This professor says Big Tech's exploitation of our attention is like tobacco companies in the '50s

D. Graham Burnett is a history professor at Princeton — and he thinks we’re at a pivotal moment in history. A moment he likes to compare to the birth of environmental activism, or the labor movement. We are, he says, facing a crisis of attention.

Burnett is a co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, a project of a nonprofit called the Friends of Attention. They advocate for a practice they call “attensity” — paying attention to attention.

It’s an urgent mission, they argue, because we live in a world where our attention is being ruthlessly exploited by tech companies for profit.

Burnett will give the annual Humanities Institute Distinguished Lecture on Thursday at Arizona State University.

As he told The Show, it will be a call to action against “human fracking.”

Full conversation

D. GRAHAM BURNETT: Big Tech operates as an extractive industry, extracting something essential from our personhood. You know, petroleum fracking involves pumping high pressure, high volume detergent down into the Earth to get the oil and natural gas up to the surface. And there is a way in which, you know, the companies do sort out pump into our eyes and minds and faces.

And there is a way in which, you know, the companies do sort out pump into our eyes and minds and faces high pressure, high volume detergent in the form of low grade slop kind of content, right? Rage baits and playing on our, our fears and hungers.

To be clear, we spend a lot of time doing things we like on our devices. And our movement is not anti-tech. The Friends of Attention actually like to focus on the problem being exploitation, not our quote unquote "phones."

The problem is the underlying and heedless, unregulated, greedy business model, right? Human fracking.

DINGMAN: So that's interesting though, Graham, because you do in your language around this, and I realize by saying you I'm referring to a collective movement, not you specifically. But the Friends of Attention do describe this as a crisis. And for you, what makes it a crisis? And I hear you, that exploitation is part of that.

But what do you see as the end game if people don't sign on to this mission that you're calling for, of fighting against the extraction of our attention?

BURNETT: To be clear, we are in favor of fighting back against the human frackers. But our movement is not merely a sort of negative or defiant thing. Attention activism basically involves doing the stuff that makes you feel closer to yourself and others in the world. Rock climbing, throwing dinner parties, doing some community service, you know, music lessons for kids, sports.

The issue is just that over the last 10 years, Big Tech has noticed that groups of people like doing things with their attention together. And the industry has expanded by identifying those activities. And then there's somebody with, you know, a deck leaving business school, proposing to get all the people who like doing those activities using some app to do whatever it is they do so that then one can frack the heck out of them.

That's like the history of Pinterest. It's the history of Facebook. These are ways that people were already finding each other and liking certain forms of contact with each other that in being moved onto these digital platforms, have been subjected to this kind of fundamental tax.

Our point is, this is not a you thing. This is not like a private shame thing where you're like, oh, I went down a rabbit hole. I was on TikTok for three hours when I wanted to just check one thing. This is not personal shame. What we need is a kind of collective solidarity. Like, we need to convert that private shame into something more like political anger.

DINGMAN: What does that look like for you? I mean, is it legislation limiting the reach of what tech companies are able to do? What are your goals there?

BURNETT: Yeah, I think in 20 years, we will look back at this moment and we will say, oh, my heavens, how could, how could people have let it get so bad? How could they have not understood the way that those large tech companies did not have the best interests of humans, like, at the core of their business models?

Just like we look back now, you know, at the 1950s, and we're like, oh, how could people have not seen, you know, that the tobacco industry was harming people? Did you all really believe that the doctors who were telling you that, like, mentholated cigarettes were going to help you with your asthma? Did you really think that was true?

You know, and our analogy here, so I'm a historian by training, is a little bit like the Industrial Revolution, when new forms of technology made possible new forms of exploitation of labor, and that those new forms of exploitation actually created new possibilities for political resistance. So I'm talking about, for instance, the factory systems of the textile industry in the 19th century in England, and then the emergence of labor politics and unions and strikes as ways that workers who've been sort of reduced to their labor were able to sort of use that new position for a new kind of collective power.

And I don't pretend to understand the precise shape that this moment will take, but we are being reduced or transformed, you might say, into sort of attentional subjects. And the question becomes, what forms of new collective political action will permit us to establish the worlds we want to live in rather than having those dictated by tech barons and AI algorithms?

DINGMAN: I'm curious if you see humanity anywhere in the world of tech and how you see perhaps tech being friendly to this reconsideration of attention. What does being tech friendly in your framing look like?

BURNETT: Well, I'm an academic and I did my Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science, so I love tech. I'm very interested in the history of science and technology. There's lots to say here. I did an essay for the New Yorker last year on AI, attention and education, and in that piece I make an argument about the way that AI, by taking over certain features of the sort of production of knowledge within universities, may actually reopen us to spaces of study and contemplation within educational spaces.

Because it becomes a matter of what do humans do that the machines cannot do? The machines have lots of answers, but they do not have questions. And the having of questions is our work. And I like the idea of the experience of study and reflection with others that centers on our sharing and holding questions together.