Sublime

I would start with three big, bold goals. One: ban surveillance capitalism, because people who are being hacked and deliberately hooked can’t focus. Two: introduce a four-day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention. Three: rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely—in their neighborhoods and at school—because

1. We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention.


2. The interests served by this environment in turn pathologize the resultant inattention.


3. These same interests devise and enforce new techniques to discipline the inattentive subject.

unregulated territories of failure, loss, and unbecoming, must make a long detour around disciplines and ordinary ways of thinking. Let me explain how universities (and by implication high schools) squash rather than promote quirky and original thought. Disciplinarity, as defined by Foucault (1995), is a technique of modern power: it depends upon

As I talked with Ben, I wondered if a movement to achieve these goals should be named Attention Rebellion. He smiled when I suggested it. “It is an attention rebellion,” he said. I realized this will require a shift in how we think about ourselves. We are not medieval peasants begging at the court of King Zuckerberg for crumbs of attention. We are

the “third space”—not of retreat, but of refusal, boycott, and sabotage—can become a spectacle of noncompliance that registers on the larger scale of the public.