Your Mind Is Being Fracked
About this episode
Klein interviews Princeton historian of science D. Graham Burnett, on what the attention economy is doing to our minds. Burnett calls it 'human fracking': just as fracking extracts the last drops of petroleum from exhausted wells, the attention industry extracts our last mental capacity. They trace how 20th-century lab research — from interwar fighter-pilot tests to WWII radar experiments — created a 'triggering' conception of attention that made it measurable, pricable, and exploitable. Burnett draws on Jonathan Crary's argument that modern attention is a construct of modernity and Simone Weil's idea of attention as radical, objectless waiting, and he takes seriously the 'moral panic' objection (we worried about radio and newspapers too) while insisting new technologies enable new exploitation. The conversation ends with the Strother School of Radical Attention's practices — sidewalk studies, communal listening exercises — and Burnett's counsel from his '12 Theses on Attention': find a sanctuary.