Over the past 15 years, a cascade of new technologies has transformed what it means to be human for much of the world. Today, nearly 70% of the global population owns a smartphone, accounting for about 95% of all internet access. On average, people spend close to half their waking hours looking at screens—and for young people in wealthy countries, that number is even higher.
History shows that new technologies always enable new forms of exploitation, and the rise of society-wide digital platforms is a glaring example. This has been fueled by a novel way of extracting value from people—what we might call “human fracking.” Just as oil frackers pump high-pressure chemicals into the earth to force out oil, human frackers pump a relentless stream of addictive content into our lives to force out our attention, which they then collect and sell.
Fracking—whether of the earth or of our minds—creates instability, toxicity, and the degradation of our landscapes, both natural and social. We already know that the reckless exploitation of our external environment has put human survival at risk. Now, a new “gold rush” into the inner world of the human psyche is well on its way to causing similar—and perhaps even more insidious—destruction.
The stakes are existential. That’s because our attention—what the frackers want, measured by our eyes on screens—is ultimately our capacity to care, to think, and to give our minds and time to ourselves, to the world, and to one another. To turn that into a commodity is to commodify our very being. The problem isn’t just “phones” or “social media.” The problem is human fracking: a worldwide grab for human consciousness, treated by big tech as an open territory to be plundered.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that new forms of exploitation give rise to new forms of resistance. What fills the coffers of the world’s largest corporations is nothing less than our humanity itself. This fight over our attention is part of a long history of struggle between those who reduce people—their labor, their focus—to cash value, and those who believe in a richer vision of human flourishing. That history is long and often painful, but it shows us one thing clearly: we can fight back. In fact, we must.
We must insist that our attention belongs to us—and that we will use it to build the world we want to live in.
So what can be done about this new form of exploitation, which harms children and adults alike, weakens our democracy, and undermines our mental well-being? Regulatory efforts are fragmented and actively blocked by powerful interests. Turning to pills to cope with the growing damage only monetizes the problem in another way and makes us more compliant in a system that works against human thriving. How do we confront a problem that is both deeply personal and impossibly vast?
The answer is clear: we, the people of this planet, must come together in solidarity. We must say no to the human frackers by insisting in new ways that human attention is human—it is ours, and we will use it to create the world we want. In short, we need a movement.
Does that sound unrealistic? Remember: that’s how real change happens. And it can happen quickly. The environmental movement as we know it…In 1950, it did not yet exist, but by 1970 it had become a global force. In 1946, Reynolds Tobacco was using doctors to endorse cigarettes. Less than two decades later, the American Medical Association and the U.S. Surgeon General publicly declared that smoking caused lung cancer.
And the changes grew even larger. In 1925, very few activists dedicated themselves to environmental politics—because “environmental politics” wasn’t even a concept. It took a cultural shift across the mid-20th century, fueled by advocates like Rachel Carson, to establish the natural world—the interconnected system of land, water, and air that sustains life—as a political issue around which diverse groups could organize. This shows that the very structures of politics, not just our beliefs, are themselves emergent. New things come into being; old things fade away.
When it comes to attention, growing signs suggest we are nearing a turning point. People of all kinds—MAGA Republicans and progressive intellectuals, hipsters in Portland and evangelicals in Arkansas—agree on almost nothing, yet they share a sense that something is deeply wrong with a world where everyone spends hours mindlessly scrolling through algorithmic social media feeds. A world where military-grade technology and trillion-dollar corporations target children, feeding them whatever keeps them hooked.
People can only be pushed so far before they turn, rise up, and demand change. Politicians on both the right and left are already recognizing this as an issue that moves voters. In 30 years, we will look back on this era—the wild west where tech princes plundered our hearts, souls, and relationships—and struggle to explain it to our grandchildren. “How did you all let that happen?” they’ll ask. And we’ll say: “It’s hard to explain. It happened before we noticed; it was so much fun, especially at first. It took time to understand what was going on.”
But we are figuring it out. We write as part of a fast-growing, increasingly organized movement focused on pushing back against those who extract our attention and shaping a new politics of human attention. At the core of our efforts: building broad coalitions around the politics of attention, practicing diverse forms of study that awaken the mind and senses, and creating sanctuary spaces to protect and nurture the kinds of attention that make life meaningful. We call this attention activism.
We believe everyone already has the tools to resist the attention extractors, because we all have activities and cares that lie beyond the reach of algorithms. We already know the deepest truth: real human attention isn’t about clicks and swipes. It’s about love, curiosity, daydreaming, and caring for ourselves and others.
New technologies do create new forms of exploitation and resistance. But new forms of exploitation can even give rise to genuinely new kinds of politics. Before the factory system, you couldn’t brutalize an industrial working class. Steam engines made that possible. They weren’t inherently a “problem”—they were gleaming, precise, and powerful, inspiring awe. But they also created a world where human physical labor could be aggregated and extracted on a revolutionary scale. In the process, they created a new political subject: Homo economicus, a person reduced in the calculus of modernity to “labor value.” Actual revolutions followed—and a new politics was born, reflecting a new world of industrial labor and new forms of solidarity.Unions and workers’ parties are examples of groups affected by this shift. The emerging system of “human fracking” is transforming everyone into subjects of attention in a profoundly new manner. Homo attentus—the attentive human—has become the ultimate user of every networked system, whether economic, political, or expressive. As we have learned, this new form of life brings with it a disturbing vulnerability. Yet we are also beginning to grasp the new power now within our reach in these “fracklands.” We sense the call of a new kind of politics. What shape will it take? That is difficult to predict, and there are reasons for concern. But if we, the people, can rally behind a fresh freedom movement—one dedicated to the true liberation of attention, what we term attensity—and learn to wield our genuinely human attention in novel ways, with a clearer sense of what is at stake, we can resist the frackers. Together, we can insist on building a world that remains truly human.
D. Graham Burnett is a professor of history at Princeton University. Alyssa Loh is a filmmaker. Peter Schmidt is a writer and organizer. The authors are members of the Friends of Attention coalition and co-editors of ATTENSITY! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Particular).
Further reading
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt (Penguin, £10.99)
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (Melville House, £14.99)
The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes (Scribe UK, £16.99)
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs Protecting Ourselves from Human Fracking
Beginner Definition Questions
1 What exactly is human fracking
Human fracking is a metaphor comparing the data extraction industry to hydraulic fracturing for oil It describes how companies drill deep into our personal livesthrough apps devices and online activityto extract vast amounts of behavioral and psychological data which is then processed sold and used to influence us often without our full understanding or consent
2 Is my data really that valuable
Yes Your aggregated datayour location history search habits purchase patterns social connections and even inferred emotionscreates a highly valuable behavioral profile This profile is used to target you with hyperspecific advertising influence your opinions and predict your future actions for commercial or political gain
3 Who is doing the fracking
Primary actors include large technology and social media platforms data brokers advertisers and sometimes political consultancies Any service that is free often means you are the product with your attention and data being sold
Common Problems Risks
4 Whats the biggest danger of human fracking
The core danger is the loss of autonomy When algorithms know you better than you know yourself they can subtly manipulate your choiceswhat you buy what you believe and even how you voteeroding your free will and potentially undermining democratic processes
5 Can this lead to realworld harm beyond ads
Absolutely Risks include
Financial Discriminatory pricing or denial of services like loans or insurance
Reputational Data breaches exposing deeply personal information
Psychological Social media algorithms that promote content that fuels anxiety depression or radicalization to keep you engaged
Societal The spread of misinformation and the deepening of social divides through targeted divisive content
6 I have nothing to hide Why should I care
Privacy isnt about hiding wrongdoing its about personal sovereignty Its about having the right to control your own identity thoughts and choices without invisible manipulation It protects you from being unfairly judged or exploited based on data taken out of context
Practical Protection Tips
