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The photograph on the last page shows a car at the side of the road. In the backseat, a woman reclines with the cheek of a boy pressed against her shoulder, their faces misted with sleep. Outside the window, a flat and dusty desert stretches to a mountainous horizon, but mother and child pay no mind to the wide-open country. They are enclosed in their cabin, swaddled in quiet, unsuspecting of cameras, dreaming unknowable dreams.

In 1955, a 31-year-old photographer named Robert Frank won a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph the United States. Setting out from New York, he crisscrossed the continent with a camera in the passenger seat of his black Ford Business Coupe, pulling over long enough to capture what he saw and then keep moving, a restless, taciturn Swiss immigrant composing his adoptive country exposure by exposure: Philadelphia, Detroit, Savannah, Houston, Reno, San Francisco, and the long, lonely stretches of road in between. On some legs of the trip, his wife, Mary, and their young children, Andrea and Pablo, travelled with him. Cops eyed him with suspicion: a foreigner with a camera, and Jewish too. He was thrown in jail in Arkansas and chased out of a small town in Tennessee. In total, he took some 28,000 pictures. Of these, a selection of 83 were published as The Americans, which became one of the most celebrated photo collections of the twentieth century.

But not all at once; it took years for The Americans to find a receptive audience. A Parisian press was the first to print it, and when the book was finally released in the United States (with an introduction by the novelist Jack Kerouac), sales were poor and critics were unimpressed. They derided Frank’s photos as sloppy and blurry, with “drunken horizons.” They supposed that he hated this place – so why didn’t he leave?

In time, though, his glowing jukeboxes and blond starlets and leather-clad bikers came to be recognized as prescient visions of America’s self-ascribed mythos. The Americans shows a people in motion, the grimacing, blinking, half-obscured contradictions of democratic life in its mottled glory.

The nation is a simplifying fiction; it blankets vast and varied maps with a single identity. In doing so, it purports to tell us the essence of places we have never been. This is what Frank did with his pictures: by setting them together, he made us believe we could see beyond the edge of each frame. He fashioned his American fiction from close attention to the world past his windshield, and then he taught us how to do it for ourselves. Frank never went to Biloxi, Mississippi, but after seeing his work, one can imagine how Biloxi might have looked through his Leica. His photos suggest that America is a way of seeing as much as it is a thing to be seen.

Yet one image – the last in the collection – rubs against this unifying vision: a woman and a child sleeping in the backseat of a car. The woman, of course, is Mary Frank. The boy is her son, Pablo. One suspects little Andrea is in there, snoozing somewhere out of view. They are accustomed by now to these frequent stops; they have spent plenty of time waiting at the side of the road, watching the artist point that little box of his at the parade, the burial ground, the motorcycle show, the baptism. Do they sense a thing called America coming into view? Do they see what he sees? Do they care?

U.S. 90, en route to Del Rio, Texas, the image caption reads: just another stop. But this time, the artist has turned his camera toward the car. He lets us see who’s been sitting in the backseat all the while. They are, perhaps, the only people in this entire collection of photographs who know the name of the man who took their picture. Yet here they are, on equal footing with everyone else in these pages – as democracy would have it. They must be the Americans, too.

The Americans was published in 1959. In 1969, Robert and Mary divorced. In 1974, Andrea died in a plane crash in Guatemala. Pablo, who suffered from schizophrenia, died by suicide in 1994. It’s possible the factory worker in Detroit and the priest in Baton Rouge met tragic ends, too, though Frank would know as well as we do – which is not at all. He needed his subjects to be anonymous. The forms of attention that conjure the identity of a people are not the forms of attention that honor the specificity of a person. Problem is, we need both. A people without persons is a dangerous abstraction. A person without a people lacks the fastenings of obligation that make us whole. Both tend, in their extremes, toward violence.

The challenge of democracy is to reconcile these ways of seeing. Can free, self-governing individuals make up a nation? Can we exist fully unto ourselves and also fully unto others? The Americans does not resolve the question, but it does put us behind the viewfinder of a man who embodied its contradictions. Immigrant, artist, husband, father. Frank went searching for America, and that’s what his photos portray: a determined, possibly interminable, searching. It’s why they feel so sad, and so full of hope.

It’s also why they seem, half a century later, to capture the truth of this place. Insofar as America exists, it exists in our will to find it. It is a mode of attention that dares to encounter divergent realities without collapsing them – an attention that is the thing it seeks. Frank made no exclusive claim to this kind of vision. His crooked angles and fuzzy focus disavow technical expertise and signal that his pursuit is ours, too. Take a page from Frank’s book. Go looking for America, and you’re already there.

Peter Schmidt is the Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn.

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A twelve-hour and fourteen minute YouTube video entitled Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay~ on the channel FCPlaythrough has 1.3 million views. It consists of the player completing the 2004 Pokemon game in its entirety: going to every building, talking to every non-player character, and finishing every side quest – silently and with no commentary.

“Longplays” – comprehensive recorded playthroughs of video games – are created primarily for archival purposes. One can download an old video game’s game file, but longplays preserve the game experience. The resulting artifacts, as one might expect, are long. On YouTube, among the tens of thousands of longplays created by volunteer archivists, you can watch 9 hours of Minecraft, 23 hours of Super Mario Odyssey, or even 39 hours of Pokemon Black and White 2.

Aside from the editors themselves, few people watch longplays in their entirety. I asked Alec Foster of the YouTube channel AL82Retrogaming about his audience retention stats, and he said that most viewers drop off after a few minutes, “looking for a quick fix of nostalgia.” Others, commonly, watch longplays as “second-screen content.” As one commenter writes, “I always use this video as background noise when studying. There’s something so soothing and calming listening to a game I played so heavily as a kid.” Other commenters mention watching them to go to sleep, or in the background on long car rides.

Longplays are, in some sense, films. Their construction is intentional, and they are heavily edited to demonstrate the entirety of a game as completely and efficiently as possible: usually random mishaps are removed from the final product. The result is intended to be, as distinct from raw gameplay footage, at least somewhat watchable. But broadly speaking, longplays don’t exactly seek to entertain, but rather, to exhibit a game.

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I wanted to experience a longplay as, essentially, an incidental art film. To this end, I watched Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay~ in its entirety. I gave it my full attention: six hours each day, no distractions except my notebook, each session broken up by a one hour lunch break.

Broadly speaking, this “film” is uneventful. Most of Pokemon involves repetitive actions like battling or walking around that provide little interest to a passive viewer. It does not resemble a conventional narrative film, but rather the “durational cinema” of avant-garde artists, like Andy Warhol and his eight-hour long Empire, which consists of nothing but a static shot of the Empire State Building, or Wavelength, with its extended zoom of an artist’s loft. “Durational cinema,” like Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay~, gives little purchase to the viewer’s attention. In other words, it is a bit boring.

Boredom, however, is sometimes an essential, even fruitful aspect of a work of art. Andreas Elpidorou and John Gibson note in their essay “Really Boring Art” that people generally accept that a work of art can make us feel “negative” emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, or despair, but balk at the idea that art could be intentionally boring. But boredom has some interesting characteristics. It is, of course, broadly unpleasant, but can serve to transform our relationship to a piece. As they write, “the perceived meaningless or felt blahness of an experience can propel the bored subject to reappraise the object, look for occluded dimensions of significance, and, generally put, righten one’s relationship to one’s situation.” Boredom motivates a different kind of attention.

My viewing of Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay inverted the regular experience of playing the game. The interactive components (battling Pokemon) became repetitive and uninteresting. My attention instead shifted towards the game’s “decoration” – the “unnecessary” parts: the beautiful pixel art scenery, the characters whose dialog does not advance the plot, but simply adds character to the world. I found myself, after long periods of boredom, genuinely excited when I simply got to see something new, or hear dialogue from a new set of non-player characters. The narrative crescendo, where legendary Pokemon battle to plunge the world into eternal sun or rain, became, genuinely, moving and impressive.

Unlike feelings of anger, irritation, or sadness, boredom is an emotion that platforms like YouTube generally seek to completely eliminate. “Doomscrollers” stay online, but bored users, who log off and do something else, are totally unacceptable to a business model based on sustained attention. To intentionally seek boredom online is to rebel against the psychological demands of the attention economy, which seeks to hold our attention as much as possible, as quickly as possible.

As Jenny Odell writes in “Who Has Time for Parsifal” about the four-and-a-half hour Wagner opera, marathon-length artistic experiences can transform our relationship towards time, allowing it to become, rather than a measurable resource that we worry about “spending” or “losing,” a succession of abundant moments to be experienced, savored. It is precisely because Parsifal is so long that it has this capability: it prompts us to let go of the idea that our time is something to be “used effectively.”

In order to experience marathon-length art, we must, as she says, let go of our mind’s tendencies of “working, grasping, and analyzing.” It was on the second day of my watchthrough that I found myself able to do this. It was as if my mind, after struggling for hours in search of something to occupy itself, finally gave up and submitted itself to a lower base level of stimulation, a more open experience of time.

In The Pale King, a novel about the IRS with no shortage of highly technical, boring passages about tax accounting, David Foster Wallace writes that boredom “is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.” Some young people seem to agree, partaking in the social media trend of “rawdogging boredom,” where they perform various feats such as staring silently at a blank wall, or, in BWong’s account, doing nothing on an eighteen hour flight. After many hours of Pokemon Emerald, not only did the “film” itself start to be, as Odell puts it, “a reprieve, a gift, and an invitation,” it also did feel like, afterwards, this feat of endurance made smaller things somewhat sweeter. Washing dishes or making dinner, for example, after so many hours in a chair, became a pleasantly embodied experience.

The aesthetic rewards of Pokemon Emerald playthrough ~Longplay~ – a renewed appreciation for this twenty-year-old game, an acceptance of a different relationship with time, the satisfaction of psychological endurance, were only accessible after the endurance of large amounts of boredom, after letting go of my struggle for stimulation and entering a kind of submission to whatever simply is. Perhaps we can endeavor to seek out more experiences that might be boring with a bit more lightness and ease, experiences where, in the words of one of the characters in Pokemon Emerald’s Route 116: “We’ve got nothing to do but loll around here doing nothing.”

Alex Wennerberg is a software engineer who occasionally writes about technology, philosophy and culture.

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Machines, it seems, can read. Plug a news article or an epic poem into an LLM and it will unfurl a tightly structured gloss with bulleted takeaways and sunny suggestions for further prompting. This new technology has plenty of implications, one of the more troubling of which (at least for those of us who care about this stuff) is that, before long, people won’t need to read at all, since machines will do it for us.

Will this happen? We’ll see. But until such time, questions remain about what exactly we mean by “reading,” and whether the data-intensive churn-and-burn operation of our modern day computers truly fits that description.

For instance: we know that LLMs can process text prompts with extraordinary speed. What happens when we remove the prompt? Can there be reading in the absence of text? Machines seem to be able to read everything, but can they read nothing? Can we?

An experiment, then: What follows is a selection of blank spaces, each scanned from the margins of a different page of text. Each will be the subject of a close reading. My intent is to assay absence as a source of meaning and to understand, by extension, whether there are forms of reading not yet reproducible by machines. Perhaps these spaces — the blank ones, plus any other spaces beyond the enclosure of computation – deserve more of our attention.

In that spirit:

1.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Tr. Damion Searls (Liveright, 2024) pg. 181

This blank appears on page 181 of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the German philosopher’s masterwork, and the only book he published during his lifetime. The Tractatus takes the form of a series of numbered propositions (ex. “A logical image can depict the world”) that define the scope and limits of analytical logic. The blank in question is an important one; its upper edge borders text (the Tractatus’ famous and final pronouncement: “About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent”), and its bottom edge marks the end of the book.

What does this blank do? For one thing, it makes Wittgenstein’s Tractatus finite. It marks the conclusion of his thought. It permits his text to declare: I have said everything I intended to say, and now I surrender myself to you, the reader.

This is a funny maneuver for a work that seeks to be so totalizing in its precision, but it’s also appropriate: the Tractatus is about the limits of logic-in-the-form-of-language. The words on the page describe those limits, but the blanks are the limits.

Blanks, then, achieve what Wittgenstein’s language can only gesture toward. They are the silence of the “things we cannot speak.”

2.

Youn, Monica. “In the Passive Voice,” From From. (Graywolf Press, 2024) pg. 96

This blank is one of many blanks that stitch together Monica Youn’s “In the Passive Voice.” The poem, which is written in an inquisitive and uneasy first-person, threads a range of topics (sharks’ teeth, quantification, hate crimes, coins, Ovid, etc.) across forty-four pages. It’s a case study in Hannah Arendt’s observation that “Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is brought about poetically.”

Strangely, though, the paragraphs in “Passive Voice” don’t quite fit together. If a thrifty and overzealous editor were to compress the poem into a continuous essay, without breaks, Youn’s clarity of style might be enough to whisk the reader from top to bottom, but the piece would lose its perplexing unity of thought. That effect comes not from the text per se but from its discontinuities. It happens in the blank spaces.

Consider the above. The line of text above this blank is a comment on the grammatical tense of a previous line: “‘Is assumed’ is in the passive voice,” Youn writes. On the page following the blank, Youn writes about Korean Americans’ role as a demographic buffer for white-vs-black racial violence.

It’s a change of subject — sort of. But Youn’s note about passive vs. active verb tenses avoids getting lost in the transition to other matters, since the sizable blank that follows this remark gives it space and time to breathe. As a result, in the paragraphs to come (and the discussions of systemic violence therein), the reader is extra attentive to verbs and subjects and the ways that the passive voice can obscure harm and responsibility.

The use of blanks in Youn’s poem allows her ideas to hang loose at one end, which allows us (the readers) to grab them. It makes them into strands for our own weaving. The reason we don’t see Youn pulling everything together is that she isn’t the one doing the pulling. What she has done is provided the materials, and, just as importantly, enough empty space to work in. The best magicians let the audience do magic for them.

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3.

Blank rotated 90º clockwise

The Economist, 15 March 2025 (pg. 36-7).

This blank from The Economist’s March 15^th issue links two articles about econometrically dubious claims to a “revolution” in Ethiopian wheat production (pg. 36) and reports of the worsening conditions for civil war in precarious South Sudan (pg. 37). These events don’t seem to have any causal relationship – at least, none that’s mentioned in the text. But their inclusion in the same section (Middle East & Africa) and issue (March 15^th) of the magazine implies that they are relevant to the same readers for the same reason: they’re world news.

The idea that “the world” encompasses Ethiopian wheat, South Sudanese guns, and readers of The Economist seems obvious. Such is the unspoken logic of world news: that there is one world (i.e., the globe), and the goings-on in any single part of it can be the concern of anybody, anywhere else.

This wasn’t always self-evident. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the new media forms of the novel and the newspaper changed how people thought about time and space. By putting simultaneous but apparently unrelated events on the same page, novels and newspapers created a shared frame of reference in which those events (and the people involved) could be seen (and could see themselves) as participants in a common timeline. Simultaneity became a source of shared identity. This allowed the useful fiction of “the nation” to be conjured from people who, for all purposes, lived in totally different realities.

Anderson’s account suggests that national identity emerged as a sort of literary fiction. Perhaps our global frame of reference arose in similar ways. But if this impression of a linked destiny was once fictional, it is a fiction that has proven self-fulfilling. Ethiopian wheat is connected to South Sudanese conflict, and both are connected to readers of financial magazines. What links the events in these pages is the web of global capital that The Economist, liberalism’s most loyal periodical, has cheered into existence.

This universalizing work happens outside the text, in the empty spaces that join scattered reports and make them into a single story. What this blank represents is the flow of money that encircles our planet; what it asserts is that capitalism is coterminous with the world.

4.

Grocery List (May 8^th, 2026)

This blank separates the sections of my last week’s grocery list: produce and dairy are above the space, and dry/canned goods are below. I learned the technique from my fiancée. Dividing a bunch of ingredients into related categories lets me move through the grocery store and cross items off my list one bunch at a time. No need to zig-zag from bell peppers past aisles one through eight to parmesan cheese, and then back to nab the cilantro.

Not exactly rocket science. But I used to list ingredients in the order that they appeared in the week’s three or four recipes, and my trips to the store would take twice as long. Now, entries of one yellow onion and two yellow onions become a single entry of three yellow onions, right next to the kale. Separate recipes become one big, undifferentiated haul.

What does this blank do? It gives order to a mundane task and saves me time on a Sunday morning. You could even say it creates a correspondence between the structure of the list and the layout of the store.

But set aside the clever stuff. What really matters, for the purposes of this evening, is that I have forgotten the shallots, and that the blank allows my beloved to fill in this oversight with her looping script before the list goes from the refrigerator door to my back pocket. With text, as with one’s own life, it is the empty spaces that allow other people to enter, and to make it their own.

Peter Schmidt is Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn.

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On January 26th, Pope Leo XIV announced that the theme for this year’s World Day of Social Communications would be “Preserving Human Voices and Faces.” In a brief and elegant message, the Holy See warned against the dangers of AI and attention capture technologies dominating our digital media landscape. The challenge before us, he writes, “is not technological, but anthropological.”

The World Day of Social Communications was announced in 1967 by Pope Paul VI to celebrate the role of new media technologies in spreading the Gospel. If this purpose seems at odds with the Church’s traditionalist orientation, that’s the point. The fifty-year history of the campaign is a kind of long-running acknowledgement that, in the face of technological change, “a merely censorious attitude on the part of the Church … is neither sufficient nor appropriate.” As Pope Pius XII argued in 1957, media technologies are “gifts of God.”

In that light, Leo’s recent announcement strikes a notably alarming tone. Across two-thousand-some words, his message is an effective and concise rundown of digital technology’s threats to human flourishing. AI systems’ ability to produce texts, music, and videos turns us into “passive consumers of unthought thoughts.” The unconditional affection of chatbots risks deteriorating the fundamental goodness of human relationship. And machine learning systems have proven to reproduce the bias of their makers (is Leo reading Safiya Noble?). He even condemns the media companies that service “algorithms designed to capture a few extra seconds at any cost.”

In response to these harms, the Pope calls for greater responsibility from corporate and political leaders, widespread cooperation to implement safeguards, and education aimed at a healthier culture of communication.

So far, so good. But what’s most impressive about Leo’s message is the elegance of his central claim: “Faces and voices are sacred.” God created us in his image, he writes, and to confuse the human likeness for its digital simulacra is to invite the dissolution of human relationship altogether.

Broadly speaking, the genre of tech criticism tends to deploy a kind of rigorous, methodical thinking that meets the scientific rationalism of Big Tech on its own turf. Leo’s readiness to invoke “sacredness” without any apparent need for justification shows the special ability of religious thought to rise above that critical tug of war and reveal its limitations.

“We need faces and voices to speak for people again,” he writes. In doing so, Leo makes a decisive comment on techno-accelerationist speculations about AI as a window into the divine: When we are talking with the machines, he suggests, we are not talking with God. He also returns our attention to a simple fact: no matter what you call it, the humanity that we are trying to protect is right here, waiting to be beheld, in the presence of the person beside you.

Leo’s message – one of the first of his pontificate – could not be better-timed. As public discourse around AI widens in its senseless gyre, the announcement is a reminder for the faithful and the secular alike that, in the blast zone of our splintering reality, institutions committed to absolute truths are uniquely equipped to contain the damage.

— Peter Schmidt
Editor-in-Chief

GREEN light filled the harbor and intensified with the opening chords of a song sounding from Sydney’s Opera House steps.

I stood with a couple of colleagues from Appstinence, an advocacy group that helps communities quit technologies designed to be addictive. We visited Sydney the week that Australia’s new social media age restriction went into effect and met with civil society organizers, government staffers, and youth founders. On December 10th, we were invited to a celebration with some of the advocates who helped push the policy through. This group was composed mostly of parents, some of whom lost children to online harms, and others who have worked to raise their children away from attention-fracking products.

“Free concert,” mused one of the fathers. Turning to us Americans, he explained, “This guy is an Australian rock legend.”

It was 8 p.m. The celebration of the new law had begun right on time. A message was projected onto both bases of the bridge:

As a light, springtime rain fell, I observed the children standing beside us: five siblings from elementary school-age to sixteen, all being raised without smartphones. Then I drifted back to my colleagues. One of them was teary eyed, and the other leaned over the barricade, looking pensive. I let my mind wander, too, to my teenage self, to my friends, what we didn’t know as we bounced between screens, to the skills we missed out on and the discontent we grew into. Then back to where we are now — off all social media, and more peaceful at present, but certainly still carrying the weight of my digital adolescence.

A better path stood before us. Those five little ones, now huddled closely in a circle, prefigured a different kind of upbringing that had, with this win, become far more attainable — at least for a few million young Australians.

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EVERY day for a week on that trip, my two colleagues and I stopped locals in public space to ask their thoughts on the new Online Safety Amendment. This groundbreaking law, which went into effect on December 10th, prohibits minors under 16 from owning accounts on major social media platforms.

We questioned Aussies of all ages about this policy, which is the first of its kind in the world. When primed to think about the law itself, some locals questioned the efficacy or flagged certain details; their minor misgivings have been covered pretty extensively in the press to date. But that’s far from the full story.

The ban came up in conversation with an Uber driver early on in our trip. At the first mention of the law, our car was filled with an uncertain silence before we explained that we were in support of the legislation. He sighed and said, “Oh, good. Me too. I was scared to say it first.” He continued, “I’m glad that they’re doing this.”

Over the next few days, it became clear that this was a common sentiment. Despite the media’s critical coverage so far, we kept seeing expressions of pride — pride for their country’s status as the first to make such a bold move against social media companies. We saw cautious optimism, too: that plenty of kids will actually wait until later to create accounts, and that many may decide against it altogether by the time they’re of age.

Naturally, our discussions covered people’s personal relationships to apps like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. Having spoken to at least a hundred strangers, I saw a common thread. Like in the States, Sydney’s young people and parents are weary of attention-stealing feeds, and they’re concerned about emerging tech like AI chatbots. We met high school and college-aged Aussies who’ve already quit Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok, for all sorts of reasons. A woman in her early 20s shared that she was groomed as a minor; a 17-year-old boy just “didn’t like what the apps were doing” to his brain.

We met far more who hadn’t quite pulled the trigger, but wanted to — like a young schoolteacher who had just moved to the city from Italy; she stayed on Instagram begrudgingly to find events, but she questioned whether the few she found justified the use. Still, people like her were eager for a world where they didn’t need to rely on “enshittified” networks to make plans with friends or flirt with each other. I’m 25 myself, and I know that many in our generation wish some platforms never existed in the first place.

Over the course of the trip, I came to understand the ban in a new light: above all, it is an emphatic stance against products designed to exploit users for profit. Having such an explicit societal standard can motivate further forms of activism: lawsuits, sure, but also collective agreements about the proper use of tech, and new forms of social togetherness as well.

Towards the end of our trip, we hosted a small public workshop in which we discussed ways to make the most of this opportunity. What structures, we wondered, can we build to sustain richer social lives offline, where attention can flourish? A few of the ideas I jotted down: having groups of parents commit to delaying access to coercive tech; teaching kids about digital spaces earlier so they can make more informed, intentional decisions; public campaigns that encourage people to leave their smartphones at home (Australia has a free phone system); and free play initiatives that make the most of carefully designed physical space.

FLYING back to the season’s first snowfall in New York, I was eager to keep moving with the tech resistance scene we’ve been growing here at home. The situation in Australia underscores the importance of a multipronged approach: policy alone, or education alone, or culture alone will never be enough. It’s the mutual reinforcement of these intersecting initiatives and organizations that will make a difference at the necessary scale. The task before us is to weave together diverse efforts so we all may leap into a powerful, unified global movement.

Nick Plante is a Brooklyn-based organizer and community educator. He advocates for social infrastructure free from Big Tech and hosts events around the country to foster deeper agency and connection. His column, On the Ground, follows current activist efforts against extractive technology.

In this Special Dispatch, writer and Zen practitioner Sal Randolph, a long-time Friend of Attention, journeys through reflections on attention in Zen practice by way of the Japanese zuihitsu form. Zuihitsu, translated as “following the brush,” loosely joins fragments of poetry, personal essays, and quotations to articulate wanderings of the mind. Randolph invites readers into new methods of looking in her memoir, The Uses of Art, and her substack, Free Words.

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I’ve just returned from a week-long silent Zen retreat, a sesshin. My Zen group, the Village Zendo, holds these retreats every year, beginning the day after Christmas and ringing in the new year with 108 bells. I’ve been going to them since 2012.

Zen practice has seasons and rhythms. In addition to daily sitting, there are periods of intensified practice known as ango (安居) or peaceful dwelling, held twice a year in Japan, summer and winter. The tradition goes back to the time of the Buddha in Northern India where monks and nuns often traveled for much of the year but came together during months of the rainy season.

Within an ango, there are multi-day sesshins. Sesshin, (接心) or gathering the heart-mind, is a time of all day zazen (sitting meditation), alternating with kinhin (walking meditation). Noble silence is practiced, with the forgoing of any speech outside of necessary communication. Meals are silent and inwardly focused, and a meditative quality is kept during samu (work practice), chanting ceremonies, Zen talks, and individual meetings with teachers.

During sesshin, we sit eight or nine periods of zazen each day. There’s an effort to it, of course, but also a luxury. Your preoccupations have time to flourish into great entangling hedges of thorns and then to exhaust themselves and return to earth. The sweetness of bare earth.

—

When I teach beginning meditation, new students often think they are going to be learning a form of concentration, a way to focus the mind and eliminate distractions, a taming of attention. Surprisingly, the classic Zen texts have little to say about attention. Other traditions, like the Tibetan Vajrayana or Theravada Jhyana practice, lead students through a succession of exercises in concentration and focus, but Zen takes a simpler approach.

In the essay “Fukanzazengi” (“Recommending Zazen to All People”), written in 1233, Eihei Dogen offers instructions for the proper way to arrange the body, finding a quiet room, using a cushion, sitting upright in the lotus or half-lotus posture. As for the mind in zazen, he says simply: “Now sit steadfastly and think not-thinking. How do you think not-thinking? Beyond thinking. This is the essential art of zazen.”

Beyond thinking!

Here, Dogen is quoting the great teacher Yaoshan Weiyan (745-827), who once said these words in answer to a monk who asked about thoughts during meditation. That conversation became a koan, a dialog for students to contemplate, one that can help them leap clear of dualistic thought.

—

By contrast here’s another koan:

One day a man of the people said to Zen Master Ikkyu: “Master, will you please write for me some maxims of the highest wisdom?”

Ikkyu immediately took his brush and wrote the word “Attention.”

“Is that all?” asked the man. “Will you not add something more?”

Ikkyu then wrote twice running: “Attention. Attention.”

“Well,” remarked the man rather irritably, “I really don’t see much depth

or subtlety in what you have just written.”

Then Ikkyu wrote the same word three times running: “Attention.

Attention. Attention.”

Half angered, the man demanded: “What does that word ‘Attention’ mean

anyway?”

And Ikkyu answered gently: “Attention means attention.”

This koan appears in the book The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau, which was first published in 1965. Kapleau cites a source, but no one has been able to follow that citation successfully, so there are those who wonder if Kapleau may have invented the story himself.

—

For me, zazen has no particular form of attention or state of mind. I experience many states of mind and heart as I sit, and no two periods of meditation are ever alike. I appreciate the movements of my own attention and the constant flow of thought and feeling. I follow my breath going in and out, and in the same way, thoughts and sensations arise and dissipate. I like to approach whatever appears with curiosity. Oh! That’s what’s on my mind. Oh! That’s how I’m feeling.

—

“Beyond thinking” is the translation of a curious Japanese word, hishiryo (非思量). Thinking is shiryo (思量), not-thinking is fushiryo (不思量). The prefix hi (非) implies negation and opposition (in- non- un-), and hishiryo is variously rendered by English translators as “beyond thinking,” “non-thinking” and “before thinking.”

One translation I especially like is “spacious thinking.”

—

One of my favorite forms of attention during zazen is something like the free-floating attention described by Freud. He calls it an “evenly suspended attention,” (gleichschwebend) a field of attention that doesn’t concentrate or attempt to fix the mind on any particular thing.

For me, the experience is of hovering, of overhearing one’s own thoughts and sensations as if they are a conversation going on in another room. Sometimes I think of it as equalizing the pressure between inside and out. A feeling in my knee, a sound from outside, the fragment of a thought, light entering my pupils, an emotion rising in my chest.

—

Floating, hovering.

“Sick on a journey, my dream hovers over withered fields” (Basho)

Dream self, ghost self.

A light awareness.

Thoughts and fragments of thoughts.

Butter yellow of the wood floor, thin pine boards.

Not one color, many yellows—amber, mustard, straw.

—

Case 19 of the Gateless Gate

Joshu asked Nansen, “What is the Way?”

“Ordinary mind is the Way,” Nansen replied.

“Shall I try to seek after it?” Joshu asked.

“If you try for it, you will become separated from it,” responded Nansen

.
“How can I know the Way unless I try for it?” persisted Joshu.

Nansen said, “The Way is not a matter of knowing or not knowing. Knowing is delusion; not knowing is confusion. When you have really reached the true Way beyond doubt, you will find it as vast and boundless as outer space. How can it be talked about on the level of right and wrong?”

With these words, Joshu came to a sudden realization.

—

The Platform Sutra of Huineng (638-713), the sixth Chinese ancestor of Zen, says, “One Practice Samadhi means at all times, whether walking, standing, sitting, or lying down, always practicing with a straightforward mind.”

Samadhi is a Sanskrit word meaning awareness or absorption. In some meditation traditions, samadhi implies an intense and undistracted focus. In Zen, samadhi is straightforward mind, ordinary mind, the mind flowing freely.

Huineng says:

Deluded people who cling to the external attributes of a dharma get hold of One Practice Samadhi and just say that sitting motionless, eliminating delusions, and not thinking thoughts are One Practice Samadhi. But if that were true, a dharma like that would be the same as lifelessness and would constitute an obstruction of the Way instead. The Way has to flow freely. Why block it up? The Way flows freely when the mind doesn’t dwell on any dharma. Once it dwells on something, it becomes bound.

—

One evening during sesshin I felt myself hot and messy over an incident. Self-justifying conversations were tumbling in my head. Each time these thoughts spoke they provoked more feeling, and the feeling, in turn, provoked more thoughts. I didn’t want to spend my evening in a cycle of silent imaginary conversations and intensified misery.

I rarely try to control my mind during zazen, but in this case, I wanted to do something. A passage from Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind came to me. He says, “To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.” Give your animal, your mind, more space, not less.

He goes on to say, “to concentrate your mind on something is not the true purpose of Zen. The true purpose is to see things as they are, to observe things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes. This is to put everything under control in its widest sense.”

In that moment on sesshin, I remembered his image not as a cow or sheep, but as a horse in a paddock. I pictured restive horses in a small fenced corral, unhappy at their confinement. I opened the gate and offered these horses a huge area, an expansive pasture, and they moved easily away from the troubling imagined conversations.

I asked myself what gave horses pleasure and ease, and I thought of lush grasses, of sun and shade, of the companionship of the herd, of a flowing stream of water. The horses became an image of my own attention, and at the same time they carried my attention with them as they ambled and snuffled in the grasses.

I let my attention loose to move freely towards the things which pleased it: the texture of the floor, the rustle of someone shifting nearby, the sound of my own breath. My attention wandered in its own wide pasture.

Naturally, there were moments when the conversations in my head began again, and I asked my horses why they wanted to go to the edge of the pasture where there were wolves just beyond the fence. Reminded of their sense of possibility, the horses naturally moved back towards the copse of trees and the deep grass. They settled again.

—

Awareness of the room, of the space of the room, seated bodies in the room.

Hush of the ventilation system, a no-sound sound.

Breath coming in, breath coming out. Nothing moving except the breath.

—

I feel there’s a good reason that attention and the experience of zazen are not much spoken of in Zen circles. Any description of one person’s experience is likely to seem as if it’s meant to be a model, a way for others to go forward, a kind of prescription.

Since the retreat, my horses have galloped off into unforeseen spaces. Herds and groupings have dissolved and reformed. Right now, even as I am writing this, I do not know where all of my attention is. Some of my attention is concentrated in my fingers typing, and on the words as they appear. Some of my mind is rehearsing or remembering my relationship to the School of Radical Attention, its people and its histories. Some of my awareness is in my bodily sensations and emotions. Some thread of curiosity is still puzzling out meanings from Zen texts. The horses are roaming, and I have no mind to hinder them.

It was hard to be an environmental activist a hundred years ago, because back then there was no “environment.” That’s not to say there was no air or water or soil — those had been around for some time already. But the idea that these material surroundings made up a single system, and that this system’s health was the precondition for the health of human — all that had yet to be commonly understood in such explicit terms (at least in Western thought). This way of seeing the world achieved a new social forcefulness in the mid-century as a nascent counterculture dipped its toes in Eastern philosophy and indigenous cosmologies and visionary advocates like Rachel Carson sounded the alarm about the deadly consequences of industrial pollution. A full account is the historian’s remit, but the story is simple enough: the environment became an idea, and also a thing out in the world that people could point to, and talk about, and also protect.

There’s the key. The conceptualization of the environment occasioned a political movement that put bayou duck hunters, West Coast hippies, middle-America housewives, and white shoe lawyers on the same improbable team. These groups all had one thing in common: they understood that the health of the environment was in some way constitutive of their well-being. The blockbuster series of federal regulatory victories they scored over the subsequent decade shows just how powerful that simple insight was. To organize around a thing, people need to agree that it exists. For the environment to be political, it first had to be thinkable.

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Something similar is happening now, although this time, it’s with our attention. Yes, we’ve had that word for centuries. But we are coming to see the political and existential valences of attention in new and transformative ways. As in the mid-twentieth century, we are learning to value our attention at the very moment we seem to be losing it. The multi-trillion dollar business model that’s fracking our eyeballs for salable “time on device” wreaks plenty of harm, but it comes with an upside: we are able, in our own exploitation, to say, Hey! Something’s wrong here. Part of me is hurting. What is that part of me? And why does it seem to touch… everything?

The central place of attention in our lives is newly thinkable, as we see its role in basic flourishing – of individuals, and of communities. Not only that: it’s becoming broadly recognizable as a politically tractable object. The constellation of groups that is forming around this new political center, a formation we call Attention Activism, is in its earliest stages. But it is stirring.

Every movement needs a rallying cry. In the 1960s, it was ECOLOGY NOW!, which lifted the Greek compound from 19th century German zoology and hoisted it high enough to stand for a broad political commitment to the material interconnectedness of beings and things. We propose a parallel phrase for the present moment: ATTENSITY NOW! Once a technical scientific term, attensity now encompasses a budding cultural sensibility to the unity and the lifegiving powers of our mental and sensory lives.

Attensity is the ecology of our immaterial being. It is a collective response to the ruin of our inner world, just as ecology was (and still is!) a response to the ruin of the planet. We will need both to survive.

Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement is available for preorder now. All our proceeds from its sale will support the work of the non-profit School of Radical Attention.

All of our readers in the New York metro area are warmly invited to join us for the Attensity! Launch Party at 7pm on Tuesday, January 20th in Manhattan’s historic Judson Church.

How do you imagine the route between, say, a friend’s apartment and your favorite park?

Is it a single, fixed path? Does it change from day to day? Do you picture it from a bird’s eye view? Is it oriented with north at the top?

Artist Nobuta Aozaki explored this question in his performance piece From Here to There (2012 - 2014). He asked strangers for directions — “How do I get to Astor Place from here?” — and collected their sketches on scraps of paper, receipts, and napkins. He then stitched this collection into a composite map: a patchwork journey from Wall Street, to Alphabet City, to Central Park, to Washington Heights, drawn entirely through other people’s eyes. The resulting route is a long and meandering city re-imagined through hundreds of hands. Streets were bent and warped — not a display of a failed or erroneous geography, but of personal geographies, shaped by everyday experience. Every sketch was a small act of generosity. Someone paused in their day, thought about where they were, and translated that knowledge into a line. Aozaki mapped connection and relation to reveal that finding your way takes more than knowing the coordinates of your destination. Moving through space, in other words, isn’t just about space: it’s also about who helps you move through it, and what they point out as they bring you along.

The idea that mapping begins with attention has always been core to my creative practice. Cartography isn’t just about precision, but also about curation and composition and subjectivity: each of these choices are deliberate, not neutral. To attend differently is to orient differently to the world.

The maps we are familiar with today are oriented north-up, a convention borne from histories of Eurocentric navigation and colonial expansion. But this convention is relatively recent, and variations in the way we orient our maps have subtle but significant psychological and political implications. The global north developed a visual hierarchy and disguised it as a cartographic norm. Many maps, including millennia worth of indigenous and non-western cartography, orient maps downstream of river paths, communicating how communities document their knowledge and relationships. Urban pedestrian maps may be oriented “heads-up” so that the direction you’re facing in real life maps to the top of the sign, improving usability rather than enforcing cartographic convention. Reorienting our maps can reveal new relationships. These choices are philosophical: they tell us which way is “forward.” Orientation is a quiet but decisive act of storytelling.

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Research shows that when we construct cognitive maps, we tend not to place north at the top of our visualizations. In one study participants navigating a campus environment oriented themselves relative to the road grid, not true cardinal north. When a map is oriented to show your path toward your favourite park rather than true north, it’s a map of your lived knowledge, just like the maps that Aozaki quilted into a larger cartographic consciousness.

Maps like to promise objectivity: they flatten our world to a threshold of “agreed upon” truths. But they hardly match the embodied knowledge we carry when navigating familiarity and unfamiliarity. Cartography, at its best, and when done with others, as in Aozaki’s participatory artwork, reminds us that mapping is relational; that relation and attention determine what direction we orient as forward. Forget latitude and longitude: let the persons and places that sustain you be your North Star and let attention be your compass.

Queenie Wu is a creative technologist & educator using cartography to playfully interrogate spatial data, and how they inform our relationships and memories of shared surroundings. Equipped with the medium of maps as a research process, she grows her practice as a current Steve Jobs Archive fellow, past member of NEW INC, and soon IMA Low-Residency grad at NYU.

Last month, President Trump issued an executive order Prosecuting Burning of the American Flag. It reads:

Our great American Flag is the most sacred and cherished symbol of the United States of America, and of American freedom, identity, and strength. Over nearly two-and-a-half centuries, many thousands of American patriots have fought, bled, and died to keep the Stars and Stripes waving proudly. The American Flag is a special symbol in our national life that should unite and represent all Americans of every background and walk of life. Desecrating it is uniquely offensive and provocative. It is a statement of contempt, hostility, and violence.

As it happens, flag burning is protected by the First Amendment. The legal logic of Trump’s chest-thumping order relies on the sole carveout of this Constitutional protection, a legacy of the landmark case Texas v. Johnson (1989) in which the Supreme Court ruled that an act of flag desecration was not protected if it could be shown to incite violence. The implication in the final line quoted above — that flag burning is intrinsically violent — hints at Trump’s eagerness to interpret this exception as broadly and punitively as possible. (To no one’s surprise, his order takes extra pains to threaten immigrants and foreign nationals with blocked or revoked visas, and even deportation.) Hours after the ink dried on the order, a 54-year-old Army veteran named Jan Carey was arrested for burning an American flag in protest near the White House. Carey was served two federal criminal charges; he has pleaded not guilty to both.

Anyone even modestly familiar with American history will know that Trump’s order and Carey’s response stand in a long line of legal and cultural battles over the sanctity of the Stars and Stripes. Though this fact may seem obvious, it is not unreasonable to wonder at all the fuss over a patch of fabric. Why is the flag such a big deal?

Trump’s order offers one answer: the flag symbolizes the nation and its most important principles. Because Americans have fought and died under the flag, it is a uniquely sanctified object and any act that desecrates it is “uniquely offensive.” This is standard fare. But let’s pause where Trump’s declarative mode gives way to a more open-ended prescriptiveness: “The American Flag is a special symbol in our national life that should unite and represent all Americans…”

Should unite and represent. Why “should”? That word prompts all kinds of questions. Does the flag not unite and represent all Americans? Why not? Is this a failure of the flag, or of the people to whom it belongs? What is the gap between how things should be and how things are? And who decided that the flag should be uniting and representing in the first place?

I am not accustomed to seeing myself in President Trump’s pronouncements, but I’ll admit that this line occasioned a weird shiver of recognition. In my eyes, the flag is defined by this “should” — by the gap between what it is and what it ought to be. At times, that gap has seemed so wide that I forgot it could be crossed. I forgot, in other words, that the flag could serve political futures other than the one it’s currently serving.

This is a shame, but it’s true. During the ten-or-so years during which I became a politically minded person, I have seen enthusiasm for the Stars and Stripes more or less cornered by a vision of the US that I flatly reject: imperialistic, xenophobic, reflexively anti-intellectual, and mired in what looks to me like white supremacist nostalgia. At some point, I concluded that the flag really did stand for that vision of the country, and that the flag was not for me — that I was even, in some vague way, against it. I suspect this story applies to lots of folks of my political bent, especially the ones my age. At some of the parties I go to in Brooklyn, it is not exactly cool to wear an American flag pin on your shirt. You are going to get some uneasy looks.

Here’s the problem: that vision, the one I reject, appears increasingly cozy in the seat of power, and its claim to the flag seems increasingly secure. What’s even harder to stomach is that my irreverence has played into that fact, since accepting as inevitable that the flag represents a political project I can’t abide is nothing less than an act of surrender. For better or for worse, the future of the United States is going to be imagined and brought to pass in the idiom of the United States, using the symbols and the stories that have been handed to us from a complex past. By rejecting these symbols, I excuse myself from the conversation. By neglecting to insist upon a vision of the country that I can love, I’ve forfeited any claim to its future.

The solution is not to create new symbols; it’s a willingness to imagine our old symbols anew. That means reimagining how those symbols work — how they convey meaning, and how we stake a claim to that meaning. To create a livable future without abandoning our past, we need to rethink what the flag is for.

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Let’s start with flags in general, and with their more straightforward functions as an attentional signal par excellence: for centuries, they have served as a signaling technology on the battlefield, or at sea. In the chaos of war, before militaries put eyes in the sky, flying standards were a way of marking territory and orienting soldiers across contested terrain. On the open ocean, yellow flags came to signal quarantined passengers, and white flags came to signal a truce. In 1857, the British Commercial Code of Signals became the first internationally adapted flag alphabet, with a set of 18 pennants that combined to express over 70,000 symbols — a sophisticated system of attentional semiotics that is still in use today. This kind of flag is useful precisely to the extent that it is unambiguous; you do not want to end up on the wrong side of a trench war, or to confuse an onboard smallpox outbreak with an invitation to parlay. Clarity is king.

National flags work differently: their function arises from a sort of charismatic ambiguity. When the point is to bring people together, the most powerful flag is the one that can rally the most people. This requires a meaning so diffuse it is effectively in the eye of the beholder. Or, even better, in the “I” of the beholder — since the best way to rally someone around a flag is to claim that it represents them.

Historian George L. Mosse tells the story of how this distinctly modern behavior emerged. By his account, the rise of the nation-state replaced the will of the king with the “general will” of the people. The novel notion of popular sovereignty became the object of the “secular religion” of nationalism — in which the people of a nation worshiped themselves.

Mosse is a historian of Germany (and a refugee of the Nazi regime) whose work traces the rise of the nationalist energies that culminated in the Third Reich. He argues that the rise of fascism can be understood as the rise of a new “political style” that drew upon myths and symbols to enchant and unite a fragmented nation. “Symbols were visible, concrete objectifications of the myths in which people could participate,” he writes, and fascism was “a theology which provided the framework for national worship.” A brief tour through Nazi rally footage will show how important a role flags played in these theatrics, and how intoxicating the overall effect seemed to be. We know the dangers, too.

A symbol may supposedly represent the will of the people, but that’s no guarantee that the people will be interested in it. For nearly a century following the conception of the United States, the American flag was the object of remarkably little attention, much less devotion. In fact, few could agree on what, exactly, the flag was supposed to look like: how many stripes, with what colors, in what configuration. (In 1847, a representative of the Dutch government reportedly inquired, “What is the American flag?”) Before the Civil War you were unlikely to find a flag displayed in a state or local government building, and you wouldn’t find one in a private home. From its adoption in 1777, a full sixty-three years passed before the flag appeared in a presidential campaign (William Henry Harrison’s), and seventy-seven years passed before it was used as dissent (by Boston Abolitions, who flew it upside down to protest the Fugitive Slave Act).

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It was only in 1861, when Confederate troops fired on the flag-bedecked Fort Sumter, that Americans (the unionist ones, at least) rushed to fly it from their windows. “When the stars and stripes went down at Sumter, they went up in every town and county in the loyal states” and developed a “new and strange significance,” writes historian George Preble. Curiously, the symbol of American unity went mainstream on the occasion of the country tearing itself apart.

The decades following the Civil War saw the rise of a flag protection movement (FPM) whose members exhibited a nationalist zeal of near-theological intensity. In the words of pamphleteer and FPM leader Charles Kingsbury Miller, the United States “must develop, define and protect the cult of her flag, and the symbol of that cult — the Star Spangled Banner — must be kept inviolate as are the emblems of all religions.” This movement, mostly composed of union veterans and patriotic-hereditary organizations like the Sons and Daughter of the American Revolution, went about pushing anti-desecration laws in every state of the war-weary union. The legal battles they set in motion persist today at the gates of the White House.

It’s little surprise that a flag whose supposed sacredness came from its ability to represent “true” Americans would fly over a blatantly nativist project: in 1890, an FPM leader urged flag rituals in schools as a way to resist the “evils and dangers” posed by the “human scum cast on our shores by the tidal wave of a vast immigration.” By Miller’s complaint: “We observe our flag no longer protected by the sentiment of a century ago, but treated with open disrespect… [by] the multitude of uneducated foreigners who land on our friendly shores.” Trump was hardly the first to use the flagpole as a nativist cudgel.

And then there was the Ku Klux Klan. In August of 1925, forty thousand Klansmen hoisted the red, white, and blue aloft as they processed down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. This sort of spectacle is hard to unsee.

It’s striking, then, to heed how proudly civil rights activists displayed the flag in their March on Washington thirty-eight years later. As Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King claimed to make good on the “promissory note” of the nation’s founders, one could suppose that the uncashed check was fluttering, right there, between some 250,000 human bodies and a sweltering March sky.

This was, to put it mildly, an unreasonable claim on the symbol. There’s little doubt that, at that time, the flag had a deeper history as a symbol for white supremacist ends than it did as a symbol of racial plurality. As Frederick Douglass noted in his famous July 4^th address, the power of slaveholders “is co-extensive with the star-spangled banner.” But Douglass knew (or else he would not have bothered with his address) that symbols like the flag are not about reason. King and the marchers understood that they were flying in the face of history; that was precisely the point. Their example has plenty to teach us.

What the flag demands is that we rise above the weight of our past and the tug of contrary evidence and insist on its meaning. This is a creative act. There’s a reason we call the US a national project; everybody gets to say what the symbol of America means, and then to make it so. Theorists of democracy have long observed the funny paradox that plurality produces unity: if you and I have different ideas about what the flag stands for, then we have different ideas. But we have the same flag.

The shortcomings of the interpretive approach are especially evident on the political Left. In 2024, the Guardian ran an essay by Derecka Purnell criticizing Beyoncé’s deployment of the flag in her Cowboy Carter country album, arguing that the artist’s “pride in the flag is misplaced.” Purnell details the long abuses inflicted on Black Americans, sometimes in the name of the flag itself. She is right on all counts, except for the assumption that the flag is identical to those abuses. Symbols are meant to be reclaimed and reappropriated. They will always have a history, but we can decide that they have a future, too. The first step toward making a symbol (indeed, a country) belong to you is by insisting that it does. To conflate a symbol with its past is to entomb it – and as Beyoncé demonstrates, flags are meant to fly.

This requires care. On one hand, we look at the flag and see only its brutal history. On the other, we look at the flag and see nothing at all. Michael Billig, an academic, argues that the function of the American flag is to be so common as to become invisible. The real sign of national power is not a passionately waved banner, he argues, but one that hangs, unnoticed, above a post office. Placing flags everywhere – what he calls “flagging the homeland” – is a strategy by which established states like the US assert a “banal nationalism” that hides in plain sight. Once we stop seeing the Stars and Stripes, they become unquestionable, and the state power that they represent appears inevitable. Beware the extremes: whether we worship the flag (in Mosse’s account) or ignore it (Billig’s), the perils of nationalism are never far off.

The trick is to see the flag just right: as an object with a history to be weighed, a power to be tempered, and a future to be determined. Artists can help us in this respect: the paintings of Jasper Johns and David Hammons and the performances of Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar insist upon the flag as an object of close attention. Johns calls attention to the flag’s formal contradictions (as both image and object) while Beyoncé and Lamar make claims to the flag in the name of Black Americans; Hammons does both. These works model how to suspend certainty and inhabit the gap between what the flag is and what it could be. To see the should not as a failure but as an invitation. To accept the terrain of contestation that opens up, and to understand that terrain as a kind of homeland – possibly one worth loving. This is a useful way to think about a symbol. For that matter, it’s not a bad way to think about a country.

Peter Schmidt is the Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn and the editor-in-chief of the Empty Cup.

A growing community of organizers, activists, and motivated individuals are hitting the streets to push back against the forces of extractive tech. This wave of collective resistance is not just manifesting through traditional protests, though public demonstrations against companies like Meta, Apple, and Palantir are picking up. Rather, widely held feelings of frustration are motivating bolder and more inventive acts of defiance: carnivalesque parades and mass graffiti détournements of a reckless ad campaign, to name a few examples. The prevailing logic of these happenings is clear: the way to overcome an addictive and exploitative industry is to refuse it in favor of more humanizing alternatives.

To be an activist right now is to push outside of Big Tech’s imposed interfaces by practicing the forms of attention (shared, embodied, sustained, and so forth) to exercise full human agency against the coercive pressures of Zuck et al.

We talk a lot at SoRA about modeling other ways of being that “cannot be commodified.” That’s precisely what’s happening in public gatherings that invite participants to step out of their roles as data-generating consumers and instead step into those of high-agency people. Some of these events have ties to SoRA, with facilitators and other members of our community contributing—but it’s all happening spontaneously at the grassroots, with no single group in charge.

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A DELETE DAY IN THE PARK

I co-hosted a Delete Day two weeks ago in Tompkins Sq. Park. Delete Day was the kickoff to the “Time to Refuse” campaign, a grassroots effort in support of tech refusal through education and public events. Spearheaded by Appstinence, Reconnect, and The Anxious Generation, it has blossomed into an international effort with many groups collaborating and imbuing their perspectives. Our goal at this collaboration between various organizations, artists, and educators was to carve out spaces to live without certain platforms in solidarity with each other.

We opened the event to the public and relied heavily on word of mouth and direct invitations—chalk on the street, friends tabling with fliers, announcements yelled from passing Citibikes.

Attendees were handed booklets at the entrance of the green and then invited to sit around the makeshift stage. Facilitators started group discussions: Why are you here tonight? What will you do with the time you get back? These questions gave everyone space to think through alternative ways of keeping up with the news, staying in touch with friends, meeting new people, and more. Participants exchanged helpful resources as well, from local publications to recommendations of less exploitative digital spaces like Signal and Arena.

Once the picnic blanket circles filled up with some 80 to 100 people, one of my co-hosts, Gabriela, set the tone: “I see a burning desire for a better life,” she said, calling the day a milestone for collective action.

Our friend Jackie went on to lead everyone in a ritual, holding nothing back as she decried the shit our generation grew up through: “I want you to put your phone on your head,” she started as she paced through the crowd. “Feel that lithium ion battery in there … feel that chain of child labor … you’ve spent years of your life on this thing already — can you believe that?!”

As Jackie counted down from fifteen, participants brought their phones to hand and located the delete buttons of their respective apps. Deletion itself took an extra beat — these companies don’t make it easy with their verification codes, password confirmations, and subtle glitches. But soon enough, as the chorus of “wait a sec” and “hold on” subsided, we burst into a primal cheer.

Having rid myself of a stale LinkedIn account, I hopped between picnic blankets chanting “I deleted!” We fed off each other’s joy—which sprung not just from the act itself, but for the shared leap we’re taking, away from the status quo of over two decades, and towards each other.

Facilitators handed out cheeky “iDeleted” stickers while more participants shouted for all to share in their ecstasy: “I’m done with Hinge!” “No more TikTok!” At one point, someone from the Light Phone, a Brooklyn-based “dumbphone” company, jumped on stage. He had no apps to delete, but he came with two new devices to give away.

Many stayed after for a phone-free party with a game organized by my friend Sean of Reconnect. You could call it a form of “attention sanctuary,” a friendly cousin of no-screen school policies and unplugged bars like Hush Harbor in D.C. and the Powder Room in Austin.

Deletion and phone-free spaces open the door to lasting cultural shifts. If we can normalize these, we increase the extent of our agency amid the exploitative pressures of Big Tech. Think of these as small but significant acts of world building.

Nick Plante is a Brooklyn-based organizer and community educator. He advocates for more robust tech policy,and hosts events around the country to foster deeper agency and connection. His column, On the Ground, follows current activist efforts against extractive technology.

If you’re interested in hosting a Delete Day, or if you want to learn about more action surfacing on the ground, don’t hesitate to reach out!

On a sunny Saturday in August, twenty or so New Yorkers (strangers, lovers, friends; one person was from Jersey) gathered to walk the length of Manhattan. We met across the river in downtown Brooklyn, on a grassy corner nestled in the curve of a BQE off-ramp, then crossed the bridge and headed north: through Chinatown and SoHo, past Washington Square Park and Madison Square Park and Times Square and Columbus Circle and Central Park and Morningside Park, up past the elevated trains of 125^th Street, through a West Harlem sunset, into Washington Heights and then deeper into Washington Heights, right down to the entrance of Fort Tryon Park, from which point we processed, in a stately, spontaneous, and slightly awed silence, through the falling darkness, past the pitched lamps of open-air bingo and the tail end of a fifth birthday party, up the worn stone stairs along the curve of the hill as the shadowy undergrowth gave view to the wide, black Hudson and the moonlit paleness of the Palisades, and up and around, and up and around to what is very nearly the highest point on the island of Manhattan: a patch of grass known as the Cloisters Lawn. This is a total distance of some thirteen miles. It took us eight and a half hours. The weather was favorable; I doubt we would have made it had the day been even a few degrees hotter. Our assignment was to walk, and to think about the relationship between walking and thinking. A sort of moving seminar. A “study.” On foot.

Readers with a nose for stunts may sniff. “Walking and thinking” is a neat enough premise, but why not meet in a park? Or at the beach? And did we really have to go thirteen miles?

Right around 96^th Street, as I loosened the laces on my creaking boots, I, too, began to wonder.

But we had come for an investigation that merited 260 city blocks worth of rigor: What is the role of the academic traditions (reading, asking questions, thinking systematically, etc.; what you might call “study”) in our rapidly changing world?

This question, and the peculiar streetwise trajectory with which we approached it, began with the hypothesis that creating the conditions for an intellectual life at the present moment means looking beyond the sluggish structures of traditional schooling. Ubiquitous AI technologies, rampant anti-intellectualism, the pillorying of legacy institutions from all quarters, and the perverse economics of higher education (ICE recruitment ads now offer student-loan relief) are driving a phase shift in the relationship between inherited practices of study and the world of everyday life, between the inside and the outside of the classroom. In view of such changes, new configurations of these two zones must be tested. Have you ever read Guy Debord while skirting bus-tour hawkers and breakdancing buskers at 42^nd and Broadway? It is hard to get more “outside of the classroom” than that.

As Program Director of the experimental non-profit School of Radical Attention, I have a vocational commitment to this very question. Over the past few years, I’ve talked to artists, organizers and old-fashioned educators across the country who are testing new and known ways of bringing school out of the classroom and into everyday life. What these scattered, scrappy, and spirited efforts evince is a powerful desire to see the embattled traditions of collective study (from the sandal-clad Peripatetics circling the Acropolis to the Black Panther Liberation Schools) find their footing in a historical moment that has proven largely unfriendly to contemplative pursuits. You might say that study itself is searching for a new home. It, too, is on the move.

Study: the word wants context. On one level, its meaning is perfectly self-evident. If I tell you to study a poem, you’ll look at the poem, hard, for a while. You may not enjoy yourself, and you may not “get” anything from the text, but you certainly know how to go through the motions. The problem is that for most people, this version of study (solitary, compulsory, graded) conjures unhappy memories of No. 2 pencils and hand cramps and the ritual shame of standardized testing. Which, if we are interested in a future that people actually want, does not do us much good.

But there is another, increasingly popular, use of the word, one commonly associated with philosophers Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. In Moten’s words, “Study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – these are the various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.”

This sketch is a touchstone for many of the organizers I know, and captures nicely the spirit of a busy field of creative thinking that has opened up on this topic. It casts study as what happens when you lift the spirit of school (inquiry, community, intellectuality) from its corporeal form (budgets, hierarchy, standardization). No longer is a life of the mind limited to close readings of Levinas; shooting the shit on the factory floor can be just as deep.

That’s an attractive idea, especially for the many people who have felt their own intelligence belittled or neglected by formal school systems. Indeed, it seems obviously wrong that academic institutions should have an exclusive claim to serious thought. But Moten’s gloss is also undeniably slippery. If “study” is a way of indexing latent intellectuality, and if any activity is potentially intellectual, then study can mean anything at all – which is to say it means nothing. In this light, does study have anything to do with school? And does school have anything special to offer?

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The key, I think, is in that phrase, “speculative practice.” It’s a way of characterizing study that only begs further questions. What, after all, is speculative practice? One must speculate, practically. In other words, if you want to know what study is good for, don’t try to theorize it – just get down to business! Study is what you do with other people…

The week before our trek, I sent a handful of readings to the twenty-ish participants who had signed up online: excerpts from Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant cultural history of walking, James Baldwin’s meditation on the streets of Harlem, Guy Debord’s theory of the dérive, and Virginia Woolf’s tale of wandering through crepuscular London in search of a lead pencil. These are four authors who wrote about walking and who walked in order to think. I asked folks to read the full essays in advance, although I paired short passages with discussion prompts, each of which we would consider at one of the nine or so stops along our route: Do you believe that knowledge or truth is mobile? What are some ways that walking has been rationalized, mechanized, and disembodied? What is the relationship between movement and narrative?

On Saturday at 2pm, we gathered in Brooklyn. People arrived in pairs or alone, with backpacks or, in a few mystifying cases, appearing to carry absolutely nothing at all. I had a cooler bag full of sandwiches and a pile of packets. Folks formed a loose circle on the grassy slope, in the shade of a tree. When nearly everybody was present, I launched with a question: What sorts of activity can walking be? A friendly professor from the New School started us off: Walking can be pilgrimage. Walking can be therapy, said another. Trespassing. Protest, someone offered. A way to get around. A way to socialize. Entertainment. Exercise. Exodus.

That seemed like a good place to start. With a capacious sense of the task before us, we formed buddy pairs, distributed maps, identified our first rendezvous point, and set out. Across the street and up a flight of crowded stairs that opened onto the magnificent expanse of the Brooklyn Bridge. There, ahead, rose Manhattan.

Yet whatever naïve hopes I had for a smooth synthesis of seminar and ramble were promptly dispelled. Within minutes, the lead pair had disappeared into the tourist throngs ahead, and two other pairs had fallen behind our designated sweep. It appeared my job for the day would not be preceptor, but crowd control. I hustled to the front to check on the speed-demons, then doubled back to herd the stragglers. A pair of friends from Bed-Stuy asked if I had planned out our bathroom stops. I had not thought to do so. By the time we made it over the bridge, twenty-five minutes had elapsed, and I was sweating through my socks.

We regrouped beside a kiosk near City Hall, then switched partners and forged north along Centre Street. Three participants split off to pee. Two latecomers called to coordinate a meetup at Bleecker. When we circled up to read a passage from Virginia Woolf, my attempts at framing were nearly extinguished by pounding hip-hop from a passing Jeep Wrangler.

And so on.

Studying in the street turned out to be a messier affair than I had anticipated. In Times Square, our group dissolved completely, and it seemed a minor miracle when everyone converged on the fountain at Columbus Circle, bubble teas in hand. The comparative tranquility of a subsequent straight-shot up Central Park West was aggravated by the fact that everyone’s feet were beginning to ache. My lower back was sore. And we were only halfway there.

It was then, as I have said, that doubt overtook me. We had been walking for three and a half hours, and our pace was flagging. As the Natural History Museum sailed by, I felt a mounting suspicion that nobody wanted to be there, that at some point, one or two and then five or six and then all of these people would peel off with some perfectly reasonable excuse and slip with relief into the subway. They wouldn’t make it to Fort Tryon – and why should they? – when what was promised (French Marxists! Baldwin! a methodical inquiry into the rationalization of movement! school stuff!) was a far cry from what we were actually talking about.

Which begs the question: What were we actually talking about? For each leg of the journey, my packets provided a text and a set of questions to be read aloud. But no sooner had the pairs shouldered their bags and set out for the next stretch than they left the prompt behind. In response to Virginia Woolf’s reflection that a stroll dissolves one’s sense of self (“The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken”), I heard one participant recounting her recent cross-country move. To Rebecca Solnit’s close reading of the treadmill (“A corollary to the suburb and the autotropolis: a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go”), a charismatic young academic extolled his newfound love for tennis. And in the icy heat of James Baldwin’s moral censure (“Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become”), a gregarious Gen-Z was overheard describing her involvement with a radical puppet troupe.

Admittedly, my perspective was incomplete. I was bouncing from pair to pair and catching only a fragmentary impression of any single conversation, with little sense of how they had gotten from the autotropolis to the tennis court. Still, I felt I had failed to transpose a meaningful academic conversation from the seminar table to the sidewalk. This was a disappointment. But what was I to do? People were still hanging around, and I was responsible for the route.

Onward!

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We struck west at 96^th and then continued north via Amsterdam. As we passed into Harlem, the rose-gold light of the waning day climbed fire escapes to kiss the paint-flecked cornices. At 125^th, we caught a view of the sunset through the demi-lune arches of the 1 train viaduct. The Hudson twinkled. The mood shifted. Perhaps, I considered, the breadth of our conversations wasn’t a failure. We were walking, after all. Why shouldn’t our thinking travel, too?

Still, our so-called “study” was proving less bookish than I had expected. Which redoubled my confused response to Moten’s formula: if everything is intellectual, then what is the point of reading and thinking? Why do school stuff at all? The day’s events suggested that these people (nearly all of whom, I might add, were college-educated, and a few of whom were academics) would just as soon shake off the texts and the prompts. If that were the case, was there any point to calling it a seminar? Any point to assigning readings? Would we have done just as well simply walking? And if a mere walk qualified as its own way of exploring a question, then what, exactly, was the question?

I wondered.

Meanwhile, as we made our way up, improbably up, into the lively dusk of Washington Heights, a subtle change began to be felt. Our loose line of twenty mostly-strangers had compacted; we were walking as a group. Night fell. The pizza parlors and barber shops cast their yellow light onto the sidewalk. Stoop-sitters eyed us over the rims of beer bottles and our gait quickened with purpose. My doubt began to crystallize into disbelief. We were going to finish.

A word of context: When you get right down to it, my job is to persuade people to go to events that they have no obligation to attend. This is difficult anywhere; it is especially difficult in New York City. I have learned to enroll exactly double the number of available spots for a given event to account for the inevitable 50% attrition, and I have contemplated many an empty circle of chairs. Getting people to show up to anything on a Saturday afternoon is a tall order. Getting them to show up to a 13-mile walk is inadvisable. Getting them to actually finish? In my line of work, that’s a downright miracle.

Indeed, “miracle” is the word; at a certain point, I wasn’t getting people to do anything at all. I may have cued us into motion back in Brooklyn, but by the time we had left Harlem, the movement of the group ceased to reflect any single person’s urging. Some other force was moving us: not coercion, certainly (anyone could leave at any time), nor even curiosity (there would be no reveal at our destination, no pat resolution to our guiding questions), nor promise of gain. Nobody was counting steps. Nobody was taking selfies for clout. Yet here we were, each of us growing perceptibly giddy as the island of Manhattan shrunk beneath our feet.

The hum of the hospital at 165^th. The dazzle of the United Palace theater. Ducking under the Cross-Bronx Expressway and cresting the heights of 181^st. Then a long, smooth descent toward Fort Tryon Park. We paused to regroup before a stone gated entrance. Is this it? a few folks asked, as if arriving came as a surprise. As if they had expected to walk forever.

We resolved from this point onward to walk in silence. The path beyond the gate was dappled by the sodium orange glow of the nearby streetlamps. Somewhere on Dyckman Street, a subwoofer was thumping; at this distance, it was soft as a heartbeat. We passed through the park and wound our way up toward the top of the hill. After a day of incessant chatter, the absence of conversation gave way to the presence of everything else: the far-off hum of traffic, cricket song, our own footsteps. In a way, stepping forward into the darkness helped me understand what our task had been all along: not to ask, much less to answer, but to inhabit a question. To walk toward what we could not see. No wonder I had been mystified by the group’s progress; I didn’t know what had moved us across thirteen miles of pavement because what had moved us was precisely what we did not know.

It is a simple fact of social existence that we organize ourselves around what we believe. This instinct is the basis of affinity groups, of sports fans and political parties and countless online subcultures. Shared conviction is the base upon which we build a legible world. But to avoid the paralysis of dogma, or the bone-breaking weight of absolute truths, the gravitational tug of conviction requires an equal and opposite force – one that is often denigrated by our culture’s fetish of limitless information and the eradication of uncertainty.

What moved our unlikely cohort was this opposite force: the contrary impulse to organize ourselves around what we do not know, around what we cannot fathom, and possibly cannot name. That may sound mystical, but it is plain as day. Most of life looks like this. The basic work of a plural existence, of a national project, of stepping into an unknown future is the work of organizing around the limits of our own understanding – limits that tend to reveal themselves as a sort of absence. Silence is the sound of whatever’s beyond language and emptiness is the mark of whatever’s beyond sight. It is easy to trivialize these uncharted zones, to confuse them with nothing at all, but precisely the opposite is true. Ask any astrophysicist and they’ll tell you: the universe is held together by the gravity of what we cannot see. People want to be held together in this way, too.

Do the inheritances of schooling (reading, writing, asking questions, testing ideas) play any special role in this process? These activities can seem terribly contrived, not to mention laborious, now that machines can do them for us. But saying so is to confuse these practices with the kinds of knowledge they can produce. Scholastic traditions are not output functions; they are maps for configuring ourselves in relation to what we do not know. They can teach us, if we will learn, how to live a question together. And living a question together – consciously, willingly – is the task before us. Study is a name for this.

A dogwalker in Fort Tryon Park around 10:30pm on a recent summer Saturday would have harbored modest unease to hear noises – a mixture of pleasured sighs and pained groans – issuing from the dimness of the Cloisters Lawn. Twenty people sprawled there who had formed a similar circle, hours prior and miles away, on the far side of a wide river. We had gathered to read and found ourselves at a loss for words. We had gathered for school and found ourselves elsewhere. We had, to my own surprise, gone the distance, with nothing to see us onward but a shared desire to assemble around what we could not name. Some concluding talk was had, some applause was offered (for whom, we did not specify), and then we picked ourselves up and made our way toward sleep.

Like Virginia Woolf, who returned home with a single lead pencil, we carried an artifact of our own excursion, a trace of the purpose we had found, at great length, atop a moonlit hill. It was there, in the simple geometry of a ring of bodies about a grassy center: the empty space, the absence that joined us to each other. •

Peter Schmidt is Program Director at the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn. His next seminar at SoRA on the symbolism of the STARS & STRIPES begins October 22nd.

An assassin is waiting around the next corner. Your friend, out in front of you, is about to turn that corner. They are too far away to hear you shouting. What will you do?

The answer is obvious: try your best. Run towards them. Scream. Look for some other way to be noticed. Time feels different in this scenario: every second becomes the split root of two eternities, the difference between a future in which your friend is dead and one in which they survive.

This is a drama — one that is life-and-death. It is easy to grasp; it involves events we can witness in real-time. There is a clear tension between inner urgency (yours) and outer passivity (your friend’s). The action you must take — to transfer that urgency from the inner to the outer, even if you’re bound to fail — is straightforward.

Tragically, the existential drama we experience in relation to the climate (knowing what’s happening while being unable to stop it) feels different. Ecocide, cascading weather chaos, and rising sea-levels exhibit a diffuse complexity that makes our instinctively “right” response difficult to square with reality. What do we do — or rather, how does it feel — when an emergency is not a singular event at a specific point in time, but a gradually mounting death-heap of tragedies that will, in the end, have the same catastrophic results?

Sure, we all know things we could do; specific actions that might make a small difference. We could vote, call our senators, sign petitions, march in numbers, and make our voices heard.

But these actions feel at odds with that inner urgency. They feel almost nauseatingly insufficient: “Yes, hello sir. You know that looming existential threat against life as we know it? Yes, well, between my groceries and walking my dog, I just want to express my wish that this issue should move from sixth to fifth priority on your political platform. Thank you and have a great day!”

These more specific, short-term, and visibly urgent projects (cleaning beaches, protecting rainforests, de-polluting waterways) are real and important, but they require personal transformations many of us feel unprepared to make, or else they feel demoralizingly small. After all, viewed through a utilitarian lens, many of these clearly meaningful acts are a mere drop of clear water in a river rank with sewage.

There is, however, one climate action that I believe to be truly and universally effective. It is concrete and accessible. Not only can it make a real difference for the more-than-human world, but it can also act as a salve for the painful and paralyzing dissonance of the anguished position many of us have internalized. This action is familiar to all of us. It is deeply human, and is deeply real, even if — like the earth under our feet — we almost always take it for granted.

Yes, I’m talking about love.

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Are you rolling your eyes? Good. That’s a fine place to start. Anything that reeks of an easy answer, especially a sentimental easy answer, should be met with sober skepticism. And I understand: “love” feels like a non-answer meant to put a neat bow on this depressing analysis so I can allow myself to end on an uplifting note.

But it’s not. Trust me a bit longer. Hear me out.

At the end of Don’t Look Up, a 2021 film that analogizes the climate crisis to a meteor hurtling towards Earth (a narrative move meant to eliminate that feeling of distended and ironic suspension), we find our main characters gathered around a dinner table. The US government’s half-hearted, short-sighted attempt to curtail the disaster in economically lucrative fashion (a reference to the insanity of geoengineering, and a coy subversion of techno-jubilant disaster movies from the ‘90s and early ‘00s) has predictably failed and impact is imminent. No one discusses the comet, but the quiet scene is not a portrait of denial. Everyone is aware of what is about to happen.

Rather, the doomed heroes’ response to impending disaster is simply — simply, that word’s important, and more radical than you’d think in a time of overwhelming complexity – to share a meal in love and gratitude.

There’s something real in this.

I’ll get the depressing part out of the way first: one reason love is so important is the same reason it matters to hold someone as they’re dying. Dying well — dying held — is better than dying alone, both for the dead and for whoever is left behind. We know this of humans, so why would it not be true of the planet? Why would it not be true of the trees in your neighborhood falling victim to an invasive beetle, or the currents in the increasingly polluted river outside your back door? Hospicing is not meant to defy death, but to dignify it. Love what is around you so that we all move more gracefully into oncoming tragedy. Be like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who, addressing the “Darkening Ground,” voices his desire “to love the things / as no one has thought to love them / until they are worthy of you and real.”

And yet: this consoling power of love is only the beginning. Love is the first step to caring and, most importantly, doing. Love (a word Erich Fromm defines as “the passionate affirmation of another”) transforms a relationship. It changes what actions and behaviors are easy or hard. It’s hard to dedicate a year of your life to a cause when it comes at the cost of so much that you value — but if it’s for someone you truly love? Suddenly, it becomes hard not to. Love is a rebellious act that, as bell hooks has observed, begets more (of the best kind of) rebellion. This is the rebellion we need against a society that has forgotten how to love.

Remember when I said that those concrete actions (riverkeeping, protesting, rewilding) are just drops in the bucket — that they are ultimately temporary in the face of the wicked problem of the climate crisis?

Well, when I said that, I was talking to the cost-benefit analysis you. The “rational actor” you. Can I just say it? To the comparatively loveless you. I was talking to you before you go out and do this — before you learn to love. Once you do, you’ll realize that all this talk of drops and buckets is bullshit. Your love won’t care about the ends nearly as much as the means, the act itself, and the absolute need to do all you can. Even in less tangible work — work like writing articles and grappling with these hyperobjects – you can summon up that love, staying grounded in it and guided by it.

Love is a prime mover (in some faiths, the prime mover). Instrumentalize your love so you can take real action. If you have a problem with that — if love seems to you too precious, too sacred on its own to become the object of a word like “instrumentalize” — go back and love more; you’ll get over it. You won’t care about minor differences, you won’t care what words anyone uses, you won’t care about your own alienation or your dissociative urgency or the inner, whirring tension of a distant impending crisis. Instead, you’ll just care.

To add a further layer to the importance of love: living in sincere community is, simply put, far more rewarding and honest to who we are than living in the detached isolation of despair or ironizing alienation. Love is connection and connection is life. So when I say this, I mean it: When in love with the world, it is impossible to be alone.

The river, the trees, the soil, other alienated people… the more time you spend with each, the more attention you give to each, and the more you love each, the less alone in all of this you will feel. It is from this place that others can be invited. Hearts may even change.

Taking action without love is difficult and perhaps insincere. Forcing others into action without first inviting them into love is, as a result, ineffective and (more often than not) obnoxious. Notice what arises in your body when you imagine me scolding you: “If you don’t spend every waking moment campaigning to save the Amazon then you are a terrible person. You’re part of the problem, and your personal struggles and obstacles are irrelevant.”

This is the inner voice some of us hear when we think of environmental action and alarmism. It’s a voice we implicitly trust as a moral authority, and thus the voice we hide from in our rush toward relentless distraction and rebellious nihilism. It’s the voice critics (often mistakenly) project onto vegans, or Greenpeace, or whomever, with Adam McKay (the director of Don’t Look Up) being another easy target.

But campaigning to save the Amazon is not what you should be doing… at least not at first. Learning to love is what you should be doing. That way, when you do head for the rainforest (or into your studio, or into your garden, or into your community hall), you mean it, you’re sure of it, and it’s easy.

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Now here’s the best part: learning how to love the world is also easy. It’s easier than you’d think. In fact, we are made for it, and the more we love the more we receive. It just takes practice, like stretching muscles that have atrophied from injury to relearn how to walk.

We have not — not one of us — fallen out of love with our world. This is impossible. We have, instead, just forgotten how to be in love with it. There’s no way to get love out of us. Even the ten-thousand-year-old heartbreaking walls we’ve built between ourselves and the earth (most recently fortified by social media, virtual unreality, and xenophobic politics) are nothing against the Gordian-knot-cutting straightforwardness of a little bit of love.

Despite being easy, however, learning the skill of love is of critical importance. And not nearly enough of us are doing it.

Call this “tough love” — you’d better learn to do it. Our flourishing, the manner of our flourishing, and the flourishing of countless nonhumans depend on each of us learning.

So how do you do it? If love is a skill, and if it’s an easy skill, how does one develop it?

My skeleton key to loving absolutely anything (a bold claim, I know, but it really is okay for this to be simple) is a second inconspicuous and under-appreciated word, one I’ve used a few times already: attention.

Attention is miraculous on countless levels. We need only turn to Mary Oliver (“I do not know what a prayer is. But I do know how to pay attention”) to hear an echo of its sacred character. For one, there is no world without attention. No experience without it. No you without it. To “pay” attention (an odd phrase that diminishes attention to a mere resource rather than the fundamental and invisible ground of you) is to decide what is invited into your reality.

There is also no value without it. The rightly named Friends of Attention make this crystal clear in their upcoming book:

“It is attention itself that MAKES things valuable. It is by means of our attention that we constitute the values of this world: what we care about, what we give ourselves to, what we endow with time and touch and thought, what we stay with, what we circle back toward; these are the things that become valuable.”

What you attend to is what you say “yes” to, what you passionately affirm, so to attend is already a movement towards love. The more beings you witness, the more paths to love open before you. Watch that horrendously sad film with the albatross full of plastic (the one the director, maybe not so mysteriously, calls “a love story”) if you can stomach it. If you can’t, be kind to yourself; watch the birds outside. But just be there. For something. For someone.

To give other beings the gift of our attention is, to borrow Henry David Thoreau’s language, to see rather than merely look at them. To look at is to apprehend a thing for a pre-determined purpose: how much lumber is in this three-hundred-year-old sequoia? To see, on the other hand, is to allow yourself to be surprised by the spontaneous expressiveness of the Other. It is only by seeing, and by allowing ourselves to be seen, that avenues for real connection become possible.

For philosophers like Simone Weil and Martin Buber, this real attentive seeing is a moral act that shifts us out of an isolated world of objects into what, in the later words of eco-theologian Thomas Berry, becomes a “communion of subjects.” In other words: attention is nothing less than a deep magic that brings a deadened world to life, and in so doing, wraps you up with it in mutual relation.

How does this magic work? First, it works by revealing the inexhaustible depth already present in all that surrounds us. When you really attend to something — when you honestly look, smell, taste, hear, and feel it — that thing will never cease to reveal new parts of itself to you. That tree you pass each day and barely see, except to note that it’s there? Pay attention, now, and see the pale brown and white tones of the bark; the way the smooth paper layers feel under your fingers; the way the blue of the sky sits stark and biting against the forked cow-patterned fingers of this — you now know the name — sycamore.

In revealing the depth and quality of the world to us, attention also reveals us to us. The particular emotional stirring you notice in response to the tones and textures of this sycamore will be (if you pay close enough inner attention) a nuanced and layered feeling-world all its own. It will be of a kind you could never have known outside of this moment, with this Other. Attention is the key to the sort of poetic attunement which is synonymous with psychological richness.

When we are no longer attentive to the wild Others that surround us, our inner ecosystem suffers biodiversity loss. When we let the world back in, that ecosystem begins to repair its complex shape. Attention, then, begets loving action that is mirrored both within and outside us — as we act to reweave the world, we are at the same time reweaving ourselves (and knitting ourselves into the world).

In short: the more honest your attention, the more your capacity for surprise. The more your capacity for surprise, the greater your openness to wonder. The more wondrous your world, the fuller to the brim it will be with love.

This is a working strategy of mine — but it’s just a start. No doubt you have your own. There is (endlessly) more to say, but far more importantly, there is a hell of a lot to do. After all, it is your friend about to turn the corner as much as mine — and, in a sense we are now beginning to feel, it is you and me, too.

So: practice attention. Practice often. Practice constantly, obsessively. Mold your mind and senses, and thereby your heart, to the shape of the things around you. Choose one thing at a time, or choose several, or choose many. Learn to love, then learn to love more fiercely and more deeply — then follow your love as it moves swiftly and confidently towards action.

Henry R. Kramer is the new Academic Dean at SoRA. He is a Hudson Valley–based writer and educator whose work weaves imagination, deep attention, and experimental pedagogy to help repair our relationship with the more-than-human Earth. He holds MAs in Environmental Philosophy and Ecocritical Literature and a BA in the Psychological Dimensions of Religion. He teaches Religious Studies at Hunter College and also serves as Program Director at the Center at Stone Mountain.

Things kicked off with a celebration of the recently signed Take It Down Act (a bill introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, criminalizing non-consensual AI deepfakes) followed by a few words of greeting on behalf of First Lady Melania Trump. Speeches from members of Congress began with Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee holding forth on the perils of social media, followed by Louisiana State Rep. Laurie Schlegel (R) citing bipartisan victories around age verification laws. Snacks and coffee were not permitted in the conference hall — this point was repeatedly stressed.

Several hours of presentations, testimonials, and friendly panel discussions amounted to a genuinely distressing rundown of the harms of the attention economy: cyberbullying, disordered eating, data privacy violations, sexual grooming, violent pornography, manipulative AI chatbots, and addiction — plus the (in our view, comparatively dubious threat of) “weaponization of our children’s data by agents of cancel culture.” But talk of actual attention was sparse, and the effects of Big Tech on children’s attentional capacities themselves went largely unremarked.

Instead, conservative values stood front and center. “The purpose of innovation and a just society is to promote the flourishing and success of ordinary families,” announced FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson, asserting that parents have a “sacred charge to protect their children’s reputation and good name.”

That innocuous normative term, ordinary, seemed to obscure as much as it expressed. But there was no denying our genuine pleasure at Ferguson’s invocation of “flourishing,” and the day did reveal, by the standards of a regulatory agency, a heartening measure of humanistic richness.

“The point of technology is to actually help us become more human,” opined Chris Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, lamenting that today’s youth “can’t attend to something seriously. They lack the virtue of study.”

Michael Toscano of the Institute for Family Studies, a conservative think tank, called for an affirmative, values-based tech design paradigm in a similarly expansive spirit: “There are ways to encode your values into a technological design which can preserve certain things about, say, the political form of your nation or your view of what childhood should be like,” he said. “Give these kids the freedom, not just having their attention stolen away from them at every moment, but… to hear common words, to experience a common place together, to experience friendship.”

Friendship… collective attention… a shared world? Our ears perked. He was speaking our language!

The day’s nearly unqualified criticism of Big Tech chimed somewhat discordantly from an administration that was sworn into office atop a dais bearing a full cheerleading squad’s worth of tech executives.

Dissonance aside, though, the FTC’s emphasis on child welfare has the gleam of good strategy. After all, it was only when the effects of second-hand smoke on children became irrefutable that the tables began to turn in the fight against big tobacco. Protecting minors is one of American movement politics’ most reliable causes.

Speaking of minors: Apple’s iPhone celebrates its 18^th birthday next week. The handheld smartphone — and the intimate incursions of attention fracking that it facilitates — hasn’t even reached legal adulthood! Perhaps, one hopes, this anniversary will occasion a coming-of-age. Could Big Tech finally grow out of its destructive adolescence?

Time will tell. But we’re not waiting around. And neither are the folks at the FTC. Here’s hoping that our efforts bear fruit. For the children! And for everyone else, too.

— Peter Schmidt, Editor-in-Chief & Danielle Bejerano, SSII Fellow, Princeton University

A rat scurries across your path as you walk out of the subway station at night. A cockroach emerges from underneath your bathroom sink when you go to brush your teeth. A flock of pigeons descend upon your cracked-open window.

Did you feel yourself squirm when you read these statements? Did your eyebrows rise, your nose wrinkle, your stomach churn?

Charles Darwin proposed in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals that disgust serves the evolutionary purpose of alerting us to health hazards. Individuals more alert to the possible dangers of disease-carrying food or a threatening creature were more likely to survive and pass on their genes. But what happens when disgust responses outgrow their evolutionary function? Is it possible for us to attend to our experience of disgust, and trouble it? Or even turn it into fascination?

As a socially learned emotion, disgust can become an abstracted, embodied moral judgement towards the “other.” This gets sinister; the Nazis frequently compared Jews to cockroaches and rats in order to manufacture consent for genocide. But such comparisons would hold less power if we learned to better connect with and grow alongside our nonhuman neighbors: rats, pigeons, and cockroaches. As scavengers, these creatures follow close behind wherever humans have made their home. In this manner, they are the shadows of our civilization. And isn’t it a sign of paranoia to be afraid of your own shadow?

In a time where our attention is bought and sold, the beings that evoke our disgust make for compelling foils to the gleaming digital surfaces engineered to canalize our most visceral desires. The disgusting creature or object confronts us with its impurity, driving us to rid ourselves of the disgusting thing. In this way, disgust walls us off from curiosity, connection, and understanding.

A different relationship to vermin is possible. In exploring it, we might also find the beginnings of a new relationship to urban ecology, to the city as a whole, and even to our own attention.

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This June, Chimeras Collective (of which I am one half; Olivia Tai is the other) is leading an in-person seminar on CREATURES at the School of Radical Attention. Our mission is to trouble the boundaries of our own disgust towards our nonhuman neighbors. Kinship with the more-than-human starts here, in the natural world that already surrounds us — even if we sleep better when we pretend like it doesn't.

Here’s an attention practice for you: next time you find yourself in a chance encounter with a rat, pigeon, or cockroach, spend five minutes with the creature (if it will have you). Notice how it moves, how it communicates, where it goes. Ask yourself what it might be feeling, or experiencing. Maybe it’s hungry, maybe it’s angry, maybe it’s scared. Maybe, in spending this time together, you might see past your own knee-jerk response. Attend to your own feelings of disgust. With any luck, what seems like a simple repulsion will transmute into a more complicated fascination with how the other half lives.

Kyle Barnes is an artist, UX designer, facilitator and writer. He is also one-half (alongside Olivia Tai) of the Chimeras Collective, which creates interspecies encounters in NYC and beyond. The Chimeras Collective are leading a seminar on CREATURES at the School of Radical Attention from June 10th to 24th.