D. Graham Burnett discusses the politics of attention in our algorithmic age.<\/p>\n
Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement by Friends of Attention, D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt. Crown, 2026. 256 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org<\/a><\/p>\n Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit?<\/a><\/p>\n LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today!<\/p>\n THE WORK OF D. Graham Burnett was first brought to my attention in 2022 by the Los Angeles Review of Books, where a volume he edited with ESTAR(SER),<\/a> the creative collective to which he belongs, received a charming review.<\/a> As a philosopher interested in art (and that ever-elusive boundary that separates art from life), I found myself ensnared by his evasive community of artist-scholars who dedicate themselves not merely to attracting attention but also to fixing it.<\/p>\n Curious and wanting to know more, I reached out to Burnett directly, and he was quick to reward my interest by agreeing to meet. We jumped immediately into a discussion about attention, virtue, and \u2026 miracles. What I took from that initial conversation was his commitment to the idea that attention is a virtue, to be cultivated through deliberate attentional \u201cpractices\u201d\u2014formal activities designed to foster the habits that enable us to give ourselves more generously to art, to one another, and to the world in which we live.<\/p>\n Since then, I\u2019ve read further, and we have had other occasions to talk. Burnett identifies as part of a coalition called the Friends of Attention,<\/a> a group dedicated to \u201cpushing back against the commodification of human attention\u201d<\/a>\u2014or what the Friends call \u201chuman fracking.\u201d<\/a> I met with Burnett earlier this year, and we talked about digital media, attention activism, and Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement,<\/a> the new book he helped make.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n MATTHEW CLEMENTE: Let me start with a question about attention and community. We\u2019ve known each other for a few years now, and every time we\u2019re together, I find myself reflecting on your generosity and the graciousness with which you treat your friends. You have a way of inviting others in and making them a part of everything you do. I\u2019ve certainly benefited from this collaborative spirit, and I know I count myself among many who can say the same. How does this ethos of hospitality relate to human attention and the movement you are wanting to see take off and flourish?<\/p>\n D. GRAHAM BURNETT: That\u2019s so kind. Maybe the question can be answered in a roundabout way? We learn from our elders, surely. Cornel West was an important mentor-teacher back in my undergraduate days. He was then just on the cusp of publishing Race Matters [in 1993], and he gave off an incredible sense of comradely dynamism and spiritual largesse. I distinctly remember the way he conveyed that a kind of \u201cmovement\u201d was taking shape, and I asked him if there was some way I could be a part of what he was trying to do. He demurred, but in a kindly way. It is funny to think back now. He was always a genuine ironist\u2014a good-hearted ironist, very much in the Socratic mold.<\/p>\n Older now, I do wonder what he was actually thinking as he acted so dramatically \u201cinterested\u201d or \u201cpuzzled\u201d or \u201cenlightened\u201d by this or that contribution from a student. He was often elsewhere, in the heart of his own reflections. But he gave so much to the act of being present. In a way, this was a component of his charisma\u2014that he felt so generous and engaged, even though there was also a way in which he always seemed far away. When we later became colleagues, I asked him to do a piece with me on Herman Melville\u2019s The Confidence-Man. The resulting conversation was published in D\u00e6dalus,<\/a> and I feel it is a working-out of a lot of these questions. It is a little hard for me to read now. But I think it possesses a kind of truth about the limits of parrhesia\u2014maybe even a truth about saying the opposite of what you mean.<\/p>\n Say more.<\/p>\n Oh, I don\u2019t mean to be cryptic. West, as I experienced him in those days, was a person who could really \u201csing the we\u201d\u2014and I loved that about him. The \u201cwe\u201d\u2014the first-person plural\u2014is the performative utterance par excellence. For it to work, you have to say it in a way that makes the other person say it too\u2014or, better yet, say it with you! Or, even better still, you both start singing it, and others join in. The \u201cwe\u201d is made of this. Is it \u201ctrue\u201d? Is it \u201creal\u201d? Does that question even make sense?<\/p>\n It is reasonable to worry \u2026<\/p>\n For sure. But then, pragmatically speaking, the first-person plural is neither \u201ctrue\u201d nor \u201cfalse\u201d\u2014it is a thing that is effected, that must be practiced. It happens, and it happens precisely in that \u201csinging.\u201d Yes, its claim to be \u201ctrue\u201d can always be understood as \u201cfalse,\u201d just as its claim to be false can be understood as \u2026 well, false. West always had a deep understanding of these tensions.<\/p>\n So, is this your answer to my question about your hospitality?<\/p>\n It\u2019s one answer. There is another too, which is simply that, in me, what you are talking about as a virtue may simply be a kind of crazy, even a proper vice. My high quotient \u201cteam energy\u201d \u2026 it may be, in the end, something more or less diagnosable! I wonder about this a bit\u2014and I am certain some other people do too. But what does Slavoj \u017di\u017eek say? Enjoy your symptom! Amen. Or the Guns N\u2019 Roses version: Use your illusion! I have always had a strong desire for the jumping-together of thought. William Blake has that amazing apothegm, \u201copposition is true friendship\u201d\u2014and that is a proposition for which I have no native feel whatsoever! On the contrary, I like it when thinking comes into conjunction. I love the quality of chorale and harmony and the ecstasy of syncopation in thought with others. I like the feeling of being \u201caccompanied\u201d in thinking, and this may simply be libidinal, or compensatory, or something else.<\/p>\n The angelic chorus of the happy day? The Rose of the Empyrean?<\/p>\n There may be some of that. I know that when I encountered Ivan Illich\u2019s concept of \u201cconviviality,\u201d I felt immediately that he was getting at something I really cared about. How does he define it? As the \u201cautonomous and creative intercourse among persons\u201d\u2014as \u201cindividual freedom realized in personal interdependence.\u201d For him, the cultivation of the \u201ctools of conviviality\u201d was essential training for collective resistance against the reductive, dehumanizing logic of industrial modernity. I think that is basically right. I don\u2019t live up to my sense of the ideal here, but I definitely care about the pursuit of this project.<\/p>\n In an important way, that notion seems to be at the heart of your recent work\u2014both the calling-together of creative persons to give their time and attention to one another in spaces held open for imagination, co-creation, and play, and also the call to collective resistance against the market-based logic that commodifies human beings and treats us not as persons but as consumers whose consummate value can be found in buying products.<\/p>\n For sure. There is a continuity there. As you know, my introduction to the world-making power of human attention came when I fell into the company of an eccentric community of more or less underground \u201cattention artists\u201d: the so-called \u201cBirds.\u201d<\/a> For more than a decade, this was a kind of pure play. I will always be so grateful for those many occasions. In one sense, it is only now that I feel I can talk openly about all that. Because there was something fugitive and even authentically surreptitious in the way the Order of the Third Bird collective operated then. It retains some of that energy, of course. But nothing like the way it was. When, nearly a decade ago, the New Yorker journalist Nathan Heller first approached someone in the community, having heard about its activities, and wanted to participate in order to potentially write something about our attentional \u201cs\u00e9ances,\u201d nobody was willing to talk with him.<\/p>\n Is that true?<\/p>\n Absolutely! You can ask him. It was only much later that his renewed interest met with a more permeable reception from folks within the community. Even then, people wanted him to prove his commitment. He literally \u201cembedded\u201d with the Avis Tertia for nearly a year in researching and writing the piece that became \u201cThe Battle for Attention,\u201d<\/a> which very much \u201couted\u201d the Birds\u2014for better or worse.<\/p>\n By then, though, the attention work already had a public face, in the Friends of Attention.<\/p>\n Yes, and that is why folks in the Bird community were more willing to talk\u2014more willing to be \u201cseen.\u201d A number of us had, already for some years, managed the public dimensions of the Avis Tertia by means of the \u201cResearch Collective\u201d known as ESTAR(SER), whose members vociferously disavowed any active association with the Birds and insisted, rather, on a \u201cscholarly\u201d orientation to the history of Birdish activities. This Borgesian \u201cgame\u201d solved a basic problem: we wanted to talk about the Birds, but we agreed that we shouldn\u2019t!<\/p>\n We squared that circle by means of a thinly veiled mystification. And so ESTAR(SER) became a kind of Trojan horse for the Birds: groups of us did ESTAR(SER) performance lectures at different museums and biennials and independent art spaces, and published research briefs on the history of Birdish attentional practices. In practice, wherever we went, we convened actual Bird occasions on the side\u2014because, of course, we were all Birds of the purest water, and the whole ESTAR(SER) thing was merely a front operation. All this nourished and extended the community\u2014and was also absurdly fun. We were very much a merry band of attentional pranksters. I think audiences mostly found the whole thing entirely indigestible\u2014twee and involuted and pointless. But we had a great time, sleeping on couches from Kochi [India] to Gwangju [South Korea] to Buenos Aires [Argentina] to Nagano [Japan], and convening a series of participatory charivari-pastiche symposiums on art history and the philosophy of attention.<\/p>\n In Search of the Third Bird,<\/a> the book through which I first encountered your work, came out of all this.<\/p>\n Right. Most of those essays started out as scripts for our performance lectures. And we recently issued a box set of all the programs<\/a> for those events over the years: 27 programs in seven languages! A labor of love\u2014if of a very strange sort. I have tried to express, here<\/a> and there,<\/a> how conceptually rich I found this work. It opened up, for a number of us, a range of fresh thinking about history and the imagination.<\/a><\/p>\n And it stands as a brilliant example of what I, along with other contemporary philosophers (John Manoussakis, for example, and Jean-Luc Beauchard), have called metareal art\u2014the kind of art that plays with the line between fiction and reality and invites us to take our fictions as reality because, as Miguel de Unamuno says, they are just as real as we are (if not more real).<\/p>\n Yes, I\u2019ve enjoyed engaging with your theoretical work on this. Bacchus Agonistes is an exceedingly fine book. And it connects with the important work being done by a number of scholars I care about. Carrie Lambert-Beatty at Harvard, for instance, who coined the term \u201cparafiction\u201d to describe a similar phenomenon that is taking place across the world of contemporary art. And then there\u2019s Saidiya Hartman\u2019s \u201ccritical fabulation\u201d and David Kishik\u2019s \u201cparaphilosophy.\u201d<\/p>\n What do these seemingly esoteric artistic ventures have to do with the Friends of Attention? And with the turn to \u201cattention activism\u201d<\/a> in your current work?<\/p>\n In 2018, the curator of the S\u00e3o Paulo Biennial was my good friend Gabriel P\u00e9rez-Barreiro. He built the whole exhibition around the theme of \u201cattention,\u201d and invited ESTAR(SER) to do a performance. That biennial became an authentic \u201cconvening\u201d for Birds from all over the world. There must have been 50 or 60 of us there for a weeklong program<\/a> of a diverse range of artists whose practices dealt in one way or another with attention as a medium or form. It was all very wonderful \u2026 except the whole event took place in the immediate aftermath of the election of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency of Brazil. Which was a devastating blow to the local artistic community\u2014and, more generally, a further index of a shifting right-populist politics that felt closely linked to shifting media systems.<\/p>\n This was Brazil\u2019s \u201cCambridge Analytica\u201d moment<\/a> \u2026<\/p>\n Precisely. There was, on the final day, an intense and wide-ranging conversation in the big auditorium of the biennial\u2014everyone wearing headphones, simultaneous translation. And the message from the local Brazilian participants came through loud and clear: there might not even be a biennial in another two years! In their view, this was exactly because of the ways that attention-bending social media platforms and data-targeting political subterfuge were actively subordinating deliberative democracy. Our highly \u201caesthetic,\u201d and frankly ludic, engagement with attention seemed, in the context of this disaster, rather beside the point! Did we have anything to say for ourselves?<\/p>\n Ouch.<\/p>\n I am flattening out a more complicated set of exchanges, certainly. But, yes, the charge landed. And we had Birds there from Poland and Italy and Turkey and the United Kingdom and, of course, the United States\u2014all countries that had seen parallel reactionary-populist candidates arise out of political polarization, a polarization that seemed tangled up with new technologies, siloed information systems, and commodified consumer data. We were primed to hear the message. And so it was in the wake of S\u00e3o Paulo that a group of Birds\u2014about 18 or so at first\u2014began to convene under a new banner, and with a much more explicitly political agenda. The issue? To fight back against the commodification of human attention. Or, to put it in a more positive framework, to insist upon the human uses of human attention. The Friends of Attention were born. The first formal gathering was in the summer of 2019, at Mildred\u2019s Lane, an Upstate New York artist colony, for \u201cPolitics of Attention: Art, Time, Technology, Action.\u201d<\/a> That was where the Twelve Theses on Attention<\/a> were first drafted, and that became the first of what is now seven straight years of Politics of Attention<\/a> summer school residency retreats.<\/p>\n So, are all the Friends actually Birds?<\/p>\n No, not at all. At this point, most of the folks who would identify as part of the Friends of Attention coalition have no connection to the Avis Tertia. And there are plenty of Birds who gently stepped aside from the more \u201cactivist\u201d orientation of the Friends\u2014even rejected it outright. But the pandemic intensified the urgency of the issues and helped move the emerging Friends to online organizing and regular Zoom gatherings. In fact, back in 2020, LARB actually published a roundtable on COVID-19 and attention,<\/a> which came out of the nascent community of the Friends of Attention, who were then actively working to nurture the coalition across that profoundly destabilizing period.<\/p>\n With the advent of artificial intelligence, things seem to be destabilizing all the more. Everyone, of course, is talking about the problems posed by the oversaturation of digital media today, but I have found your work on the topic to be particularly compelling. What is it that you and the Friends see as the root cause of the issue, and what can be done to combat it?<\/p>\n For us, the core issue is not \u201cphones\u201d or, for that matter, \u201csocial media.\u201d We like to point out that if your grandmother had designed the iPhone, you\u2019d use it to call your grandmother. The actual problem isn\u2019t the technology\u2014it\u2019s the business model. It is the heedless, greedy, seven-trillion-dollar<\/a> commitment to a hyperintensive extraction of the money value of human attention. That\u2019s what we call \u201chuman fracking.\u201d Fracking the earth for hydrocarbons involves pumping high-pressure, high-volume abrasives and detergents into deep tectonic structures\u2014to break up the foundational architecture of those layers and force the oil and gas to the surface. Human fracking isn\u2019t even analogous. It\u2019s more like homologous. It involves pumping into human faces high-pressure, high-volume abrasives and detergents (in the form of algorithmically determined rage-bait and high-affect \u201ccontent\u201d) to break up our attention and force it to the surface, where it can be auctioned off to the highest bidder. This system \u201cworks\u201d\u2014it maximizes time-on-device and is authentically amoral. The AI systems that optimize our feeds do so with a relentless and computationally sophisticated focus on \u201cengagement\u201d because that is money for the companies who have wagered on this business. This is literally a bio-hack at the scale of whole societies. How else do you get human beings\u2014who have evolved as cognitively and sensorily and culturally complex creatures\u2014to spend half their waking hours staring at small glowing screens?<\/p>\n To stick, for a moment, with the image of fracking, let me ask you how you hope to combat the problem. Do attention activists, like environmental activists, advocate for greater regulation and government oversight? Or are there other means of resistance that you would like to see implemented?<\/p>\n Legislation is certainly necessary. Legislation, regulation, litigation\u2014the works. If the movement of attention activism is going to be successful, it will need to attract a very wide coalition of political, legal, social, and cultural actors. It will need to be as broad and diverse as the environmental movement itself. That said, the part of the project with which I am most directly concerned centers on education and the arts. While we in the Friends want to be in alliance with legal activists, our special work lies in doing what we know how to do best, which is not writing policy! It is the work of the school: creative forms of study, the cultivation of attentional sanctuaries, the building-out of connected communities committed to the human uses of human attention.<\/p>\n Politics flows downstream from culture.<\/p>\n Exactly. We are totally in favor of new laws and good amicus briefs, but we want the richness of real human attention to be broadly recognized as integral to our flourishing\u2014as individuals, and in communities. We want a world in which everyone thinks it is obvious that attentional habits and practices are integral to civic culture and personal well-being. In that world, the no-holds-barred violence being done to our attentional lives by unregulated profiteering corporations would be universally rejected as obscene\u2014which it is!<\/p>\n And how do you propose to bring that world into being?<\/p>\n Using all the tools at our disposal. This is movement work. It involves organizing, mobilizing, teaching, listening, writing, doing! It takes a lot of folks doing a lot of different kinds of things\u2014everyone from scholars to surfers. I started a nonprofit about a decade ago, the Institute for Sustained Attention,<\/a> and that has served as the vehicle for a lot of the attention-related work with which I have been involved. But I also do academic research. I am currently writing a scholarly book on the history of the laboratory science of attention between 1880 and 1980, which reveals how our attention was sliced and diced by experimentalists, who set the conditions for the pricing of attention in the attention economy. I summarized the arc of it in a co-authored essay for The New York Times<\/a> not long ago. The upshot: We need to escape from the machinic, cybernetic, hyperinstrumentalized concept of attention bequeathed to us by the Cold War human sciences.<\/p>\n But that kind of academic work isn\u2019t going to change the world.<\/p>\n Quite right. To be clear: I have no idea how to effect change on the scale that we need. But as a historian, I know change at such a scale has happened before. And it will happen again! We write about this in Attensity!\u2014the co-authored book that is really our biggest effort to get the message out. The book is unusual because it was written by nearly two dozen people over several years. And all the contributors agreed that our proceeds from the sale of the book would go to support our nonprofit efforts: the Strother School of Radical Attention<\/a> in Brooklyn, our national organizing projects,<\/a> our Educators for Attention<\/a> coalition. Our dream is that the book gradually builds momentum behind attention activism as an actual movement\u2014that it functions as a kind of \u201cSilent Spring\u201d catalyst.<\/p>\n You and I are both, ultimately, teachers. We are university professors. Could you talk a bit about the role education plays in all of this? What is the relationship between attention activism and the academy?<\/p>\n Attention activism reaches way beyond colleges and universities. It is an all-hands-on-deck moment, and a few thousand university professors are not going to solve this problem! That said, we really do need everyone who can help\u2014and colleges and universities are important cultural spaces. What happens there matters. One of the most significant claims we make in Attensity! is that study lies at the heart of attention activism.<\/p>\n Not exactly a slogan that is going to have people pouring into the streets \u2026<\/p>\n But we stick by it! The study of attention matters. And what\u2019s more, study itself is an attentional mode\u2014all study deepens our relationship with what attention is and what attention does. This realization has powerful implications for higher education. We need more talk about study and less talk about \u201cresearch.\u201d Research makes knowledge, but study makes thoughtful, free, self-aware human beings who pursue understanding. Knowledge is great, but the university as a site for the production of knowledge has been so powerfully integrated into the dynamics of profit-seeking that we are in need of a significant course correction. If education is the holding space for the taking-shape of persons equal to the conditions of freedom, then we need more study.<\/p>\n How do we get there?<\/p>\n In my view, it has become so difficult for colleges and universities to hold the space we need to facilitate something like a quiet, peaceable revolution in education. What we need is hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new schools\u2014structured in different ways, funded in different ways, serving different communities\u2014that can actually take up this authentic work of education. Colleges and universities have ended up so entangled with the ROI exigencies of neoliberalism that they cannot serve in the ways that are needed. I think of the School of Radical Attention as one such school, but just one.<\/p>\n Are there others?<\/p>\n I think of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research<\/a> or Outer Coast<\/a> in Sitka, Alaska, or the Catherine Project.<\/a> I think of Boston College\u2019s somewhat experimental Department of Formative Education to which you belong. My long-standing friend and collaborator Justin Smith-Ruiu has recently taken the \u201cHinternet\u201d project in this direction too\u2014restructuring as a nonprofit and embarking on a series of workshops and courses. There is also the lively world of the \u201cpublic philosophers\u201d on YouTube and elsewhere\u2014many of whom are building or trying to build online communities for lifelong learning. These are folks trying to nourish lives of study and inquiry.<\/p>\n Can you talk a bit about the kinds of curricula that are involved?<\/p>\n They vary. But at the Strother School, we are deeply committed to a very particular kind of study, rooted in the idea of an attentional \u201cexercise\u201d or \u201cpractice.\u201d We draw on the score-based work of conceptual artists, the improvisational work of theater and dance, the formal architecture of contemplative disciplines. We love the situationists. We care about \u201cactive learning.\u201d But anyone who wants to get a sense of how we actually do this stuff should check out our Study Corps<\/a> project. This involves coordinated engagement in attention-based, collaborative \u201cstudy.\u201d The resulting occasions are remarkable. They are a little like participatory improv theater! But you could also say that they are like a collective \u201cceremony\u201d of enacted thinking.<\/p>\n This is the future of the humanities: more oral, more performative, more essentially committed to real-time shared experience. All of this is in the tradition because the tradition is rich and various\u2014we just have to bring these modes forward and foreground them. They are urgently needed now because of the specific character of our moment. The older routines\u2014\u201chere\u2019s the reading for next Wednesday\u201d or \u201cgo to this lecture on Thursday and take notes\u201d\u2014cannot do for us what is needed.<\/p>\n Last spring, you wrote quite beautifully about AI and the future of the humanities for The New Yorker.<\/a> What does that future look like, and how does your work on attention seek to revitalize the liberal arts at a time when cultural forces seem set in stark opposition to them?<\/p>\n I believe the language of attention provides a powerful way to gather up and rearticulate the project of the \u201cliberal arts\u201d\u2014the project of education itself. What we want is freedom. We want the forms of freedom that are inextricable from the dignity and flourishing of human persons, and the wider worlds within which we are embedded. The liberal arts are the body of practices and habits and objects that have been understood to advance that essential and ineluctable project. They have changed over time. They will keep changing. But we see them now, at this shocking watershed, more clearly\u2014we see them anew. What they have always been, we suddenly discern, is a rich repository of attentional modes and occasions\u2014the liberal arts have been, above all, inherited traditions of attentional choreography, ways of directing and elaborating shared attentional experiences. It turns out that this kind of activity gives shape to persons and communities. It creates the conditions for ethical commitments, civic association, epistemic enterprises. We have what we need to survive these harrowing times! But it is our work to realize this and make it real! After all, if we let the machines pay attention for us, our lives will not be our own. And whatever that may be, it is not freedom.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n D. Graham Burnett is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of history of science at Princeton University.<\/p>\n \u00a4<\/p>\n Featured image: Photo of D. Graham Burnett by Landon Speers.<\/p>\n LARB Contributor<\/p>\n Matthew Clemente is the director of research and curriculum at the Center for Psychological Humanities & Ethics and an assistant professor in the Department of Formative Education at Boston College. His most recent book is Bacchus Agonistes: Metarealism and the Future of Art (2024).<\/p>\n Share<\/p>\n Copy link to articleLARB Staff Recommendations<\/p>\n Josefina Massot reviews the very strange anthology \u201cIn Search of the Third Bird.\u201d<\/p>\n