❄️MattK💨@pluralistic I don’t like to bother, but this is EXTREMELY YOUR SHIT. I’m reading it and shocked you’re not one of the blurbs. #Attensity is well designed and has the delicious new concept of #HumanFracking.
Also the book is gorgeous inside
Bernhard E. Reiter"human fracking
The use of information technology to exploit human attention in ways that are net counterproductive to the persons thus exploited
" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/human_fracking
Just learned about the term, reading
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jan/18/how-can-we-defend-ourselves-from-the-new-plague-of-human-fracking
I like the idea. So maybe they deserve some "attention".
Will read more on https://friendsofattention.org/about/ (though their
animation is somehow like an annoying <blink> tag. ;-))
Miguel Afonso Caetano"Yes, new technologies give rise to new kinds of exploitation and resistance. But new forms of exploitation can even give rise to genuinely new forms of politics. You couldn’t brutalise an industrial proletariat before the factory system. Steam engines set the conditions of possibility for this development. They weren’t themselves a “problem”, of course; they gleamed and were precise and powerful. Who could see them operate without awe? But they also created a world in which it was possible to aggregate and extract physical labour from human beings in a revolutionary way. Along the way, they created a new kind of political subject, Homo economicus, a person who had been reduced, in the calculus of modernity, to “labuor value”. Actual revolutions followed – and a new kind of politics was born which reflected a new world of industrial labour, and new forms of labour solidarity, such as unions and workers’ parties.
The new system of human fracking is turning all of us into attentional subjects in a powerful new way. Homo attentus is the end user of every networked system – economic, political, expressive. With this new form of life comes, as we have discovered, appalling new vulnerability. But we are on the brink of understanding the new power that has come into our hands in the fracklands. We believe a new kind of politics beckons. What will it look like? It is hard to say. And there are reasons to be fearful. But if we, the people, can take up the banner of a new kind of freedom movement – a movement for the true freedom of attention itself, what we call attensity – and deploy our truly human attention in new ways, with a new understanding of the stakes, we can defy the frackers, and insist on creating, together, a human world."
#BigTech #HumanFracking #AttentionEconomy #Attensity #SocialMedia #CellPhones
CFy"Just as petroleum frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergents into the ground to force a little monetisable black gold to the surface, human frackers pump high-pressure, high-volume detergent into our faces (in the form of endless streams of addictive slop and maximally disruptive user-generated content), to force a slurry of human attention to the surface, where they can collect it, and take it to market."