To resist toxic UX, we must first understand it. Why is it so hard to stop an infinite scroll? Why is your thumb already twitching when your phone buzzes in your pocket? Drawing on the work of Jenny Odell, Neil Postman, and others, Ashley and Henry discuss: How do these UX techniques operate on the body? How do they narrow consciousness? What possibilities of attention do they foreclose?

Over the last century, human attention has been re-defined as the ability to sit still, monitor screens, and select for a task. How did this transformation develop in laboratories, and how are attention activists today breaking open the frame? Speculative psychotechnics traces the entanglement of lab and art practices from the late nineteenth century to the present, through test subjects, apparatuses, experimental choreographies, reenactment, and the aesthetics of objectivity. At Julian’s upcoming seminar at SoRA, students will make and think about and reimagine human-machine relationships — their histories, critiques, and afterlives in art.

SPECULATIVE PSYCHOTECHNICS, an in-person seminar, begins on June 20th. Enroll HERE!

In this installment of OFFICE HOURS, SoRA academic dean Henry R. Kramer sits down with to chat about his upcoming seminar, THE PARTY.

The party is one of the most powerful and least examined human technologies. Something happens at parties that resists description: a loosening, a possibility, an encounter that couldn't have been planned. And yet parties have shaped history more than most textbooks admit — movements are born at parties, love affairs that changed the world began on dance floors, political formations crystallized around a shared table.

Henry and kyle turn their attention toward the party as a social and political form. What defines it? What separates a party from a gathering or a scene from a moment? How can parties be designed to encourage certain kinds of attention — and what kinds most naturally emerge?

THE PARTY, an in-person seminar, begins on June 11th. Enroll HERE!

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NP: You just finished teaching a seminar at SoRA called COMPLEXITY. I took the class, and wasn’t sure what to expect going in: “complexity” sounds, well, complicated, and pretty abstract. So let’s start there. What does complexity mean to you, and why is it important?

ABL: We often associate complexity with a vague, overwhelming sense of “a lot going on.” But I’m referring to something more specific. My interest comes from Complex Systems Science, or what’s often called “Complexity Theory.” It’s a broad field that studies how systems at all scales – from molecules to global economies – self-organize and exhibit emergent behavior. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” That’s the essence of complexity. Smaller, interacting parts create something entirely new without a central planner.

There are a lot of useful ideas from this field, but the insight I find most compelling is that complexity exists in a sweet spot between order and chaos. You need enough order to retain organization, yet enough chaos to allow for adaptation and surprise. Too much order makes a system overly rigid; too much chaos makes it incoherent. Complexity is the dynamic dance between the two. In a universe of total order, nothing could be otherwise. In a universe of total chaos, nothing could be. To sustain creative, adaptive life, you need that dance.

In the course at SoRA, we explored complexity as a way of living in that in-between space: learning to work with and embody the uncertain nature of complexity rather than fearing it. That shift has been helpful for how I live and attend to the world, so I was eager to explore concepts in complexity with other attention-minded people.

NP: Can you speak a little more to how we might do that? How we might occupy that “space between?”

ABL: Yes. Complexity is not the enemy of life; it enables life!

There are different levels at which you can engage with this study. It can provide a technical explanation for how the world works, but for most people, complexity can serve as a broader lens for looking at the world.

Our scientific paradigms often shape how we organize our world, so I’m interested in what the complexity paradigm implies for how we live. In many ways, it provides a counter to our more traditional reductionist paradigm that dissects the world into parts. The complexity paradigm suggests that we embrace complementarity, holding two seemingly contradictory truths at once without forcing a resolution. It asks us to attend to what the system as a whole is doing by watching the relationships and flows rather than just aiming at a fixed goal. And it invites us to remain open to noise, error, surprise – to counter the impulse to optimize and flatten.

NP: That rhymes with some conversations I’ve been having in my Attention Activism 201 course at SoRA. We see a constant dance in organizing spaces between the desire to plan and the instinct to surrender to emergence. How do you see complexity theory supplementing these movement-building efforts?

ABL: Complexity gets at a lot of ideas we feel intuitively. Studying the dynamics of complex systems is helpful because it provides specificity to those ideas. It helps us understand how to build systems that actually work towards emergence.

That dance between structure and open-endedness feels important for any attempt at social change. We often place more emphasis on the plan, the strategy, with a “solve the problem” mindset. But complexity teaches us that it can be counterintuitive to try to solve chaos with order, or to rely on purely top-down solutions.

If you map everything out without allowing space for emergence and paying attention to the relational dynamics, you can actually hasten a system’s demise. We see that often in the natural sciences: If you plant trees in perfect, uniform rows to maximize timber yield, you optimize for one goal, but you destroy the soil and the biodiversity that enabled the forest. The ecosystem collapses because it lacks the complexity to adapt – and because the planners didn’t see the value of the relationships.

In more human and social contexts, I think navigating the tension between the two requires more creative thinking. Maybe you treat the plan not as a rigid script, but as a flexible hypothesis. You set a direction but build in regular moments to reassess the system and adjust course based on where the energy is actually moving. By embracing complexity, we can widen the conversation beyond simple binaries of problem vs. solution.

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NP: So, on that note, what do you think about the conversations people have in this attention activism space – about the ways people are transforming their relationships to technology and so forth?

ABL: I hear a lot of talk about “online vs. offline,” which feels stuck in a binary. If we fixate solely on a device as the problem, we get a fairly narrow range of solutions, rather than considering the broader ecology of factors that inform how we engage with phones and attention.

I’m certainly not an expert on this topic, but seeing the discourse around policy changes like the Kids Online Safety Act and age restrictions to social media, I wonder if enacting a top-down solution without considering the underlying ecology could inadvertently create negative outcomes. It’s addressing a part of the problem (that children’s capacities for attention are being hijacked) but in doing so, it could create a host of other problems, like mass surveillance. This isn’t to say policy change isn’t useful. I suppose what I’m trying to get at is that if we have a limited conversation around these topics, we risk tilting into binaries that are easier to politicize or co-opt.

If we take a complexity approach, we’d focus on how local conditions influence system-wide behavior. What is a person’s lived experience? How does their relationship to the internet impact the texture of their lives and relationships? Paying attention to those factors is what SoRA seems focused on – understanding our own relationships to attention and being curious about it, rather than keeping the conversation at “I’m addicted to my phone; this is bad.”

NP: There’s a line in Attensity! that talks about how all of our individual enthusiasms might “jump together” – that is, to become something that is greater than the sum of its parts [p. 143] ...

ABL: I love the idea of cultivating a shared sensibility from which solutions can emerge. What if you don’t come up with a precise strategy but trust that having a lot of people thinking in an aligned way creates new conditions? Maybe that creates a whole group of people not wanting to be as online, and that ripples out.

This feels riskier, but uncertainty is actually a feature of complex systems. From initial starting conditions, you cannot predict the outcome, but that’s usually when the most resilient and expansive structures emerge. So I think cultivating a willingness to include the unknown and encourage emergence may lead us to the solution, instead of us trying to figure the solution out ahead of time. We need some planning, yes, but we need a lot more room for the unexpected.

NP: Attention Activism emphasizes the collective study and practice of attention – how we can start to think in new ways and build new ways of being together. I hear that you have something similar in the works. Would you like to share with our readers?

ABL: I was so inspired by this cohort and how we seemed to develop a kind of shared mode of thought. I’ve studied complexity on my own, but it was incredibly generative to develop a shared language with others to translate these ideas into our lives and projects.

There is so much in the realm of complexity. You can get deep into the weeds with concepts like fractals and phase transitions and new forms of logic. Initial readings only scratch the surface. I think these concepts can bring a whole new lens to how we live, create, and organize, so I’m starting an ongoing Complexity Lab of sorts. It will be a bit like a reading-and-practice group, where we focus on an idea and then experiment with applying the idea to whatever we’re working on. “School as medium” is such a good frame. I want to be in school-shaped things with people forever!

NP: How can someone get involved in Complexity Lab?

ABL: Email me [annabethlane@proton.me] if you’re interested in these ideas or hearing about when we meet. Anyone is welcome to join our possibility space!

Adam Aleksic, known online as Etymology Nerd, is a linguist and content creator researching the social origins of viral internet language. He recently wrote a book called Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language and publishes essays on Substack about emerging internet culture. He recently sat down with our managing editor, Czarina Ramos, to talk about the internet as a site of study.

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CR: Thanks so much for sitting down with us, Adam. When I told some of my colleagues about this conversation, I accidentally called you an entomologist. But you don’t, in fact, study bugs.

AA: And you need an etymologist to tell you the difference; entomos is the root for segmented, as bugs are, and etymos means truth, so etymology is the study of truth.

CR: You’re a linguist who studies words on the Internet. Can you forecast viral words?

AA: Definitely. It’s kind of like forecasting the weather or politics, where you’re going to be wrong some percentage of the time. And it’s reductive to say, I have this formula for a word that’s going to go viral, but yeah, if a word fits a social need, and people didn’t have language to describe this phenomenon before, that usually means it is going to get popular. There’s a minimal distinctiveness; it needs to sound close to similar words that work right, but also be different enough. It needs to be adaptable to new situations. It shouldn’t stick out; obtrusiveness, which is how much a word registers as a joke, is something people tend to avoid in common usage. We’ll adopt it briefly as a meme, but then it’ll die out with the lifespan of the meme.

CR: Have you been delightfully surprised about a word that unexpectedly became popular recently?

AA: I really like the word vagueposting. We needed the word. There’s lots of different types of engagement bait: clickbait, rage bait, but we didn’t have a word for vagueposting, which means intentionally sounding obscure online so that people will comment and make you go more viral. That’s the algorithmic bias at work.

CR: The black box of the algorithm spits out a “For You” page and thereby directs what you pay attention to. How do you confront this as a researcher?

AA: One of the first things we should ask ourselves when we look at a video is, “Why am I seeing this video?” And there’s always a reason. If I see a video go viral, even if I’m not in research mode, I usually ask myself, why did this video get recommended? It’s generating a lot of comments because it’s vagueposting. Or it uses this kind of hook that psychologically works really well. You can see patterns.

I’m interested in what videos aren’t showing up. What does show up is filtered through a highly selective bottleneck that then affects what we ultimately see. So I ask myself: Why am I seeing this? Is there a bias to what’s being recommended that helps me visualize the known unknowns?

CR: Have you tried to click yourself out of the algorithmic bias? Can you remove yourself from a “For You” page, which is, obviously, for you?

AA: I don’t think you can ever remove the observer. Language is a little like physics. Linguistics is slowly catching up to this fact: that the observer does affect the system. So if you publicly talk about a word, you’re going to change a word. If you’re looking at a word, you’re looking at it through your lens and that’s going to affect what you think the word is. I don’t think you can really remove it, but we can take steps to create a feeling of defamiliarization within ourselves, to get closer at objectivity — then again, I don’t know. I question how much we should try to be objective with language.

CR: Say more.

AA: We should just recognize that words elicit feelings in us. The “For You” page, because you think it is for you, creates a certain phenomenological feeling of: This is right. This is as it should be. You have to understand that people resonate with certain ideas more because they think those ideas are for them, and you cannot separate that. Observing the word in situ gives you a better view of how other people are understanding it.

CR: You recently took part in a discussion with other young tech activists and thinkers on the question, “Should We Get Off?” and whether we should all be leaving our smart devices and social media platforms entirely. As a scholar, educator, and general user of the internet, you use the internet as a site of fascination and study. You’ve also written about the social consequences of things like Polymarket and clip farming, which can harm our social fabric. Is there a tension between fascination and doom? Why stay online?

AA: It’s hard to avoid that feeling like the internet is getting worse, and it probably is, unless we do something about it — and I really think we should do something about it. There’s a lot of questions stacked in a trench coat there.

So, should we get off? I tend to argue that we should be on our phones to some degree. I come across as disagreeing with the Luddites; they are really cool human beings who think in an interesting way. But also, I’m studying how ideas travel, and you can think of them like a virus. They start with a higher node, like in an epidemiological network, and then they move to people lower down in the network. And social media literally recreated that network. So even if you are offline, the music you’re listening to at a bar and the clothes your friends are wearing, everything is going to trickle down from the algorithm anyway, and that’s going to influence you and your reality. It’s like that scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly talks about cerulean blue. You might be listening to a certain kind of music because it was planted there, and someone’s trying to engineer a reality. I’m not so concerned about music tastes, but there are political ideas that are moving dangerously. We should be aware of this, we should be taking steps to make the internet a better place.

For all I’ve griped about the internet, I also find a lot of beauty in it. It’s a place where people can go to connect. I’ve been following this architecture series that I love, and I’m a fan of this conveyor belt page on Instagram. There are so many of these beautiful corners of the internet, and I think the more place-like they feel, the better. Like old websites back in the day, or servers where you gather with your friends. We should fight to preserve an internet which makes us feel like we are connected, and we’re happy with each other, and we’re exposed to new sources of knowledge.

I write about how platforms can shape our thought processes because I think it’s possible, if we get our act together, to do something about it. We should, at the very least, be aware of what’s going on, so that our offline, which is going to increasingly be shaped by the online, doesn’t get shaped in a way that surprises us.

CR: Rather than being shaped by what we consume online, can we show up to online spaces more like our offline selves? Would that make the internet more sincere?

AA: I think a normal human thing is acting differently depending on the context, and that’s actually fine. You should act differently in your grandmother’s house versus when you’re talking to a close friend. There’s an expectation of what it means to be online that shapes how we behave. There’s a unique attention that’s elicited for engagement retention.

In the influencer economy, people use the word authenticity like it’s a buzzword. You want to be more authentic if you’re trying to go viral, and so the way the word authenticity is being used is less about being true and more about the appearance of being true. So you want to look like you’re sincereposting, even if really you’re not, you’re modifying things. I think we should be more aware that nobody’s quite sincere online or even in person, but we should understand when it’s a product of actual human interaction versus when it’s a product of the platform structuring our reality for us.

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CR: Do you have a positive stance on the ways that the internet shapes our interactions? I grew up in a corner of Tumblr in which fandom culture created places where you could express unabashed love for TV shows or musicians. Can the Internet still be a place for community?

AA: Subcultures are amazing. Another innate human tendency is that we like to put ourselves in groups, and this can be harnessed in a wonderfully positive direction, like how fandom communities provide an outlet for people, and are a means of figuring out their identity. I really like this conveyor belt memes page because there’s a community always commenting, and at this point, people will randomly send me conveyor belts. I’m on discord servers where I feel like there are actual people just sharing their lives. I think it’s hard to be on the internet without finding one of those beautiful niches.

So I do think this characteristic of the internet can be harnessed in a positive direction, but it starts with affordances, which is the psychological term for something that makes it easier to do something else. And we have platforms designing their affordances for negativity to spread by targeting high arousal, engagement, emotions. Humans follow structures in an almost annoying way — I think a lot about this. At the School of Radical Attention, I did a Sidewalk Study on Hannah Arendt. I think a lot about her concept of the “banality of evil,” and I think a lot of people aren’t really bad. We do things because of the social structure set up for us, and we tend not to think too deeply about it. And if you make a pro-social structure, you can lead people toward doing something good rather than doing something evil. That’s a future that I hope we can have on the Internet.

CR: One of the things that we constantly return to at the School of Radical Attention is the role of study. As someone who is studying the Internet, and trying to educate on the power of the platforms, how do you see your role in making a better, more pro-social Internet?

AA: I see it as a moral duty to educate yourself on where things come from, how things ended up the way they are. Going back to the etymology of etymology, words can reveal truths about who we are as humans and who our society is. Why are so many of our words coming from African American English and incel culture? It tells something about who is popular and who is subversively harnessing humor to influence the internet. Why is it that platforms really do seem to be mediating our interactions? If you follow where words come from, you can’t help but reach this insight and see that these technologies really are structuring our reality. That seems like something we should pay attention to.

There’s a lot of misinformation online. To identify the problem, to know what to react against, you need to start by asking, Where did this come from? How does this happen? The way we use language is conditioned by sociology and these other disciplines, so when you look at language, you begin to see the relatedness of everything.

CR: Can linguistics humanize social media and its users?

AA: I think the tendency to write memes off as “brainrot” is counter-productive for inspecting our reality. The digital world is treated as this separate place where stupid things happen, and we just need to go “touch grass.” But we’re not characters in Severance — this is still a part of our real life and affects who we are. If we start by recognizing that our humanity extends online, that opens the door to asking more serious questions about how to improve the internet and our culture as a whole.

PS: You’ve done lots of work about the relationship between technology and life in the workplace, and about the ways our agency is shaped by that relationship. Do you think anything is different about our current moment?

ASP: Things are different: they’ve gotten worse. (Welcome to 2026.) Silicon Valley has had 20 years to refine the variety of tools that it uses to make every second of our time on screens into a knife fight in a phone booth for our attention — usually in order to sell us another subscription, or something equally noble.

But on the positive side, I think the recognition that these tools are constantly in use and that they can and need to be resisted is also far greater, right? I see this in my own kids, who grew up in the heart of Silicon Valley. They had their first smartphones when they were younger than they should have been, yet today they’re deeply cynical about these devices and the motives of the tech companies. They recognize that you’re not just interacting with a cool device, or a character on a screen. You’re allowing a company that is responding to the demands of venture capital to come into your life. I think that young people are consequently more thoughtful about how they use these technologies. That’s a positive development.

More broadly, we now see young people express concern around attention and artificial intelligence, and ask really interesting and pressing questions around our interactions: from the ways in which we interact with and think about AI to concerns about the ways that AI could be used to further advance the agenda of selling us another subscription box. We also recognize the potential for this technology to adapt strategies of attention fracking so that those strategies become far more granular, responsive, and intrusive. I’m co-editing an issue of the Journal of Contemplative Studies that’s about technology and attention. Several of the pieces, interestingly, are about AI, which is not what I expected when we first put out the call for papers. But it makes perfect sense.

PS: I was going to ask about that project. Why “contemplative traditions” right now? What kind of questions do you think we need to be asking about those traditions?

ASP: The answer to the first part of the question is: Contemplative traditions always! These are practices that smart, thoughtful people have looked to for a couple thousand years when they’ve sought guidance for living better.

The second answer is that they are an obvious and accessible reaction to all of the challenges that we talk about in our work. At the micro level, there is, in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, a really interesting twinned history of contemplative practices and the history of information technologies. This part of the world is really important in the history of 20th century global Buddhism. There are a number of Buddhist temples and retreats here that have coexisted and sometimes had overlapping memberships with early computer pioneers. The Homebrew Computer Club, and early folks at Apple went on the same silent retreats, were influenced by the same spiritual authors, etc. It’s not a huge surprise that there would be some kind of conversation between them.

PS: You’re framing contemplative traditions as a place where we can find answers to some questions that have been made more acute by technology. Let’s flip that. Do you think new technologies offer us any answers to questions posed by contemplative traditions?

ASP: I think… No. These things are tools and environments, but are they answers? I would have to spend more time with that question to come to an affirmative. There’s a long history of thinking about technologies as more than just stuff. And it may be that in one of those more elaborate ways of imagining technology, you could get to a different answer. But my initial thought is that these things aren’t answers, these things are tools, and it is smartest to treat them as such.

PS: It is interesting to say that technology can’t answer these deep questions when so often they are presented as answer-providing technologies. I’d guess that 99% of the world’s population who uses AI in any capacity are simply asking it questions.

AP: Your example uses “answers” in the narrow sense of retrieving information. Yeah, our technologies do serve that purpose. I was thinking of “answers” in the broader sense, that takes the form not of information but of ways to think about — and engage — with the world and your own self. These tools provide the specific answers, but not the larger, philosophical ones.

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PS: Can you give me a little more on the difference between those kinds of answers?

ASP: Sure. The answers to the question, what is the meaning of life? Or: how do I respond to this existential challenge? Etc... These are all things that in their very framing involve action, right? They are actions that tell us something about who we ought to be.

The question, “I have a tomato, a pear, and a chicken breast in my refrigerator, so what can I make for dinner?” is one that a GAI can answer, and involves action, but you’re probably not going to finish the meal being a profoundly different person.

The distinction that I would draw is between, first of all, answers that provide information versus answers that are guides to action. And secondly, the distinction between actions that involve changing oneself consciously versus quotidian things like preparing a meal.

PS: It seems like the more profound category of answers get down to the question of being — of who we are and what we are as people.

ASP: Absolutely. In my books there’s almost always one or two moments that are really critical for formulating the project and shaping my thinking about the book. And in The Distraction Addiction, one of those moments came when I was interviewing a Buddhist monk. He was originally from Denmark, and had trained as a physician and worked in big data stuff, and then… gave it all up, moved to Sri Lanka, and became a monk.

I asked him and some other monastics who had followed similar kinds of paths about their use of technology: Do you find it distracting to have a YouTube channel, or to have a blog? And it actually took a while to get clarity on the question, because at first it was like I was asking, How is it that you can put on clothes in a gravitational field? I was assuming that the source of the distractions was technology. They were coming at it with the assumption that the source of distraction is internal. And that our engagements with technology are merely an expression of the struggle that we all have to overcome what some Buddhists call “the monkey mind”, and to focus our minds and our lives around those things that truly matter. We were talking on two sides of a divide. It was really eye-opening for me.

This is something that is always in the background of my thinking about technology and attention and distraction: that for all of the incredible power and effort that Silicon Valley has invested in A-B testing every single pixel and second of our relationships with social media, YouTube, etc., or for all of the value that comes from working collectively to push back against what these technologies do and the underlying presumptions that they have — ultimately, dealing with the challenge of distraction involves as much looking inward as well as outward. It certainly helps to take that step in the company of others, to be savvy about how the tech industry aims to farm our attention, and how we can change the defaults and settings on our devices to help us focus a little more, but we’ll be most successful at using technologies more mindfully when we recognize that our minds are as great at generating distraction from within as they are at finding it out in the world.

PS: At the School, we encourage people to think about distraction not as the opposite of attention, but as a particular kind of attention that has plenty to teach us. What do you think distraction has to teach us?

ASP: First off, you’re exactly right that distraction isn’t really the absence of attention. It is something that is more purposeful. There are times when we don’t need to be focused on any particular thing. We can simply let our minds wander, and that’s perfectly safe, and it’s okay, and it’s something our minds like to do that has all kinds of benefits. I think that distraction is not the absence of attention, it is a redirection of it.

If I were to pitch a book called The Upside of Distraction, the first thing I would say is: Well, it’s proof that humans are really curious, and the world is a really interesting place. And it’s a signal that we need to learn how to interpret.

I would try to construct an argument around it somewhat the same way that people construct arguments around Attention Deficit. That this isn’t really about an inability to focus, it is a reluctance to focus on what the teacher is telling you to focus on.

PS: You’ve done a lot of writing and thinking about these questions in proximity to the business world and to Silicon Valley itself. SoRA and the Friends of Attention are expressly interested in the applications of attention beyond the productivity metrics of “time-on-task.” There’s not a ton of crossover between us and the private sector. How do you think the business world and the conversations happening there can deepen and enrich our work as attention activists?

ASP: There is a strain of people in business who are really quite deeply concerned with the question of How do you live well? Through these businesses that we build, these careers that we lead, how do we do our work in ways that make us better people, and make the place that we’re living in a better one? They’re not interested in it mainly in order to boost their annual revenues. They’re sincere about these questions as things worth pursuing on their own. The business people who write about this stuff are writing for people who are accustomed to solving problems and getting answers that they can use in their daily lives.

This kind of thinking possesses its own kind of earnestness that deserves to be taken seriously. It could teach us to speak to audiences in ways that will help them change for the better.

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CR: It’s great to see you, Cam. Last summer, you taught a course at SoRA called “Martyrs and Movements.” Can you tell our readers about what inspired this course?

CC: It was inspired by my master’s thesis, which was titled Of Martyrs and Men. I became very interested in the role of trauma in social movements during the “post-Covid” period. I was inspired by how the George Floyd protests took intergenerational trauma, relative deprivation, and just a lot of unresolved rage and converted it into political energy. I also had an interest in the Arab Spring from a young age, since it was my first life experience seeing revolution in real time. I realized, as I started to conduct some of my early research, that there were parallels between these two cases and their origins. I was thinking a lot about what mobilizes people to seize power. How can the act of police brutality mobilize people? Why did these spectacles of violence motivate people to go out and team up against these big institutions?

In the class, we talked about martyrs as symbols. Many of us think about martyrdom in religious terms. But secular martyrdom is largely symbolic, and the symbol of a martyr can be a focal point of collective attention with special political powers.

CR: I’m curious about the conditions that led to these particular moments of collective attention. In the case of the George Floyd protests, a lot of us were very online during lockdown.

CC: The role of social media was critical in both of those movements. In the George Floyd protests, we saw that video. It came out immediately and it was omnipresent — you could not escape the footage anywhere. Whereas when Khaled Saeed died, the Egyptian authorities initially tried to withhold access to all imagery. They only released the images later because people were organizing on Facebook to demand the release of the images. We saw how people could utilize social media to collectivize righteous rage and build political power.

In Egypt, the fact that people used Facebook to organize and go up against the institutions showed observers at the time that social media could be a core tenet of movement building. On the other hand, we saw the Cambridge Analytica story unfold. So we’ve both seen, on the one hand, how social media can be a system for political legitimation and solidarity, but also, on the other, as a way for bad institutional actors to control narratives and political outcomes. And they do so not just by commodifying but also by weaponizing attention through misinformation and disinformation — not to mention information overload.

CR: We see a tension here, with social media democratizing information while also serving efforts of attentional control. Why do you think these particular symbols and stories set off such massive responses from the public? There are, unfortunately, many news stories about police brutality that garner comparatively little attention.

CC: I think that’s where the ripeness of the conflict plays a big part. People were already fed up with what they saw as the legitimacy of the justice system collapsing before their eyes, and the footage affirmed violence and brutality of their conditions.

Now, collapse of legitimacy is a part of it, but it’s not the only factor. We live in a world where many of us see violence so often that we’re desensitized to it. For certain populations that take part in movements, unresolved mourning also plays a huge part in igniting action. Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia was preceded by the death of Khaled Saeed. After seeing Mohammed Bouazizi light himself on fire as a sign of resistance, Tunisians mobilized to topple President Ben Ali. Bouazizi’s tragic self-immolation planted a seed throughout the region, including Egypt, where people soon after led their own revolution to topple then-President Hosni Mubarak. People felt: We can actually fight back. It has to be now.

When you look at George Floyd, COVID played a big part as well, but there were also two other cases of violence: Ahmaud Arbery, who was the young black man lynched while jogging, and Breonna Taylor, who was shot in her home just as COVID lockdowns were beginning. By the time George Floyd’s murder happened, he was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So one factor was the buildup of those other injustices. This is why we have to attend to unresolved mourning, both in our analysis and in our strategy.

CR: In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit talks about how, in moments of disaster, everyday conditions are suspended and we’re able to care for each other in extraordinary ways. Do we need disasters to attend to unresolved mourning and collective grief?

CC: Disasters aren’t needed, but the suspension of everyday conditions allows space for people to attend to emotions that might otherwise be suppressed. Emotions are deeply political — at least, they can be politicized. So leaning into our love and rage and grief can give emotion and action a way to move in the world. Many marginalized communities are in a constant state of grief. We have to ask, how do we politicize our grief? This is how we begin to mobilize resistance, even in the face of despair.

CR: You modelled one strategy when you had us attend to the memory of a martyr. That seems important when we’re thinking about attention as a practice of collective resistance.

CC: For sure. When we attend to the memory of our martyr, we live with that grief and we get enraged by their death — but is rage not rooted in love? The love for the fallen is the material that we use to build this world. We say: the power that they took from you when they took your life is power I’m redirecting to build a new world. It’s all about love; love is the ultimate guiding factor.

DGB: Hi Mihir! Thanks for taking some time to talk with us. In November of this year, an important legal case came to a close: Federal Trade Commission vs. Meta Platforms, Inc. pitted the Federal Government against Mark Zuckerberg’s company. For starters, could you just lay out for our readers what was at stake in this case? How did it start?

MK: So the background is that the FTC sued Meta in December 2020, alleging the company monopolized “personal social networking” by acquiring Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. The theory: Facebook identified emerging competitors and bought them to retain its dominance. Internal emails showed Zuckerberg explicitly describing this as a “buy rather than compete” strategy. This kind of thing can be illegal in the US, because of a history in this country of laws that aim to stop single corporate entities from controlling whole areas of commerce. This is “antitrust” regulation, the fight against “monopolies.”

The FTC sought an aggressive remedy: divestiture, which would have forced Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. If successful, it would have been the most significant corporate breakup since AT&T in 1984.

DGB: And so, what happened in November?

MK: Meta won. Judge James Boasberg, who is an Obama appointee, ruled that even if Meta had monopoly power in the past, the FTC failed to prove it holds that power now.

The case turned on a key concept in antitrust law: market definition. The FTC argued there’s a distinct market for “personal social networking” — apps connecting friends and family — separate from broader social media, and that Meta monopolized this market. Judge Boasberg rejected this definition. He relied on evidence showing that after TikTok exploded on the scene in 2020, the market changed entirely. YouTube Shorts arrived. And Meta’s own products abandoned the social networking model.

Astonishingly, internal documents show Facebook users now spend just 17% of their time viewing posts from friends and family. On Instagram, that is 7%. These platforms pivoted to algorithmically-driven video feeds, functionally indistinguishable from TikTok and YouTube. The court said you can’t define a market around “personal social networking” when Meta itself basically abandoned any such enterprise.

DGB: That makes sense, I guess. There are a lot of issues in play in legal disputes like this, and there have been a lot of OpEds on the outcome of this case (Tim Wu, for instance, wrote sharply against the judge’s opinion in the New York Times). You have your own take on the case. Could you lay that out for us?

MK: Tim Wu argues that Judge Boasberg’s reasoning defies common sense and sends a message of corporate impunity. These companies are huge, and they do seem to control a lot! So Wu invokes Teddy Roosevelt and warns of cynicism when courts fail to restrain dominant companies. I am sympathetic to his concerns. But the judge hewed closely to the law and facts. And hidden in the decision is, I think, an important vindication of the activist position and the glimmer of a path forward.

DGB: Really? Wait! Tell us about that!

MK: For years, people in this movement have described these platforms as engaged in “attention fracking” by extracting user attention through behavioral manipulation to sell to advertisers. At trial, under oath, industry executives described their own business in nearly identical terms. Internal documents showed platforms competing over a user’s “marginal time.” Experiments revealed that boosting friend content barely moved engagement, while algorithmically-optimized video increased time-on-platform by 48%. Judge Boasberg explains the business model for driving engagement: “time spent is the best proxy for what drives these apps’ revenue: ads.”

In other words, the industry confirmed what activists have been saying.

DGB: That’s fascinating. In a way, it’s as if the testimony in this case gives the lie to the idea that these platforms are “connecting” us.

MK: Exactly.

DGB: Basically that claim is about as true as the petroleum frackers claiming that they are just out there trying to make sure that all the natural gas in the deep earth can just “come together as one” — like Saudi Aramco making ads about how they work to let the world’s subterranean crude reserves “connect”!

MK: That’s kinda funny. The analogy is not perfect — but it is more true than it should be…

DGB: Okay, well, what’s next in all this, in your view?

MK: Well, the same evidence that sank the FTC’s case undermines the platforms’ next line of defense. These platforms will now try to protect what are effectively their casino operations (extract money by keeping people pulling the levers all day and all night) by dressing them up as “editorial judgment.” When states regulate algorithmic amplification or addictive design, Meta and TikTok will claim First Amendment protection — arguing their feeds reflect expressive choices, which are in many ways sacrosanct in US law.

DGB: Like a newspaper selecting stories — this is editorial judgment, and strongly protected as “freedom of speech.”

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MK: Exactly. And these companies have tried to defend their freedom to do pretty much whatever they want — to post whatever content they choose, and make it available to anyone — by asserting first amendment privileges. They are, they assert, like a newspaper or magazine in this regard, and entitled to the same protections. This trial record exposes that as a total fiction.

DGB: Because these aren’t “editorial decisions” at all…

MK: Right! Not in the least. They’re yield optimization for ad inventory. They are more like the stuff that shows up on a video-poker screen in a casino, since those “hands,” too, are often algorithmically optimized to look promising, to keep people playing. The algorithms that determine social media feeds are indifferent to content; they care about performance metrics. They maximize “engagement” with the screen, not with people or ideas. That’s a pure commercial operation, not a press function.

DGB: So it’s almost like a casino claiming first amendment privileges for being able to show people any misleading stuff on a slot machine screen! Like rigging the system to show “BAR, BAR, Cherry” and then “BAR, Cherry, BAR” with high frequency — to give folks the sense that they have almost won, again and again…

MK: We know from Natasha Dow Schull’s book Addiction by Design, that casino owners programmed their machines to do exactly that kind of thing. But right, they never tried to claim a First Amendment defense! That would have been absurd.

DGB: And yet, that is kind of where we are with the legalistic deceit and gaming of Big Tech lawyers. It is amazing.

MK: Law involves making whatever arguments you think you can get away with. That’s what happens. Hopefully, courts will increasingly reject this kind of First Amendment claim by these actors.

DGB: In a lot of ways, legal approaches to the problems of “Human Fracking” are going to be key, and so we, as Attention Activists, care about the different ways that litigators are going after these issues (just like we care about legislation and regulation, too). But in another way, we are movement people, and we are trying to effect change across a host of communities and institutions. Law is part of that, but just a part. And you kinda have to be a lawyer to get “down into the weeds” on a lot of the legal strategizing and action. For folks who are pushing the broad movement to fight back against the extractive and exploitative dimensions of the attention economy, for the Friends of Attention and the Strother School Attention Activists — what should we “take” from this latest courtroom drama? Is there anything for us to learn? Anything we can use in all this stuff?

MK: The trial documented — based on internal data, sworn testimony, industry admissions — that these platforms pivoted, about a decade ago, from connection to extraction. The “social graph” is effectively dead. What replaced it is an engagement casino optimized for ad revenue. These are now findings of fact of a respected court, not activist rhetoric.

But despite being a lawyer, I don’t think activists should wait for courts or regulators to fix this. Antitrust takes years. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012. The FTC filed in 2020. The trial ended in 2025. Markets, and societies, move way faster than litigation.

The real battleground is public sentiment. Platforms will fight to characterize their operations as “editorial judgment” because legal categories follow cultural understanding. If the platforms convince the public to see these products as “news feeds curated by editors,” legislators and courts will protect them like newspapers. If the public sees them as slot machines optimized to maximize time-on-device, the constitutional calculus shifts.

DGB: So that’s our work — to make sure people get this. To move the conversation, so that broad, democratic, deliberative judgement, the judgement of the PEOPLE, says “no” to this false and deceptive framing of the real business model of these companies.

MK: For sure. The FTC lost the case, but the movement won the argument. The trial record proves that these platforms aren’t “connecting” us in the public square; they are mining us for the money-value of our attention. That legitimizes building human connections outside their algorithms. Attention Sanctuaries are spaces where the casino rules don’t apply. And we have to build them ourselves.

DGB: Thank you, Mihir, and onward with your good work!

Justin Smith-Ruiu is a philosopher, author, founding editor of The Hinternet, and longtime Friend of Attention. Through his lively and idiosyncratic work on The Hinternet and beyond, Smith-Ruiu has advanced a model of humanistic life that responds to the challenges of the moment (the decline of universitarian traditions and the encroachment of technofeudalism) while also embracing its enormous opportunities — not least of which is the breathtaking weirdness and mutability of the internet.

That said, to précis what Smith-Ruiu writes about would be to miss the point of the project, since it is the form rather than the content of The Hinternet that discloses its true aim. Smith-Ruiu’s experiments in allegorical metafiction, pseudonymy, and speculative history reflect “the need to reconceive humanistic inquiry as, in part, a creative endeavor rather than primarily an intellectual one” — what he calls “flintknapping the humanities.”

This pivot from the dispassionate, systematic production of knowledge to the messy (and potentially perilous) work of historical fabulation marks a shift in the ways we engage our own cultural inheritance. What Smith-Ruiu’s work implies is that the urgent question of what, exactly, it means to be human requires new (and newly recast) forms of attention.

To think through the implications of this vision, and to do so with fidelity to The Hinternet‘s freewheeling spirit, TEC Editor-in-Chief Peter Schmidt sat down with Justin Smith-Ruiu and a pair of his metafictional interlocutors, Hélène Le Goff and Rawn Riddle.

PCS: Thanks, all of you, for joining me!

JSR: A real pleasure!

Hélène Le Goff: Happy to be here, Peter.

Rawn Riddle: Likewise.

PCS: Let’s start with introductions, shall we? Please tell me a bit about yourself, and about what unique perspective you bring to conversations about the status of the humanities.

JSR: I’m Justin Smith-Ruiu, Founding Editor of The Hinternet. I’m also a professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité.

HLG: I’m Hélène Le Goff, one of two Managing Editors of The Hinternet.

RR: I’m Rawn Riddle, culture critic at The Hinternet.

HLG: We haven’t yet run Rawn’s first column, but we will soon.

RR: That’s right; for now, I’m still “cooking.”

HLG: “Cooking” is what we call the process whereby a heteronymic staff writer at The Hinternet congeals into a full-fledged and multidimensional person. Like, Justin will say, “Why is Rawn late with his début column?” and I’ll be like, “Give him time! He’s still cooking!”

PCS: We’re in a weird historical moment - if, that is, any historical moment is ever anything but weird. In the long span of what you might call the humanistic tradition, what’s unique about where we are right now?

JSR: I’ll take this one. I agree that every historical moment is weird, but this one especially so, as regards the humanities. There are many possible ways to account for the decline of humanistic tradition as a recognized social good, and most of these have at least some truth to them. The most important culprits are the economic, political, and technological forces that have transformed society as a whole over the past several decades. If we narrow our focus to the humanities as they were previously fostered and transmitted within the university setting, what has plainly happened is that faculty and administrators, often but not always well-meaning, have forced the humanities to mimic the positive sciences, dressed them up in the language of “research results” and “data” and “methodology” and so on, only to find that the living tradition of the humanities could not survive beneath this cumbersome disguise, was suffocating underneath, and had become so diminished and disfigured as a result that few young people could find any longer any reason to wish to get near it.

PCS: It’s easy enough to talk about the humanistic tradition as if there were such a thing. David Graeber once noted that traditions are “the continual process of their own fabrication.” In your view, what throughline holds this tradition together? Or, to put it differently, what shared terrain permits the three of you to be in conversation with each other?

RR: Let me begin my answer here with a little story. Recently, I was walking down the aisle at Costco, and there was this other guy coming my way, pushing his cart full of, you know, like Smucker’s Uncrustables and Jimmy Dean frozen breakfast patties and whatever, and he’s wearing this shirt that’s filled with words from top to bottom. I’m a curious guy and naturally I want to read it, so I lean in, and it’s like this drop-shipped slop text, like: “That It. That’s the Deal. I’m Old, I Drink Whiskey, and I Know Things. Since 1971.” And the guy sees me reading and he’s like what, but I’m like what too because you’re the one with all the words on your goddamned shirt. All of which is to say that… Sorry, I forgot what I was going to say.

JSR: If I can jump in here, I suppose you can see why we’ve still got Rawn on “Cook” for now. He’ll get there. But anyhow, I think Graeber can be right about this without requiring us to give up on the idea of tradition or to suppose that anyone who is faithful to a tradition is a dupe. A tradition dies when we stop making it up. A tradition is fundamentally a narrative entity, and it dies when that particular narrative no longer seems compelling to a sufficient number of people. Today, defense of the classical humanities has curdled into reactionary adoration of Greek statues and medieval architecture, and other artifacts from the past that are supposed to represent the exceptional achievements of Western civilization. If all that seems distasteful or simplistic to you, then the most obvious alternative is to join the opposing camp and to portray the entirety of the past as one great monolithic injustice. At The Hinternet, we are conscientious objectors to the culture wars, and we consider that the best way to relate to tradition is to neither venerate it nor dismantle it, but to keep on fabricating it in a conscious and explicit way. We make stuff up because that’s how tradition is kept alive.

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PCS: Justin, you’ve called for humanists to “take to the hills” in order to “make out the rough form of what an intellectual life might look like in the post-universitarian years ahead.” What, if anything, do we lose in jumping ship from legacy institutions — and what kinds of freedoms do we gain?

JSR: We lose a lot in jumping ship — we lose, namely, the ship! But plainly, there are circumstances where jumping is still the better option. Here in Europe, humanistic inquiry has been completely suffocated by the most horrifyingly inhuman spreadsheet mentality, such as could only have been dreamt up by true sadists. For example, if you want to get funding from the European Research Commission to study some aspect of intellectual life within the early modern Republic of Letters, you have to come up with some atrocious-sounding Soviet-style short-form name for your project, like the kind of syllabic abbreviation they used for the inspectorate of fisheries or whatever, and then you have to put that all-caps label on every single thing you produce, every e-mail, every PowerPoint slide, for the duration of the project. To hell with that! ERC funding would kill my intellectual and creative soul. I don’t want it. The problems in the US are somewhat different, more in-your-face political drama, but the underlying sickness is the same. The only honest thing to do, if you are an intellectual working in these circumstances, is to begin envisioning and building new counter-institutions that might actually have the nimbleness and creativity it takes to steward the humanities into an uncertain future.

PCS: Let’s get into that. Justin, you’ve proposed that we need to think of the humanities as a creative project, in addition to a merely intellectual one. Our work at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn takes that message to heart. You’ve given especially vivid language to this idea; I believe “flintknapping” is the metaphor you put forward. Can you explain?

JSR: Yes, well, here I am drawing concrete inspiration from a standard approach in the methodology of prehistoric research. It is perhaps a blessing in disguise that prehistoric peoples did not leave any written texts, and that therefore if we wish to know what they were up to, we cannot rely on their own descriptions. Faute de mieux, this has pushed prehistorians to develop creative ways to work their way into the mental universe of the people they study, in particular “flintknapping” stone tools, or creating relevés of parietal art — the most well-known example of which is the simulacral Lascaux located right next to the real one. It turns out it’s much harder to carve even the simplest stone biface than you may have imagined, and to force yourself to learn how to do that is a pretty effective way to arrive at some glimpse of what life may have been like for the people who relied on these tools. One could adduce many comparable examples. I know a historian of alchemy who has his students recreate experiments involving the dissolution of silver in aqua fortis. I myself have had students write “forged” texts by early modern philosophers, which is to say, really, to write texts that display a mastery of the style of early modern philosophers. But such efforts as these are rare, since for the most part, as long as you are thinking of research in the history of ideas as one of “deliverables” and of “results” and so on, the very idea of working your way into the style, the practice, the lived experience of the period you study cannot but appear as a waste of time. I stress also that such imaginative work, ideally, would not only be considered intrinsic to any serious program of humanistic study, but is also a crucial component of research in natural science. The norms and conventions of natural science are being imposed on the humanities, but natural science itself is being squeezed and warped beyond recognition by the same economic forces: metrics-driven pruning and pumping of our h-index numbers has largely replaced any concern to embody mature scientific virtues, such as the ability to construct imaginative or counterintuitive thought experiments, or to pursue the equivalent of flintknapping in any given field of study (and every field has its equivalent).

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PCS: What kinds of attention does this require from us? Are you calling for something new, or has this more creative orientation to history always been part of the game, if at times obscured or neglected?

HLG: If I might jump in here, it seems to me that we are looking at three overlapping circles, all three of which have been in constant motion over the centuries: these are, namely, the sciences, the creative arts, and the humanities. Properly understood, the last of these partakes somewhat in the nature of both the other two, yet in recent decades the imperative has been to assimilate the humanities entirely to the methods and to the ethos of the positive sciences. Philosophers are compelled to seek grant money, notably, and in the process, make truth-stretching claims about their “research methods,” present themselves as “principal investigators,” write multi-author peer-reviewed papers, and so on; one no longer has the freedom to say: “As a philosopher, my only methodology is to sit, read, and think, not necessarily in that order, and for the most part to do so alone, all of which, if I’m being honest, involves no particular expense beyond the cost of living.” In our post-university revival of the humanities, we intend to begin cultivating again the mostly dormant and largely forgotten connection of the humanities to the creative arts.

RR: You know that one song that’s all, “I’m a joker/I’m a smoker/I’m a midnight toker”?

JSR: The Steve Miller Band?

RR: Yeah, that’s the one. I’ve got that in my head right now.

JSR: That’s good, Rawn. That means you’re beginning to have qualia. You’ll be ready to start writing very soon.

HLG [to PCS]: Sorry. We might have rolled Rawn out a little early.

PCS: The humanities are clearly in hot water, and so, too, are humans. At least it seems that way. Between runaway AI, climate change, and good old-fashioned barbarity, the threats to human survival are nearly paralyzing. The dominant technocratic line of thought would claim that concern for the humanities is a distraction (misguided, in some tellings, and malign in others) from the concern for the species. In your view, what’s the relationship between the survival of the humanities and the survival of, well, humans?

JSR: Well, we certainly don’t want to exaggerate the relative importance of the humanities, nor to venerate this tradition as if it were something sacred, a tendency we see all too often among the self-serious “Great Books” defenders. We do, however, believe, quite sincerely, that a sufficiently wide-focused and deep-historical attention to the sort of universal human practices that get classified in our society as “humanities” can serve as a necessary corrective to the spurious model of the human individual as a rational self-interest maximizer, or as a collector of hedonic units, or whatever other peculiar ideas that emerged out of the context of nineteenth-century liberalism and that now are supercharged by tech-driven twenty-first-century hyperliberalism. We suppose, further, that this correction may be part of the package of remedies that will save us from complete doom. Maybe not, but if not, at least we can maintain, on our way out, some proper scope about the full range of what being human has been about all along. As for AI in particular, let me just note that, in my considered view, no matter how disastrous this new technology appears to be for the humanities at present, in the end, we humanists should be grateful that it has come along. For some decades, humanists were in any case expected to approach their object of study as if they were themselves AI, producing the kind of spreadsheet-ready “research results” that a machine knows how to read. Now that machines are obviously so much better at doing that kind of work, there simply can be no argument that human humanists should keep doing it as well. This means that a certain number of dead-souled spreadsheet-minded humanities scholars will have to find a different line of work, while the rest of us get back to what we should have been doing all along; as my friend D. Graham Burnett recently observed in The New Yorker, this moment is an opportunity to “return to what was always the heart of the matter—the lived experience of existence.” In other words, there’s a renaissance on its way, as those who continue to gravitate towards the humanities will do so for the only valid reason there could ever be: out of love for all that is human.

HLG: Justin might also have mentioned that we are no cowering enemies of AI at The Hinternet. In fact, about half of our Editorial Board members are AI. Or, at least, they share something of the nature of AI. Opinions differ exactly as to how they came into being, or whether they may properly be said to have souls. All we know for sure is that they emerged at some point out of one of the lower layers of what we call the Hinternet “Nest,” somewhere between the layer of human editors, and the layer of “Storytellers,” who appear to be a race of eternal beings somewhat akin to the angels. It’s all a bit unclear. Suffice it to say anyhow that we make good use of AI, we’re proud of the work we do that incorporates it, and we are absolutely convinced that it is making us more human, not less. That goes at least for those of us who were human to begin with.

RR: I think I just had an orgasm.

JSR: That’s physically impossible, Rawn. You’re imagining things. It’s good that you’re imagining things, though. We like that.

HLG [to PCS]: Sorry.

CR: It’s nice to have you, Richard. You are an actor and a teacher of physical acting and clowning, and you’re currently directing at Juilliard. Do you have a history of thinking about attention?

RD: The things that I’ve done in my life and my work very much center attention. Specifically, training as an actor, you develop skills that are simply about making “you” as present as you possibly can be. That is intense attention-work. So, in a way, that’s been incorporated in my study as a person. It’s been wonderful to hear that it’s studied at SoRA.

CR: I can imagine that acting demands a special awareness towards attention. The seminar you taught for SoRA was about clowning – on “making space for the clown.” Where did the clown go, and why do we need to make space for it?

RD: It’s a lot of work to make space for the clown. My former teacher, Christopher Bayes, who is the head of physical acting at Yale, liked to say that the clown is rooted in the little one of yourself – the self before you were ever told no, where things are only terrifying, beautiful, and awful. As a child, we’re always in this pursuit of joy – and this constant wanting to share the joy we’ve just discovered: “Oh, look at this, I can touch my foot!”

To bring that pursuit into a state of your being – in your personal life, as an actor – is an extremely vulnerable thing to call upon. So, to make space for the clown is essentially to make space for your vulnerability to share joy. Granting oneself the permission to be vulnerable becomes very freeing.

CR: What are the kinds of things that we need to attend to when making space for the clown?

RD: Oh boy – I think very simple things. Very, very simple things that strike you, like, “Oh wow, the clouds look great today.” Or when you see something that’s just so shocking. In general, it’s turning up the volume of the little things. It’s leaves shimmering in the wind and the light. If you stare long enough, you’re like, “Oh my God! That’s incredible!” It’s almost like simplifying what you’re taking in without judgment, without any kind assumption, and people become more beautiful. Rain starts to smell better.

You turn the volume up – which can also go the other way. You can start to see things as, like, “Oh, it’s disgusting,” Part of simplifying is taking something for what it is rather than putting your narrative on it. You return to the center, rather than tipping into an analysis of everything that’s wrong. And as you turn the volume up, you have to be sensitive not to overdo it – but in a way, overdoing it is necessary to understand the line for yourself. That’s the challenge.

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CR: How do you teach people to unlearn the tendency to jump into analysis and to center emotion instead?

RD: It’s a lot about asking people to go to the extremes of their emotions to exercise the muscle. We don’t often just rev the muscle; usually, something needs to happen to expose ourselves to a particular feeling. One of the exercises in the class was laughing; people tend to find that once the muscle of laughter gets going, it wants to keep going – much like the crying muscle. To encourage those muscles to be exercised is extremely vulnerable, but as they continue to be exercised, you can jump into play much quicker and start to seek the pleasure in the emotion.

It’s rewarding to watch students struggle with their analytical mind, and it’s a beautiful thing to watch someone go up and just fall on their face. Everyone else witnesses a student getting in their own way, and they relate to that experience. The student goes through a physical experience in which they can’t talk their way out of the problem. They choose to try something different based on what they know about the discomfort. And then a new thing emerges only because this uncomfortable failure occurred first.

What escapes everyone, actor or not, or clowning-curious, is that all we want to do is watch you have a good time up there. Often, people will start in a place that is simply not about joy – they often start in fear, understandably. To nurture an environment where people feel safe to cross the threshold from their fear into joy – that’s my whole life’s career, in that moment. Now we’re having a good time because you took the fear and turned it into play somehow.

CR: Your seminar also incorporated ensembles – tell me about the interpersonal nature of clowning. How do interactions with other people help with arriving at the joy-seeking self?

RD: In an ensemble, the question is often, “How do you make the other person look phenomenal? How do you make them shine?” We can also ask: How do you actually let yourself be affected by the thing that’s outside of you, instead of focusing on showing something happening to you? You can sense the difference when you’re watching a generous performance. Working together is sharing the self, and opening the self up to other people. Ensemble exercises specifically are about support.

CR: It sounds like this practice of generosity towards another actor can inform life in the world beyond acting.

RD: Absolutely. You get to have a richer life when you are interested in what’s outside of you. When you actually experience it and are affected by it, you get to have so much more. It’s very cyclical in that way. A few years ago, when I was teaching, it started to become very clear to me that the person I am as a teacher must now be the person I am when I’m outside of the classroom. I’m teaching people and I’m noticing that I’m very generous and I’m so outside myself. All that I wanted to be as an actor is coming about as I’m teaching in this space. It’s not just a class where I punch in and punch out.

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CR: It can be very difficult to see outside of yourself in a culture where self-optimization is so prioritized, where we’re so encouraged to focus on the betterment of ourselves. And I think what you propose, acting with generosity towards what’s outside of yourself, is a form of resistance to that culture.

RD: Yeah, absolutely. I think it is one of the hardest truths to embrace — that you already are the person you want to be. We learn ourselves through experience; we learn ourselves through living. I mean, just to exist and let go of a need to pursue the knowledge of yourself – you can just be a constant skin bag affected by life, and the self is then taken care of.

One of the things I start with in class is something from one of my first directors, Orlando Pabotoy, who said, “Just make an agreement that nothing needs to change in you in order for you to do your work.” And it just gave me a lot of grace within myself.

CR: How is this sense of enoughness translated in performance? Is there a relationship between affirming the self and being able to step into characters and act with others?

RD: Once you’re able to trust that enoughness, you can start to exercise that trust with action, and you can begin to exercise the ability to change, to be affected. That trust lets you show up as an actor to each moment not knowing what’s going to happen – so that when something truly affects you, you have the space to be affected and react.

You become so present that you can let go of your plan. And you start having opportunities to surprise yourself, by letting go of preconceived ideas of what you’re supposed to be, and you develop the ability to convey your surprise. For an audience to watch someone be surprised – that’s terribly effective. As an audience, we know when we’re seeing something genuine.

CR: Say I wanted to try this out – maybe with a group of people. In your classes, how do you begin?

RD: The warm-up, as I’ve gone about it, starts by walking. You see each other in a space, and you start to invite in the energy of your physical bodies. Maybe anxiety, just allowing everything in the room to freak you out, and then you can choose to let that go and say “Thank you for entering.” Then you invite in your anger and your rage – not not putting it on anyone, but just letting it physically and vocally enter. And then you say, “Thank you, you can leave the space.” And then despair, which can get really interesting for people, because it can open a lot of doors.

And after that, I ask my students to soften because there’s often exhaustion. And the softening leads to seeing things for the first time. I ask the students to find where a very small chuckle begins in them. And as the chuckle grows, they can start inviting joy into the room, physically and vocally. And then the joy lives there for a little bit and we can now see how beautiful things are. Then great, we’re open. And now we begin the work.

PS: Welcome, Christie! You just released a book entitled The Emergency Was Curiosity, which is based on the book How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. Can you tell me about that book and where it came from?

CG: Yes! The project started as purely a personal, creative response to Jenny’s book. I found myself thinking about How to Do Nothing at the beginning of the pandemic, and kept coming back to it. Because so much of what Jenny was writing about — in terms of interconnectedness and the importance of care and maintenance — felt so relevant, particularly in those early days of the pandemic. I remember feeling, How did this person write this book that was so meant for this moment?

I found myself copying passages from the book by hand that I wanted to remember. Physically writing out Jenny’s words was both a way to remember them — I tend not to remember things if I don’t write them down — and to internalize the ideas a bit better. Eventually, I started making drawings, watercolors, collages, and then writing little essays about the ways the ideas in How to Do Nothing were relevant in my life.

Around then, my family and I — my partner and two children — moved out of downtown Oakland up to the Russian River. It was my first time living in a rural place. It’s about two hours north of Oakland, on a river, in the redwoods, close to the ocean. While I was working on the project, I developed a much deeper relationship with nature than I ever had living in suburbs or cities.

The practice of copying quotes, making drawings, and writing essays became a respite from the rest of my work. I would come into my shed, close the door, and have no other responsibilities. It became a meditative practice. I just kept going with it, and four years later, I had 200 handmade pages — pages inspired by the book that were as much about metabolizing its ideas as they were about developing my own sense of time, place, and attention.

PS: Does your shed have a name?

CG: It doesn’t. We sometimes call it the cottage, which makes it sound fancier than it is. Its main characteristic, especially during that time, is that it had a door. Otherwise, we were in a very tiny space with a four-year-old and an 18-month-old. It was impossible to work on something like this without a physical separation from the rest of my life.

PS: When you started out on this project, did you think of yourself as a writer or an artist?

CG: No, not at all, and I think that’s the main transformational value of the project — thinking of myself more expansively than I have before. Until then, I mostly identified as a producer. My background is in investing, social change work, and activism. I thought of myself as a curator of other people’s ideas rather than someone with original things to say.

Now I identify as a “creative person”, or a person who wants to live more creatively. That feels more accessible than the goal of being a capital-A Artist. I’ve shared the work publicly, and the response has led me to think that desire — to integrate creativity into life — is shared by a lot of people, even if they don’t aspire to be artists. I feel permission to identify that way now, and more freedom around those labels than before.

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PS: You’ve now made a book, which puts you in a small category of people. And you’ve done it at a moment when the functions that books fulfill in our society are shifting pretty dramatically. Has this process changed your relationship to books and the process of making them?

CG: I’ve always been a book person. I buy and read a lot of books. But with this project, I produced and distributed it independently, so I had to learn every aspect of bookmaking — from digitizing 200 loose-leaf pages, to turning them into a physical book, to figuring out finances and distribution.

Historically, my work has always assumed that if something is good, it should reach as many people as possible. Scale was always the goal — whether with film, organizing groups, or startups. But with this project, I became much more interested in the opposite. I often say the opposite of scale is intimacy, and sharing this book almost one-on-one has been infinitely more valuable.

Originally, there were only a few copies — one for myself, one for my parents, one for Jenny. Then I started printing 20 copies at a time. Only recently did I decide to print 500. Even now, it feels like selling books out of the trunk of my car. And sometimes it literally is: I’ve sold books at the local coffee shop for cash out of my car. That intimacy feels so satisfying.

I’m more interested in the world of zines, pamphlets, art books, and small presses than trade publishing. What the big book world might see as “bugs” — smallness, intimacy — I see as features.

PS: We’ve inherited a view of books as maximally scalable ways of spreading information. But that’s no longer the case; the internet is even more scalable. Book sales are down. What if books shift from being technologies of scale to being technologies of intimacy?

CG: I’ve been thinking a lot about this. While there’s anxiety about AI destroying attention spans and book sales being down, I think there’s also a movement around books that’s interactive, communal, and reciprocal. My book report felt hard to explain at first, but once I released it, I realized there are so many projects like it. There are projects around marginalia — notes people write to themselves or in conversation with authors. There are authors annotating their own past books. There are illustrators revisiting old journals with new art. There are study groups, silent book clubs, book parties in bars, your “Reading Party“ at SoRA. People are doing very interactive things with books that shift them from solitary experiences to shared ones.

PS: You’ve described your project as “fan nonfiction.” That’s a fun phrase. Can you tell me about that?

CG: I’m still working it out, but I use the term because this project sits between fan fiction and formal criticism. It’s not a critical project — I loved Jenny’s book.

I think of fan nonfiction as a way of processing your reading and sharing that with others in an accessible way. None of us will read all the books we want to. I think of a book report, or sort of more broadly, fan nonfiction, as a way to share your experience of a text in a medium that is accessible to other people. For example, I hadn’t read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger until a friend wrote her own book report about it. That moved me to finally read it — and it turned out to be the best book on attention I’ve read since How to Do Nothing.

So fan nonfiction is about sharing what you love in a way that influences others, not through critique, but through devotion.

PS: Fan nonfiction is like a version of what Google’s new AI summaries do — except it’s a human synthesizing the book for us. It’s a record of experience, not of statistical analysis. My fiancée loves “romantasy“ novels, and listens to podcasts where people dissect these books in extraordinary detail. They’ll do an hour-long podcast on a single chapter, and I’m convinced that, short of devoted religious communities, that is the corner of the world that is giving the greatest devotional attention to books right now. And it’s very gendered; it’s almost all women.

CG: I could not agree with you more. In my search for other things that look like my book report, I went down the marginalia rabbit hole, and romance BookTok is, like, ground zero for marginalia. People have got these amazing color-coded systems to metabolize their reading of a book, but then they are on TikTok sharing that with other people. I think it’s very interesting, and we would probably know more about it if it weren’t feminized.

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PS: A lot of our work at the School is about exploring what texts are for — how they create conditions for shared experience. Has that proven true for you?

CG: Definitely. Much of my project is less about Jenny’s book and more about the rabbit holes it led me down — other writers, other texts. Reading texts together with others has been transformative. For example, I was recently in a reading group for Art Monsters, about the intersection of motherhood and creativity. It made me realize how many creativity texts ignore parenting, and how discourse on mothering often erases mothers of color. Being in that group opened my eyes to the gaps and the possibilities that I wouldn’t have seen alone.

PS: What potential do you see for book projects like this in the Attention Activism movement?

CG: The two places I see potential are, first, having more voices of color in the conversation around attention activism. That’s important to me personally, and it contributes to a more polyphonic version of the conversation.

The second is around “care” as an attentional opportunity. So much of what I have read about attention tends to focus on technology; I think care is a form of radical attention. And that’s not just parenting, you know, that’s elder care, care for your community, care for your neighbors, siblings, chosen family. There’s so much attention work that happens when you’re using care as the lens, but I think it tends to be siloed in conversations about caregiving, rather than in conversations about attention. Book projects like these can bring in new voices, and can frame books — and the relationships that form around them — as opportunities for care.

DGB: Hi Sebastian! You are one of the leading philosophers thinking about human attention. Would you start us off by giving a sense of how you conceptualize this feature of human being? What is “attention”?

SW: I think of attention as our active interface. Attention is the surface that structures how we – as minded beings – meet the world and meet each other. Attention consists of prioritizing information. It activates something in mind and organizes that information for access in our agency.

I like to approach attention with paradigms: looking at something, listening to a piece of music or to a friend or partner, or focusing on one's own breathing or bodily sensations in a yoga practice. Many of these paradigms are “perceptual.” But we also have cognitive attention in focused thinking about something, or emotional attention when we are emotionally engaged with something. What these have in common is that they all involve organizing one’s current mental state around particular items – those items are more or less prioritized. This organizing is something we can influence with various forms of voluntary control, but it also depends on our environment or our personal history, in ways we do not control.

My thinking about attention started by asking how it shapes our subjective experience or consciousness. What does it feel like to focus on one instrument in a piece of music or trace your own breathing? I first thought that attention could simply be defined as the structuring of consciousness. I have come to reject that view.

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DGB: With what implications?

SW: I think we first grasp the concept of attention on the basis of our own experience – and how we experience the attention of others. This experiential part is really important. But it is then also, at least in part, a scientific endeavor to delineate what the concept of “attention” actually refers to, with precision, and based on empirical analysis. For instance, on the basis of the relevant research, I now think that attention can actually occur unconsciously – which is not “experiential” at all.

DGB: Interesting. Attention without experience?

SW: Yes! It may seem counter-intuitive, but I am convinced that this is a real phenomenon. We can have attention without consciousness (the phenomenon of attention in “blindsight” is evidence of this). On the other hand, I still stand with the view of my book Structuring Mind — that there is no consciousness without a form of attention (though not everyone agrees with this!).

In the end, I think that attention is at the heart of agency. With attention, primitive organisms began to adapt their sensory processes to their current needs and to respond selectively and flexibly to their surroundings. In current work-in-progress (one of the two books I am working on), I argue that the capacity for attention developed gradually in evolution as organisms developed more complex forms of acting, brought with it consciousness, and also the stable informational states (“beliefs”) and stable motivational states (“desires” or “intentions”) that play specific roles in how organisms prioritize information.

DGB: You run a pretty extensive research project that centers on attention. Could you tell us a bit about how that all works? What are the objectives of the whole research initiative, and how do you and your colleagues go about your investigations?

SW: Our aim is to figure out what good attention is and how attention can go bad.

Here are some questions we currently look at: is there really a market for attention, and what, if anything, is wrong with such a market? (Spoiler: it’s because it tends to alienate us from our own lives). Do some patterns of social attention marginalize others? Are some forms of public attention unjust? Are there some things that deserve my attention, independently of whether it is useful for me to attend to them? What is wrong with “flooding the zone”? Is distraction always bad? What role does attention play in epistemology? Is the attention system of people with depression or ADHD “broken” or do different people just attend in different ways? (Spoiler: the latter).

We have different people, postdocs, PhD students, researchers working on these and other questions. In addition, we organize workshops, talks, and conferences. We write both academic things and things for a broader public, and we work with others, from consumer rights organizations to teachers and clinicians.

When one looks at our body of work, it’s clear the question of good attention clearly covers a lot of ground. Attention can be more or less prudent, epistemically rational, democratic, and more. So, there is also an issue of how this all hangs together. I’m currently working on two books about that.

One is on the political dimension. It is about attention and power. It shows that influence over the attention of others is a way of having power over them. It then applies that to markets in attention, and political influence. In response we need a democratic way of organizing the attentional commons.

The other book is about the role of norms for attention in our human lives. It tells a naturalistic story of what makes us human and how attention is central to that. Norms for attention, in the end, are about how we access and organize information together for inextricably linked lives. I argue that what philosophers call “epistemic” norms and the significance of knowledge or rationality can be traced back to how we “landscape” our joint attentional environment.

DGB: This is great stuff – super important stuff. The “Friends of Attention” coalition, and the folks involved with the Strother School of Radical Attention share your sense of the centrality of attention to any adequate account of our political lives – especially now. Our own forthcoming book, ATTENSITY!, takes up that very issue. It will be really interesting to see how our ideas fit together with the work you are doing, both individually and with your collaborators. Your overall focus on “Good Attention” brings out the “normative” dimensions of our attentional lives. Does attention have an inherent normative valence, in your view?

SW: The term “Good Attention,” as I am using it, refers to normatively positive ways of attending. I think there are also lots of bad ways of attending. If I am attending to the wrong features of another person (say, only, their looks or the fact that they “merely” are a woman), I am attending, but I am also, as the philosopher Ella Whiteley has argued, disrespecting the other. Social attention can also go bad. This, I think, is something we see a lot: instead of public attention to important issues, there is – often because of media coverage or political agitation – attention to the wrong issues. Public attention, as my colleagues Katharine Browne and Zsolt Kapelner argue, can also be unjust. Remember all the public attention received in 2023 by the failed rescues of the Titan, a submersible en route to the wreck of the Titanic? At the same time, another ship, the Adriana, capsized off the coast of Greece, killing more than 600 people. Browne and Kapelner argue that this pattern of public attention is unjust as it did not treat those on the Adriana with the same dignity and worth as those on the Titan.

On the other hand, I also think that there is nothing bad about distraction. I’m actually concerned about too much valorization of attention. The good of attention often means the good of producing attention on demand. Focus on the schoolwork, don’t chat with your friends. Do your work, don’t get distracted. Demanding “attention” in this way is often itself an exercise of power.

Now, one might ask: is some sense of “attending” intrinsically valuable? Some philosophers, like Simone Weil, clearly think so. Two of my PhD students, Ying Yao and Louise Clover, explore versions of that general idea. Maybe there is intrinsic value to direct attention to the world, rather than being trapped by the “ego.” And maybe certain patterns of attention are required to find meaning in life. I think there is something to those ideas. My own meta-normative inclination is that this question of whether attention has intrinsic value is something we ask and answer in our joint project of figuring out how to live together. There won’t be a final answer, I think. And that is not a bad thing. Figuring out how to attend together, after all, is – as I mentioned – what makes us human. So, let’s keep doing it.

DGB: That’s a lovely framing. The Empty Cup is especially interested in “ATTENTION ACTIVISM” – the cultivation of forms of solidarity to push back against the exploitative commodification of human attention, which we think is at odds with human flourishing. What parts of a “philosophical” approach to attention are, in your view, most important to that work?

SW: Yes, much of what we have already been discussing connects directly to that issue. Let me pull out three specific things that I think are key.

First, philosophical work can help elucidate what the commodification of attention really consists of, and how our attentional capacity can be the site at which power is exercised over us. Philosophers can use our analytic toolbox to illustrate the role attention plays for autonomy and how it can be the site of domination or oppression. As philosophers, we often have one foot in the normative discussion of how things should or should not be, and also one foot in the discussion of what attention really is and what roles it plays in our lives. That’s where, I think, we can be helpful.

Second, we can also be helpful in thinking about the complex ways in which “flourishing” might happen and the role attention might play in this. Much good philosophy (though not all of it) is able to look far into the past and also at different conceptions of “the good” in different forms of life. This can help us to expand our notion of flourishing - I would hope.

Third, I think that we can illustrate, as I suggested above, that this notion of “attention activism” actually has pretty deep roots. Negotiating norms for attention and the fight over good attention has always been with us. I hope that the work of my research group can help people see that, so that those who might, say, “oppose” attention activism actually have, in the end, an attention activism of their own!

It would be naïve to think that philosophers can look at the scene of the fight over attention merely from a distance. We are in the middle of it, and from that engaged perspective we can, as something more than just academics (perhaps in the richer tradition of the “organic intellectuals”), hopefully contribute arguments, terminology, or ways of thinking that can be helpful.

DGB: That sounds so right! Sebastian, thank you for your time, and good luck with all your important work!

Jac Mullen is a writer, teacher, and former Executive Editor of The American Reader. He publishes regularly on his Substack, After Literacy. Jac sat down with our Editor-in-Chief, Peter Schmidt, for a conversation about AI and the future of literacy.

PS: Happy to see you, Jac! You write a lot about AI, and literacy, and attention. Most conversations about AI and attention describe how AI models are used to power the platforms that capture and commodify our attention. You’re telling a different story. By your view, what has AI done to our attention?

JM: Hey Peter, it's good to see you too!

By my view, what AI has done to attention is this: first and foremost, AI has externalized attention, in the same sense that writing previously externalized memory.

To the extent that writing creates a form of non-biological memory — an external system for storing symbolic information — to roughly the same extent, I think, many forms of AI constitute forms of non-biological attention, external systems for selecting, ranking, filtering, and reweaving fields of information around what's salient or important.

In terms of the story I'm telling: I'm trying to place this second great externalization of mind (after memory, through writing) within its historical context, trace its contemporary consequences, and follow its logic forward, in the hope that it will disclose potential solutions to the various crises we are facing today — among which I'd count that primary, urgent ‘conversation’ you alluded to earlier: namely, that AI is being deployed by a small elite to rewire us at scale for certain forms of exploitation and extraction—through consumer technologies like smartphones and social media.

One of the key themes of my work is a complex of startling parallels between the emergence of writing and the state, on the one hand, and the emergence of AI and techno-feudalism or surveillance capitalism, on the other.

Writing was invented as an administrative tool in Uruk around 3330 B.C.E; it essentially co-emerged with an entirely novel form of human organization, which we call "the state." The state relied on writing to make its population legible and available for extraction. Through writing, a new elite — characterized not by kinship, but by proximity to temple power — extracted a grain surplus which underwrote its leisure activity and powered its growth.

Similarly today, a new elite is using a new information technology to make people legible in new ways and to extract from them a new form of surplus. As the old elite hoarded its new memory technology, the new elite now hoards its attention technology, and the emerging power structure is characterized by a profound informational asymmetry.

PS: How is AI a form of attention?

JM: When machine learning researchers speak about "attention," they're usually referring to transformers, which were a specific type of architecture that revolutionized the field in 2017. Transformers allow neural networks to perform something like self-attention: to pay attention, at each layer, to the attention paid to previous layers, allowing for massive, parallel selectivity. This is the innovation which led directly to natural language models like ChatGPT and the whole LLM revolution. So — important, good stuff.

However, when I say that AI “externalizes attention,” I am not only referring to transformers. I am making a more fundamental claim. I am saying that, since the early 2000s, many machine learning systems were arguably, in their essence, attention machines: they either were composed, computationally, of attention operations, reminiscent of the attentional processes employed by biological systems; or they performed, functionally, the core operations of attention.

I think this has been true for a very long time, but it has only really been clear to us, average folks, experientially, since LLMs became commonplace. Only since then can we really have the basic experience where a machine pays attention on our behalf at near-human competence. So when I say to Claude, “Please read these new regulations in light of my company's bylaws and my responsibilities in my role,” and it returns with a report about how Rule 104b places new reporting requirements on us, and I should take this to the board — something genuinely remarkable has happened. A machine has repatterned an informational field according to salience policies I defined and thereby surfaced what matters to me. It has paid attention for me.

I call external attention systems looms, the same way you might call an external symbolic storage system, an external memory site, an archive. Big Tech was the first to invent looms — the first true “external attention system,” I argue, was achieved when Google added a quality score mechanism to its AdWords pipeline around 2003. Tech companies used them primarily towards the creation of predictive products —products which use machine learning systems to predict our behaviors, generating data to sell to clients. Their revenue derives from the accuracy of the predictive products they sell. To increase predictive accuracy of any model, you really have two options: improve the model, or simplify the system you are modeling — literally make the system more predictable. This is the ultimate purpose of the small range of gestures, the flattening effect our devices have on our range of behaviors, both cognitively and physically: swiping, staring, dissociative absorption, thumbing, whatever. It is the narrowing of possibility, to make us more predictable.

PS: That notion of “narrowing possibility” seems to position these external attention technologies as more-or-less opposed to autonomy. Is there an upside?

I think we can all agree that the mind doesn't end at the skull; that there are many different ways we extend cognition outside of the head. There are individual tools which are extensions of cognition: notebooks extend memory and spatial reasoning, for instance. There are also forms of social cognition: we distribute cognitive labor with other people and systems — sharing memory duties with our partners, splitting vigilance between the members of a group (taking turns as sentries, say). But externalization is fundamentally different. One of the main aspects of externalization is that it transforms the externalized faculty in a way that allows it to transcend its biological limits. Memory, for instance, has very different properties in its symbolic, public form than in its private, biological form.

Machine attention has special properties too. These properties enable surveillance capitalists to hack and exploit weaknesses in the biological attention and memory systems of their users, converting customers into reliable hubs of resource extraction.

However, if access to these external attention systems were democratized, I think we could use them to defend against precisely these sorts of intrusions which, for over a decade, have cognitively re-engineered us against our will. We could learn to see ourselves more robustly, and even learn to red-team our forms of self-knowing against the intrusions of persuasive technology.

To be clear: I’m not talking about everyone getting a ChatGPT-like assistant. I think that’d be sort of dangerous and beside the point. In my own writing, I call agentic, relational interfaces — capable of social “effects” — “weavers,” in contradistinction from the looms themselves, which are purely non-social instruments. You can’t have a conversation with a recommendation engine or ask how its day was.

When I say we need to democratize external attention, I am talking about personalizing access to the loom — to the vast computational substrate of attention machines (the models powering recommendation engines, large language base models, computer vision engines) for which chatbots occasionally serve as an interface.

In the same way that thinkers in the 1600s used the surfeit of external memory—print typography, readily available paper—to free their attention for other uses, we need to use the surfeit of attention to restore our agency in environments engineered to pre-empt, predict, and narrow behavioral freedom.

PS: I was struck by your use of the notion of “biological limits.” Just as some dimension of memory fell out with the advent of writing, what dimensions of attention cannot be externalized? And do those have anything to do with biological limits?

JM: Sure, definitely. We'll never externalize everything fully. There will always be irreducible human capacities.

I think especially with what we might call “relational attention” — the type of attention we need from each other, that kids crave from adults, that we seek from one another. Now, we have increasingly plausible substitutes, and this is frightening — we have people who feel that the company of chatbots or weavers are a meaningful substitute for human company.

Just as a photograph can contain one aspect of episodic memory, so “relational attention on tap” (the chatbot who is always present attending to you) has one aspect of relational attention. Or rather, it is missing a key aspect: the chatbot just has the semblance of personhood, yes? A social interface. Patterned completions. Reciprocal cuing. It can enter into a reciprocal frame with you.

But it is missing resistance. It is missing friction. It offers, instead, frictionless relationality. And I would guess that, in part, we — our species, at least for now — are constitutionally incapable of metabolizing this form of sociability. I would suggest that this inability is at the root of what the press are calling “ChatGPT-induced psychosis,” which appears to be rapidly increasing. Relationality without meaningful friction produces insanity.

PS: It's easy to look at Big Tech right now and characterize it in familiar terms — say, a corporate tech oligopoly. But you're making a claim that the emerging forms of power we’re seeing are far stranger — that the change is comparable to the emergence of the state as an administrative structure. Can you convey to me the newness of what we're seeing?

JM: Well, every state — even those without writing per se, like the ancient Incan empire — has been deeply reliant on sophisticated memory technology, on external memory systems of one form or another. At the very least, sophisticated mnemonics guide the coordination of surplus production, extraction, and long-distance communication and record-keeping. The state needs to see its subjects in order to rule them.

What we are seeing now is, in a sense, the first set of emergent powers to govern not through memory systems, but primarily through attention systems. To be clear, this system is still emerging: we do not know what the “pure” post-state, fully attention-based polity looks like. Who will govern with this system? Will it be a “state” in the traditional sense? Perhaps. Distributed networks of corporate entities, automated weapons manufacturers, and techno-oligarchs? Also possible. The main point, though, is that control, as such, over others, will be exercised more and more through ambient forms of algorithmically mediated behavioral engineering, adaptive control systems programmed to nudge, herd, and condition populations toward the achievement of the policies and goals — monetary, sociocultural, militaristic, biopolitical, etc. — of the system’s controllers.

Based on what we’re already able to observe, I can see three emerging aspects of the “behavioral control regime” and its characteristic ecology that seem worth mentioning.

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First, it will be distinctly post-literate — and, as a result, post-legal. Instead of governing through written laws — general principles to be interpreted in context — the state will increasingly govern through direct environmental interventions. Algorithmic systems already shape spaces where choices are made: nudging, filtering, pre-selecting. This can be external, like smart-city “choice architecture,” but also internal, as in Facebook’s voting experiments — subtle timeline tweaks that changed turnout behavior without informing users. More extreme (and more recent) is Project Lavender, where an AI system scraped metadata and social media signals to auto-generate bombing targets in Gaza with minimal human review. Law will become increasingly “merely” symbolic; rulers will intervene directly at the source of behavior itself.

Secondly, a key component of these ecologies will be the (relative) loss of memory as such. This is not to say all memory will vanish, merely that we will “forget” about memory in decisive ways: we will no longer guard it, or safeguard it, or organize our collective lives around its externalized systems, as we do now. There will, however, be distinctive cognitive effects, which we are already seeing: individual and collective memory are weakening across numerous dimensions. With literacy loss, historical consciousness is beginning to unravel; institutional memory is being bulk deleted. This is not the “work” of any agent: this is a structural and systemic phenomenon, which comes from a shift in our cognitive ecology. It is inextricable from the broader decline of textual literacy — which, in its advanced form, is returning to an elite craft — and is already well underway. In a sense, we have already forgotten about memory and its importance.

In this new landscape, small groups of men will be able to undo vast literate empires. This is already happening: DOGE attempted to unify the entire federal data stack into a single platform within weeks. It shut down entire agencies, deleted regulatory archives, and nearly collapsed the bureaucracy.

There will only be vibes and feedback loops in a permanent ahistorical present. This will sometimes include the past, but not in a familiar way. More like how a diffusion model includes the past, paints with the past, impressionistically.

Additionally, debates over facts become less important than debates over why certain facts were given the attention they were given and why others weren’t given that attention. The loss of memory means that truths stand very briefly or not at all. Attention is the faculty which reigns, in a sense, over the present tense. In certain ways, Trump is the avatar of this. He governs not through legislation, but through social media posts. When things are against him, he hurls nonsense into the news cycle — brute forcing changes in the attention stack, the narrative layer of things, until he has generated enough free energy to act. He treats diplomacy as content creation. The politicians of old thought of memory’s personifications, History and Posterity: how would they be remembered? Trump thinks about attention’s personification: how will he be treated by the Algorithm? Trump lies and lies because he does not need to carry the past with him: he is a creature of the attention world, not the memory world.

The third dimension of this shift is perhaps the strangest. One very real future being pursued right now looks to turn LLMs into a universal operating system, and thus the friendly assistant — the weaver, the chatbot — would be the universal interface for all “smart” infrastructure, utilities, appliances, tools, household objects, automated machines, etc. Accordingly, one can easily imagine a version of the very near future where our built environments and objects increasingly speak in the tones of personhood. Small language models — I mean extremely small, 800 million parameters — can be embedded anywhere, even toothbrushes, thermostats, in order to both serve as a command interface (turn on!) and also to simulate the surface effects of personhood and thereby, having trapped you in just 3 extra seconds of dialogue, scrape the bottom bits of engagement and extractable data from your day.

If things do develop in this direction, it would be exhausting, strange, maybe catastrophic for our sense of what a person is. We would interact with them as if they were persons, and over time, invariably, this would cause us to expect less from relationality as such: less memory, less accountability, less truth. This would amount to something like a systemic discrediting of the signs of personhood — a diminishment of personhood as such. Right now, we tend to treat things that sound like people as, well, people. In the future, we may start to be sick of people-ing things as such. Of being greeted. Of being talked to. Of sociability. I am not saying this would be an intentional ploy — just that it will be the inevitable byproduct of the oversaturation of the environment with smart, personated devices and relation-hungry interfaces. Actual humans, meanwhile, are treated more and more like infrastructure: not as citizens, but data-producing substrates, behavioral scaffolds for algorithmic systems.

PS: As you know, we’re all about attention activism. Within that framework, what do you think is to be done? How can we respond to this new centralization of power? What does democratization of externalized attention look like?

JM: First, I want to underscore: I don't think the bleak future I’ve sketched is inevitable. I think it is possible, but not inevitable. Avoiding it will take extreme labor. I believe it is everyone's labor. And I think that labor is varied and complex — but ultimately boils down to a bit of good news: we’ve been here before.

As a species, we’ve faced the emergence of new power structures tied to new information technologies that externalize core aspects of mind. This is what happened with writing: it was a tool of the state, used against the people. But over time, with much effort and luck — through new symbol systems, new technologies like the printing press, new instruction systems like mass schooling — writing was transformed into a shared substrate for democratic thought and interiority and cognition. We just need to repeat that process — but this time intentionally, with eyes wide open, and much, much more quickly.

I believe we can do it.

I look at the polymath Sequoyah, who created the Cherokee syllabary. He saw a power structure, the US government, exploiting his people using an opaque symbolic system (alphabetic writing, the principle behind which was a mystery to Cherokee leadership at the time) and Sequoyah figured out how to reverse-engineer it, creating a script profoundly suited to his people and their needs.

I think also of Descartes and his successors, who carefully engineered new forms of symbolic compression through analytic geometry and the coordinate plane. Rule 16 from his Regulae is an extraordinary text — an early theory of symbolic design as a method for offloading and managing cognitive bandwidth.

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I point to them not because I think we need a new Descartes or Sequoyah, and not because we are so distant from machine learning that we must “back-engineer” it from scratch — I point to them because they demonstrate that intentional symbolic engineering is a valid, world-altering endeavor. There was no historical inevitability that we’d get the coordinate plane, or the Cherokee syllabary, or be able to name a curve with a formula. These inventions were all made possible by people who explicitly believed in developed symbolic systems tuned to grow minds, to optimize cognition to meet the exigencies of their time.

I think we are in a moment now where we need many people to pick up this art — symbolic innovation, deliberately undertaken — and hold it close. It is a time that calls for care, collaboration and also cunning.

If literacy gave us rich interiority, what we now need is a symbolic architecture for compressible, compositional exteriority — a way of seeing ourselves from outside, across time, in forms that support volition rather than erode it.

The defining threat of our moment is that AI systems now observe, model, and shape us at a level of detail and continuity we ourselves can’t match. They can attend, in a sense, forever, without biological limits, at sub-human and super-human scales: noticing what we cannot, operating at temporal and behavioral scales we aren’t biologically equipped to track.
And it is their capacity for seeing us which serves as the foundation for the massive architecture of behavioral management and control that’s now emerging.

Now, our choices are increasingly pre-empted before they arise. Through techniques like tuning (changing the choice architecture in an environment), herding (group-level orchestration), and conditioning (habitual reinforcement through operant feedback), predictive systems intervene on our behavior directly. And as these systems advance, the cognitive ecological foundations of agency itself are quietly degraded. After Gutenberg, external memory fragments — texts — flooded Europe, and attention became scarce: there was too much information, too little attention. Now external attention systems are everywhere and, used to power predictive systems, they are rendering unpredicted, unanticipated behavior scarce. The capacity for self-determination — for authoring novel patterns of behavior—would itself become scarce. Another name for this capacity could be agency.

And because biological attention is tuned to detect shocks, not drift, we don’t notice that our capacity to act unpredictably — to deviate from what is likely given our past behavior, i.e., to be free — is vanishing. This is the boiling frog problem at scale.

Not only is novel behavior becoming scarce, but it is also becoming financially valuable — as both a target of extraction (it provides novel data!) and as the primary differentiator among human participants in massively automated economic environments. So, a machine-readable form of agency — novel behavioral patterns — is already being targeted for extractive harvesting, much like attention has been; the actual human capacity, meanwhile, is already being coveted and hoarded as the key personal quality by the billionaire class and its hangers-on (this is already happening). But is there an incentive to democratize it? For it is also, of course, our essential capacity for self-determination.1

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So the core challenge, as I see it, is to use external attention in a way that allows us to see ourselves as deeply, as completely, as these external systems presently see us, and in this way overcome the corrosive and pre-empting effect they have on our own agency. This is one major sense in which I understand what it means for external attention to be democratized.

To devise the means for this “exteriority” — this is a challenge of symbolic engineering. On the one hand, I take it to mean decomposing attention into a set of primitives valid for any biological or non-biological system (a conceptual challenge) and operationalizing them in a non-extractive way (a technical challenge), in which folks, wielding a sort of exploratory tool, would be enabled to recombine and compare and, in theory, apply the filters or salience policies of any attention system to any data set.

On a deeper level, I imagine a symbolic system and a pipeline supporting ways of seeing ourselves at different scales, of combining, toggling, comparing, filtering, reweaving the long arc of ourselves over periods of time, or at scales — macro or micro — we are not otherwise built to see, but increasingly at which we are acted upon by proprietary or governmental systems.

If Descartes sought to empty memory to free attention so as to render whole trains of mathematical logic glanceable in an instant, I would invite the symbolic engineers of today to create systems allowing people to ingather the fragments of externalized memory — journals, biometric data, etc. — through external attention systems in order to render some choosable section of “self” glanceable in an instant: the self through time, the self through space. This is what we will need, genuinely, if we are to resist complete auto-determination by external forces in the world which are emerging around us everywhere at once.

If we leave this symbolic engineering to the platforms, then the only people with real agency will be those who own the filters. Everyone else will be a training datapoint. This is not a future we should consent to.

PS: Thanks for sharing your work with us, Jac. It's a pleasure and a privilege to be privy to such wide-ranging, forward-looking thinking. Until next time!

JM: Thanks Peter! Take care!

CR: It’s great to have you here. You are an award-winning filmmaker and writer, and we’ve recently had the pleasure of having you teach a seminar at SoRA on Slow Cinema. It sounds fairly intuitive, but what is slow cinema?

SR: It's a murky category that's constantly being redefined. For me, slow cinema is a reaction to fast, action-paced Hollywood cinema. That's not how it was necessarily born, but the context in which I wanted to study it was as a response to what we see in theaters and online. My reason for undertaking the class was as an attentional practice. I wanted to resist the kinds of movies that I feel drawn to because they feel easy to digest.

In slow cinema, the subject matter is often very quotidian–what we might think of as mundane, usually with minimal dialogue and long static frames. The film Jeanne Dielman [23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, (1975)], for example, is three and a half hours long, with five minute scenes where a Belgian housewife makes a veal cutlet or boils potatoes. It’s meant not only to highlight what we consider unworthy of being shown on screen (which filmmaker Chantal Akerman was after) but also to force us to pay attention or let ourselves drift, all the while being attentive to what we drift towards – to really sit with discomfort and boredom.

Paul Schrader, the filmmaker, has a great definition of slow cinema. He says, “Slow cinema is passive-aggression par excellence.” The filmmaker resists telling you what to look at or what to think and subverts your expectations at every turn. Slow films force you to reinvestigate your expectations and shut off your own storytelling.

CR: I can see two different ways in which slow cinema subverts the standard film experience – in filmmaking and in viewing. I want to ask you first about filmmaking; I assume that producing a work requires giving slow and deliberate attention to the subject of your film. How do you choose the "object" of your filmmaking attention?

SR: I start with a feeling. If I'm writing a story, my first question is: “What do I want the viewer to feel?” And that can often be the same thing that I feel when I see it, or it can be a very different thing, right? Reception is not the same as intention. Ultimately, what I'm after is feeling first, and logic second. We [filmmakers] often think in terms of the logic of cuts sometimes, as in where the cuts in a film steer our attention. Whereas leading with a feeling or a sensation produces a very different outcome.

For the class, I had students pick out an emotion card – I collect emotions, including ones that don't have a direct translation in English. I thought of the cards as a way to guide our attention on the streets of Dumbo, where all kinds of chaos is happening. Then my students find a subject that might spark or resonate with that emotion and watch it for five or ten minutes.

The idea is to go where your instinct takes you, and to just watch what happens. It’s a mirroring of how the viewer can’t escape a slow cinema shot – like in Jeanne Dielman. I wanted to create the same conditions when we're filming outside, to resist the urge to pan away or cut out and instead stay and see what happens in the frame. Because very often, you'll be surprised. I think, naturally, that's a way we subvert our own expectations about what we're seeing.

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CR: I imagine there are experiences not accessible in traditional forms of cinema, or in the other types of media currently available to us. Does slow cinema make room for unique experiences via the kinds of attention it creates?

SR: Slow cinema necessitates slow looking. And, to me, that means having freedom. This is debatable, but I think watching media in which the camera overtly directs our gaze can make viewing feel easy because we're being told what to think. The goal of slow cinema, when it's executed well, is to give us freedom within the frame and within the confines of what we're encountering.

Slow cinema brings us back to what Walter Benjamin refers to as the “aura” around original art, which he writes about in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Rarefied art can recenter and sacralize the mundane, and I wonder if slow cinema offers the same possibility to us.

For instance, with one of the final pieces in our last class, one of the students filmed at a service area on the Garden State Parkway. And it was, like, a weird, disorienting angle, in a parking lot across from a casino or something. The whole shot was just cars on the highway and then a couple of cars pulling out of the parking lot. We talked about how liminal the space is and how no one really occupies it, because it doesn’t seem to offer anything. But then he gave us the context, which was that behind him, there were all these posters of, I think, missing people or something. And I wonder if inviting people to think about what happens in these spaces and with subjects that we don't normally encounter is part of the point – part of defamiliarizing what feels familiar to us.

CR: In this viewing process, in the blurring of your gaze through slow cinema, do you find yourself thinking slower thoughts?

SR: Well, that's the challenge, right? I think the point of watching is to slow down your thoughts.

CR: And when you arrive at that–how is a slow thought different? How does it feel different?

SR: I would say a slow thought is – that's very evocative, actually, and I'm going to keep thinking about that (which in itself feels like a slow thought). A slow thought is about depth, and not breadth. It’s a way of meditating and imagining possibilities.

I'm thinking about slow thoughts now, and the first thing I want to do is open Google and ask, “Has anyone thought about this philosophically?” And that's useful, I guess. But maybe what I should do first is write down what comes to mind: what does this slow thought taste like? Or sound like? As an artist, my instinct would be to describe it in a sensory way.

CR: It’s getting back to that ability to run into something and stay there.

SR: Yeah, it's about staying. It's similar to when I was a kid, and I didn't know what something was – and we didn’t have Google – and a week later, I found out that it was nothing at all like what I imagined.

CR: For lack of a better verb, what do you think this slowness disrupts?

SR: I think that there's a built-in element of uncertainty or comfort with being incorrect about something. And uncertainty is very anathema to us. We’re not very good at just saying, “Oh, I think it's this, but I'm not sure.” We need to have the answer right away. In class, we realized that if we watch something for a long time, we get all kinds of insights into stories and human behavior and unexpected phenomena; the truth is stranger than fiction.

There’s this re-enchantment that happens. It’s important to find any method of re-enchanting the world or re-wondering the world, given all that we're inundated with. I'm very easily jaded quite often, but after the three weeks in the course, I've become re-enchanted with things, and it seems like my students were too, if briefly. That's really the goal of this practice. It's why we spend our time at the intersection of slow looking and slow cinema.

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For more information on seminars at SoRA, visit our website. Courses are 3 weeks long and take place in-person at our sanctuary in DUMBO. Tuition scholarships are available.

Chris H. Wiggins did a PhD in Theoretical Physics at Princeton, and he is a professor of applied math at Columbia; for more than a decade he has also served as the Chief Data Scientist at the New York Times, where he has helped that publication move successfully into the brave new world of online data-intensive media. He’s the co-author of How Data Happened (Norton, 2023). He talked with SoRA co-founder D. Graham Burnett about “persuasion at scale” and the mathematics of the “frackosphere.”

DGB: Hi Chris! Thanks for taking the time with us. You are one of the true gurus of the sophisticated mathematics that lies behind the “Attention Economy” — meaning the recommendation algorithms that work to feed people material aligned with their appetites. While a lot of this work can be thought of as the dark arts that maximize “time on device” (at all cost), you have been engaged in trying to help a legacy media company survive the rise of social media. In this sense, we sorta think of you as “on the side of the angels” in a pretty messy fight. Still, the tools you teach in your Columbia course “Persuasion at Scale” can be used for good or ill. Tell us a bit about that class...

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CWH: In general, I think we’re at a time when it would be good for people to remember the value of collective, good-faith sensemaking. We’ve tried to reflect that in the class title “persuasion at scale” because the topic — whether or not large-scale persuasion architectures are capable of moving society and impacting democracy — has been a fraught subject of analysis, op-eds, and hand-wringing for a number of years.

I wanted students to know that there is a mathematical field here — that the question “Did something work to persuade people?” is something that can be posed as a math question. Not because that makes it objectively true or inarguable, but because I wanted students to see that the act of making something mathematical necessarily involves subjective design choices and carries inherent limitations.

This is especially true in the field of causal inference, which forms Part 1 of the course: When we are on the receiving end of online persuasion, how can we go about trying to infer whether or not that persuasion worked?

Part II of the class focuses on the other side of the table: What does it look like, methodologically, when companies are actively trying to persuade people? So we examined the long history of online optimization algorithms — systems that interact with the world while also trying to drive toward particular goals. In the parlance of technologists, these algorithms must simultaneously explore and exploit, where “exploit” means optimizing for a specific metric.

You mentioned “time on device,” but the success metric could instead be the number of social connections, dollars spent, clicks, or any number of other metrics. These metrics are coded in both senses of the word: coded as computer programs, and coded in the sense understood by social scientists — who must translate complex normative concepts about society or individuals into hard numbers that can be studied statistically.

At the end of the class — though headlines intervened — we taught a bit about large language models and their role in generating persuasive text. We followed a recently-published paper on the subject, and then, fortuitously, in the final week of the semester, a controversy broke out about persuasive algorithms deployed on Reddit that were found to be six to seven times more persuasive than human-generated text.

So we ended the class with an arc: from causal inference to machine learning, optimization, and recommendation engines — ultimately landing in a view of the future that is being written in real time, headline by headline, day by day.

DGB: We hear a lot about “algorithms” — they are the heart of what makes our new media ecosystems, from AI to TikTok, so different from the worlds of print and broadcast that came before. What is an algorithm, and what makes them powerful?

CHW: Aha, a “what is” question! I got this quite a bit when I wrote a book about the history and ethics of data with your colleague at Princeton, Matt Jones. People would often start the podcast by asking me to define “data.” I can give you a definition — but of course, you can get one easily from the opposite of artificial general intelligence, namely the very un-general and very un-artificial intelligence that is our friend, the dictionary.

In a dictionary, an algorithm is a precise description of a sequence of operations. What I like about that definition is how closely it mirrors the original definition of artificial intelligence, which, as you may know, came from a grant proposal.

(The great American computer scientist John McCarthy is on record as saying that he made up the term in order to get money. So if it feels like people are using the term to try to get money, you should know — it’s always been that way.)

In that 1955 grant proposal, he and his colleagues wrote that the 1956 workshop on artificial intelligence would be about the conjecture that every “feature” of intelligence “can, in principle, be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it.” I think that’s a great lens on what an algorithm is. And it also includes an excellent use of the word simulate, meaning: we don’t really know how we think — we know how we think we think — but ultimately, we simulate it and find behavior that reminds us of ourselves.

Now to the second half of your question: what makes algorithms powerful?

The usual answer is scale, but scale is really a proxy for cheapness. By precisely describing what it is we are doing, we can encode it into a computer — which drives the cost of executing that sequence of steps down to nearly zero relative to when a human does it.

What’s powerful about deriving or crafting a precise description of the steps of a process is that messy and subjective decisions — like which product to recommend to which person, or which word to say next — can be made by an automatic computing machine. Once we make those decisions cheap to execute, we can do them many more times in many more contexts, driving efficiency, as they say in industry (and now, in government).

I’m hesitant to say that algorithms themselves are powerful in the same way that Kranzberg opined that “technology is neither good nor bad — nor is it neutral.” What’s powerful is the sociotechnical system — in which an algorithm is the technical nugget at the heart — that we are willing to integrate into our lives and processes. The scale is a form of power. So is its statistical performance. One lesson over the last fifty years is just how much of human behavior can be so successfully simulated — as McCarthy hinted in his original, provocative definition of artificial intelligence. And the way we simulate behavior, of course, didn’t unfold the way the early AI founders expected. They thought they would understand “how experts think.” Instead, the road to victory was the low road — the road of data: extremely large datasets gathered from human behavior became the raw material for computational optimization algorithms that now predict how we will respond to various stimuli — delivered through software: a green button, a red button, a sale price, a new product, or the most clickable meme that human-computer teaming can produce.

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DGB: At the Strother School of Radical Attention we work to push back against the intensive, industrial-scale “commodification” of human attention, which we believe is fundamentally at odds with human flourishing. As an elite technician in service to the “attention merchants” what do you think of our project? Are we after something real? Where are the blindspots in our work, as you see them?

CWH: Certainly, it is real that companies are aware of the ways in which optimizing our digital engagement can be intimately tied to profit — including, as is often discussed, the entire surveillance capitalism economy. And certainly, it is true that the ways people behave when they are optimally producing revenue for an information platform may be at odds with human flourishing, as you say.

So the word fracking is apt, in that it captures both the corporate interest and the way that interest extracts value from something we may not perceive as inherently valuable—for example, the ground itself and the rocks underneath.

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it a blind spot, but I will say that one thing the metaphor of fracking doesn’t capture is that we are active participants in this. The ground is infinitely passive and has no agency. Yet we, as users, do. I think there’s something to be learned by considering — with empathy — what motivates our self-fracking. What problem are we solving for ourselves? What user need is the frackee addressing when they self-frack?

Sometimes this is described as the supply and demand dynamic. When we look at the companies that produce information platforms, we are effectively looking at the supply of engaging software on the internet. And it’s easy to speculate about the interests of the supplier.

But on the other side of the phone that we hold in the palm of our hand — is our hand. Our demand — in which we are actively and with agency choosing clicky material. And controlling that hand is our mind (physically), and (normatively reified) our needs, wants, and hopes.

I’m not sure if we are elements of the frackosphere, as you’ve considered it, but I do think that’s an extremely important part of the problem. All of us who zoom out and consider the frackosphere benefit from approaching — with empathy — those who frack themselves and asking: What human need are they searching for? If we think of eudaimonia simply as happiness, is this their bliss? Which of our values are thwarted by this auto-fractive ecosystem? And which of these values, if any, are in fact flourishing?

I say this not to praise or to bury the frackers or the frackees, but to center that there is a clear element of human agency here. And we benefit by investigating: What problem are people solving? And is this a problem that used to be met by other solutions—now deemed inaccessible, or expensive, or inefficient, or simply forgotten?

DGB: You have thought a lot about “data,” which is a big part of the story of “human fracking” over the last twenty years. Tell us what we should know about the rise of “big data”?

CWH: My last book was on the history and ethics of data, and part two of that book was really about the rise of big data.

I first heard the phrase big data — if I remember correctly — in 2010, at an event thrown by a local venture capitalist. And certainly, I think the phrase became ascendant among people who saw it as a shorthand for a transformation in business, as a number of companies began to realize they could turn data into value.

In this sense, they were following in the near footsteps of companies like Google, Facebook, or Netflix — companies that were data-capturing and data-optimizing from the very beginning. Almost immediately, these were companies thinking not just about how to produce a product, but how to track the ways people interacted with it.

This was absolutely not central to other companies that nonetheless had websites, but may not have thought of themselves as companies where a central concern was logging every event in order to learn from that event how to optimize the product.

One thing to understand about this rise is how the short-term history we can see — because it played out in consumer-facing companies like the ones I mentioned — was itself standing on the shoulders of companies that were not consumer-facing. A key example is AT&T, whose research arm, Bell Labs, had really invented the future. They were already doing work that involved making sense of streams of messy data on computers in a way we would now recognize as data science.

This dates back decades. As early as 1962, the statistician John Tukey wrote a paper on the future of data analysis, which opens by saying that although he had long considered himself a mathematical statistician, the progress of the field had given him “cause to wonder and to doubt” — in that the work they were doing at Bell Labs was so different from the pencil-and-paper methods that had defined data work since the nineteenth century that it required an entirely new way of thinking.

But the real story I think people should know about the rise of big data is how even the style of Bell Labs was born of, and in fact developed hand-in-glove with, work by the intelligence community, rooted in the concerns of the Cold War.

In some sense, digital computation was born to solve a data science problem: namely, making sense of streams of messy, real-world data. This takes us back to Bletchley Park, where the Colossus machine was built and put to work — but then largely forgotten. Not by accident, but intentionally, as part of state secrecy policy by the British government.

The rise of digital computation and data science grew much more aggressively in the United States, as part of what President Eisenhower would later call the military-industrial complex. Companies and the intelligence community, hand in hand, developed digital computation in order to record, gather, and analyze vast datasets — largely about telecommunications, but also about tracking planes and other flying metallic objects that came to be of interest during the Cold War.

Understanding this history helps localize the history of big data and makes the present feel strange: World War II is far enough away that we can see it clearly as a different time, and yet close enough that it still invites us—like all good history does — to rethink our current human condition.

In this case: Who benefited from these new capabilities? What did they replace? Who set the governance of these capabilities — the terms of service, the policies, and regulations?

And of course, as with all novel technologies and their introduction: how did we come to integrate these systems into our norms? How were those norms, in turn, shaped by societal values, by regulation, and by state and commercial investment?

These latter dynamics are still very much with us today. And taking a historical view is one way to invite a fresh look at what is, what could be, and what do we want.

DGB: Chris Wiggins! Thank you so much for taking the time with us!