal weakness
• Photographic documentation can turn automated screen absorption into a staged, noticed performance.
• Political issues only become contested once enough people attend to them
• Political visions are judged by the worlds they create, not their factual truth
• Politics itself is being reshaped by attentional extraction industries
• Precautionary action against attention extraction is warranted before causal proof arrives
• Private shame over failed willpower should be redirected into political anger
• Programmers who built manipulative interfaces can teach students to dismantle them
• Protecting outer environment depends on protecting inner psycho-sensory environment
• Pure philosophical patience does not by itself constitute a revolutionary movement
• Quantifiability is the necessary precondition for monetization
• Quantifiability is the necessary precondition for turning anything into money.
• Racist pseudoscience can hold scientific legitimacy for years within expert debate
• Radical attention is a mutual remembering that restores a thing’s innate loveliness
• Reading stands as a great mode of human attention that the frackaverse erodes.
• Rebuilding social webs is the goal, not means, of Attention Activism
• Recalling past change shatters the complacency that inevitability reinforces
• Receiving genuine care attention is a gift made precious by universal vulnerability
• Recovering the cybernetic version of attention would only refit people for task-selection
• Recreational attention activities can be reclaimed from extraction without abandoning them
• Refusing presentation of the world is not refusing the world itself
• Rehearsing past social change undermines the felt inevitability of the present
• Resistance must use the same platforms that extract attention
• Resistance to human fracking requires activism across many scales simultaneously
• Resistance to the attention economy must use the platforms themselves as tools
• Resisting attention extraction means refusing the enemy’s definition of attention
• Revolutionary change requires converting pain into politically effective outrage
• Running shoes did not exist as a consumer product before 1965
• Running, gyms, and trainers as mass middle-class practice barely existed before 1965
• Sabbath traditions and sleep are ancient attention sanctuaries
• Sanctuaries must restore non-monetizable forms of attention and a feeling of agency
• Sanctuary traditions of exclusion converted into protection for the vulnerable
• Sanctuary’s exclusionary logic of separated power paradoxically produced protection for the vulnerable
• Scales-based justice assumes all things are exchange-equal by quantity
• Scarcity alarms over oil proved wrong because fracking unlocked new supply
• School is being reframed as a study sanctuary distinct from information processing
• Schooling can be engineered to train attention for exploitation rather than liberation.
• Schooling legitimately transmits the attentional modes that let people shape their world.
• Schools are wherever focused attention is collectively learned and practiced
• Schools form attention in ways that can serve exploitation, not just freedom
• Scientific precision can block, not enable, deeper understanding of attention
• Screen culture trains us to misperceive attention as singular and task-oriented
• Screen-based training reduces attention to stimulus-poking in ordinary thought.
• Seepticised traditions gain value when reconceived as attention formation
• Self-blessing sometimes requires an external catalysing gesture of attention
• Shaming traditions like rote memorization contain valuable attention-forming practices
• Shared attentional forms are what make shared human freedom possible
• Shared attentional practices are the movement’s only real resource
• Shared world-making requires joint attention in physical co-presence
• Singular attention thinking causes concrete human harm, not just inconvenience
• Smartphone screens monopolize attention formation toward a single engineered kind
• Social movements function like controlled burns that rejuvenate democracies.
• Social participation makes contested attention truth more real over time.
• Social transformation depends on care networks plus formal mobilization structures
• Some attention’s value resists translation into any other good
• Spectator attention transforms grueling endurance events into triumphant experiences
• Static pinpoint focus is not attention but stultification
• Stiegler defines attention etymologically as waiting on infinity
• Strikes became politically powerful only with industrialization
• Study counters AI’s information dominance by centering human reflection and being
• Sustained collective silent attention can be choreographed by shared protocols
• Taking down the frackers requires recognizing attention practices already present everywhere
• Teaching developers the industry’s techniques triggered his reversal
• Technology-enabled attention extraction both creates the crisis and reveals attention’s true importance
• The ‘attention span’ concept is a historically recent, lab-derived construct.
• The activist roll call is deliberately open and invitational
• The attention activist network has remained small while its programs draw thousands
• The attention economy captures pre-existing human communities onto platforms to monetize them
• The attention economy functions as an industrial farm of vegetative users
• The attention economy has captured control of how cultures dream
• The attention economy rests on a hidden false premise about attention.
• The attention extraction industry is an enemy of all humankind
• The attention industry rests on the idea that attention can be measured and sold.
• The attention movement’s work parallels ecological restoration of erased prairies.
• The attention-versus-distraction pairing has deep roots in patriarchy and Christian devotion.
• The blindfold sash symbolizes the right to direct attention by withholding it
• The built world is made of attention as much as of materials
• The clinical ADHD test so resembles a video game it is hard to distinguish
• The clinical attention test is nearly identical to a video game.
• The commercial attention economy feeds on pre-existing civic community decline
• The diagnostic premises of attention science are cultural artifacts, not natural facts.
• The dignity-truth becomes more real as more people join the movement.
• The dispute over attention is ultimately an argument about what constitutes our humanity
• The distraction problem is not short attention spans but the instrumentalization of attention itself.
• The dominant monocultural attention is mistaken for attention itself.
• The dominant scientific definition of attention as task-selection is the foundational lie.
• The environmental activist identity is a recent invention requiring long cultural work
• The environmental movement succeeded by uniting diverse stakeholders across class lines.
• The free digital universe was produced by political decisions, not inevitability
• The group aspires for this book to catalyze change comparable to Silent Spring
• The group organized as a Quaker-inspired coalition model
• The group traced Bolsonaro’s rise to big data social media manipulation of attention
• The information and trade accounts of schooling both fail under scrutiny
• The internet could be redesigned as an attention sanctuary
• The Luddite label has a radical, pro-worker political lineage
• The meaning of any tool depends entirely on its historical moment
• The measured attention of lab science was defined by duration and person-machine coupling.
• The modern concern over short attention spans inherits a military-industrial definition of attention
• The modern measured notion of attention poorly captures lived human attention.
• The movement operates as a coalition of the willing without formal membership counting
• The movement organizes around freedom as an ever-unfolding truth rather than a fixed doctrine.
• The movement’s central truth is human infinitude, irreducible to proof or numbers.
• The prairie-to-monoculture story is the template for what industrial attention farming did.
• The pricing of mental and sensory stuff is nonsensical and unsustainable
• The rise of Bolsonaro galvanized attention activists around attention’s commodification
• The science of attention was shaped by military-industrial funding imperatives.
• The shared crisis unifies otherwise unrelated attentional practices
• The term attention has been redefined by AI researchers to mean context pruning.
• The Twelve Theses on Attention originated in a 2019 retreat.
• The world’s five largest companies all monetize captured attention
• The world’s most valuable corporations are unified by attention monetization
• Thicker communities were already dissolving before the digital attention economy arose
• TikTok outcompetes legacy nonprofits because it is better engineered for appeal
• Transnational capital is seizing human attention as its newest exploitable frontier
• Treating the immeasurable core of life as unreal is an injustice against humanity
• True attention survives only in carved-out sanctuaries, not by singular events.
• Truths that compel assent cannot sustain a freedom-based movement.
• Twentieth-century attention research served machine-monitoring practical ends.
• Twentieth-century attention science was driven by Cold War input-output thinking
• Two separate kinds of justice govern the attention movement
• Uncapturable collective gathering time constitutes resistance to the Attention Economy.
• Unchecked administrative growth and wealth produce bureaucratic iron cages and oligarchy
• Understanding cannot be outsourced to AI because it requires active study.
• Unlike Marx’s workers, the owners of attention still possess the means of producing value
• Untreated democratic rot produces citizenry convinced the system is rigged.
• Varied modern harms share a root trend of dissociation
• Visions are evaluated by the worlds they bring into being
• Waiting for proof of attention-extraction harms risks acting too late
• Weil held that highest-degree attention is identical to prayer and presupposes faith and love
• What attention is remains an actively contested political question
• Widespread attentional disorder diagnoses and device use are undisputed facts
• Window-staring is an endangered attentional species schools mislabel as distraction
• With the GATHERERS the movement answers who acts and how
• Withholding attention from one thing is what enables directing it elsewhere.
• Withholding labor only gained real power with industrialization because production then ran through machines.
• Youth suicide and hopelessness have risen sharply over ten years