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Frank Cappello: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to this week's premium episode exclusively for the lever's supporting subscribers. I'm Lever time producer Frank Capello. today we'll be sharing David Sirota's interview with Princeton professor D.

Graham Burnett, who recently co authored an op ed for the New York Times about our ever diminishing attention spans. This is due to what Graham calls attention fracking from social media giants whose primary business is to keep your eyes glued to your screen so they can profit from your attention. David and Graham also discuss how the fracking of our attention directly contributes to our intensely polarized political landscape here in the U.

S. It's a really fascinating conversation, and I personally learned a lot about intensity, which is our ability to pay attention, And how it's a crucial sensory function.

Thank you again for being a supporting subscriber and funding the work that we do here at The Lever. Now here's today's interview.

David Sirota: [00:01:00] Hey Graham, how you doing?

D. Graham Burnett: Oh, I'm really well. Hi, David.

David Sirota: So we're talking about, uh, wait, what are we talking about? I can't remember. Oh, attention! That's right, that's right, attention. Sorry, my attention was scattered. Uh, attention is a topic that I'm actually kind of obsessed with because I feel like I'm losing my ability to, uh, Stay attentive, uh, keep my attention on one single thing.

And that may be because I'm getting older, but I also sense that it's because of the information environment that, that we live in and that I expose myself to, both in my job and as a, as a person in the world. You, in a recent New York Times, uh, op ed came up with the term, Attention fracking. Uh, I know people who are listening to this have heard the term fracking.

I know people who are listening to this, uh, understand basically what the idea of attention is. What is attention fracking?

D. Graham Burnett: Okay, yeah, thanks for the question. I got it. And let's just start by saying that, David, your [00:02:00] vague sense that something, uh, may be slightly off with your attentional faculties. you should not think of that as a personal failing. I would go so far as to argue that that right there is enemy action. And when we talk about attention fracking, that's what we're talking about.

So your listeners may know what's fracking when we're fracking for petroleum back in the old days before large scale petroleum exploitation, there were like zits of juicy crude oil down in the earth. And you could just sort of stick a line down in there, tap them and they would gush. Uh, there isn't that much of that left out there.

So what we now have is residual, low volume, widely distributed in the sandwich layers of the deep earth. And you drill a hole down there and that stuff doesn't just Shoot to the surface. How do you get that stuff out? You have to pump high volume, high pressure detergent [00:03:00] down into the earth and force that Widely distributed stuff up to the surface separated out and it's the perfect analogy to what's happening now to human beings Because the attention economy is not working like it used to back in the old days where you'd throw up a big billboard and some people would look at it.

On the contrary, we are now continuously fracked by high pressure, high volume detergent being pumped directly into our faces in order to push to the surface. A little spume, a little, uh, thin foam of that, monetizable stuff that can then be aggregated and sold off to, um, the highest bidder, uh, in what we think of as this attention economy.

And maybe just a last quick thing to say, you [00:04:00] know, our attention is very valuable. This is a, depending on. Um, with whom you speak a three to seven trillion dollar per annum industry, but my little attention and your little attention, while it's very valuable to you and to me because it's the stuff out of which we make ourselves and our relationships with others and the stuff we care about.

Um, it's not that much value to me. You got to aggregate it, so that's what makes it like this fracking situation. You need a ton of attention, you know, to get it to the surface, um, in order to be able to sell it, uh, in a meaningful market at this scale. This is a revolutionary condition, and we, you know, we need to do something about it.

David Sirota: So, you mentioned the billboard analogy, and I, I, I think that's an important one. Um, in, in the olden days, if you will, there were, uh, billboards, there were a couple of newspapers in a city, [00:05:00] uh, there were, uh, Three major broadcast television companies, uh, and it was presumably slightly easier to know what to pay attention to, uh, or at least there were less things in media to pay attention to, and therefore it might have been easier, uh, to uh, to To preserve one's attention.

You're not necessarily facing that huge blast of information all the time. And without going into the evolution of that from 24 hour, seven cable to the internet, I think the question is, it's not necessarily that that was better back then because a lot of what competes for our attention right now in the so called attention economy.

I mean, yes, there are big companies. But there, there has been a small d democratization of, uh, information distribution on social media as the, as the best example. Now, I'm not touting social [00:06:00] media, but I guess my question is, is does the democratization of, uh, Information dissemination, giving more people more ability to get whatever messages they want out, as opposed to having it just be giant corporations.

Does that democratization inherently come with the problems that you describe in this op ed where our attention is being so competed for that it's hard to focus on anything.

D. Graham Burnett: Yeah, it's a great question. So I think you probably know, listeners may not. I trained in the history and philosophy of science. So I'm basically a historian by trade. That's my academic métier. So when you say, you know, without getting into the whole evolution of this, you're a little bit, you know, there you're kind of bracketing the stuff I love to do.

But I'll be faithful to your question. Um, I do think though it has another kind of historical analogy will be of some value. You might have said back in the 19th century, Ah, you know, there's cloth, [00:07:00] and people used to make it in handlooms. Now they increasingly make it in these giant factories. And boy, we get a lot of diversity in the cloth that is available to us.

And the price has come down quite a bit, too. A lot to be said for this new situation, in which there's a ton of high value textiles being produced. Uh, aren't, I mean, Sure, although the scale of the technological and the social and the labor revolution that was at stake as you went from piecework production in village settings on handlooms to the satanic mills of Lancashire rolling out, calico by the mile, transformative.

And there were conditions of human exploitation that demanded social action, new forms of social solidarity, new forms of resistance. What we've seen in the world of attention, buying and selling, by which I mean in a sense advertising, is a [00:08:00] scale at that revolutionary scope. there is, no relationship between the teeny tiny world of me out there selling a couple of, you know, uh, chicken, uh, drumsticks at the, uh, county fair in 1920 and saying, buy my chickens, buy my chickens, or for that matter, um, classified advertising and the forms of, uh, financialization of attention that gave rise to the newspaper industry itself and what's happening now, uh, you are, Tiny and defenseless in relation to aggregations of capital and computational force and outright brilliance and relentless innovation, uh, at staggering scale at this point.

So I'm into the democratization of access, but our habit to us, what it is to be human is being meaningfully changed by a 5 trillion industry that's trying to get you to look over here. All the time and is pretty good at making that happen. That's why you [00:09:00] feel different. That's why you feel crazy. And many of us do.

David Sirota: So let's talk about it in the context of education. And I, I, I ask some of these questions as a parent because I am struggling with these questions in watching my kids, uh, in school. You come with some first hand experience of working with young students. What is it that you've noticed, uh, with, uh, this assault on our education and how it affects children.

And, and how does it compare even to 10 years ago? Uh, how fast is, is, is what you're going to describe for us? How fast is it moving?

D. Graham Burnett: Moving super fast. and I want to share your sense of the importance of approaching this intimately. I'm also a parent of a 14 year old and a 17 year old. And indeed, While I come at these questions as a scholar and as an activist, my 14 year old has almost 20, 000 followers on TikTok and that kid's life has been sort of shaped in the [00:10:00] space of the power and opportunity and creativity of that environment for which I have huge admiration.

So, when. Those of us who work on these questions in an activist way, and I'm referencing here the Friends of Attention, the community that drafted that op ed that you saw, I had a couple of co authors on it, or the Struther School of Radical Attention, which is the non profit in person school in Brooklyn, uh, that we have where we study and organize and, uh, create sanctuary for attention in an effort to push back on this stuff.

When we come together on these questions, we are not Luddites. We're not kind of anti phones. We realize that curriculum is going to need to be delivered on tablet devices and all that kind of stuff. So, important to say that we are opposed to the damage being done to human beings by the financialization.

commodification of our attention, but the devices are [00:11:00] not themselves the problem. Our phones are not the problem. The wider matrix within which they're situated, uh, which are capitalist matrices of exploitation that are inadequately regulated.

You're not going to make it with anybody at this point in terms of meaningful social action by saying, Hey, let's put our phones away. That's not the solution. Curriculum is going to need to be delivered on tablet based devices, you know, and on other forms, other platforms that are technologically mediated.

These tools are incredibly powerful and they are our future. We're not saying no to that. What we are saying is that if you have unregulated and rampant, exploitative, financializing dynamics, you arm people and we need new forms of resistance, new forms of social organization, and new habits individually as well to protect ourselves.

Um, and that's the work that we need to be doing. You asked a question about how fast this stuff is changing. And just as an educator, [00:12:00] I would say anecdotally Staggeringly fast. And I won't cite numbers, but anybody who's into it can check out a couple of recent studies that have placed in evidence extremely rapid fall offs in people's ability to stay with a single, uh, focused, uh, topic of interest.

I think it's worth saying, that this is not totally unlike The famous fight around tobacco and whether it caused cancer. Meaning, you need to read the studies that are out there carefully. Because, where's the money? There's quite a bit of money in forming research that sort of says, Oh, but people love their phones.

And actually, people report increased happiness if they're permitted to tap their phones relentlessly for, you know, 45 minutes. So, you know, you need to read critically, um, with a little scrutiny on that kind of stuff.

David Sirota: So let's talk about the specifics. The specific things that you think are most problematic in the [00:13:00] battle for our attention. I mean, there's the phone itself as a, as a device, maybe that's one. Um, there are social media sites, there's targeted advertising, there's, uh, specific apps. Like if, if, if you're asked, hey, give me the.

three, four, five specific things that are most insidious. I mean, we all know that our phone itself is just a, is in a, is in a, a distraction machine. Uh, what would you name as the three, four, five specific things that are the most insidious in, in grabbing our attention or in using, um, kind of underhanded or exploitative ways to grab our, our attention and our kids attention.

D. Graham Burnett: Great question, David. I'm, uh, I'm kind of a lover, not a fighter, though. So maybe, you know, I pivot and tend to want to emphasize the positive things that we could be doing differently. Um, and that we need to do to make change. [00:14:00] I mean, for sure. dark patterns, deceptive user interfaces, uh, there are a bunch of, you know, very concrete things of which we can complain and on which we need legislation, on which already there's kind of some litigation postures being mounted against unscrupulous tech companies that are doing this kind of stuff.

But I actually feel that that would be In a sense, to narrow down, you know, just to analogize again to the tobacco fight. It's like, oh, why don't you regulate tar or take away the flavorings in menthol cigarettes so that they're kind of not targeted to kids or shift your marketing campaign. No. I would actually say all that stuff's good and the people who are doing that work there are friends and allies.

But what we need is a groundswell of Attention to attention. What's going to save us is not a couple of [00:15:00] new laws or, you know, a couple of victories in the courts. What's going to save us is when the people say, Wait a second, I've had enough of being harmed by the fracking of my spirit for the most precious thing I possess.

my ability to attend, to give my care to myself, other people, the earth, things that matter to me. So just as in the 19th century, it wasn't like smashing any particular loom. In some particular factory or saying, well, really, we should have more comfortable seats in the factories. I mean, none of that was going to change things.

What we needed in the 19th century was the rise of trade unions and labor movements. Those things matter. People coming together and saying, we're not going to do this. You we're stepping aside and developing new ways of relating to this new technological and political and social situation. That's [00:16:00] what's needed here.

The only thing that's going to make a real difference is widespread social action where people come together and they study and they help each other create new forms of being with and in relation to our attention. And that may sound Pollyannish, but let's think back, you know, David, I don't know exactly how old you are, but, um, we're probably in the same zone.

We probably remember back when James Fix wrote that book on running, remember back in the day? Remember before that? Were people jogging or running, David, back, you know, before Fix published that book? Not really, right? You might be an athlete and be in training, but ordinary people did not run for fitness.

And we probably remember the first Nautilus gym. Which was like a gym, like oriented to like ordinary folk, right? and that too was a moment where fitness and our, our collective and individual investment in our health and wellness and, and our diets [00:17:00] and stuff. 40 years ago, my grandparents, probably yours too, uh, you know, their idea of exercise was taking a drive in the Winnebago and you know, they had pork and eggs with jello salads with marshmallows on it.

And a lot of them had heart attacks at 42. mine, I'm speaking of not generally. Fitness changed and we're in a different world now where everybody's aware and attuned to this being a part of life. I predict for you that in 30 years, Attentional fitness, hygiene and wellness is going to be a ubiquitous feature of our collective life.

And that's going to be the way we make inroads on this immense challenge.

David Sirota: I, I mean, I Sure, I sure hope so. Uh, and I wanna go back to something that you mentioned. this notion that, let's go back to kids for a second. This notion that, being anti phone or, uh, uh, uh, talking about, uh, computers, uh, uh, the, the tablet in the classroom, how this is not necessarily what, what you're fighting, but I wanna go back to that for for a [00:18:00] second, because. granted, I've only been a parent for now 13 years, that's how old my oldest son is, but I don't remember when the decision was made, and it probably was a million different decisions, not one decision, but I don't remember when we decided, hey, we're going to put computers as an example. Inside of the classroom when we were growing up there might have been computer class like you go learn how to type on the computer and whatever, but I had this interaction with one of my son's teachers who said, you know, she said something along the lines of, well, you know, he sometimes gets a little bit distracted, with his computer. Laptop in the classroom and I'm thinking in my mind and I wasn't mad at the teacher, but I'm thinking you put a distraction machine inside of the classroom. Like when did we decide to put the distraction machine inside of the venues that were supposed to be in part teaching attention or at [00:19:00] least where a.

Attention is most necessary. So I guess I guess the question out of that is, as part of what you're talking about, where where we revalue attention. Do you think we're going to move into a place if you're being optimistic where places like schools say, Hey, We made a mistake bringing these machines into the classroom.

Like you can go do your homework on the, on the machine. You can maybe have computer class, but the technology literally in our faces, uh, in the students faces while they're trying to learn to me, that seems like a fundamentally problematic decision. And I wonder if you think we're going to reverse something like that.

D. Graham Burnett: I mean, if I'm being honest, uh, I think we aren't probably going to reverse that, David. Although I can see how, Some experimentation in those spaces would be cool. Um, my own kid is out west, um, for a short semester school where they don't have their phones, doing kind [00:20:00] of trail craft, uh, and learning how to be outdoors.

Um, and so I'm into that and where those are options and where other people want to experiment with sort of utopian pedagogy of various sorts. Uh, I'm all for that, um, let a thousand flowers bloom. I think the big difference that we do need that speaks directly to your question, is that your kid's teacher was talking to you about your kid saying, hey, trying to teach your kid.

It seems like your kid has a bit of an attention problem. And how many of the parents out there have had some version of that conversation? I bet pretty much all of them. And here's what's going to change. Those teachers are operating on an antiquated assumption about what education is. They're saying to you, hey, you were supposed to bring me a kid, functionally equipped to pay a certain kind of attention, and then I was going to teach that kid.

And, you know, it seems like you're dropping up your side of the bargain. But in fact, the [00:21:00] central claim of our essay in the New York Times is that that way of thinking about education is over. What education itself needs to be going forward is the formation of attentional capacities. I want to say that again.

Education itself needs to be the formation of attentional capacities. So it's not that you have kids who know how to pay attention who come to you because they've been acculturated in that format in families or churches or wherever, and then you teach them some stuff. Uh, it's rather that what an education is is the formation of a person capable of paying the right kinds of attention in the right settings.

That's why we say that for our era, Our politics is not a politics merely of literacy or of informed citizenry. What we need is an attentive citizenry. What we need is a tensity, a focus on how to use our [00:22:00] attention collectively and individually in ways that are productive and conduce to flourishing and civil democratic life.

Do you feel that kind of pivot in the way it can potentially work for us?

David Sirota: You know, I, I, I think that. That that point about teaching attention is so key, it makes explicit what I think I've been thinking about implicitly, uh, in the sense of watching my kids in school, and I should say I'm not a Luddite either, I mean, I can tell you, I see my son as, using him again as an example, I see my son have incredible attention when he is doing something like, uh, one of the science projects, uh, through Mark Rober.

Mark Rober is this amazing YouTuber who teaches kids about engineering and physics and the like, and he does these videos and they send you out like a little kit where, where the kid is kind of making what Mark Rober is teaching on the screen. Point [00:23:00] being that it's on a screen. Okay, so there, there is a kind of technological mediation happening, but my son is completely absorbed in that, which is a good segue to the question I have about how do we teach attention?

And I think the question I have on that is. Are we talking about the same things that we've been teaching just, um, what, you know, whatever discipline, math, science, social, social studies, that it needs to be more attention grabbing, or is it that we need to teach kids to be able to hold their attention, uh, on, uh, Uh, colder or sort of hotter media.

I guess I'm Marshall McLuhan, hot media, cold media, but, but, but media that's less kind of, uh, visual and grabby, and we need to teach kids, uh, we need to teach the next generation how to deal with and maintain their attention on those things, right? Because the Mark Rober, The Mark Rober videos as an example, they're very entertaining.

I mean, he's super charismatic, [00:24:00] right? I mean, there's a lot, there's some graphics going on, so it really does hold your attention. So I think this question of how we teach it is, is part of it that, that what we're providing to the next generation. Makes it more attention grabbing, or is it as much, if not more, that we need to teach kids, and I don't know how you do this exactly, but teach them to hold their attention on things that aren't attention grabbing.

D. Graham Burnett: So, uh, I think the short answer, uh, David is that we, we don't know yet. I can tell you about how at the Struthers School, we're working on a specific attention curriculum that's rooted in these exercises. and, um, you know, I'd love to pitch folks on that stuff for a second, but I think to get big, you know, Rather than to talk about, you know, my own little thing that I'm passionate about with my collaborators, let's just say, this is one of the primary battles of our time, and it's going to take all hands on deck, all different kinds of innovators and [00:25:00] experimentalists and, uh, folks willing to try different stuff because nobody has the answer yet to this question, how to train up attention.

I do think it's very important for us to draw on our for fighters and on our traditions. I go around a lot to museums involved in the arts and stuff like that. And one of the ways to talk about what a museum is and needs to be now is to say to the folks who run those places, What you are, is a sanctuary of a certain kind of attention.

And you have installed in this space deep and beautiful traditions for how to pay attention to a certain kind of category of objects. So, That's what we need from you all, museums. Not necessarily, maybe, so much now for you to think of yourselves as treasure houses of culture, uh, because, you know, there's a lot of different ways to access a lot of different kinds of cultures.

We don't need, maybe, necessarily your specific lessons [00:26:00] on greatness as we may. But this attention stuff we need. Libraries? Similar, Libraries were born of a moment where information scarcity was understood to be a rate limiting factor for a certain kind of democratic participation. Do we have that problem now?

Not really, to be honest with you. But public libraries are also very powerful institutions that enshrine a certain kind of sanctuary relationship to attention and they have meaningful traditions of slow and low and in there, attention on which they can draw. Universities, another example of a space where, yeah, we teach a lot of stuff, it's very important, we do research.

But increasingly, a lot of the courses are online with a lot of high value production. Why would I lecture, you know, to, uh, 50 students? They don't necessarily even want to come into that class to see that lecture. Lectures can be recorded. Seminar spaces? Forms of attention to a text we put in front of [00:27:00] us and we circle up and it's a way of practicing a certain kind of deliberative and critical listening to each other in real time.

That's a sort of quasi sacred form of collective attention of which universities are very particular. we've sheltered that form of attention, uh, for a long time. Those would be some of the ways I would think about this stuff. I mean, I will talk about, sort of, Activations of our joint attention.

Because when I say attention, I don't want your kind of listeners out there just to be thinking of sort of mindfulness. Fine with mindfulness, it's cool. and meditation. I hope a lot of people out there have practices and, you know, studying these forms and disciplines. All good. But, you know, mindfulness can be critiqued in certain ways.

It's like neoliberal religion of capitalism, you know, it's sort of siloed self care. We hope that you can, um, keep track of your innards, uh, when you don't have access to the forms of, uh, healthcare, for instance, that you need. There's always [00:28:00] a danger that too much emphasis on the interiority and siloing, the solipsism, that would be a concern.

So I don't want people to think I'm sort of Shit talking. Can I say shit talking on your show? Shit talking. I'm not shit talking mindfulness. I love mindfulness. Like, I've spent a ton of time in Trappist monasteries. Silent retreat. Love that stuff. But when we talk about attention, we're talking about joint attention.

Not necessarily inside, but to the stuff in the world. And that can be part of this, like, again, more politically engaged question of world making. We need to have a shared reality. And that starts by people being able to pay attention, using all their sensory modalities and their cognitive equipment, To a shared world, um, and that's kind of world making in Hannah Arendt's sense.

It's, it's the condition of possibility for any meaningful, deliberative political process. And that's what we're in danger of losing if we permit our attentional faculties to be deeply damaged by the human [00:29:00] fracking that is now, you know, a ubiquitous feature of our daily lives. And they get them real young, as we know.

David Sirota: Yeah. I also think I want to add to it. I also think that, I mean, when you think about attention and how to, how to cultivate it, uh, I think. There's also a case to be made that, again, focusing on children, I think having when they participate in sports, as an example, where you literally have to be present in order to participate or participate at a high level.

I mean, that's why this discussion of, you know, we're thinking about in the classroom and teaching attention, but it's actually much bigger than than just the classroom. I want to transition. To that question of politics for a second because I think that's really important the loss of attention. And what's going on in our politics, you link in this in this New York Times piece, and I think it is so, so important.

And I want to use Donald Trump as an as an [00:30:00] example here. Seems to me that Donald Trump thrives in a world. That cannot hold its attention for more than five or 10 seconds. And I'm not, I'm not even making a value judgment on Trump and his politics. Although people who listen to this show know that I can't stand his politics.

But the point is, is that I kind of believe that Donald Trump is a product of, or at least is the the person most able to have maximized our lack of attention, uh, because he is a walking attention grabber, in the sense of, it doesn't even matter the issue. It's just he get, he knows how to grab our attention for five, 10, 15 seconds.

I use that as an example of, that's not a very cohesive. Politics. It's not a very cohesive way to run a country to to be a leader, although it is certainly in an attention, uh, fragmented [00:31:00] society. It's certainly a an effective way to gain power. The question then becomes how much. Of this attention crisis.

Do you ascribe to our current political crisis? Right? Talk about that connection between the assault on our attention and and what's going on in our politics today.

D. Graham Burnett: Yeah, I think any, um, anybody who has been an observer of let's just stick with the United States for a moment, although these parallel issues have been seen all over the globe, UK, Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, you know, the list is long, but let's just stick with the, with the political world. situation that, that you and I probably know best.

Um, I don't think anybody who's watched U. S. politics over, say, half a century would dispute the assertion that our, uh, political life [00:32:00] has never been, in modern memory, more polarized. I mean, you know, you read Sean Lilland's, any, you know, my colleague at Princeton, uh, be the first to say, you really gotta go back, uh, To the, to the Civil War, I think, uh, period, to see a comparable level of polarization.

There are many factors. As a historian, I would say explanation is always a very tricky business. And ascribing causality in a complex social situation requires, uh, delicacy and tact. however, I am, I deeply believe that a significant feeder of the political fragmentation, polarization, and the distinctive forms of brutalization, squalor, incivility, demonization, the ugliness of our contemporary politics.

I deeply believe that a major feeder of those dynamics is precisely the [00:33:00] transformation of our citizenry by attention fracking. I want to say that very clearly because the problem is not that there's a lot of information out there. The problem is not merely that we have phones. The problem is not social media.

We have to say what the problem is. The problem is the wholesale dynamic that financializes human attention and which has progressively damaged our ability To give our attention to another human being or to a question in the ways that are required for meaningful democratic life. That's what we're dealing with.

And it's very, very scary and dangerous. And, and what we need to do is just what I said. Gotta get the folks to see that this is the problem. [00:34:00] And then we have to, and, and they feel it. Everybody out there already knows. That there's something that's not right with their attention. When we have these levels of mental health, uh, problems among our kids, we have these levels of loneliness and the experience of and oh me, these kind of dynamics of vituperation, everybody out there knows that they're not okay.

And so, that recognition is going to be part of a pivot where people are like, I need to take care of my attention, and that's going to begin to change things. I'll say one more thing, you know, politics is made of. Coalitions. I think this is not a left right issue. I want to say that very clearly, you know, out folks on the right understand that something's not right.

They know. And in many cases, those are communities that are kind of, if you like, more grounded and say, more traditional forms of, say, spiritual or religious life. Those are very important institutions. I'm going to call myself out. I'm [00:35:00] a practicing Catholic. I believe deeply in them. the power of certain collective forms of, focused attention and religious communities and religious rituals are part of that.

Folks on the right know that this is a problem. We don't want to scare them off, um, those of us who are folks of the progressive left and I count myself among them, because they feel the problem too, which is why In the Friends of Attention and the work of the Struthers School, we focus on coalition.

If you jump on our website, you'll find, you know, these lovely short documentaries where we go to a welder and we talk with that welder about the way his Welding is a kind of vocalizing of his attention that when he's in the puddle and it's that incredibly bright light through the dark glass Everything else falls away.

He can't be thinking about his phone or social media He can move that puddle with his, you know acquired skill and that that is in a sense his attentional practice So we talked with [00:36:00] surfers and teachers and folks who do needlepoint. We want them all to see look I've got an attention practice and this is part of how I push back against The fracking of my attention.

Uh, these are my communities of attentional practitioners of attention knots. That's part of how we make political changes through coalition.

David Sirota: So I want to ask a final question about for folks who are wondering what they can do to protect themselves. And I want to ask that. Honoring the fact that your, your point about how this is not just a how can you protect yourself individually, this is a society wide systemic social problem. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, uh, in terms of trying to protect my own cognition.

Right. I mean, I, I have tried to, not consume less news, but, but consume news in different forms, longer form reporting, uh, longer form podcasts, conversational podcasts, where you really can delve [00:37:00] into an issue like this. I think there's ways to try to regulate. Your information, um, uh, consumption, uh, that can try to preserve some of, uh, of your attention.

I don't think that's a, that's a fix. I'm wondering, uh, if you agree and if you do agree, what tips you may have. And, and you also mentioned this attention exercise called attention in place. talk a little bit about that as well.

D. Graham Burnett: so, consciousness, raising an education, uh, got to get a practice, got to find a community. Those would be the big things. stop having arguments with your kids about their being on the phone. Uh, you know, when you're getting dinner ready and start being like, let's think about attention.

Let's hey, let's talk about the history of attention. How has attention changed over time? Like get some resources. Broaden the conversation because we need to make this about attention.

David Sirota: Somebody, somebody is trying to get your

attention right now.[00:38:00]

D. Graham Burnett: Um, so, uh, yeah. and we actually even say, you know, there are some little, tiny, fun, practical things you can do.

You're out with a group of your friends. Somebody's going to check their phone first. Say from the outset, whoever checks their phone first picks up this round, picks up the tab. We play that game. I think back to the sort of fantasy of the American West, you know, where in the saloons of the gold rush, uh, you know, you had to Take your piece out and you put your gun on the table and you know that idea of like now we take out our phones if we're going to be with humans.

We stack them up on the table. You disarm because this is human time. These questions of the kind of boundaries of our human encounters with each other feel very important. and then jump on our resource page, you know, the Friends of Attention, non profit coalition of people from all over the world. We built a thing we call the Attention Trove with literally thousands of open source, super interesting.

Um, texts about the history and practice of attention available to like begin to do that education work. [00:39:00] we love to do exercises at the Struthers School. And our attention labs, and, uh, which are free, and which we run in person, um, in New York and in other places, we've got sort of 20 facilitators who do them, and our courses focus on practices.

And attention to place is a practice that's based on, on a wonderful experimental novel, uh, by a French writer named Georges Perrec, who, uh, went to a cafe in Paris every day, day after day, and just recorded everything that happened there. And the novel consists simply of his having all his senses on the qui vive, all his senses alive.

And, what we do with groups is we read them a little passage of that to open up the question, send folks out into their own neighborhood in many cases with a notebook to take, turn off their phones and just listen, write down what they see and hear. We come back together after 20 minutes, a half an hour, and then we circle up [00:40:00] and we just begin to read line by line what people heard going around the circle.

And we go faster and faster to make a kind of a weave and what I heard you saw and what I saw you heard and I heard that too. And you begin to sort of, in effect, braid, uh, our shared world. And it sounds so simple, and it is. But I'm telling you, you know, people literally have ecstatic experiences of joy doing something.

Like that, just sort of together and having a moment to sort of feel what they can do with their attention. So we have to reconnect to the incredible beauty and power of our attention, because then it'll be a thing that we more want to talk about with others, and get a little apoyo, a little push from our pals to take care of it together.

That's what we need if we're going to have any chance of resisting the big money. The big tech, the big [00:41:00] power that wants us to spend our TOD, time on device, which some of your listeners will also know is the German word for death. So if you're in control of what you're doing with your device, it's all good, but you got to take that device back.

So it's not doing it to you. That's the only way we are going to save ourselves.

David Sirota: I absolutely agree and it's something I think about all the time, uh, and sometimes I feel like the device is stealing my attention and other times I feel like I've really got it, got some systems for my life on like to, to, to, to prevent that it is, it is a, I think that word that you use practice is really important because it's not just a one and done kind of thing.

It is a, it is a practice. It is a skill, especially with the assault on our attention only intensifying. Thank you. Uh, Graham Burnett is a historian of science, a member of the Struthers School of Radical Attention, and a professor of history at Princeton University. We're gonna link to the New York Times op ed he co authored, uh, about [00:42:00] the fracking of your attention.

We'll link to that in the show description. Graham, thank you so much for your time today.

D. Graham Burnett: Thank you. It was a real pleasure. Take it easy.

that's it for today's episode. Thank you again for being a paid subscriber to The Lever. We could not do this work without you. If you liked this episode, feel free to pitch into our tip jar.

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The Lever Time Podcast is a production of the Lever and the Lever Podcast Network. It's hosted by David Sirota. Our producer is me, Frank Capello, with help from Lever producer, Jared Jacangmayor.