The Attentionauts
My first magazine cover story
On a Saturday afternoon in the bohemian neighborhood of Silver Lake, Los Angeles, I convened a focus group of California-based creatives for an experiment in attention. In a grassy park bordering the neighborhood’s eponymous reservoir, we sat in a circle and read an excerpt of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic children’s novel The Little Prince. The passage considered a scene in which the interstellar-traveling boy prince encounters a talking fox, who encourages the royal to observe and cherish a particular rose among a field of flowers. After we finished reading, each participant chose an object in the park to focus on — their very own “rose,” to which they would pay attention for four minutes. One participant observed a flower, another an abandoned basketball. I tracked the pacing of a wandering Labrador retriever.
“How often do I just sit in the park and just listen and look at the humanity of it?” reflects Anya Jaremko-Greenwold, an editor at The Week who chose a nearby ironwood tree as her rose in the exercise. “If you’re a writer or creative type, you get a lot of ideas and inspiration from just sitting with your thoughts and not being distracted by your devices.”
The unconventional lesson plan was a product of the Strother School of Radical Attention (SoRA), a Brooklyn-based organization devoted to reclaiming society’s experience of human attention, which in the past 20 years, the leaders argue, has been completely hijacked by the monied interests of big tech and social media. They call the architects of social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram “attention frackers,” weaponizing their algorithms to entice attention for the purpose of extracting an immense stream of advertising revenue. According to SoRA’s rhetoric — echoing the positions of tech ethicist Tristan Harris and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt — the digital-based attention economy has inflicted a substantial human cost. While tech companies such as Apple, Meta, and Alphabet (Google) have become among the most profitable in the world, their success has simultaneously left a long shadow of teen depression and suicides.
For three weeks, I had embedded myself within SoRA’s Zoom workshops, two-hour-long seminars that explored how participants might experience life liberated from the addictive pull of the smartphone and build attention “sanctuaries” for other like-minded thinkers. Much like a university-level course, the workshops included reading packets of scholarly writings, office hours, and the promise of open-ended inquiry. Unlike a college class, enrollment only cost $99.
The school itself is just one pillar of a larger project orchestrated by the Friends of Attention, a group that is in turn supported by the Institute for Sustained Attention, a nonprofit founded in 2015 by Princeton history professor D. Graham Burnett ’93. The Friends of Attention have a podcast (Attention Lab), a newsletter (“The Empty Cup,” named after a quote from novelist Henry James), and as of January, a Penguin Random House-published polemic (Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement) written as a collective among various contributors from the Friends of Attention group, and edited by Burnett, his partner, filmmaker Alyssa Loh ’12, and SoRA director Peter Schmidt ’20.
The reason for all these efforts, the self-described “attentionauts” and “attentionistas” contend in their manifesto, is that “something is seriously wrong,” and if activists don’t organize against tech’s exploitative grip on the human mind soon, then future resistance might be futile.