1 00:00:00,618 --> 00:00:01,930 Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. 2 00:00:03,992 --> 00:00:08,054 I'm Anne Strainchamps in a deeper register today, getting over a head cold. 3 00:00:08,274 --> 00:00:09,515 Well, better than yesterday. 4 00:00:09,795 --> 00:00:10,656 I'm Steve Paulson. 5 00:00:11,236 --> 00:00:16,439 We talk a lot about wonder on this podcast as an experience and also as a practice. 6 00:00:16,839 --> 00:00:26,144 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. 7 00:00:26,504 --> 00:00:27,925 You have to keep yourself open to it. 8 00:00:28,305 --> 00:00:28,945 Be curious. 9 00:00:29,566 --> 00:00:30,346 Notice beauty. 10 00:00:30,846 --> 00:00:31,487 Get outdoors. 11 00:00:32,287 --> 00:00:34,690 And that's harder to do in today's attention economy. 12 00:00:35,150 --> 00:00:40,976 Many of us feel a little less open to wonder these days, a little too stressed out for awe and mystery. 13 00:00:41,776 --> 00:00:49,304 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. 14 00:00:50,004 --> 00:00:57,929 What's happened in the last 15 years represents a historically unprecedented innovation. 15 00:00:58,629 --> 00:01:16,460 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. 16 00:01:17,381 --> 00:01:19,722 It's a civilizational biohack. 17 00:01:21,273 --> 00:01:32,641 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. 18 00:01:32,942 --> 00:01:37,445 We all know by now that in today's global marketplace, attention is money. 19 00:01:37,845 --> 00:01:45,151 Big tech and the entertainment giants, you know, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, they're all competing for our eyeballs. 20 00:01:45,671 --> 00:01:50,495 And there are a lot of very sharp critics out there, people like Chris Hayes, Tim Wu, Jonathan Haidt, 21 00:01:50,875 --> 00:01:52,716 who've done a lot to point out the damage. 22 00:01:53,456 --> 00:01:56,097 So what's different about Graham Burnett's take on all this? 23 00:01:56,597 --> 00:01:57,278 A couple of things. 24 00:01:57,878 --> 00:02:02,500 One is the emphasis on the need for collective resistance to what he calls human fracking. 25 00:02:03,000 --> 00:02:05,081 That's a term I love, and we'll talk about it in a minute. 26 00:02:05,961 --> 00:02:13,004 That group that I mentioned, the Friends of Attention, just published a book-length manifesto called Attensity, which he co-authored. 27 00:02:13,425 --> 00:02:17,066 They also have a nonprofit called the Strother School of Radical Attention. 28 00:02:17,506 --> 00:02:18,547 Radical Attention. 29 00:02:18,587 --> 00:02:19,027 What is that? 30 00:02:19,566 --> 00:02:22,148 The kind of attention that doesn't involve looking at a screen. 31 00:02:22,368 --> 00:02:22,708 Really? 32 00:02:22,788 --> 00:02:27,552 So if I go out weeding the garden, playing tennis, cooking, riding my bike? 33 00:02:27,712 --> 00:02:31,795 Yeah, any of those, depending on the kind of intention you bring to it, sure. 34 00:02:32,476 --> 00:02:36,319 So the other thing about Graham is that he's a historian of science at Princeton. 35 00:02:36,819 --> 00:02:44,745 He's working on a book about how researchers in early psychology labs developed a somewhat warped idea of attention. 36 00:02:45,365 --> 00:02:48,568 And he wants us to recapture older, deeper forms. 37 00:02:49,188 --> 00:02:57,019 So we wound up talking about the German Romantic Movement and Saint Augustine, the radical French mystic Simone Weil, even Henry James. 38 00:02:57,580 --> 00:02:58,542 Okay, let's listen. 39 00:02:59,216 --> 00:03:06,917 Graham, I have a friend, a philosopher and critical theorist who was very active in SDS in the 60s and 70s. 40 00:03:07,678 --> 00:03:22,280 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. 41 00:03:23,040 --> 00:03:25,721 So you have a name. 42 00:03:26,201 --> 00:03:30,625 or the system that fuels the attention economy, fracking. 43 00:03:31,185 --> 00:03:33,147 Will you tell me about attention fracking? 44 00:03:33,868 --> 00:03:37,251 Yeah, yeah, human fracking, attention fracking. 45 00:03:37,691 --> 00:03:39,072 That's, in a sense, the enemy. 46 00:03:40,293 --> 00:03:51,503 The hyper-intensive, technologically sophisticated, deep-pocketed project to commodify our attention. 47 00:03:52,349 --> 00:04:03,780 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. 48 00:04:04,101 --> 00:04:08,145 And we call that human fracking. 49 00:04:08,885 --> 00:04:10,527 And we use that language of fracking. 50 00:04:10,567 --> 00:04:12,989 I mean, you can probably see it immediately. 51 00:04:13,029 --> 00:04:14,791 That's why the language hits with people. 52 00:04:16,115 --> 00:04:22,919 Petroleum fracking isn't just drilling a hole and waiting for some oil to kind of spurt up. 53 00:04:23,079 --> 00:04:25,320 There's no more of that kind of oil out there. 54 00:04:26,160 --> 00:04:42,009 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 55 00:04:42,749 --> 00:04:49,511 a kind of monetizable spume of natural gas and crude. 56 00:04:50,411 --> 00:04:55,192 I confess, I did not know that that's how fracking works. 57 00:04:55,232 --> 00:05:06,195 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... 58 00:05:07,195 --> 00:05:21,447 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. 59 00:05:21,928 --> 00:05:23,610 Yeah, and the harms are parallel too. 60 00:05:23,650 --> 00:05:36,961 I mean, we know that hydrocarbon fracking, tectonic instability, mini earthquakes, you know, groundwater pollution and human fracking destabilizes us as individuals. 61 00:05:37,362 --> 00:05:38,363 It harms our kids. 62 00:05:38,983 --> 00:05:53,245 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. 63 00:05:54,655 --> 00:06:01,599 It turns out that deliberative democracy demands certain kinds of attentional habits and practices. 64 00:06:02,140 --> 00:06:13,287 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. 65 00:06:13,875 --> 00:06:21,540 It's so ironic because from the beginning, digital technology was marketed to us as an attentional good. 66 00:06:22,161 --> 00:06:26,243 You know, it promised more efficiency and efficacy at work. 67 00:06:26,303 --> 00:06:32,288 We'd have richer lives with scalable communities, all the people you've ever known and loved in one place. 68 00:06:33,508 --> 00:06:35,409 And then it did exactly the opposite. 69 00:06:35,449 --> 00:06:37,850 Instead of efficiency, we got distraction at work. 70 00:06:37,870 --> 00:06:40,551 We got impoverished personal relationships. 71 00:06:40,591 --> 00:06:43,392 We got an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. 72 00:06:44,373 --> 00:06:48,214 How is it that the thing that promised one thing gave us exactly the opposite? 73 00:06:48,795 --> 00:06:49,975 I would put it this way. 74 00:06:50,455 --> 00:07:01,220 At no time in human history has every human being been more directly and intimately connected to every single other human on the planet. 75 00:07:02,333 --> 00:07:16,819 And at no time in human history have people so roundly and universally expressed mounting anxiety around loneliness, isolation, and despair. 76 00:07:17,199 --> 00:07:18,440 That's the paradox. 77 00:07:18,660 --> 00:07:19,500 It sure is. 78 00:07:20,020 --> 00:07:21,481 Now, how did this happen? 79 00:07:22,221 --> 00:07:23,702 Human fracking. 80 00:07:24,689 --> 00:07:27,431 business model is the problem. 81 00:07:28,132 --> 00:07:45,066 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. 82 00:07:46,227 --> 00:07:48,870 The AI systems that drive the 83 00:07:49,450 --> 00:07:54,071 algorithmic feeds, they optimize simply for what holds you on the device. 84 00:07:54,711 --> 00:08:11,355 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. 85 00:08:11,655 --> 00:08:19,177 It turns out that you can just maximize time on device better by deploying targeted strategies 86 00:08:20,099 --> 00:08:28,357 that kind of climb down the brainstem in a human and play to our baser reflexive urgencies. 87 00:08:29,092 --> 00:08:31,994 Is there a moment where it all went wrong? 88 00:08:32,054 --> 00:08:39,740 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. 89 00:08:40,480 --> 00:08:48,866 The people who founded the digital infrastructure we live with had great dreams and visions. 90 00:08:48,946 --> 00:08:51,248 They thought it was going to bring the world together. 91 00:08:51,268 --> 00:08:54,390 We were going to have, you know, we'd spread love everywhere. 92 00:08:54,430 --> 00:08:55,591 We'd all be connected. 93 00:08:56,532 --> 00:08:58,093 They didn't mean it to turn out this way. 94 00:08:58,971 --> 00:08:59,291 Yeah. 95 00:08:59,591 --> 00:09:06,114 I mean, I think different people would answer that question different ways, but there are a couple of moments you can point to. 96 00:09:07,334 --> 00:09:15,017 The commitment to an advertising revenue model for much of the largely free internet. 97 00:09:16,057 --> 00:09:37,325 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 98 00:09:38,125 --> 00:09:39,046 advertisers. 99 00:09:39,627 --> 00:09:44,952 Each of those represents a kind of deepening of a certain sort of extractive commercial model. 100 00:09:45,692 --> 00:09:54,841 But I would just want everybody to remember all of history amounts to these complex stories of wins and losses. 101 00:09:56,903 --> 00:10:02,485 like the example of the 19th century, which has shaped so much of our thinking about technological change. 102 00:10:03,105 --> 00:10:08,547 In the 19th century, what was commodified and brutalized was the labor of the body. 103 00:10:08,767 --> 00:10:15,230 And what's being brutalized now is nothing more or less than our minds. 104 00:10:17,200 --> 00:10:27,747 modified is literally the core indices of personhood, our ability to care, to desire to be in contact with the people we love. 105 00:10:28,507 --> 00:10:36,132 All those things are being squeezed for cash value and compromised at the same time. 106 00:10:36,192 --> 00:10:43,697 And it's no wonder that we feel unwell in new ways as individuals and as communities. 107 00:10:46,201 --> 00:11:03,392 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. 108 00:11:03,913 --> 00:11:07,975 That didn't just happen, and it wasn't just a bunch of guys at Microsoft who figured it out. 109 00:11:08,476 --> 00:11:13,019 So tell me how this happened, because I know that's a subject you're spending a lot of time on. 110 00:11:13,565 --> 00:11:13,986 It is. 111 00:11:14,106 --> 00:11:14,526 It is. 112 00:11:14,726 --> 00:11:25,198 And indeed, you can hear in the background, maybe the little person who is running interference on my finishing my academic monograph. 113 00:11:25,678 --> 00:11:30,463 That's Chiara in the background, who's five months old and just a week from her nap. 114 00:11:30,804 --> 00:11:34,368 I am not on baby duty right now, so I will stay with us. 115 00:11:35,809 --> 00:11:49,940 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. 116 00:11:50,801 --> 00:11:53,983 And one of the really amazing things to come out of that archival 117 00:11:54,910 --> 00:12:06,827 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. 118 00:12:07,048 --> 00:12:08,009 Surprise, surprise. 119 00:12:10,427 --> 00:12:28,978 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. 120 00:12:29,760 --> 00:12:45,070 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. 121 00:12:45,130 --> 00:12:51,995 And meanwhile, we're going to like pump loud noise into your head or distract you in some way or another. 122 00:12:52,055 --> 00:12:56,198 And let's see how long you can hold on to the picture of the raccoon. 123 00:12:56,598 --> 00:12:58,079 That's basically exactly it. 124 00:12:58,560 --> 00:12:59,140 We want 125 00:12:59,664 --> 00:13:04,107 the best radar screen monitors in our Navy that you can get. 126 00:13:04,367 --> 00:13:14,214 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? 127 00:13:14,395 --> 00:13:16,296 Oh, it turns out that amphetamines help. 128 00:13:16,456 --> 00:13:19,038 Great, let's use a little bit of amphetamine now and again. 129 00:13:19,458 --> 00:13:21,320 These were the kinds of experiments that were being done. 130 00:13:21,840 --> 00:13:25,503 And big picture, what one sees in that research is, 131 00:13:26,620 --> 00:13:42,012 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. 132 00:13:42,732 --> 00:13:55,041 Now, what's really important is that people remember that that attention span, instrumental, operational kind of attention is not 133 00:13:56,278 --> 00:13:59,619 the sum total of human attentional abilities. 134 00:14:00,019 --> 00:14:02,460 It's one kind of attention. 135 00:14:02,480 --> 00:14:02,740 Exactly. 136 00:14:03,260 --> 00:14:10,701 But it's not obviously the kind of attention that permits us to live rich, flourishing, meaningful lives. 137 00:14:12,062 --> 00:14:20,864 The solution lies in our actually remembering that our real attention is so much more and so different 138 00:14:21,617 --> 00:14:26,701 in our ability to rewild this monoculture of our attentional lives. 139 00:14:27,381 --> 00:14:40,051 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. 140 00:14:40,291 --> 00:14:45,014 Because it turns out wherever you feel good like that, that was something you were doing with your attention. 141 00:14:45,254 --> 00:14:48,597 But you're going to need to protect that because the frackers are coming for it. 142 00:14:49,268 --> 00:14:58,693 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. 143 00:14:59,233 --> 00:15:01,414 Nine mornings out of 10, I lose that battle. 144 00:15:01,914 --> 00:15:06,657 It is exactly like trying to resist alcohol or any other substance. 145 00:15:07,317 --> 00:15:11,999 And the sense of shame and personal guilt is the same too. 146 00:15:12,159 --> 00:15:15,421 Like I cannot believe I have so little willpower 147 00:15:16,061 --> 00:15:17,483 So little self-discipline. 148 00:15:17,923 --> 00:15:22,948 So help me think about that, because I think I am not remotely remarkable. 149 00:15:23,088 --> 00:15:32,137 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. 150 00:15:32,657 --> 00:15:32,917 Yeah. 151 00:15:33,378 --> 00:15:33,638 Yeah. 152 00:15:33,918 --> 00:15:40,565 So let's do some work to convert the sense of private shame into political angst. 153 00:15:42,050 --> 00:15:52,385 Because what's going on here is nothing more or less than an unprecedented biohack at the scale of society. 154 00:15:52,926 --> 00:15:55,410 It's a civilizational biohack. 155 00:15:56,273 --> 00:16:10,165 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. 156 00:16:10,845 --> 00:16:13,748 So it's going to take us coming together 157 00:16:14,088 --> 00:16:18,129 in a version of the movement that, you know, changed our relationship to the environment. 158 00:16:18,429 --> 00:16:21,910 I mean, the environment wasn't even a thing in like sort of 1920. 159 00:16:22,250 --> 00:16:27,511 By 1958, 60, you could start to hear people being like, no, no, the environment is like a shared good. 160 00:16:27,831 --> 00:16:38,414 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. 161 00:16:38,894 --> 00:16:41,775 And we have to be able to say together, no to that. 162 00:16:43,073 --> 00:16:46,437 So what does liberated attention look and feel like? 163 00:16:46,878 --> 00:16:47,639 We'll be right back. 164 00:16:47,810 --> 00:16:48,692 Hey, it's Steve. 165 00:16:49,133 --> 00:16:50,575 I am so glad you're with us. 166 00:16:50,876 --> 00:16:51,978 And I have a favor to ask. 167 00:16:52,539 --> 00:16:56,005 This is a new podcast and we're really hoping to reach more listeners. 168 00:16:56,486 --> 00:17:04,661 So we'd love for you to tell your friends about Wonder Cabinet and it will really help when you give us a good rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. 169 00:17:05,282 --> 00:17:10,632 And if you're not already subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up at wondercabinetproductions.com. 170 00:17:15,809 --> 00:17:16,729 I'm Anne Strange-Jampson. 171 00:17:16,749 --> 00:17:20,570 I'm talking with Dee Graham Burnett about what's wrong with the way we've been thinking about attention. 172 00:17:21,990 --> 00:17:31,212 Graham, I was also thinking about the way we think about attention has often been through a religious or a spiritual frame. 173 00:17:31,632 --> 00:17:38,513 Like mindfulness meditation made it our individual responsibility to get to the mat or the meditation cushion. 174 00:17:39,093 --> 00:17:42,294 And before that, you know, there were centuries of religious instruction 175 00:17:43,214 --> 00:17:48,138 in multiple religions that taught people that we are responsible for the state of our souls. 176 00:17:48,278 --> 00:17:52,641 You know, I can kind of hear echoes of Puritan ministers in colonial New England here. 177 00:17:53,041 --> 00:18:04,190 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? 178 00:18:04,210 --> 00:18:05,030 For sure. 179 00:18:05,110 --> 00:18:05,391 So... 180 00:18:08,344 --> 00:18:24,316 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. 181 00:18:25,017 --> 00:18:29,781 This starts to get in the weeds a little bit, like in intellectual history, but it's very juicy. 182 00:18:29,941 --> 00:18:33,223 I'll do a second on it if you can do it, if you want to groove on it. 183 00:18:33,243 --> 00:18:33,964 Should we do some of this? 184 00:18:34,264 --> 00:18:35,085 So, indeed... 185 00:18:36,212 --> 00:18:52,921 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. 186 00:18:53,641 --> 00:19:05,668 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 187 00:19:06,366 --> 00:19:06,987 That's interesting. 188 00:19:07,007 --> 00:19:19,555 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. 189 00:19:20,115 --> 00:19:23,758 What are the attentional practices that happened at that moment? 190 00:19:24,378 --> 00:19:25,439 It's a great question. 191 00:19:26,459 --> 00:19:33,304 And indeed, some of the most powerful moments that those romantics had, that shivering sense of, 192 00:19:35,164 --> 00:19:43,769 of interiority, their spirits, was when they were placed in front of works of art looking at them. 193 00:19:44,330 --> 00:19:45,711 Or landscapes, right? 194 00:19:45,731 --> 00:19:48,692 This is the experience of the sublime. 195 00:19:48,732 --> 00:19:59,999 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. 196 00:20:00,019 --> 00:20:02,121 They're all in love with the sublime. 197 00:20:03,081 --> 00:20:11,603 Yeah, and in my class at Princeton, I do a whole section on the sublime as an attentional habit or mode. 198 00:20:11,843 --> 00:20:13,904 Wait, wait, what do you mean? 199 00:20:14,044 --> 00:20:17,745 Like, if I want to have an experience of the sublime, is that something I can cultivate? 200 00:20:18,505 --> 00:20:29,548 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. 201 00:20:30,028 --> 00:20:32,009 And its shape is like this. 202 00:20:34,430 --> 00:20:42,015 you are in front of a gigantic wave breaking on a rocky coast. 203 00:20:44,136 --> 00:20:49,220 You have a powerful feeling as you look at that gigantic wave. 204 00:20:50,200 --> 00:20:53,703 That feeling is a sort of a two-step feeling. 205 00:20:54,903 --> 00:20:58,426 First, you're like, wow, that wave is so huge. 206 00:20:58,966 --> 00:21:03,329 It would crush me like a tiny little grape. 207 00:21:03,980 --> 00:21:05,001 So there you get the fear. 208 00:21:05,803 --> 00:21:06,063 Fear. 209 00:21:07,024 --> 00:21:18,861 And then the second movement of the sublime is, but wait, gigantic and powerful as that thing is, I am still greater. 210 00:21:19,787 --> 00:21:34,636 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. 211 00:21:35,717 --> 00:21:46,144 So that those double moves of, wow, I'm so tiny and insignificant before the enormous grandeur of that mountain, wave, whatever, 212 00:21:47,422 --> 00:21:53,063 And then that second move, wait, I'm still more ginormous than that ginormous thing. 213 00:21:53,703 --> 00:22:03,086 I mean, I would have said that that moment, standing in front of this giant wave, it is your mind that encompasses the wave. 214 00:22:03,146 --> 00:22:07,367 You are standing there looking at it, thinking about it. 215 00:22:07,467 --> 00:22:15,148 So the wave exists as something real and physical, but it also exists inside your own mind. 216 00:22:15,168 --> 00:22:17,109 Therefore, your mind is bigger. 217 00:22:18,135 --> 00:22:18,476 Yes. 218 00:22:18,956 --> 00:22:34,377 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. 219 00:22:35,963 --> 00:22:53,225 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. 220 00:22:53,865 --> 00:22:59,989 from the existential richness of our inheritance, and that's part of why we feel unwell. 221 00:23:00,049 --> 00:23:09,556 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. 222 00:23:09,576 --> 00:23:11,397 What did St. Augustine say about attention? 223 00:23:11,417 --> 00:23:13,919 So, for Augustine in Book 11 of the Confessions, 224 00:23:14,947 --> 00:23:27,193 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. 225 00:23:28,053 --> 00:23:34,896 You understand that me and all of us humans, we live sort of smeared across time. 226 00:23:35,397 --> 00:23:39,939 We're in the present, but we are often thinking about the future, but we're haunted by the past. 227 00:23:40,991 --> 00:23:49,100 And you, God, who art infinite and eternal, you're not in time this way like we are. 228 00:23:49,320 --> 00:23:52,424 That's like a mark of our fallenness in some sense. 229 00:23:53,205 --> 00:24:02,134 And God, what I want to do when I pray is gather myself up into a kind of focus. 230 00:24:03,533 --> 00:24:07,978 that would permit me to escape from my smearedness in time. 231 00:24:08,899 --> 00:24:21,133 So for Augustine, true contemplative attention unites us with God and is the way we catch a glimpse of our own participation in eternity. 232 00:24:22,174 --> 00:24:24,518 magnificent and strange and rich idea. 233 00:24:24,738 --> 00:24:37,916 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. 234 00:24:38,877 --> 00:24:50,462 You're making me think about Simone Weil, the French mystic who talked about attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. 235 00:24:51,182 --> 00:24:53,723 Attention is a gateway to the divine. 236 00:24:53,803 --> 00:24:56,865 For Simone Weil, attention is a form of love. 237 00:24:57,645 --> 00:24:59,426 I'm also thinking about... 238 00:25:00,186 --> 00:25:05,832 Mary Oliver, the poet, or much quoted, really beautiful instructions for living a life. 239 00:25:06,352 --> 00:25:07,253 Pay attention. 240 00:25:07,713 --> 00:25:08,774 Be astonished. 241 00:25:09,275 --> 00:25:09,976 Tell about it. 242 00:25:10,616 --> 00:25:11,597 You know, we know this. 243 00:25:13,520 --> 00:25:13,900 We do. 244 00:25:14,461 --> 00:25:28,414 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. 245 00:25:29,035 --> 00:25:33,039 And Simone Weil is one of the true forefighters 246 00:25:33,479 --> 00:26:02,209 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 247 00:26:03,209 --> 00:26:14,641 Attention to a person who's afflicted, attention to the suffering of others, is the deepest and highest act of morality. 248 00:26:14,841 --> 00:26:20,767 Ethics consists basically for her in our ability to give our attention to those who are afflicted. 249 00:26:21,648 --> 00:26:25,192 And she lived her own life in a really quite extraordinary environment. 250 00:26:25,532 --> 00:26:29,334 and ultimately kind of maddening commitment to that impossible vision. 251 00:26:29,815 --> 00:26:42,182 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. 252 00:26:42,482 --> 00:26:53,469 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. 253 00:26:53,489 --> 00:27:03,715 A little less interested in sort of stabbing things and carrying things off and a little more interested in sort of staying with attention. 254 00:27:03,835 --> 00:27:25,226 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 255 00:27:25,866 --> 00:27:48,045 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. 256 00:27:48,767 --> 00:28:08,027 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. 257 00:28:09,287 --> 00:28:15,413 He figures attention as an empty crystal goblet that is placed between us. 258 00:28:15,914 --> 00:28:18,437 And we think that's just such a beautiful image. 259 00:28:18,677 --> 00:28:20,018 That is so beautiful. 260 00:28:20,259 --> 00:28:23,422 It's so beautiful because it's like, it's all imminence. 261 00:28:23,662 --> 00:28:25,304 It's all what's about to happen. 262 00:28:25,557 --> 00:28:27,398 It's the negative space. 263 00:28:27,778 --> 00:28:29,279 We've been talking about poets. 264 00:28:29,359 --> 00:28:40,046 It's like Keats' negative capability where everything is potent and present precisely by not being there. 265 00:28:40,366 --> 00:28:45,589 Human attention includes just staring out the window when you wake up in the morning. 266 00:28:46,029 --> 00:28:46,750 and daydreaming. 267 00:28:47,330 --> 00:29:03,402 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 268 00:29:04,468 --> 00:29:27,346 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 269 00:29:28,450 --> 00:29:32,434 And it's nonsensical to say that he's not paying attention. 270 00:29:32,634 --> 00:29:36,598 He's pure attention in the way that he's become absent to himself. 271 00:29:37,239 --> 00:29:39,782 And so you asked earlier, like, what do we do at the school? 272 00:29:40,202 --> 00:29:42,905 And that is at the heart of the work of the Friends of Attention. 273 00:29:42,965 --> 00:29:50,273 We define ourselves as a community that is interested in forms of attention that are resistant to commodification. 274 00:29:50,833 --> 00:29:54,515 We're building a national coalition of folks who think in these terms. 275 00:29:54,815 --> 00:30:03,881 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. 276 00:30:04,361 --> 00:30:05,622 And it's really moving to see. 277 00:30:05,642 --> 00:30:10,505 We just launched it a few weeks ago, but already there's hundreds of folks who've 278 00:30:10,985 --> 00:30:21,711 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. 279 00:30:22,112 --> 00:30:28,035 We're a set of textile artists who like to knit and crochet, and we're in the Pacific Northwest. 280 00:30:28,135 --> 00:30:29,476 We're attention activists. 281 00:30:29,776 --> 00:30:32,077 We play board games down here in Texas. 282 00:30:32,137 --> 00:30:33,597 We do it on Wednesday nights. 283 00:30:34,058 --> 00:30:38,059 It's like a no-devices board game evening for social. 284 00:30:38,779 --> 00:30:47,682 And they're just all identifying whatever it is they're doing, from rock climbing to surfing to reading Play-Doh. 285 00:30:48,863 --> 00:30:52,144 They're saying, we do this under the banner of attention activism. 286 00:30:52,464 --> 00:30:56,005 And that's the kind of movement energy we need to fight the frackers right now. 287 00:30:57,210 --> 00:31:08,463 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. 288 00:31:08,483 --> 00:31:16,892 You know, the German philosopher Weber's notion of the disenchantment of the world has always really rung true for me. 289 00:31:18,073 --> 00:31:21,836 But, you know, my own view is that the world itself didn't change. 290 00:31:22,457 --> 00:31:27,141 The world didn't somehow lose its capacity to enchant. 291 00:31:28,001 --> 00:31:28,802 We changed. 292 00:31:29,302 --> 00:31:29,963 People did. 293 00:31:30,563 --> 00:31:40,731 And so my gut sense is that the disenchantment Weber named was in fact the byproduct of an attentional shift. 294 00:31:41,072 --> 00:31:41,352 I don't know. 295 00:31:41,372 --> 00:31:41,912 What do you think? 296 00:31:42,973 --> 00:31:44,895 In a simpler way, what I'm asking is... 297 00:31:45,495 --> 00:31:48,176 How do attention and wonder connect? 298 00:31:50,096 --> 00:31:55,077 What an amazing, rich and important question. 299 00:31:57,558 --> 00:32:10,381 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. 300 00:32:11,621 --> 00:32:12,862 The second thing I would say is that 301 00:32:14,345 --> 00:32:18,649 Your show is about wonder in beautiful ways. 302 00:32:18,969 --> 00:32:27,336 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. 303 00:32:27,356 --> 00:32:28,217 The Wonder Cabinets. 304 00:32:28,597 --> 00:32:39,227 And so Wonder Cabinets is a distinctive kind of space for the cultivation of wonder, or perhaps the sort of purest cathedral space 305 00:32:39,947 --> 00:32:44,132 for attention as enchantment. 306 00:32:45,113 --> 00:32:50,820 So I do think that cultivation of the right forms of attention 307 00:32:53,655 --> 00:32:56,136 relationship to enchantment. 308 00:32:56,837 --> 00:33:01,679 Now, I'm going to say something else that makes the story a little bit more complicated. 309 00:33:01,739 --> 00:33:06,742 Like, I could leave this out if I wanted the story to be simple, but hey, let's see what your listeners think. 310 00:33:07,362 --> 00:33:21,090 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. 311 00:33:21,949 --> 00:33:23,291 So the plot thickens. 312 00:33:24,012 --> 00:33:30,479 Across the 19th into the 20th century, well into the 20th century, who was really selling enchantment? 313 00:33:30,940 --> 00:33:31,680 It was Disney. 314 00:33:31,821 --> 00:33:34,083 And for that matter, it was Pears Soap. 315 00:33:34,904 --> 00:33:37,587 Coca-Cola and Henry Ford. 316 00:33:37,607 --> 00:33:38,128 Correct. 317 00:33:38,148 --> 00:33:38,508 Yeah. 318 00:33:38,909 --> 00:33:39,369 Correct. 319 00:33:40,353 --> 00:33:53,405 One of the primary discourses of enchantment in modernity has been the consumer discourse of selling dream lives as a component of consumer product. 320 00:33:53,725 --> 00:33:56,348 I mean, in some ways, there's something beautiful about that. 321 00:33:56,388 --> 00:33:58,470 It's kind of like the democratization thing. 322 00:33:59,030 --> 00:34:02,313 of wonder and luxury and marvelous. 323 00:34:02,794 --> 00:34:09,120 It's no longer just the purview of, I don't know, royals or aristocrats or incredibly wealthy people. 324 00:34:09,220 --> 00:34:16,327 You too can have a beautiful bar of Paris soap in your bathroom or a car that will take you anywhere. 325 00:34:16,947 --> 00:34:24,853 And so what happened to the enchantment function of the world of advertising? 326 00:34:24,873 --> 00:34:27,755 And was that ever really a good thing? 327 00:34:27,855 --> 00:34:33,019 Or maybe was that a form of enchantment of which we should always have been quite skeptical? 328 00:34:33,439 --> 00:34:37,262 This is a live topic among folks who do cultural studies. 329 00:34:37,642 --> 00:34:46,289 There are sort of those who are on the side of just say no to these ersatz, fake forms of enchantment. 330 00:34:46,689 --> 00:34:50,130 that are purveying illusion. 331 00:34:50,810 --> 00:35:05,633 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. 332 00:35:06,033 --> 00:35:12,435 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. 333 00:35:12,515 --> 00:35:14,395 Well, maybe a good analogy is, 334 00:35:14,675 --> 00:35:24,662 The difference between food that tastes and feels nourishing and ultra-processed foods, which are unbelievably hard to resist. 335 00:35:25,362 --> 00:35:32,527 They're engineered to take advantage of our hardwired taste for fat and sugar and salt. 336 00:35:32,888 --> 00:35:35,930 It's such a powerful analogy, and I want to thank you for bringing it up. 337 00:35:36,030 --> 00:35:43,395 I'm going to offer a slightly different but consistent image, which would go something like this. 338 00:35:44,906 --> 00:35:49,189 Neither disenchantment nor enchantment can save us. 339 00:35:50,030 --> 00:35:56,434 Which is to say, neither facts nor stories is enough. 340 00:35:57,375 --> 00:36:00,117 The scientists who are like, just the facts here, baby. 341 00:36:01,037 --> 00:36:02,899 Thank you, but that's not enough. 342 00:36:03,779 --> 00:36:07,602 And the sort of fantasists who are like, sit down, let me tell you a story. 343 00:36:08,483 --> 00:36:10,464 Not clear that they're always on our side. 344 00:36:10,804 --> 00:36:11,405 So what is? 345 00:36:13,207 --> 00:36:15,368 I mean, this is the hardest question of all. 346 00:36:15,628 --> 00:36:23,773 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. 347 00:36:24,313 --> 00:36:25,754 So I don't have that kind of answer. 348 00:36:25,834 --> 00:36:37,902 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. 349 00:36:39,047 --> 00:36:48,974 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. 350 00:36:49,555 --> 00:36:52,797 In his other life, he is a historian of science at Princeton. 351 00:36:53,418 --> 00:36:55,599 So I find this history fascinating. 352 00:36:55,780 --> 00:37:03,065 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. 353 00:37:04,026 --> 00:37:06,508 But I do wonder where that leaves us today. 354 00:37:06,528 --> 00:37:08,269 I mean, what was your takeaway from talking with him? 355 00:37:08,595 --> 00:37:15,240 I took it as an invitation to think about some of my daily and weekly activities as different forms of attention. 356 00:37:15,800 --> 00:37:27,028 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. 357 00:37:27,729 --> 00:37:36,095 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. 358 00:37:36,995 --> 00:37:41,959 And then if I think about the needlework that I do at night to unwind, that's another kind of attention. 359 00:37:42,339 --> 00:37:43,940 It's located in my hands. 360 00:37:44,020 --> 00:37:46,002 It's very sensory and tactile. 361 00:37:46,102 --> 00:37:50,145 It's all about paying attention to the details of color and texture. 362 00:37:50,986 --> 00:37:57,051 I suspect that most of us have more experiences of what Graham would call radical attention than we might think. 363 00:37:57,071 --> 00:37:59,753 I mean, you take the dog for a walk every day. 364 00:38:00,253 --> 00:38:01,254 You ride your bike. 365 00:38:01,534 --> 00:38:02,435 You cook dinner. 366 00:38:03,482 --> 00:38:09,543 Maybe it would be an interesting exercise to try to describe the quality of your attention during some of those everyday activities. 367 00:38:09,763 --> 00:38:11,804 You know, those sound like wonder practices. 368 00:38:12,164 --> 00:38:12,804 They do. 369 00:38:13,584 --> 00:38:20,325 I found that it made my mundane daily life seem richer and in some ways almost mysterious. 370 00:38:20,865 --> 00:38:27,506 One thing I really like about this is you're saying you don't need a meditation practice to enhance this sense of attention. 371 00:38:27,946 --> 00:38:31,107 These things we do every day can really add wonder to our lives. 372 00:38:31,525 --> 00:38:33,186 If you shift how you think about them, yeah. 373 00:38:34,127 --> 00:38:42,354 Thank you for joining us for another episode of Wonder Cabinet, brought to you from two places we love, Madison, Wisconsin, and Versher, Vermont. 374 00:38:42,694 --> 00:38:44,795 And apologies again about my voice. 375 00:38:45,356 --> 00:38:46,277 I'm Anne Strangehamps. 376 00:38:46,657 --> 00:38:47,498 I'm Steve Paulson. 377 00:38:47,878 --> 00:38:52,201 Our audio engineer is Steve Gottscher, and our digital producer is Mark Rickers. 378 00:38:52,521 --> 00:38:57,445 We'll be on vacation for the next couple of weeks, but we'll be back with a new episode on June 13th. 379 00:38:57,826 --> 00:38:59,627 Until then, let's all be well.