Jan 26, 2026
Our attention is being exploited by predatory companies in Silicon Valley. But the Friends of Attention are fighting back with a book called “Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement.” Peter Schmidt, co-editor of the book, discusses the movement to recover our “attentional well-being.”
We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.• The battle for attention (by Nathan Heller in the New Yorker, Apr 29, 2024):
“Consumers’ span of attention is now believed to be less than eight seconds,” [said] Raja Rajamannar, the chief marketing officer of Mastercard. “That is less than the attention span of a goldfish.”• Experimental evidence for the effects of attention at a distance (Rupert Sheldrake in 2017):
The standard assumption is that minds are located inside heads. But many mental phenomena, including vision, suggest that minds are far more extensive than brains. There is now a large body of experimental evidence for the reality of the sense of being stared at, namely the ability to detect unseen gazes. There is also evidence for the effects of intention at a distance through telephone telepathy, the phenomenon of thinking of somebody just before they call, or knowing who is calling before looking at the caller ID or answering the phone.