The Friends of Attention, Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, eds. D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt (Penguin, 2026).
“You are correct: something is seriously wrong.” The opening salvo of the new manifesto by the group calling themselves the Friends of Attention doesn’t beat about the bush. They’ve published the manifesto online, and the short book I’m reviewing here is a phrase by phrase explanation and elaboration. Together, they are an urgent call to arms about the capacity of human attention and what is threatening it today.
The co-authors take a refreshing and clear-sighted approach to a conversation that often runs in circles or relies heavily on rose-tinted nostalgia. They refuse to limit the problem of attention to individual willpower. Instead, they lay out the very real social and economic climate in which our attention is intentionally captured and used for profit, and call for collective movements to counter this harmful process. The term they’ve coined for this massively profitable industry, based around keeping people as glued to digital devices and services as possible, is ‘human fracking’:
“These companies heedlessly pollute our inner environments in order to capture and sell as much of our attention as possible.”
The Friends argue that in the shift to the online, always-connected world, there has been a comparable shift to the Industrial Revolution – when mechanisation allowed the creation of an economy which reduced the human worker to the value of their labour in ever more standardised, exploitative ways. They point to the ‘attention economy‘ now at work, in which human experience is flattened into a single form of paying attention – interacting visually with a screen – for ever greater ease of monetisation.
Oversimplifying attention
I have been thinking a lot about attention and attentiveness recently. So coming across this book and the Friends was timely and hugely energising, for a few different reasons. One is that it is surprisingly Reformational! – or rather, its vision chimes in significant ways with the vision of the inherently multifaceted, irreducible world in its many related aspects, which comes out of the Reformational tradition we explore in Thinking Faith Network.
First of all, rather than focusing narrowly on attention span, as many discussions around this topic do, the Friends put forward a much more holistic, whole-life, human account of what attention means. They describe it simply as ‘our essential ability to give our minds and senses to the world’. They explain further that it refers to the quality of presence in which the infinite depths within the human person encounter the infinite depths of the world around us. So it’s not just about mental concentration. It’s the basis for ways of doing things, for how we relate to people and our surroundings, for many of the most important aspects of how we live our lives.
The book makes a compelling argument that attention has been studied and defined in ways which unhelpfully narrow its scope to a single form of concentration, focused on interfacing successfully with machines and systems. This comes at the expense of any emphasis on the broader flourishing of human experience which is relational, outward-looking, multifaceted.
Attention, in other words, needs to be considered as more than a single-use tool. Many different approaches and perspectives are needed to understand it and understand us. The Friends recognise the irreducibility of human experience, and the world at large, to any single mode or aspect. This insight makes the book radically interdisciplinary, and I don’t just mean in an academic way.
Inviting many forms of attention
The book explicitly invites people from all kinds of perspectives and traditions, including religious ones, to draw on their particular resources for seeing the world in order to restore and nourish more attentive, humane communities and ways of life:
“the great spiritual traditions (of which we have named only a few) represent deep and rich attentional worlds realized by diverse practices of waiting upon the infinite. (If you identify with these traditions, then we believe that you already share our core commitments. What’s more, we think you have much to contribute to Attention Activism.)”
A later chapter exuberantly describes different ways of practising attention in the world – different ways of being ‘Attention Activists’. The list, while not exhaustive, helpfully honours the sheer variety of practices and ways of relating to reality available to human beings. It’s not based around professional categories, or interests, or personality types, but focused on ways of doing things. The Friends talk about:
- Amateurs – people who pursue all kinds of hobbies just for the joy of it,
- Crafters and Operators, who practise specialised, embodied skills that require painstakingly learned forms of attention,
- Gatherers, who create and host spaces that bring people together,
- Counter-Coders, who know how to turn technology out of the hands of attention-frackers,
- Gamers and Players, who go deep into the flow-state needed for real play,
- Reciters, who memorise scripture and songs and tongue-twisters,
- and more.
They point out that different, wonderfully life-giving postures of attention are needed for everything from care work and parenting to scream-singing along with a crowd at a concert.
There’s a heartening and nuanced recognition here of how the world really is and can be – beautiful in its many dimensions, disclosed by human beings to one another in all kinds of ways. It makes the Friends’ call to action very powerful and practical.
There’s much more I could discuss about the book’s ideas and proposals, but the best thing I can say is just to read it! Read it, and see where you can bring your own knowledge, concern, skill, and perspective to the movement it calls for: pushing back the dehumanising forces of attention-fracking and exploitation of human capacity, and creating and maintaining communities where human beings can flourish.
Image: Zalfa Imani via Unsplash.
- Review: Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement - February 18, 2026
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1 Comment
Mark Roques · March 3, 2026 at 4:18 pm
Excellent blog Alicia. I really enjoyed reading this.