The Attentionauts

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.

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D. Graham Burnett ’93

John Emerson

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 psychologist and pioneering attention theorist William 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.

In 1989, ahead of Burnett’s first semester as a Princeton undergrad, he was recovering from a bout with viral meningitis, and his father, David G. Burnett ’66, ended up choosing his slate of courses, including one with history professor Mike Mahoney *67 on the origins of modern science. “I was first attracted by the question of how a European worldview once so dominated by theology was largely displaced,” the younger Burnett told PAW in 2001, going on to reflect on the tenuous beginnings of modern science: “How did this mish-mash of mathematics, epistemological musings, and parlor tricks become such a powerful way of explaining reality?”

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Burnett’s pursuit of the history of science, eventually as a professor of the subject, found him engaged with unpacking revolutions in thought that completely transformed existing sets of beliefs — a process famously described by Princeton historian Thomas Kuhn 1930 as the “paradigm shift.” Burnett’s early publications included studies of Victorian-era imperialism via South American cartography (Masters of All They Surveyed), the history of whaling (The Sounding of the Whale), and a bestselling account of serving as a jury foreman in a lurid New York City murder case (A Trial by Jury).

Burnett’s attentional interests began to take shape in 2004, when he fell in with the Order of the Third Bird, an underground artist collective (also known as the Birds) devoted to earnestly engaging with artworks.

The order’s name derives from an apocryphal text about an ancient Greek painter named Zeuxis who produced a portrait of a boy carrying grapes so realistic that three birds had radically different experiences of the work. Fearful of the lifelike portrait, the first bird flew off; the second bird, thinking the cornucopia real, pecked at the images of fruit; but the third bird — the hero of the parable — stood still and took in the painting with astute attention.

The Birds, then, view artworks as “requests for attention,” and organize secretive flash mobs called “actions” to observe such works. When the Warhol Foundation invited the Birds to participate in a Philadelphia event in 2011, a schism ensued. Some of the Birds, Burnett says, were reluctant to solicit publicity, while others, including Burnett, welcomed the invitation. This resulted in a public-facing splinter group, including Burnett and Princeton English professor Jeff Dolven, called the Esthetical Society for Transcendental & Applied Realization (now incorporating the Society for Esthetic Realizers) or ESTAR(SER), the acronym a play on the Spanish phrase “to be.”

In effect, ESTAR(SER) purported to “study” the activities of the Birds, culminating in a 2021 anthology of pseudo-historical journal articles dubbed In Search of the Third Bird. Part Jorge Luis Borges-styled arcane history, part parody of humanistic academic writing, a key emphasis of the book’s sprawling drive was the principle of “attending” deeply to esoteric interests. “As we started doing that,” Burnett tells PAW, “I started seeing the history of attention as a lens with which to open up a whole bunch of very interesting questions with respect to the relationship between the history of esthetics and the history of science.”

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Alyssa Loh ’12

John Emerson

In 2018, a gathering of ESTAR(SER) and Birds members at the São Paulo Art Biennial, a long-running art festival in Brazil, thrust the sometimes-intersecting movements into the political arena. “This intense conversation happens in the wake of the [Jair] Bolsonaro election, where people are like the esthetics of attention and attentional practices in relation to esthetic objects is all well and good, but [now] there’s an urgent political catastrophe,” Burnett recalls. “That was when a bunch of us Birds were like, we really need to pivot.”

At the time, Loh was pursuing a dual graduate degree in business and film at New York University, where many of her classes were talking about attention by any other name, using buzzwords such as eyeballs and engagement. “There was something unsettling about seeing the incredible power asymmetry between these corporations that had these rigorous, robust, and intentional ways of thinking, talking, tracking, [and] valuing attention,” Loh says, all while few people outside that business context could articulate the concept. “It sets us up for the situation where our attention is being stolen from us before most of us even know what’s happening.”

In 2019, a group of Birds, now part of the newly founded “Friends of Attention,” met at the Mildred’s Lane artist residency in Narrowsburg, New York, where they began drafting Twelve Theses on Attention, published in 2022 by Princeton University Press and adapted as a short film anthology that Loh co-curated.

In just under 650 words, the theses presented a foundational framework for all the attention-related activities that followed, arguing that “true attention is fundamentally endangered” by market forces and that “escape from our attentional nightmare will not unfold in a singular event.” Rather, the theses called for the creation of “sanctuaries” and a shared “ethics of attention” that allowed for sharing sensory experiences, described as a means of “reconciling a world that is otherwise broken.”

The next phase of the movement unfurled through a collaboration between Burnett and his former student Schmidt, who had taken Burnett’s seminar on food history in the spring of 2020.

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Peter Schmidt ’20

John Emerson

Schmidt had kept in touch with Burnett after college, and after quitting his job as a researcher for a Brazilian think tank in 2022 to devote more time to writing a novel, Schmidt worked part time for the Friends of Attention to develop “attention labs,” traveling workshops inspired by the promise of the 12 theses. By 2023, Schmidt says, they realized the project needed to be more “legible,” as getting participants on board for an attention lab required “four levels of explanation.”

Thus, the School for Radical Attention was born, and Schmidt became its full-time program director. Named for Matthew Strother, a Friend of Attention who died in 2023, the school is supported by the 501(c)3 nonprofit Institute for Sustained Attention, which draws its revenue from book sales and curriculum fees. Since then, the SoRA team opened up a so-called sanctuary space in Brooklyn, developed curricula including studies (such as The Little Prince activity I replicated in Los Angeles), and finally published the book Attensity, the sales of which support the nonprofit and, the attentionauts hope, will spark a paradigm shift against the predatory technologies that exploit human attention.

In 2001, business school professors Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck popularized the concept of the “attention economy” in a book of the same name — the idea that human attention was a finite resource to be captured and activated so as to spark consumer spending.

But the origins of this capitalist paradigm run deeper, the Friends of Attention argued in Attensity. All the way back in Roman times, Saint Augustine asserted that attention included contemplation aimed at achieving divine grace, but by the time of World War II, attention had attained a much narrower definition. That was when psychologists conducted the first attention studies to determine how long humans could fixate on a radar screen.

As Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt noted, this was a limited view of the vast spectrum of what attention could entail, one that situated the majority of related research on “the stimulus-and-response capacities of human subjects sitting in front of machines.” According to the authors, this led to a project of quantifiable attention research that paved the way for the monetization of that attention in the digital and social media worlds that emerged in the 21st century. “The attention frackers monopolized the once-sacrosanct business of attention formation,” the Attensity authors wrote. “They have done it by dominating, with oodles of money and unimaginable computing power, a deck-of-cards-sized patch of space approximately eight inches from your face.”

In the past decade, various experts have hit the alarm button on the downstream effects of this attention-based economy. In the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma, former Google ethicist Tristan Harris argued that algorithmic technologies had dangerously ensnared and addicted teens, puppeteering and reprogramming their social behavior so that it was almost exclusively oriented around their phones. In his 2024 book The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt elaborated that social media companies had succeeded at capturing attention because “the creators of these apps use every trick in the psychologists’ tool kit to hook users as deeply as slot machines hook gamblers.”

Much like a gambler’s propensity to continuously pull the lever of a slot machine due to the (unlikely and random) chance of a “jackpot,” a social media user returns to the app because of the expectation of a dopamine rush from a “like” or positive direct message. As a result, users will find themselves compelled to refresh the app until they attain the desired rush. And with a continuous feed that never truly ends, Haidt added, users can be sucked into this cycle, scrolling for hours. “Heroin would win, too, if General Mills were permitted to add it to our breakfast cereal,” the Friends rejoined in Attensity.

The result of this addiction — and the exposure of teen girls to unrealistic beauty standards from edited photos — has been devastating, Haidt argued, noting that from 2010 to 2020, the rate of self-harm tripled for young adolescent girls in the U.S.

In Attensity, the Friends of Attention assert that it’s not a user’s fault for falling prey to an addictive app’s charms, but a product of the uneven balance of power between the app designers and the user. “When your hand reaches, subconsciously, reflexively, for your phone (first thing in the morning, in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of a thought), or when you get stuck in an infinite scroll for an hour when you meant for a minute, that is not because you lack the personal willpower to escape,” the authors wrote. “Rather, it is because trillions of dollars of military-grade research and technology, and thousands of the most highly trained and paid engineers in the world, are aligned behind overpowering your intention.”

Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in attention studies, however, questions the argument that humans have no free will in the face of tech companies seeking to control their behavior. “Some people do have a lot of trouble staying away from social media,” she says. “And others can come and go as they like, or don’t use it at all.”

Kristin Lawler is a sociology professor at the University of Mount Saint Vincent who teaches attention workshops both online and in-person in Brooklyn for the Strother School for Radical Attention. She acknowledges the “possibility of liberation,” but “it doesn’t come from some idea of the individual freely choosing to put this stuff down,” she says, arguing that much of the functions essential to daily life — from banking to car repair — are now facilitated by digital platforms. “We didn’t choose any of this, and it’s not within our individual power to choose to get rid of it,” she says. “Liberatory social movements come from people collectively identifying a problem and organizing.”

That principle of collective resistance, Burnett and his co-authors argue, might lead to an “attention movement.” Though an attention movement might sound absurd to the uninitiated, the Attensity authors argue that many such cultural transformations have occurred before, not so different from the paradigm shifts inherent to scientific revolutions. In fact, the term attensity — referring to a group of 19th-century researchers who sought to understand human cognition — was first coined by English psychologist Edward Titchener, who also came up with a more familiar concept: empathy.

If the idea of understanding the emotions and perspective of others remained undefined before Titchener, neither did the environmental movement before the 1970s, the Attensity authors argue. Though people certainly cared about natural beauty and conservation, they lacked the vocabulary to articulate that interest. “It took a series of harrowing environmental disasters — and the visionary work of thought leaders like Rachel Carson,” the Friends wrote, “to reveal the web of life that makes the environment a recognizably collective, and therefore political, good.”

To generate its own kind of transformation, Burnett explains Attensity was modeled on previously successful calls for collective action, such as the 1962 Port Huron Statement that built solidarity between the Students for a Democratic Society and the United Auto Workers in their shared pursuit of civil rights and social reform.

Attensity also features a compelling structure for the digital age. The manifesto is reprinted between every chapter, with a new line highlighted, prompting an expansion of the framework behind the line through a short essay. Thus, the experience of reading Attensity, Schmidt says, was designed to evoke the experience of clicking on a hyperlink, “projecting the digital world back into the past of print media.”

“I feel our way of doing it with this kind of explicit movement commitment and drawing on some of the older languages of solidarity and collective action has a special traction right now,” Burnett adds. They did have traction on Jan. 20, when the Attensity book launch at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village sold out, leaving attendees lined up around the block. Since the launch, the Strother School’s online workshops have also seen completely booked enrollments, Schmidt says.

Even before the launch, Burnett and Schmidt say prospective attentionauts would email them out of the blue or even appear on the school’s Brooklyn doorstep. Realizing they had to meet a potential surge of demand following the book’s launch, the Friends of Attention have prepared for this moment by creating a tool kit designed to help activists assemble their own attention study groups wherever they might be located.

Meanwhile, the Strother workshops focus on brainstorming ways for would-be activists to organize in their communities, and many of the registrants I met were already agitating for no-phone policies in local schools. Nick Plante, one of the Strother instructors, values the school’s work because it offers a communal “escape latch” from the nightmare of social media addiction, where other tech-blocking strategies might only offer temporary relief. For example, he says, many people he’s worked with have experimented with phone-app blocking devices like Brick, systems that add friction between the user and their social media addiction. However, Plante notes that users can easily override such systems, often undermining their intentions. “I really like how SoRA brings you out of that muddied water by offering the idea of alternative forms of attention that you can practice,” Plante says. “Now you’re starting to build that alternative world.”

If the aim of the attention classes I attended for this article was for each participant to start their own attention group, then I supposed I had to organize one myself. It was important for me to test, albeit unscientifically, if the somewhat improv-styled exercises that SoRA had designed (like following a partner across a park and imitating their gait before switching roles) would work outside of the confines of open-minded Brooklyn.

Of course, I pursued this experiment among fellow writers in Silver Lake, arguably the nearest approximation of Williamsburg this side of the Mississippi, so it might not be a surprise that my participants expressed enthusiasm for the process. “What I enjoyed the most was just our initial conversation where it was like, ‘Wow, we’re all struggling with this thing,’” Mary Dahm, a Los Angeles-based writer says. “Like not one person here said, ‘Oh, I have no problems with attention.’”

Jason Rogers, a journalist and Olympic medalist in fencing, characterized the attention activities as “old sauce, new bottle,” explaining that the exercises didn’t seem so different from new-age-styled meditation. “It doesn’t feel revolutionary in its approach, but that doesn’t make it unhelpful — it is helpful,” Rogers says. “Whatever calls you to fight back against your attention being hijacked.”

If that’s the extent of the result, Burnett might be satisfied. “It’s been utterly transformative in my life to come to believe so deeply in something so specific and critically diagnostic with implications for what needs to happen,” Burnett says, qualifying that despite his zeal for the attention movement, “the book may not be bought, the book may not be read, the movement may fail.”

In A Trial by Jury, he reflected on his role as an historian. “The primary aim of sustained thinking and talking had always been, in a way, more thinking and talking,” Burnett wrote in 2001. While scientists and mathematicians might literally solve problems, he continued, he had dedicated his life to serving as a custodian of “unanswerable questions,” like how people should choose to live their lives. “Such questions cannot be answered,” he wrote, “but they are not stupid.”

Harrison Blackman ’17 is a journalist and writer based in Los Angeles.