Your Mind Is Being Fracked

This episode explores how modern technologies, especially in the digital realm, manipulate and exploit human attention, drawing an analogy to the process of fracking in the oil industry.

1. Attention is being manipulated and exploited similarly to natural resources in fracking, with our digital environment designed to maximize this extraction.
2. Historical experiments on attention have often treated it as a commodity, influencing modern advertising and technology designs that aim to capture and sell our focus.
3. The conversation about attention is complex and intertwined with issues of free will, psychological health, and the efficacy of our interactions with technology.
4. There is a need for 'attention activism' to reclaim our cognitive environments from the forces that seek to exploit them.
5. The episode suggests that understanding and reshaping our attentional practices is crucial for personal and societal well-being.

1: Introduction to the Topic

Burnett introduces the concept of attention as a resource being 'fracked' by modern technologies, drawing parallels to oil extraction methods. Ezra Klein: "Our attention is getting fracked in the way that natural resources are extracted."

2: Historical Context of Attention

Discussion on how attention has been studied and conceptualized over time, impacting everything from education to technology design. D. Graham Burnett: "Historical experiments on attention have shaped how we manage and exploit focus today."

3: Implications for Society

Exploring the broader implications of how our attention is manipulated by media and technology. D. Graham Burnett: "The digital economy fracks our attention to extract value, similar to oil extraction."

1. Practice Mindfulness: Regular mindfulness practice can help regain control over your attention and reduce susceptibility to digital distractions.
2. Curate Digital Consumption: Actively choose what digital content to engage with, rather than passively consuming what's pushed by algorithms.
3. Use Technology Mindfully: Employ apps and settings that limit notifications and reduce screen time to protect your attention.
4. Educate Yourself and Others: Understanding the mechanics of attention exploitation can empower you to make better choices.
5. Support Digital Wellness Initiatives: Participate in or support movements that advocate for ethical technology practices that respect user attention.

The steady dings of notifications. The 40 tabs that greet you when you open your computer in the morning. The hundreds of unread emails, most of them spam, with subject lines pleading or screaming for you to click. Our attention is under assault these days, and most of us are familiar with the feeling that gives us — fractured, irritated, overwhelmed.

D. Graham Burnett calls the attention economy an example of “human fracking”: With our attention in shorter and shorter supply, companies are going to even greater lengths to extract this precious resource from us. And he argues that it’s now reached a point that calls for a kind of revolution. “This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this,” he tells me. “And we need to mount new forms of resistance.”

Burnett is a professor of the history of science at Princeton University and is working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. He’s also a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, which is a kind of grass roots, artistic effort to create a curriculum for studying attention.

In this conversation, we talk about how the 20th-century study of attention laid the groundwork for today’s attention economy, the connection between changing ideas of attention and changing ideas of the self, how we even define attention (this episode is worth listening to for Burnett’s collection of beautiful metaphors alone), whether the concern over our shrinking attention spans is simply a moral panic, what it means to teach attention and more.

People

D. Graham Burnett, Ezra Klein

Companies

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Books

• Mentioned books on attention and psychology

Guest Name(s):

D. Graham Burnett

Content Warnings:

None

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Ezra Klein
From New York Times opinion this is the Ezra Klein show I think a lot about the way we talk about attention, because the way we talk about something is the way we think about it. What do you always hear about attention when you're in school? Pay attention as if we have a certain amount of attention in our mental wallet and we have to spend it wisely. We need to use it to buy algebra rather than buying gossip or jokes or daydreams. I wish that was how my attention worked.

It certainly did not work that way then. I graduated high school with a 2.2 because I cannot pay attention, I just can't to information delivered in the form of long lectures. I wish I could. I try my attention. It just doesn't feel to me like something I get to spend.

It feels, I don't know, it feels more like taking my dogs on a walk. Sometimes they walk where I want them to. Sometimes I'm in control and sometimes I am not in control. They walk where they want to. They get scared by thunder and they try to run away.

Sometimes a dog side eyes them from across the street and they turn from mild matter terriers into killing machines. Sometimes they are obsessively trying to get chicken bone. And even when I hurry them past it, they spend the whole rest of the walk clearly thinking about that chicken bone and scheming about how to get back there. My attention feels like that to me. And this is what I don't like about the way we talk about attention.

We are not always in control of it. We may not even usually be in control of it. The context in which our attention plays out, what kinds of things there are around us, it really matters. And it's supposed to. Attention is supposed to be open to the world around us.

But that openness, it makes a subject to manipulation. You really see that now when you open your computer or your phone, it's like the whole digital street is covered in chicken bones. There's lightning cracking overhead. There are always dogs barking. And I worry about this for my own mental habits, for my kids, for everybody's kids.

I don't think we're creating an intentionally healthy world here. And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this. And I keep feeling like we're getting near it but not quite there because the way we talk about attention, it just doesn't feel rigorous enough to me. It doesn't feel like it is getting at the experience of it well. And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, people who found a better way to study attention or talk about it or teach it.

Then I was reading this piece on attention in the New Yorker by Nathan Heller, and I came across D. Graham Burnett, who's doing all three. He's a historian of science at Princeton University. He's working on a book about the laboratory study of attention. And he's a co founder of the Struthers School of Radical Attention, which is a kind of grassroots artistic effort to create a curriculum around attention.

And yeah, that got my attention. As always. My email is recline show dashtimes.com dot dgram Burnett, welcome to the show. Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

So you've written that our attention is getting fracked. What do you mean by that? Fracking. I suspect most of your listeners have heard that term. Fracking is mostly associated with this idea of getting petroleum resources out of the earth.

D. Graham Burnett
But its a new technology for doing that. In the old days, pre major exploitation of petroleum resources, there were these big juicy zits of high value crude oil just sitting there in the earth waiting to geyser up. If you tap them, drill a hole, gusher. We've tapped all that out. The only way you can get the remaining petroleum and natural gas resources out of the deep earth is to pump down in there high pressure, high volume detergent which forces up to the surface this kind of slurry mixture, natural gas, crude oil, leftover detergent and juice and nasty stuff which you then separate out and you get your monetizable crude.

This is a precise analogy to what's happening to us in our contemporary attention economy. We have a, depending on who you ask, 500 billion, 3 trillion, $7 trillion industry, which, to get the money value of our attention out of us, is continuously pumping into our faces high pressure, high value detergent in the form of social media, non stop content that holds us on our devices. And that pumping brings to the surface that spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder. How do you define what attention is? I would love for us to use this whole conversation to sort of roll up on the shores of that deepest question again and again.

So let me go at it one way. I'm in the process of finishing a history of science book about the laboratory study of this thing called detention. Since about 1880, in laboratories using experiments, scientists have, since the late 19th century, sliced and diced a human capacity that they've called attention. And it is that work that they did that has made it possible, I would argue, to price the thing called attention that we're invoking when we use that fracking metaphor. It's entangled with the idea of stimulus and response.

The earliest experimental work on attention is about sitting folks in laboratory chairs and showing them certain kinds of displays. A cursor, a flash. That triggering or targeting conception of attention has been the primary way that scientists, experimental psychologists, engineers, have conceptualized and placed in evidence a thing called detention. When they started doing sort of early eye tracking experiments to sort of follow where people's gaze went, how much information they could take in at a glance, and figuring out how to quantify that. Largely, it should be said, financed by friends in the emerging advertising industry, there was a kind of unholy, symbiotic relationship that emerged between certain forms of experimental psychology and those who were trying to study how to sell mouthwash and cigarettes.

When those folks were doing that kind of work, they were certainly talking about a thing that was attention. They could call it attention. It's very similar to the thing that right now, the most powerful computational technologies, the most sophisticated programmers, and the most intricate algorithms are madly working to aggregate an auction continuously. In your research, what's been the holiest or most unholy attention experiment you've come across? Oh, I love that question.

Well, let's do unholy, and maybe you'll give me two. In the interwar period, a set of experiments called pursuit tests were used to train and assess the capability of military aviators. Pursuit tests were attention experiments, a little like forerunners of video games. Imagine a cursor that moves around on a non computer screen. This is manual, like a clockwork cursor that's traveling back and forth in front of you, and you have a little envelope, a mechanical envelope that you have to move, manipulate, kind of with a joystick to keep bracketing that cursor as it moves around in front of you.

And then we hook you up to a rebreather so that you're gradually deprived of oxygen. It's a big twist. I did see that one coming. Yeah. We might also hook you up with headphones and run a lot of really loud and distracting noise through them.

And we could also ask you to pedal or do other exhausting things with your body. There are a whole set of ways we could complicate this ecology. And then as you gradually lose consciousness, you're asked to continue for as long as you can, manipulating this envelope around the cursor. This was understood to be an attentional test. It's cybernetic, as you can see.

It's a way of integrating humans with machines. It uses attentionality as a way of measuring the kind of mechanization of the human subject in relation to a machine. Some people are better at it than others. And let me assure you, if you're going to put somebody in the cockpit of one of these very expensive fighter planes, you want somebody who's really good at that. I would call that one kind of unholy.

I mean, let's be clear. Asphyxiating fighter pilots to see what happens to the attention. Yeah, I'll categorize that in the unholy. Yeah, but I don't want to sound paranoiac either. I'm in favor of fighter pilots who are able to pay attention.

Yeah, I understand why they were doing it. Okay. Yeah. Nevertheless, you can get a little shiver when you think about the way now we've been, if you like, cybernetically integrated into our devices. And you can see aspects of that reality prefigured in the genealogy of experimental work on attention that I'm describing.

I'll give you another one. The development during the second world war of radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense capabilities, in relation particularly to german U boats. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn't paying attention to it, you're totally screwed. A really intense set of classified experiments took place during the second world war to assess a very new problem. How long could people pay attention to screens?

And what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time? That work gives rise to an understanding of the way people cease to pay attention. What's going on comes to be called the vigilance decrement, the drop off in vigilance to a statistically low frequency phenomenon. And that work, too, can give you a little shiver to come to understand that there is again this deep techno scientific story of studying a thing that we recognize as attention, but studying it in this highly instrumentalized way that is entirely bound to questions of stimulus and response, to triggering and targeting. And we see the legacy of that kind of work to this day in the way we think about attention.

That attention was sliced and diced in laboratories, and that very same thing is what's now being priced with these calamitous effects in the way we experience ourselves. I'm so interested by that form of attention, and it gets at something that has bothered me about a lot of the writing on attention, some of the conversations I've had on the show about attention, which is, it's so wound up in this idea of attention as being something we should always have agency over. I think that implicitly in a lot of discussion of attention and a lot of research around attention, the attentional goal seems to emerge as a worker who never breaks focus on their task across the entire day. And so the enemy of attention in this telling is distraction. And I do feel that as a worker, right, I come in and I open my computer and I immediately feel distracted by messages coming and slacks and a million things.

Ezra Klein
And then at the same time, that discourse, it points somewhere I'd like to go, but not the only place I'd like to go, right? I don't imagine the good life as being a life where I have the intentional capacity of the perfect worker. A lot of what I'm interested in, in theory, with attention is a more open form of awareness, an ability to see other people more deeply. And I'm a meditator. And so one thing I notice a lot over time is that what I think I should be paying attention to and then what appears to come up with great value to me, are not the same thing.

Right? Too much agency over my attention, too much control is a way of not hearing other things in the world too. You put your finger on really the heart of the matter. So I want to suggest that part of what makes the conversation around detention right now both so difficult and so important, is that secreted within that term are in fact two very different projects bumping up against each other. In a laboratory, you use instruments.

D. Graham Burnett
As it turns out, if you use instruments to get at a thing called attention, you end up finding an instrumentalized form of attention. Is that form of attention real? Absolutely. In fact, the technologies for making it real are powerful. You can quantify it, you can place it in evidence experimentally.

Is it part of what's in that sort of worker conception of attention that you invoked? Yes, as it happens, it is. But that other thing that you're kind of calling in when you talk about meditation. You talk about awareness when we invoke the sort of experience of being, the kind of ecstasy that can come with a certain durational flow of immersion in a person, a conversation, a book, the experience of reading an object that comes from a different place. It's also in the language of attention, and it has its own separate history.

If you want to see both those operating now, let me give you two recent theorists of attention, both very prominent, whose accounts of what attention is are absolutely contradictory, perfectly paradoxical, but sort of both interestingly true. Two bischool theorists, Davenport and Beck, do a book called the attention economy. I think it's 2001. They don't actually coin the phrase, but they're responsible for it, sort of exploding into the collective conversation. How do they define attention in that book?

Attention is what triggers, catalyzes awareness into action. Attention is what catalyzes awareness into action. Definition. That couldn't be more different. The recently deceased french philosopher Bernard Stigler, in a beautiful and difficult book called Taking Care of the youth and the generations, centers that book on attention.

What does he say attention is? He says, attention playing with the attendre in French, is waiting. The exact opposite of catalytic triggering. It's waiting. It's, in fact, for him, infinite waiting.

And what are you waiting on when you attend to an object? Wait on it, he says, your waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object. Which long webs of connectedness are a mirroring of the rich long webs of connectedness that are in you. So let's imagine for a second that there was a painting on the wall of this studio, and you and I were looking at it together. We might look at that painting.

It might be a, let's say a religious icon or something. And you and I would bring to the experience of looking at it what we have. We would notice colors. We would think about other images like it. We might have seen.

We would think about the other images that might not be here, but that could be, or the symbolic things that are in it. And as we experienced that kind of web of things that are in the image, we'd really be sort of seeing a long web of connectedness that's in ourselves. And so for Stigler, attention is waiting on the disclosure of those long webs of connectedness which are a mirroring of our own infinitude in the world. Attention, infinite waiting, attention triggering sharp contrast. And let me try to bring in a third thing that I think is exquisitely poised over and outside of that contestation.

Between those two. In the early 20th century novel Wings of the dove, the american novelist Henry James describes a really beautiful and intense scene in which a very, very ill woman, terminally ill woman, has a fleeting encounter with a doctor she desperately needs. She believes this Doctor kind of knows what she needs to survive. She hopes that this doctor can kind of get her past her anguish. The doctor's very busy, and James depicts the scene where the two of them sit for a moment, and he describes the doctor as placing on the table between them a clear, clean, crystal cup, empty of attention.

An empty crystal cup of attention that the doctor places on the table between them. And that sort of figuration of attention as a kind of an empty cup that we place between ourselves and the object of our attention is like, I think it exquisitely invokes that idea of immanence, that kind of negative capability. Anything's possible here. The gesture of generosity, it has a little bit of that sense of waiting, but it also has a sense of a solicitation. Something needs to happen.

So it includes elements of that catalytic, and it includes elements of that kind of mirroring waiting image. And so when I have to sort of talk about what I think attention is, I'll often use that image. Like what's attention? Attention is that kind of empty cup we can place between ourselves and the things we care about in the world and see what happens.

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Backed by popular demand, Netsuite has extended its one of a kind, flexible financing program for a few more head to netsuite.com nyt. Netsuite.com NYT hi, I'm Megan Lorem, the. Director of photography at the New York Times. A photograph can do a lot of different things. It can connect us.

Megan Loram
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Ezra Klein
You'Ve talked about how attention is, or at least the way we think about it now, is a modern construction. Can you talk a bit about that? Let me give you one of the most amazing arguments about attention that's ever been made by anybody, by my distinguished colleague Jonathan Crary. Jonathan Crary is an art historian at Columbia University. In a book called suspensions of Perception, published around 2000, he made a super challenging argument about where that language of attention comes from and why.

D. Graham Burnett
In the late 19th century, the same time that the scientists start studying in laboratories, everybody starts getting worried about it and talking about it in a very particular way. Curry argues that you don't see a lot of discussions about attention in the 1780s, 1790s, even 1820. It's not a thing, he says, that worry about attention comes into being across the second half of the 19th century in a very particular way because of a very specific set of transformations in the experience of personhood. Imagine white guys in wigs with knickers on. These guys thought of themselves as a little bit like a camera obscura.

Those boxes that have a little pinhole in them, like a forerunner of the camera. The mind is like that box. There's a world out there. There's a world in here. There's a nice mapping function between those two worlds.

And therefore, I, as a propertied white male subject, am good in the world because the world is out there and in me in a relatively unproblematic way. Creary argues, I think, correctly, that that way of conceptualizing the human, the classical model of human subjectivity, implodes across the second half of the 19th century. What kills it? What does it in? We discover that, in fact, everybody doesn't have the same picture inside themselves as what's out there in the world, that we're these oozy things made of meat, you know, and that actually our eyes have blind spots.

And suddenly the sort of physiological complexity of sensation makes a mincemeat of the classical model. So then where are you in this kind of blooming, buzzing confusion of modernity now that you're like an opaque, thick meat creature instead of this nice camera obscure creature? Well, creary argues that attention is born in that moment, as a way of saying again, that I hold together as one being, as I confront or encounter the world, where are you? You are where your attention is, your will. Maybe that's that idea that somehow will has something to do with it, that for William James, attention and will were almost inextricable, right?

That free will itself, if it existed, its locus, was the moment in which I could choose to give my attention here versus there. And while everybody recognized that there was involuntary attention, there was this deep sense that attention was born in the late 19th century as a new language for talking about the coherence of the human subject. Let me offer two responses that come to mind and starting here. So obviously, he knows the discourse around attention much better than I ever will. But the first thing that I know, where there was a lot of discussion and conversation about attention, going far, far back before the 19th century, is within religion.

Ezra Klein
So in Christianity, you have deep attention to attention among different kinds of monks and monastics. Buddhism has that. There are traditions in Judaism around that I'm sure there's much more in other religions that I know less. Well. Prayer is an attentional question.

Meditation is a technology of attention as it gets talked about now, but you can frame it in much more spiritual ways than that. So what should that make us think that there was so much more, perhaps attention to attention within the monastic religious traditions? It's a great question again, and I share your interest in those forms of attention. I do want to say that while. While it is certainly true that people have been concerned about how to hold before their minds and their senses objects since forever, and that religious spaces have been central zones for that sort of combat of the senses and the will.

D. Graham Burnett
If one actually digs in on that stuff, the language often isn't sort of the language we would use. Contemplation, for instance, was a central preoccupation of monks. But if you had brought them the kinds of questions that are getting asked by the early 20th century concerning that sort of stimulus response phenomenon, or even the ways that William James will talk about attention, that would have been unrecognizable to them, that said, much of my own interest and attention actually comes out of my own meditational life as well. I care deeply about the spiritual traditions that inform our resources as we begin to think about what to do now. And there are some 20th century thinkers who have commented in really profound ways on the relationship between prayer and the sort of thing we are now worried about when we talk about attention.

The great french mystic Simone Weill comes to mind. So Simone Weill, who kind of skirted up to the edge of Christianity in different ways, but never kind of crossed over, was a political activist, a labor activist, and ultimately a kind of social justice martyr across the era of the second world war, wrote passionately that pure, unmixed attention is prayer. So for her, that if you like apophatic attention, attention that won't have an easy object or end or purpose. When I say apophatic, I invoke the tradition of negative theology, two theological traditions. One where you try to get at God directly, one where you say, look, God's so beyond us, we're not going to get to God.

We're finite creatures, God's infinite. Our best chance to get anything like the God space is to sort of enumerate everything that's not God, to get at God via the via negativa, the negative way. So we will enumerate the cloud of unknowing, rather than getting all puffed up with ourselves, that we're having a conversation with God. I would argue that Simone Weill's account of attention as a sort of radical, pure emptying of oneself, an openness to immanence, is apophatic. It's an attention that isn't triggerable, it won't target.

You can't bring it out in stimulus and response experimentations, because it waits in a kind of ecstatic and infinite openness for that which it knows nothing. So that's the other question that comes up for me. There is an argument that what we are saying about attention now is just another moral panic of the kind we've been having since the early 19th century, that people were complaining about how we were losing our attention then. Trains were too fast, life was too fast. Everybody's reading newspapers, and it's the same arguments, and yet.

Ezra Klein
But it's all been fine. We worried about this with the advent of radio, with the advent of television. It just comes up and up and up and up, and then we could just kind of move on to the next thing and we worry about it again. And when people think about the attentional golden age, to the extent they imagine it, they don't mean the 15th century. They mean right before.

Whatever. The thing they're worried about now is right. Blogging was great. Social media was too far. Or if blogging was too much, newspapers were great, but digital news is too far.

How do you think about that concern? That you and me, we are aging and just part of a perennial moral panic? I'm sympathetic to that. Critique of all this. By the same token, people have been deeply right again and again that things were changing, and things have changed in ways that were catastrophic, in addition to changing in ways that have been transformative and good.

D. Graham Burnett
And some measure of what we need out of historical consciousness is the kind of critical discernment to make those judgments. So was there a moral panic about advertising in the early 20th century? There sure was. Why? Because people started experimenting with projecting advertisements using very bright lights, arc lamps on the underside of clouds, and everyone was like, this is horrible.

I don't want to read soap ads like on the night sky. And then people began to think it would be amazing to sort of have amplified screaming ads floating in the air over cities so that you would have continuous barrages of sound advertisements in space. Also, horrible new technologies do really make possible new forms of human exploitation. This is real. The factory system certainly improved life in lots of ways.

It made available much less expensive textiles, for instance. But you'd have to be out of your mind not to recognize that the aggregation of labor in the satanic mills of Lancashire created monstrous new labor, conditions against which people had to gather together and mount resistance. I would argue that we are in a moment now in which this human fracking and the essentially unregulated commodification of this precious stuff out of which we make ourselves the instrument of our being. This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this, and we need to mount new forms of resistance.

We don't know yet what the forms of resistance will be. Just like those early resisters in the factory system didn't yet understand the way that labor politics and trade unionism would emerge as meaningful technologies of collective action. We don't yet know what forms of resistance are going to emerge. That is, what we need is all hands on deck for a kind of attention activism that raises our awareness. And this work is happening in lots of different places already.

We need to see what happens with it in the years ahead. Maybe this is a digression, maybe it's not, because you're a historian who's dealt with this question. I think a bunch. I'm fascinated by the way we think about past moral panics. Call them moral panics.

Ezra Klein
The very term assumes just a hysteria that then went away. Often, when I go back and I read critics of a previous technological moment, it's true on one level that obviously the world did not come to an end. We're sitting here talking, and it is also often true that they were right. You go back and you read Neil Postman's amusing ourselves to death. And the thing he is predicting, roughly will eventually happen is that we will think everything must be entertainment.

And so even things that should not be entertainment will become driven by and assessed on the values of entertainment. And it is just a direct line to Donald Trump. And you could say, oh, you know, we had a previous moral panic about television. Or you could say, all these people were right, the world didnt end, but a lot of bad things actually did happen. I think about this with advertising mid century, there is a tremendous amount of critique and interest in the rise of advertising.

You can read the affluent society by John Kenneth Galbraith, and hes very interested in this course question and my senses among economists and others, that's looked back on a little bit embarrassing, right? Like, look, there's advertising and it's fine. And I don't know, I'm actually amazed. I moved to New York about a year ago. I'm amazed at how much advertising is permitted on the subway.

Public space, right? The subway I would go into for a long time, it had a grayscale image, advertising the exorcist reboot, horrifying image, like two girls, like black ichor dripping from their mouth. I mean, just grotesque. Every morning I would see it and it seems a little bit dystopic. This is public space.

Why every morning when I bring my five year old onto the subway, is he seeing an ad for a horror movie? But we've just gotten used to it. I'm curious how you think about this discourse. A sense that the things we worried about in the past, we were obviously wrong to worry about. And as such, worrying about things in the present is probably going to be wrong too, because eventually we'll simply make our peace with it and the world will move on.

And if it does that, then clearly it was fine. Yeah. Where even to begin? Oh my heavens. I mean, those who have worried that things were getting worse have been essential to our being clear eyed about our condition.

D. Graham Burnett
Again and again, the process by which money value has displaced other languages of value. Big picture. Thats one of the enormous secular trends one can discern over the last 100, 5200 years. And I would say many of the things you just invoked are in effect explicable out of that dynamic. Now, I dont want to sound reactionary when I say that, and I also dont wish to invoke some fantasy utopia of the past, but we are more severed from each other now than at any time in human history, even as we have this kind of ursatz experience of our being aggregated in new and powerful ways.

We've seen dynamics that simultaneously severed us from each other and created new aggregations. For instance, the rise of nationalism across the 19th century, which was a kind of a harrowing ideology that created new forms of collective identity and displaced experiences of intimacy at the same time with monstrous consequences. So it's totally reasonable, I believe, to be extremely uneasy about the dynamics that we're seeing. One thing that has, again, bothered me about a lot of the discourse on attention is, I think, because we don't have a good definition of it itself, we don't, I think, think about it very clearly. We know what we often don't want.

Ezra Klein
A lot of us don't want the feeling, the fractured, irritated, outraged feeling we have on social media or online. We dont like learning and noticing in ourselves that the amount of time we spend on any single task on the computer has dropped and dropped and dropped. A lot of us have this experience of fracture. So kind of, we know what we dont want. This I dont think we have a very good positive vision.

How do you think about the creation of a positive vision of attention, given the extraordinary diversity of human experience and wants? Yeah, it's a very hard question. In a sense, you're asking both a question about authority and also asking a question about prescription. Are we going to prescribe for people this versus that? And who will prescribe, I think, of the extraordinary definition of education that Katari Spivak offers.

D. Graham Burnett
The non coercive rearranging of desire. What's education? The non coercive rearranging of desire. And that rings for you? I have to say it does.

Ezra Klein
It's not how my education felt to me. Well, I don't think a lot of our educations work that way. So I would say that that's a richly humanistic and at the same time, critical account of education. It's not especially an account of education that conduces to making optimized work workers in the labor force. But let's just sort of unpack it for a second.

D. Graham Burnett
We organize our lives around desire in some basic sense. You say, look who we just tell people that they shouldn't want. Enjoy, receive that little, like, dopamine hit, feel good when they're scrolling through TikTok. Okay. Our desires can go lots of different places.

It's also possible for us to put our desires in places that ultimately lead to our being unhappy and lonely, not flourishing. The question of how to organize our desires, how to know what it is we want. That is what we really want, or what, in wanting most, dignifies and extends our experience of being, as opposed to, again, severing and impoverishing us. That's the hard work of education, and people have to work that stuff out for themselves, but also they have to work that stuff out with other people. That's, in a sense, why the humanistic tradition brings with it tradition stuff, the kind of best that's been thought and said, texts, objects.

Here, here, look at this. It's not. Look at this. I'm going to force you. It's I want you, non coercively to discover that in being with this, in these ways, something good will happen.

Ezra Klein
Yeah, let me hold on to this idea of non coercion. So first, for me, education was coercive. I did not want to spend 8 hours a day sitting in these small classrooms being lectured at. Just didn't. I had to, which I don't think is a bad thing.

I am not really one of these people who thinks that childhood should be up to the whims of the child. I don't think I would have made good decisions as a kid. I'm not sure the decisions made for me were great decisions either. But nevertheless, and something that has been on my mind has been how bad I think parents, at least of certain classes right now, have gotten at coercion. And it worries me because my kids are young, so it's kind of easy right now, but I know it's going to get harder.

And I see all these parents who know that they don't think their kids should have a smartphone when they're eleven and they fall because, eh, the other kids do. And I see in this debate that we're having right now about smartphones and kids what I would describe as a real discomfort with how to be paternalistic when paternalism is actually needed. So John Haidt writes this book, the anxious generation. Part of the book's thesis is that smartphones and social media have kicked off a mental health crisis. Our children.

Then there's a huge back and forth on these exact studies. And one thing I really noticed in this whole debate, where I think the research is very complicated and you can fairly come to a view on either end of it, is that if you convinced me that my kids scroll on their phones for 4 hours a day, had no outcome on their mental health at all, it did not make them more anxious, it did not make them more depressed, it would change my view on this not at all. I just think as a way of living a good life. You shouldnt be staring at your phone for 4 hours a day. And yet I also realize the language of society right now in parenting doesnt have that much room for that.

And I think we have a lot of trouble talking about just what we think a good life would be. Not a life that leads to a good job, not a life that leads to a high income, but just the idea, which I think we were more comfortable talking in terms of at other points in history, that it is better to read books than to not read books. No matter if you can measure that on somebody's income statement or not. And so I wonder not just about the non coercive rearranging of desire, but I also wonder about. I mean, I don't love calling it the coercive rearranging of desire, but the ability to talk about what we think we should desire or socially approve of.

And then, particularly for younger kids for whom their attentional resources are being formed, actually insist upon that. So I want to ask you back a question in response to that, which is just where do you anchor your intuition that it is, say, better to read a book than it is to scroll on TikTok for 4 hours? If I'm being honest as a parent, right, and I'm not saying I would legislate this, I anchor it in my own experience of attention. I think books are remarkable and specific in their ability to simultaneously allow for a deep immersion in somebody else, right. Another human being's story or thoughts or mind, and also create a lot of space for your own mind wandering.

And I will say, and it's one of the reasons I wanted to invite you on the show, we'll talk about the school of attention that you're part of. In a bit, I will say that my biggest concern, and the concern that nobody really has an answer to for me, because I do want to send my kids to public school, is that I care less about how they are taught subjects and how they are taught attention, what kind of attention they're able to bring to the things they will want to know. But again, the thing that worries me is that I see so little discourse like that. I'm enormously moved by what you're saying. The dynamics that you're describing are not unfolding in empty space.

D. Graham Burnett
They're unfolding in relation to a basically unbridled dynamic of financial optimization. Like, we just can't leave capitalism out of this. The system in which we operate is centrally driven by return on investment, not by human flourishing. And there may be no other way to organize large, modern, complex societies. But we would be insane, not continuously, to hold before us the essential adversary here.

The corporations are not on our sides. And the fact that a major split of our contemporary economy has figured out how to monetize not just our labor, but our actual ability to give ourselves to what we care about is extremely bad for our ability to continue to be non inhuman beings. I think I'm getting at something similar when I talk about my discomfort with how hard we find it to criticize choice. People mean a lot of things when they talk about neoliberalism. And I don't love the term one because I think it annoys people and shuts them down, but the other is because it's imprecise.

Ezra Klein
But the thing, I mean, when I talk about neoliberalism and the neoliberal age is a period in which the logic of markets became the logic. Absolutely. And I think it has become very difficult to think outside of market logic. And when I read older texts, I see a lot more discussion of the good, of virtues. And a lot of it is very religiously inflected, to be fair.

I mean, religion was an alternative structure of logic, of meaning that was in contestation with economic ways of thinking about that. I think his religion has weakened not only as an organized force, but as a kind of conceptual way of looking at the world capitalism market. Logic has taken over a lot of that space, and the market does not have our interests at heart. You invoke religion as one of the traditions on which one has been able to draw for a discourse of value that would not reduce to money value. I would invoke two other kinds of institutions that have been really important.

D. Graham Burnett
There's the space of education. I mean, I basically believe that a lot of what we do in the humanities is a training of attention. And partially that's why we have to hold onto and protect spaces for humanistic work in our education, because a lot of the other stuff can be instrumentalized. It's part of the reason it's getting increasingly exterminated from universities, because you can't monetize it. But I say all of that just because interpretation or meaning is so inextricable from the labor of attention.

And there's a third, which I also think is interesting to consider, which is spaces of art, music, aesthetics. I mean, artists have always made fun of the bourgeoisie collector who showed up with a giant bag of money and said, show me the most expensive thing and I'll take it. And the people in the know in the space of the arts would sort of snicker and say, how callow. Then he walked out with that. That's not the good stuff.

So each of those spaces, spaces of religion and institutions of education, study, teaching, and learning, and then museums and spaces of artistic production, symphonies, music, each of those institutions has meaningful traditions of non instrumentalizable attention.

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Ezra Klein
The category of the thing we want or a subcategory of the thing that we want. So sometimes I wonder if attention is a word like health. If I told you health is important, you'd nod your head. You're nodding your head. In fact, right now, if I said, I'm really trying to work on my health, on the one hand, you would get what I meant by that on some level.

I don't want to die soon and young for a preventable reason, but also wouldn't really tell you anything. There's so many subcategories to health, right? You go to doctors for different parts of body, and there's mental health and fitness and different kinds of fitness and cardiovascular and strength. And sometimes when we talk about attention, it feels to me like we are talking about a thing like health. The entire basket of different forms of awareness and experience we use when we are moving through the world.

And sometimes it feels like we are talking about something very specific, cardiovascular fitness, not health. And then alongside that, there are all these other things you might want to cultivate and be concerned about. Which one is it for you? I think you put your finger exactly on that duplex nature of our discourse around attention. Both those notions are in the language of attention that we use.

D. Graham Burnett
And I would argue that whats important now is that we have the richest conversation about attention to surface it as our collective concern in the way that this podcast and all the podcasts youve done on this and the wide range of authors like Jenny Odell and James Williams and Tim Wu, all these folks have written on this. We need more of all of that because, and here's where your language of health is exactly right. What we need is a kind of almost revolutionary rising of our awareness around the importance of this stuff. I'm old enough to remember a period back when nobody went running. James F.

Fix, right, he wrote the book running in, what was it, 77? Before that, regular people didn't go jogging. They didn't go running. Were people who were sort of athletes or people in sort of school because they were doing collective sports. Also, there weren't gyms that regular people went to.

Right. There were places like gold's gym, where you could go if you were a powerlifter or a boxer. I'm talking 1974, 75. The whole idea that ordinary people would sort of concern themselves with their fitness is something that's emerged over the last 40 years. It's staggering to consider the scale of the collective awareness of our physical well being.

Now, does that mean that health itself is a new idea? No. People have been worried about their health since forever. But the specific activation of fitness, that's a relatively new thing, and it's really changed in our lifetimes. And I'm proposing to you that that's gonna happen again over the next 40 years.

A collective recognition that our wellness in our attentional lives, our hygiene and health in our attention, is gonna be constitutive of our experience of being. This is what's going to happen. It's going to reshape education, which, as you've signaled, needs to be for and about attention. That's what it needs to teach, and it's going to transform our other ways of being together. So you're trying to do some of this.

Ezra Klein
You have, along with others, this school of attention. What are you trying to teach? Yeah, I love this stuff. I mean, we think of the school as sort of. A little bit like Black Mountain college, sort of creative, artistic collaboration, a little bit like something like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, like continuing education for people who want to read together and think and be together in person in a place.

D. Graham Burnett
And then a little bit like the kind of radical labor schools of the teens and twenties, like the schools created by the International ladies garment Workers Union, which were more like activist projects to promote a certain kind of politics. So that's kind of the triangle in which we place the school. The school does not promote some single programmatic theory of attention. On the contrary, we're interested in all the different traditions that can inform how we take attention forward. We had a senior Zen student do a course on Zen meditation as an attentional form, class on cinematography as a medium in which attention is choreographed cinematically, a class on perfume, where smell as a sensory modalities centered as a sort of attentional form.

We run workshops, and this is separate from the classes. We do free workshops. And the workshops are sort of opportunities to actually do some attention stuff together. Exercises in which people will, for instance, listen four times to the same four minute piece of music under, again, different sort of mental orientations, but collectively, then take some notes and talk out what happened as they sort of used their attention. And possibly the coolest thing we do at the school are these things called sidewalk studies, in which between five and ten people will get together, usually a bar, a cafe, and they'll read a carefully selected paragraph closely together and talk about it seminar style, having a drink.

That paragraph is on a card. When you flip the card over, there's a thing to do together, like a street action, like a kind of situation, a style activity. So an example would be like a great Audre Lorde passage on food in the sea. The action is going into a bodega and actually examining the bodega for where surveillance is happening, where nourishment is happening, and then moving to the second bar and talking through what it was like to sort of be in the space of the bodega with the Audre Lorde passage in our heads together. And there are dozens and dozens of these exercises that are continuously being invented by folks in the school and doing them together.

They do it because it's a way of being together and practicing attention together to generate forms of solidarity. I'm interested in that idea of practicing attention together with my kids. When I think about this, one of the things that I wonder is when I ask, what do I mean by I want them taught attention? Some part of it is just like I want them to have familiarity, like a visceral, somatic familiarity with what different kinds of attention feel like. I'm not sure I had that for a very long time.

Ezra Klein
I'd, of course, experienced many kinds of attention, but it's only later in life I become more mindful of what they feel like, and that's helped me diminish the role of some in my life. Right. The reason I'm not on Twitter or x anymore is that I don't like the feeling of the attention it furnishes. I don't like how I feel when I leave it. The reason I've sort of moved back to paper books is I do like the feeling of the attention.

I notice that it is healthier for me. It sounds to me a little bit like something you all are trying to do is just creating context in which you experience different kinds of attention. So you have that internal map you can work with? Absolutely. It's a do by doing kind of thing.

D. Graham Burnett
You actually have to come together with other people and surface the question of attention and then experience what giving one's attention with others can do to be reminded of how precious that feature of our being is and discover what can be returned from the world to themselves out of opening themselves to it attention. So I thought a good place to end here would be to do the deep listening activity, or at least a truncated version of it that you described earlier. So how do you lead people through this? Okay, so this would be an example of one of the exercises we might do at one of the attention labs at the Struther school. And we always like to make clear that we borrow from lots of different traditions.

So this is very much like the kinds of exercises that the wonderful sound artist genius Pauline Olivaros would use in her practice. It's not exactly like her stuff, but we always kind of talk a bit about Pauline Oliveros when we set this one up. And there are other sound artists who inform the kind of stuff we care about. Annie Lockwood and others. The exercise is going to have four phases.

I understand that you've got a sort of sound piece cued up? We've got it. Okay. We're going to actually play it four times. So your listeners have to be ready.

You're going to hear that piece of music, which is about how many minutes, would you say? I think we've cut it to 30 seconds or so. Okay, so it's 30 seconds. Do this for a little longer, but all right, so wherever you are, get ready. You're going to hear this 32nd sound piece four times, and I'm going to give you the mood under which you'll attend to it.

First, just listen. Okay. First, listen.

Second, this. And recall what have you heard before.

Third lesson, discover what do you hear for the first time.

And four, finally, don't listen. What do you find when you don't listen?

So let's talk back and forth. An observation about each of the phases. What happened in the first phase? A few of us know. The striking thing about listening to it the first time was the way my body's response kept changing.

Ezra Klein
So initially it's like you got these birds. It seems like it's going to be a kind of nice ambient piece of music. And then just the intense escalating tension, somewhat mounting dread. The noise goes up the number of sounds happening simultaneously feels like it goes up, the volume goes up. So by the end, you've begun.

Or for me, I began. I was like, oh, like a nice. Like, Jesus Christ, why did my producers choose this piece of music? So, yeah, I was a little bit. The first time, I was just on the ride of the bodily response to it.

D. Graham Burnett
For me, in the first time through, I was acutely attuned to a thousand questions sort of pulling me in all directions, because I'm accustomed to doing these kinds of things, like, over a long time, so longer, more immersive, more people. So a lot of anxiety as to whether this kind of thing can work in this setting. So the truth is, I became aware about midway through that I was effectively not listening to the thing at all on the first time through. Trying, but trying, but failing. For me, on the first one, we go to the second listen, where we were trying to hear something that we'd heard before.

Ezra Klein
Recall the second one I was struck by. So I remember the birds, right? I noticed they'd go on a little bit longer than I thought. And the second, I was a little braced because I remember the feeling I had on the first, it was like, oh, as this keeps going, you feel worse. And so the remembrance was of what was coming in the way that then made me surprised about what was there in the moment.

D. Graham Burnett
Super interesting. This is so embarrassing, but I heard the birds for the first time. In the second phase, it's not remembering. So it was a double catastrophe, because I was like, how the heck did I not hear the birds in the first phase, my listening was so bad. In phase one and two.

Wait a second. I'm not supposed to discover new things until phase three. So I had phase catastrophic disaster and felt bad about myself, but then sort of rounded on that and became aware of that sort of inexorable march time that comes in and the sort of harrowing fatalism that one associates with that musical mode. And so I had gotten to that in the first listen and was able to be like, okay, okay, I'm remembering that. I'm remembering that third listen.

Were you able to discover anything new? Yeah, I was more attentive to the birds. I was sort of tracking them. I realized they disappear, the whole piece. Then on the third, the thing I noticed was, it feels like you're clear cutting a forest.

Ezra Klein
That felt to me like what that piece of music was, right? You were going through the forest. It's initially fairly untouched, and then with each rising, I mean, the birds eventually falling silent, that tick, tick, tick, tick. When you talk about the fatalism of it, I mean, this felt like a piece of music that was about the clear cutting of an ecosystem. Yeah.

D. Graham Burnett
And I love discovery for me, involved a loop into how this piece came to be. I heard a twang that felt guitar like, but I'm almost certain that the music was composed electronically. So I had a little moment of your engineer or your creator, whoever's back there, are making this. And were they at a machine? What kind of machine, what kinds of clips or samples were they drawing on?

So my kind of discovery, in a sense, was the sources and being recalled to the question of the sources of these sounds, these acoustic experiences. Final phase four, you tried not to listen. Ezra happened is more comfortable. That body response, that kind of mounting dread, that anxiety just was muted. So it was more like the way I listen to music when I work, where my attention is not on the music, and the music is providing a mood and an energy.

Ezra Klein
Right. The music is a kind of stimulant. What did you think? But I'm not deeply immersed in it. What did you do with the rest of you to not listen?

D. Graham Burnett
Because, of course, our ears are funny. You can't close your eyes, your ears. So the stuff's gonna keep coming in. It's not like our eyes where, like, we close. I moved to the eyes.

Yeah. More of my attention was on what I was seeing. Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. Did you close your eyes in the first three phases? Did you keep them open in listening?

You did. Kept them open on all. That's interesting. I closed them, but I opened my eyes on the final phase and had a little taste. It was quick, but a little taste of that, like a foretaste of the ecstasy of trying to awaken my visual field and brighten it such that it would sort of displace my acoustic experience.

So I kind of had hypervision for a second in an effort to sort of blast out of my ears the acoustic experience by overwhelming it with the other sensory modality. And that felt, that was a little tremor of the good stuff, where you can sort, sort of feel an activation of what you can do with your attention as an aspect of being. I must say I enjoyed that. So what's the point of all that for you, if that is a successful lesson, when you do it, what are you hoping people have experienced? What is the meta lesson of that lesson?

Ezra Klein
It's not just what you heard in the music. What did we just do? Yeah, I want to just admit that I'm not super sure. And that kind of uncertainty is part of it. And what I can assure you is that when seven or eight people get together in Brooklyn and do something like this for half hour, 45 minutes, we all come out of it feeling so good.

D. Graham Burnett
It just feels so right to be with ourselves and what our minds and senses can do and with other people in relation to what's in the world this way. And I think that at this moment we need to carve out more spaces for these kinds of activated experiences within our teaching and learning environments. Let me end on this. If you're somebody who's not near the Brooklyn Struthers School of radical attention, but you're somebody who senses something is wrong with your attention, wrong, the intentional world that you inhabit, and you want it to be better for you, you want to find a space of what will feel like attentional health. Where do you start?

Yeah, it's a great question. And for my answer, I'm going to read one of the twelve theses on attention, written by the friends thesis. Nine of the twelve theses reads, sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now, but they're endangered, and many are in hiding, operating in self sustaining, inclusive, generous and fugitive forms. These sanctuaries can be found, but it takes an effort of attention to follow find them.

And this seeking is also attentions effort to heal itself. So my answer is, find a sanctuary. It's there. And your listeners out there, they all have their different sort of sweet spots where they are able to protect themselves from the frackers. It might be gardening, it might be that they actually can weld.

And like when they've got their visor down and they're kind of in the puddle of the hot metal, that's when everything is zoned out. They may be knitting and they may be doing Zumba class. I don't know what it is they're doing that's near you and what you would find and make possible, but find your people, and out of finding your people, and with a measure of intentionality, insisting upon the sanctuary where you are resistant to being fracked, attention can begin to heal. And that seeking out of the sanctuary space is itself already part of the healing. So then, always our final question.

Ezra Klein
What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Oh, there's so many great books, and all we need to do is protect the ability to read them and we'll be good. Well, let's start with one that I think is a deep and challenging and important book. In this kind of attention, space. And it's by my esteemed colleague, Natasha Dao Shull down at NYU.

D. Graham Burnett
It's called addiction by design. Natasha Dao Shull is a science and technology studies scholar, an anthropologist by training, and she did an extraordinary book on video poker machines, gambling machines in Vegas. It's a kind of a pre smartphone book about the engineering of addiction by the folks who designed those gambling machines and the environments in which they sit. And if you want to have a kind of harrowing inwardness with the sophisticated dark pattern technologies that can be achieved even in the most primitive technologies, those machines are not fantastic fancy in important ways, right? They are a kind of 19th century printing press to a modern full color laser printer in relation to what we have now in our pockets, but already to see how sophisticated the design of those systems were to suck people in and hold them, it's amazing.

Natasha, addiction by design, a second book that I love and that also comes out of my field and I think is a deep and hard but beautiful and important book for thinking about the history of science, would be the book objectivity by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, both of whom are really great historians of science. That book is a history of something that seems impossible to historicize. I mean, objectivity doesn't have a history. Objectivity is just being objective. That's, like, trans historical.

And they do an extraordinary and counterintuitive job of showing how radically historical our conceptualization of objectivity itself is, how entangled it is with shifting ideas of subjectivity, for instance, or the way that it plays off of the emergence of mechanical technologies for making inscriptions. So objectivity by Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston. And then I guess my wildcard book would just be a book I love, a book about the imagination, belief, dreams, and about America. It's by Herman Melville, of course, the author of Moby Dick, a book I also love. But I'm going to invoke his much stranger book, the Confidence man, which is a book about how belief happens and who the people are who can make us believe, and about the sort of entanglement of hope and belief.

It's very much a book about this strange country that I love and believe in, and that has to make us all also very uncomfortable a lot of the time. Herman Melville's the confidence man. D. Graham Burnett, thank you very much. Total pleasure.

Thanks.

Ezra Klein
This episode of the Azra Klein show was produced by Roland Hoo and Kristen Lin. Checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Amin Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin and Elias Isquith.

Original music by Isaac Jones and Amen Sahota audience strategy by Christina Simielewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser and special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

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