Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
I'm Anne Strainchamps in a deeper register today, getting over a head cold.
Well, better than yesterday.
I'm Steve Paulson.
We talk a lot about wonder on this podcast as an experience and also as a practice.
Because the feeling of wonder, that combination of amazement, joy, reverence, awe, that's not something you can just order up like a package from Amazon.
You have to keep yourself open to it.
Be curious.
Notice beauty.
Get outdoors.
And that's harder to do in today's attention economy.
Many of us feel a little less open to wonder these days, a little too stressed out for awe and mystery.
And maybe that's not only because our email is piled up and our screen time has ballooned, but because our attention is being fracked.
What's happened in the last 15 years represents a historically unprecedented innovation.
The rise of a $17 trillion suite of corporations who have as their primary business model extracting value from us, from our minds and our eyes.
It's a civilizational biohack.
D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science and an attention activist, and he's one of the primary founders of a group called the Friends of Attention that's building a movement to reclaim our attention.
We all know by now that in today's global marketplace, attention is money.
Big tech and the entertainment giants, you know, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, they're all competing for our eyeballs.
And there are a lot of very sharp critics out there, people like Chris Hayes, Tim Wu, Jonathan Haidt,
who've done a lot to point out the damage.
So what's different about Graham Burnett's take on all this?
A couple of things.
One is the emphasis on the need for collective resistance to what he calls human fracking.
That's a term I love, and we'll talk about it in a minute.
That group that I mentioned, the Friends of Attention, just published a book-length manifesto called Attensity, which he co-authored.
They also have a nonprofit called the Strother School of Radical Attention.
Radical Attention.
What is that?
The kind of attention that doesn't involve looking at a screen.
Really?
So if I go out weeding the garden, playing tennis, cooking, riding my bike?
Yeah, any of those, depending on the kind of intention you bring to it, sure.
So the other thing about Graham is that he's a historian of science at Princeton.
He's working on a book about how researchers in early psychology labs developed a somewhat warped idea of attention.
And he wants us to recapture older, deeper forms.
So we wound up talking about the German Romantic Movement and Saint Augustine, the radical French mystic Simone Weil, even Henry James.
Okay, let's listen.
Graham, I have a friend, a philosopher and critical theorist who was very active in SDS in the 60s and 70s.
One of my favorite stories that she has told me is about being at one of the big anti-war rallies and hearing a speech where one of the recurrent refrains was, name the system, because once it's been named, you can't unsee it.
So you have a name.
or the system that fuels the attention economy, fracking.
Will you tell me about attention fracking?
Yeah, yeah, human fracking, attention fracking.
That's, in a sense, the enemy.
The hyper-intensive, technologically sophisticated, deep-pocketed project to commodify our attention.
to turn our ability to be with the stuff we care about, with each other and with the world, to turn all that into cash money for a small number of large corporations.
And we call that human fracking.
And we use that language of fracking.
I mean, you can probably see it immediately.
That's why the language hits with people.
Petroleum fracking isn't just drilling a hole and waiting for some oil to kind of spurt up.
There's no more of that kind of oil out there.
Petroleum fracking is about pumping down into the earth high pressure, high volume solvents, detergents, to break up the deep tectonic architecture of the planet and force to the surface
a kind of monetizable spume of natural gas and crude.
I confess, I did not know that that's how fracking works.
So it works so beautifully as a metaphor for this attention world, where I think we all feel that we are, anytime you're in front of a screen...
You are experiencing a quantity of information that's just coming at you in a way that feels like it is too much to take in, as though it is going to kind of pulverize, chop your attention up into little tiny shards.
Yeah, and the harms are parallel too.
I mean, we know that hydrocarbon fracking, tectonic instability, mini earthquakes, you know, groundwater pollution and human fracking destabilizes us as individuals.
It harms our kids.
And I think a lot of us feel that the effects of these hyper-intensified extractive attention economies is also the destabilization of our civic life.
It turns out that deliberative democracy demands certain kinds of attentional habits and practices.
And if you successfully mash that stuff up, crunch it and crack it and destabilize it, you can actually undermine people's ability to function together in community.
It's so ironic because from the beginning, digital technology was marketed to us as an attentional good.
You know, it promised more efficiency and efficacy at work.
We'd have richer lives with scalable communities, all the people you've ever known and loved in one place.
And then it did exactly the opposite.
Instead of efficiency, we got distraction at work.
We got impoverished personal relationships.
We got an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.
How is it that the thing that promised one thing gave us exactly the opposite?
I would put it this way.
At no time in human history has every human being been more directly and intimately connected to every single other human on the planet.
And at no time in human history have people so roundly and universally expressed mounting anxiety around loneliness, isolation, and despair.
That's the paradox.
It sure is.
Now, how did this happen?
Human fracking.
business model is the problem.
These are, in fact, though they look like connectivity technologies, the underlying business model is maximizing time on device in order to aggregate and auction eyeballs.
The AI systems that drive the
algorithmic feeds, they optimize simply for what holds you on the device.
And a long conversation with a friend does not do that as well as a rapid fire sequence of rage bait or something sort of a little louche and then something that you were kind of curious about and something that you're worried your friends will have seen but that you're going to miss.
It turns out that you can just maximize time on device better by deploying targeted strategies
that kind of climb down the brainstem in a human and play to our baser reflexive urgencies.
Is there a moment where it all went wrong?
Because if you go back to, like, I mean, I'm old enough to remember when people were talking about the information superhighway and how exciting and wonderful it was going to be.
The people who founded the digital infrastructure we live with had great dreams and visions.
They thought it was going to bring the world together.
We were going to have, you know, we'd spread love everywhere.
We'd all be connected.
They didn't mean it to turn out this way.
Yeah.
I mean, I think different people would answer that question different ways, but there are a couple of moments you can point to.
The commitment to an advertising revenue model for much of the largely free internet.
invention of the pop-up ad, the beginning of the internet architecture that permitted consumer profile data to be aggregated such that consumers could be sold as kind of marketing packages to prospective
advertisers.
Each of those represents a kind of deepening of a certain sort of extractive commercial model.
But I would just want everybody to remember all of history amounts to these complex stories of wins and losses.
like the example of the 19th century, which has shaped so much of our thinking about technological change.
In the 19th century, what was commodified and brutalized was the labor of the body.
And what's being brutalized now is nothing more or less than our minds.
modified is literally the core indices of personhood, our ability to care, to desire to be in contact with the people we love.
All those things are being squeezed for cash value and compromised at the same time.
And it's no wonder that we feel unwell in new ways as individuals and as communities.
This was only possible thanks to an awful lot of scientific research that was done on attention, like the ability to track where our eyeballs go on a screen and to figure out how to put a price on that.
That didn't just happen, and it wasn't just a bunch of guys at Microsoft who figured it out.
So tell me how this happened, because I know that's a subject you're spending a lot of time on.
It is.
And indeed, you can hear in the background, maybe the little person who is running interference on my finishing my academic monograph.
That's Chiara in the background, who's five months old and just a week from her nap.
I am not on baby duty right now, so I will stay with us.
So yeah, I have been working for maybe six or seven years now on a book that looks at how laboratory scientists studied human attention over the last century or so.
And one of the really amazing things to come out of that archival
kind of investigation is the revelation that a huge amount of the money that was supporting the scientific study of attention came through the military-industrial complex.
Surprise, surprise.
attention that was of interest in those settings turns out to be a pretty specific kind of attention, the kind of attention that you need if you're going to successfully shoot down a MiG or if you're going to successfully monitor a radar screen for multiple hours.
I mean, these are all studies that were done, right, where you put somebody in front of a screen, whether it's a kid or an adult or whatever, you put them in front of a screen and you say, you know, count the number of times you see, I don't know, a raccoon jump across the screen.
And meanwhile, we're going to like pump loud noise into your head or distract you in some way or another.
And let's see how long you can hold on to the picture of the raccoon.
That's basically exactly it.
We want
the best radar screen monitors in our Navy that you can get.
How do we test for optimal capacity and what kinds of things can we do with these young men that will make them better at staring at screens for longer and longer periods of time?
Oh, it turns out that amphetamines help.
Great, let's use a little bit of amphetamine now and again.
These were the kinds of experiments that were being done.
And big picture, what one sees in that research is,
is that a thing that gets called human attention, track and trigger screen vigilance, is sliced and diced in ways that set up the pricing of attention in the emerging attention economy of our times.
Now, what's really important is that people remember that that attention span, instrumental, operational kind of attention is not
the sum total of human attentional abilities.
It's one kind of attention.
Exactly.
But it's not obviously the kind of attention that permits us to live rich, flourishing, meaningful lives.
The solution lies in our actually remembering that our real attention is so much more and so different
in our ability to rewild this monoculture of our attentional lives.
And we give some very specific practical ways that people can do a kind of an inventory of when in their lives they feel good and close to the world and other people and the things they care about.
Because it turns out wherever you feel good like that, that was something you were doing with your attention.
But you're going to need to protect that because the frackers are coming for it.
So I wake up in the morning and I know that I will feel better if I reach for a book or I sit with my thoughts or do anything other than reach for my phone.
Nine mornings out of 10, I lose that battle.
It is exactly like trying to resist alcohol or any other substance.
And the sense of shame and personal guilt is the same too.
Like I cannot believe I have so little willpower
So little self-discipline.
So help me think about that, because I think I am not remotely remarkable.
I think this is a message we all get all the time, that there is something wrong with us individually, that we are so attached to our phones.
Yeah.
So let's do some work to convert the sense of private shame into political angst.
Because what's going on here is nothing more or less than an unprecedented biohack at the scale of society.
It's a civilizational biohack.
by like six or seven large corporations, the most powerful AI, the deepest pocketed private equity, and the largest and most sophisticated military grade technologies ever aggregated, you're going to lose that battle.
So it's going to take us coming together
in a version of the movement that, you know, changed our relationship to the environment.
I mean, the environment wasn't even a thing in like sort of 1920.
By 1958, 60, you could start to hear people being like, no, no, the environment is like a shared good.
We need to remember that our attention is a shared good, that there are bad actors who are willing to despoil that shared good for bottom line profits.
And we have to be able to say together, no to that.
So what does liberated attention look and feel like?
We'll be right back.
Hey, it's Steve.
I am so glad you're with us.
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I'm Anne Strange-Jampson.
I'm talking with Dee Graham Burnett about what's wrong with the way we've been thinking about attention.
Graham, I was also thinking about the way we think about attention has often been through a religious or a spiritual frame.
Like mindfulness meditation made it our individual responsibility to get to the mat or the meditation cushion.
And before that, you know, there were centuries of religious instruction
in multiple religions that taught people that we are responsible for the state of our souls.
You know, I can kind of hear echoes of Puritan ministers in colonial New England here.
So I guess my question is, with that kind of historical and cultural background, do you think we're kind of primed to think of this as a personal interior problem?
For sure.
So...
The individual struggle for attention is a long story that has been prepped across a suite of different cultural practices, including religion, which has moralized our attention.
This starts to get in the weeds a little bit, like in intellectual history, but it's very juicy.
I'll do a second on it if you can do it, if you want to groove on it.
Should we do some of this?
So, indeed...
Intellectual historians have written some super interesting stuff historicizing selfhood and arguing that there are actually quite different understandings of the self in the 5th century and the 14th century and the 18th century.
And some of the most interesting moments in which apparently new ideas of selfhood emerge can be correlated with shifts in the understanding and practice of attention
That's interesting.
So what about if you go back to the German romantics, when the notion of an individual self and wanting the freedom of the individual self, that's really when that first gets developed.
What are the attentional practices that happened at that moment?
It's a great question.
And indeed, some of the most powerful moments that those romantics had, that shivering sense of,
of interiority, their spirits, was when they were placed in front of works of art looking at them.
Or landscapes, right?
This is the experience of the sublime.
You get all these German romantic painters and writers who are, you know, hiking up the Alps or standing in front of incredible overlooks looking at oceans or whatever.
They're all in love with the sublime.
Yeah, and in my class at Princeton, I do a whole section on the sublime as an attentional habit or mode.
Wait, wait, what do you mean?
Like, if I want to have an experience of the sublime, is that something I can cultivate?
Yeah, I mean, for Kant, who's certainly one of the most important theorists of the sublime, it's a very specific reaction to a sensory experience.
And its shape is like this.
you are in front of a gigantic wave breaking on a rocky coast.
You have a powerful feeling as you look at that gigantic wave.
That feeling is a sort of a two-step feeling.
First, you're like, wow, that wave is so huge.
It would crush me like a tiny little grape.
So there you get the fear.
Fear.
And then the second movement of the sublime is, but wait, gigantic and powerful as that thing is, I am still greater.
because I have an infinite soul and the capacity to be self-conscious, and that makes my world infinite in a way that transcends even the gigantic tsunami wave that's about to mash me.
So that those double moves of, wow, I'm so tiny and insignificant before the enormous grandeur of that mountain, wave, whatever,
And then that second move, wait, I'm still more ginormous than that ginormous thing.
I mean, I would have said that that moment, standing in front of this giant wave, it is your mind that encompasses the wave.
You are standing there looking at it, thinking about it.
So the wave exists as something real and physical, but it also exists inside your own mind.
Therefore, your mind is bigger.
Yes.
I mean, attention as a language in which we can articulate something transcendent about our natures and our being, that speaks to the richness of attention in our tradition.
And the anguish of our moment is the rising to predominance of this much thinner track and trigger quantifiable metrical instrumental concept of attention has, in my view, more and more cut us off.
from the existential richness of our inheritance, and that's part of why we feel unwell.
I don't want this to sound too abstract, but I mean, even take someone, you know, paradigmatically beautiful on attention, like St. Augustine, to move into a spiritual language.
What did St. Augustine say about attention?
So, for Augustine in Book 11 of the Confessions,
which is a meditation on time and addressed to God, the young Augustine, he's not that young, but Augustine writes, you know, God, you understand this thing about what it's like to be a human person like me.
You understand that me and all of us humans, we live sort of smeared across time.
We're in the present, but we are often thinking about the future, but we're haunted by the past.
And you, God, who art infinite and eternal, you're not in time this way like we are.
That's like a mark of our fallenness in some sense.
And God, what I want to do when I pray is gather myself up into a kind of focus.
that would permit me to escape from my smearedness in time.
So for Augustine, true contemplative attention unites us with God and is the way we catch a glimpse of our own participation in eternity.
magnificent and strange and rich idea.
And one that I don't mean to sort of say, we should all be doing this, but it is a shocking reminder of, in a sense, how thin our current worry about attention spans are.
You're making me think about Simone Weil, the French mystic who talked about attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
Attention is a gateway to the divine.
For Simone Weil, attention is a form of love.
I'm also thinking about...
Mary Oliver, the poet, or much quoted, really beautiful instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
You know, we know this.
We do.
And so powerful is all that turned in us that 21st century capitalism has figured out how to jam its blood siphons directly into those pressures inside us in order to monetize it.
And Simone Weil is one of the true forefighters
in the attention liberation movement the kind of work of attention activism she's the spirit that presides over the text that the friends drafted called the 12 theses on attention which is out there in the interwebs everybody can find it it's been translated into like a dozen languages at this point and you give that beautiful proposition of hers that pure attention is the rarest form of generosity that all attention aspires to the condition of prayer for her
Attention to a person who's afflicted, attention to the suffering of others, is the deepest and highest act of morality.
Ethics consists basically for her in our ability to give our attention to those who are afflicted.
And she lived her own life in a really quite extraordinary environment.
and ultimately kind of maddening commitment to that impossible vision.
But her work was worked out and sort of theorized a little more soberly by the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, who's another kind of person who's really worth thinking.
I don't think it's exactly an accident either that you have a striking line of powerful female thinkers who have spoken richly to attention.
A little less interested in sort of stabbing things and carrying things off and a little more interested in sort of staying with attention.
the world and we at the at the struther school of radical attention so the friends of attention of this non-profit coalition a couple of years ago we created a whole kind of radical school in brooklyn called the struther school of radical attention doing courses and workshops what do you do what does it mean what does it mean to teach or to study radical attention
I'll just say that when we run these workshops and people ask, like, what is attention, one of the things that the facilitators will often point to is this beautiful woman in a Henry James novel called Wings of the Dove, in which James depicts a very busy, very prominent medical doctor meeting with a terminally ill woman who's very anxious.
And James invokes the way the doctor settles to give himself to the woman in her anxiety and fear by describing him placing on the table between them, crystal clean, the empty cup of attention.
He figures attention as an empty crystal goblet that is placed between us.
And we think that's just such a beautiful image.
That is so beautiful.
It's so beautiful because it's like, it's all imminence.
It's all what's about to happen.
It's the negative space.
We've been talking about poets.
It's like Keats' negative capability where everything is potent and present precisely by not being there.
Human attention includes just staring out the window when you wake up in the morning.
and daydreaming.
I'm thinking about a beautiful book by Paul North, a book called The Problem of Distraction, and in that book he argues that the real attention in some sense is always found in the little interstices, in the gaps, meaning
If I'm the teacher and I'm looking out there and there's that boy in the back of the classroom who's staring out the window and I say, hey, you're not paying attention, meaning you're not up here memorizing Sokotoa intrigue, the fool is I at the front of the room because that boy staring out the window is deeply ensconced in some reverie
And it's nonsensical to say that he's not paying attention.
He's pure attention in the way that he's become absent to himself.
And so you asked earlier, like, what do we do at the school?
And that is at the heart of the work of the Friends of Attention.
We define ourselves as a community that is interested in forms of attention that are resistant to commodification.
We're building a national coalition of folks who think in these terms.
And if your listeners go to the website of the School of Radical Attention, there's a section there under Get Involved of an atlas.
And it's really moving to see.
We just launched it a few weeks ago, but already there's hundreds of folks who've
all over the country and the world who say, yes, we are a bunch of philosophers who meet in a bar in Joshua Tree, and we are attention activists.
We're a set of textile artists who like to knit and crochet, and we're in the Pacific Northwest.
We're attention activists.
We play board games down here in Texas.
We do it on Wednesday nights.
It's like a no-devices board game evening for social.
And they're just all identifying whatever it is they're doing, from rock climbing to surfing to reading Play-Doh.
They're saying, we do this under the banner of attention activism.
And that's the kind of movement energy we need to fight the frackers right now.
So I wanted to talk with you for this podcast because I'm interested in how and why the world has come to feel less wonder-filled.
You know, the German philosopher Weber's notion of the disenchantment of the world has always really rung true for me.
But, you know, my own view is that the world itself didn't change.
The world didn't somehow lose its capacity to enchant.
We changed.
People did.
And so my gut sense is that the disenchantment Weber named was in fact the byproduct of an attentional shift.
I don't know.
What do you think?
In a simpler way, what I'm asking is...
How do attention and wonder connect?
What an amazing, rich and important question.
The first thing I would say is I believe deeply that wonder is a form of resistance to the pernicious dimensions of what Weber identifies as disenchantment.
The second thing I would say is that
Your show is about wonder in beautiful ways.
As you know, I've been an editor for practically 20 years at a magazine called Cabinet that derives its name from the tradition of the Wonder Cabinet.
The Wonder Cabinets.
And so Wonder Cabinets is a distinctive kind of space for the cultivation of wonder, or perhaps the sort of purest cathedral space
for attention as enchantment.
So I do think that cultivation of the right forms of attention
relationship to enchantment.
Now, I'm going to say something else that makes the story a little bit more complicated.
Like, I could leave this out if I wanted the story to be simple, but hey, let's see what your listeners think.
You know, one of the very interesting facts about the history of advertising is that the history of advertising is a lot a history of different kinds of enchantment.
So the plot thickens.
Across the 19th into the 20th century, well into the 20th century, who was really selling enchantment?
It was Disney.
And for that matter, it was Pears Soap.
Coca-Cola and Henry Ford.
Correct.
Yeah.
Correct.
One of the primary discourses of enchantment in modernity has been the consumer discourse of selling dream lives as a component of consumer product.
I mean, in some ways, there's something beautiful about that.
It's kind of like the democratization thing.
of wonder and luxury and marvelous.
It's no longer just the purview of, I don't know, royals or aristocrats or incredibly wealthy people.
You too can have a beautiful bar of Paris soap in your bathroom or a car that will take you anywhere.
And so what happened to the enchantment function of the world of advertising?
And was that ever really a good thing?
Or maybe was that a form of enchantment of which we should always have been quite skeptical?
This is a live topic among folks who do cultural studies.
There are sort of those who are on the side of just say no to these ersatz, fake forms of enchantment.
that are purveying illusion.
And there are those who are more sympathetic to the lived lives of fantasy that capitalism has always spangled as it faced its mass populations.
So I have my own views on this question, but I'm not going to sort of crank out, here's the D. Graham Burnett position on this.
Well, maybe a good analogy is,
The difference between food that tastes and feels nourishing and ultra-processed foods, which are unbelievably hard to resist.
They're engineered to take advantage of our hardwired taste for fat and sugar and salt.
It's such a powerful analogy, and I want to thank you for bringing it up.
I'm going to offer a slightly different but consistent image, which would go something like this.
Neither disenchantment nor enchantment can save us.
Which is to say, neither facts nor stories is enough.
The scientists who are like, just the facts here, baby.
Thank you, but that's not enough.
And the sort of fantasists who are like, sit down, let me tell you a story.
Not clear that they're always on our side.
So what is?
I mean, this is the hardest question of all.
And if I had an answer to you for what that meant in terms of do this at 10 o'clock on Tuesday morning, you should all be terrified and back away.
So I don't have that kind of answer.
But I do not want those answers being fed to us by five tech bros running $17 billion worth of assets out in Silicon Valley.
D. Graham Burnett co-founded the Friends of Attention, co-authored Attensity, the manifesto of the attention liberation movement, and directs the Struther School of Radical Attention.
In his other life, he is a historian of science at Princeton.
So I find this history fascinating.
I mean, lots of people are talking about the attention economy, but I've never heard anyone connect it to the German Romantics or St. Augustine.
But I do wonder where that leaves us today.
I mean, what was your takeaway from talking with him?
I took it as an invitation to think about some of my daily and weekly activities as different forms of attention.
For example, that Pilates class I take three times a week, it's all about paying attention to subtle movements in my spine and my hips and my shoulders and the muscles that otherwise I don't even think about.
And the quality of that attention, like what it feels like to pay that kind of attention, that's probably the real reason I keep going back.
And then if I think about the needlework that I do at night to unwind, that's another kind of attention.
It's located in my hands.
It's very sensory and tactile.
It's all about paying attention to the details of color and texture.
I suspect that most of us have more experiences of what Graham would call radical attention than we might think.
I mean, you take the dog for a walk every day.
You ride your bike.
You cook dinner.
Maybe it would be an interesting exercise to try to describe the quality of your attention during some of those everyday activities.
You know, those sound like wonder practices.
They do.
I found that it made my mundane daily life seem richer and in some ways almost mysterious.
One thing I really like about this is you're saying you don't need a meditation practice to enhance this sense of attention.
These things we do every day can really add wonder to our lives.
If you shift how you think about them, yeah.
Thank you for joining us for another episode of Wonder Cabinet, brought to you from two places we love, Madison, Wisconsin, and Versher, Vermont.
And apologies again about my voice.
I'm Anne Strangehamps.
I'm Steve Paulson.
Our audio engineer is Steve Gottscher, and our digital producer is Mark Rickers.
We'll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks, but we'll be back with a new episode on June 13th.
Until then, let's all be well.