human fracking

— From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” […] And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, people who have 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. […] Ezra Klein: So you’ve written that our attention is getting fracked. What do you mean by that? D. Graham Burnett: 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. But it’s a new technology for doing that. […] 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 and 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. […] New technologies do really make possible new forms of human exploitation. This is real. […] 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 resistors 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 like 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. And we need to see what happens with it in the years ahead.