You are correct: something is seriously wrong. It has to do with our ATTENTION, our essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world. This precious capacity has been channeled, captured, and commodified by an industry of immense technological and financial power. How? Call it "human fracking."
Human fracking is bad for people, and for politics. It reduces our very beings (and our relationships) to that which can be quantified, bought, and sold. All this is the triumph of a catastrophic lie about what it means to be human. But deceit and exploitation are never inevitable. To push back, we need more than isolated, individual efforts; what we need is a movement of collective resistance.
This movement of attentional liberation exists and has a name: ATTENTION ACTIVISM.
Attention Activism is a fight for justice. This emancipatory uprising takes our apocalyptic present, turns it on its head, and creates, from the chaos and confusion, new vistas of human flourishing.
Attention Activism is rooted in STUDY — a commitment to diverse forms of teaching and learning centered on attention (what it is, what it can be, what it can do). Attention Activism also requires COALITION-BUILDING — collaboration and solidarity across a range of communities who see attention's essential role in human flourishing. Finally, Attention Activism means the formation of SANCTUARIES — spaces where people can gather, care for each other, experiment with different kinds of attention, and conceive brighter futures.
To discern the revolutionary possiblities of the present, we look to artists, thinkers, and dreamers. To bring those possibilities to bloom, we heed the countless Attention Activists who are already out there, devising new (and revising old) ways of giving their minds and senses to each other and the world.
These attentionauts and attentionistas draw on the wisdom of diverse traditions. Across uncharted terrain, emerging practices of joint attention illuminate new horizons of shared political power. Not only power, but beauty, and grace, too.
This is our movement: the free movement of attention in its fullness, freely shared. We call that transformative goodness ATTENSITY. Join us in this heightened and heightening glory — or let us join you!
