Welcome back to campus! Got your classes sorted out? It’s time to gear up for another semester of school — a place to teach and learn and play and think and change.
In her 1942 essay reflecting on “the right use of school,” the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil laid out her vision for the ultimate purpose of education: not learning some “subject” or “skill,” but rather training attention itself, the actual mental activity that makes all learning possible — the capacity to open the mind, senses, and heart to an object.
So what would Weil make of the “attention economy” — a multi-trillion-dollar industry that has arisen in the last twenty years, the unholy alliance of big tech and consumer capitalism? It is safe to say she would be appalled.
Just about every human being in the modern world has become a lab rat in an uncontrolled and largely unregulated experiment in “human fracking.” Just as petroleum frackers pump high-volume, high-pressure detergent deep into the earth to bring to the surface a monetizable slurry of oil and gas, human frackers extract the money-value of our eyeballs using a similar operation: look at your little brother on TikTok, and see a pump-derrick sucking advertising wealth out of his face. We regulate the petroleum industry, because we see the dangers of fracking the earth. Human fracking, however, is mostly a free-for-all — a Wild-West gold rush into our brainstems.
The attention frackers would have us believe that this is how things have to be. But our ability to give attention is, ultimately, our ability to assess the world with others — and that includes the power to make it otherwise. There is no single fix to this problem, no hack. But as a first step, Princeton students must push for a change in the paradigm surrounding the attention crisis and for a broad coalition to mobilize around the freedom of attention in the name of human flourishing.
This summer we were part of a week-long non-profit workshop “The Politics of Attention,” led by Princeton’s own Mihir Kshirsagar. One moment from the workshop showed how the battle begins with precise language: one of the activists from the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn, Amalia Mayorga, replaced the phrase “I spend too much time on my phone” with “my behavior is being modified!” and observed how profoundly the matter changed.
Because that is the truth, of course. Your brother’s trance-like state — gaze glued to the screen, swiping — is no accident. A billion dollars in startup capital, a dozen petaflops of computational power, and a lot of very bright programmers have succeeded in making it pretty much impossible to escape the slipstream of addictive feeds.
This isn’t good for us. Indeed, it can be catastrophic. If we let the stuff of our very minds and senses be sold to the highest bidder, there is little we can do to deal with anything else, from climate change to that looming orgo midterm.
The first step in pushing back against the attention frackers is understanding what it is that we are working to protect. The conventional notion of attention — as a function primarily concerned with time-on-task and productivity — does not serve the multi-faceted demands of our present crisis. Indeed, plenty of historical research demonstrates that this kind of attention has emerged in the past century from the very laboratories where the attention frackers’ coercive tools were forged.
What is needed (as we recently argued), is a movement, a broad coalition of communities who understand the relation of freely given attention to a world of human flourishing. The good news is that such a movement is happening. We have found it churning at the Strother School, where both of us work with a community of committed Attention Activists to reimagine the ways that people might flourish in a transformed world. You can find it there too, or in places of worship, in dance troupe rehearsals, and among the folks fishing along the tow-path.
Anywhere that people gather to offer their minds and senses to their surroundings and each other, attention activists can be found. This means that you, too, are positioned to be an attention activist — if you want to be. Whether you are a scientist or a humanist or an engineer or an artist, you are immersed in a lineage of liberal arts attentional practices that reach back across centuries.
What should Princeton students do? Do what you do already. As you go about your studies, attend to the kinds of attention that emerge in the lecture, the laboratory, and the library. Lend attention to your own attention, then share what you find with others. To attend, and to share with those around you, is the blueprint of collective study and the foundational act of worldbuilding upon which the University stands. This includes: reading, in all its forms (immersive, extensive, close, distant, critical, oneiric), observing (from the eagle-eye of the field naturalist to the participatory sensitivity of the ethnographer, to the slow-looking of the art historian), and studying itself, in all its glory, alone and with others.
The more you come to know this thing called attention and the more you share it with your peers, the more acutely you will see, as a student and a student body, the nature of the challenge we face. This work of training attention, together, is the work of forming shared values. And shared values are the beginning of political action — as well as any meaningful fight against injustice.
So, as you begin the semester, consider Simone Weil’s insight that a geometry problem is more than a geometry problem. A close reading is more than a close reading. A careful titration can enrich the soul. Because, deep down, these are exercises of our ability to care. The work of study can be the work of justice. When we learn together, we build our attention. And with our attention, we build the world.
D. Graham Burnett ’93 is the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University, and the founder of the non-profit Institute for Sustained Attention.
Peter Schmidt ’20 is a writer and organizer from Clayton, Miss. He serves as the founding Program Director of the Strother School of Radical Attention in Brooklyn, NY.
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