The Trillion Dollar Battle For Your Attention, with Peter Schmidt and D. Graham Burnett

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• The core argument of *Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement* is a pivot from diagnosing the commodification of human attention to advocating for collective "movement politics" to combat this systemic exploitation.  Copied to clipboard!
• The modern, narrow concept of attention, rooted in military-industrial complex laboratory psychology, is task-oriented and cybernetic, contrasting sharply with richer, historical conceptions of attention as the dynamic experience of being.  Copied to clipboard!
• The proposed solution, 'attention activism,' involves three zones of activity: study (understanding one's own attention), organizing (building solidarity communities), and forming sanctuary spaces (creating protected environments for focused experience).  Copied to clipboard!

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Defining the Attention Crisis

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(00:00:52)

• Key Takeaway: The trillion-dollar battle for attention involves powerful tech companies extracting and monetizing focus, reshaping inner lives and threatening democracy.
• Summary: A handful of powerful tech companies are engaged in extracting and monetizing human focus, which reshapes inner lives and threatens democratic foundations. Proposed solutions relying solely on individual willpower are insufficient against technologically sophisticated, deeply financed business models. The core issue is the commodification of human attention, squeezing eyeballs for cash.

Pivot from Diagnosis to Action

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(00:03:49)

• Key Takeaway: Attensity! advocates for a blueprint for action, asserting that the exploitation of attention is a systemic issue requiring ‘movement politics’ rather than individual discipline.
• Summary: The book Attensity! shifts focus from diagnosing the problem of attention commodification to providing a blueprint for action. This new form of exploitation, centered on screens and technology, is systemic and cannot be won in isolation by individuals. Reclaiming attention requires movement politics and forging a politics of attention as a precondition for the common good.

History of Narrow Attention Concept

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(00:07:15)

• Key Takeaway: The current understanding of attention as ‘attention span’ originated from 20th-century laboratory psychology funded by the military-industrial complex to maximize machine interaction.
• Summary: The way attention is currently conceptualized has a specific history, emerging from laboratory psychology tasked with equipping soldiers to monitor radar screens. This research produced an understanding of attention that is task-oriented, cybernetic, and designed to maximize people’s ability to stay with machines. A movement requires a richer, more compelling conception of attention connected to life’s goodness.

Expanding Attention Beyond Metrics

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(00:12:22)

• Key Takeaway: Attention is far richer than the narrow, instrumental machine focus, encompassing deep philosophical concepts like St. Augustine’s defeat of ‘splayedness in time’ and Buddhist views of attention constituting subjectivity.
• Summary: Attention is much more than the quantifiable focus measured by screen time monitors; it involves time, mind, and senses, including daydreaming, caregiving, and contemplation. Philosophically, attention has been viewed as the core effort to reconstitute the human relationship to God (Augustine) or as the dynamic experience of being itself (Buddhist traditions). Practically, attention is what constitutes our experience of life worth organizing for.

Human Fracking Metaphor Explained

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(00:15:15)

• Key Takeaway: The term ‘human fracking’ describes the high-pressure pumping of low-quality content into brains to break up attention into monetizable bits, mirroring the environmental damage of hydraulic fracking.
• Summary: Hydraulic fracking uses detergent pressure to extract deep petroleum; similarly, tech companies pump high-pressure stimulation to break up human attention into smaller, capturable units for advertising revenue. This process causes structural instability to the psyche and pollutes the ‘internal environment,’ mirroring the crisis of the external environment. The feeling of pleasure from the next dopamine hit masks the fact that users are being defeated by algorithms maximizing time on device.

Call to Collective Action

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(00:23:17)

• Key Takeaway: The primary step for individuals is to ‘get together’ to form collective communities of solidarity around attention protection, analogous to the labor movements following the Industrial Revolution.
• Summary: The first step in combating attention exploitation is collective action, mirroring how laborers organized against the new business models of the Industrial Revolution. Individuals must form communities of solidarity to protect their attention, which is being exploited by the current device-based business model. This collective recognition is expected to produce new forms of politics capable of gaining purchase on the levers of power.

Framework for Attention Activism

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(00:34:32)

• Key Takeaway: Attention activism is structured around three zones: study (self-reflection on attention), organizing (building coalitions), and sanctuary formation (creating protected spaces).
• Summary: Study involves giving attention to one’s own attention, such as how surfers experience waves, to strengthen the sense of what needs protection. Organizing requires getting together with others who value enriching forms of attention to build mobilization structures for political change. Sanctuary spaces are collective commitments to protected environments, like coffee shops with laptop bans or museums, which act as portals for positive experience.

Vision for a Politics of Intensity

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(00:41:27)

• Key Takeaway: Success means achieving a total cultural reorientation where people viscerally understand the link between their internal mental environment and human flourishing, leading to a politics that rises above the current ‘politics of spectacularity.’
• Summary: The ultimate goal is a cultural shift where the relationship between the movement of minds/senses and well-being is fundamentally understood, similar to the environmental movement’s impact on ecological awareness. The term ‘Attensity’ is repurposed as a slogan for this transformed attentional relationship, inviting participation in shaping this new politics. This movement aims to counter the current societal rage and division fueled by the attention-profiteering ecosystem.