Transcript for Your Mind Is Being Fracked

Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Fracking. I suspect most of your listeners have heard that term. Fracking is mostly associated with this idea of getting petroleum resources out of the earth. but it's a new technology for doing that. In the old days, pre-major exploitation of petroleum resources that were like these big juicy zits of high value crude oil just sitting there in the earth waiting to geyser up if you tap them. Drill a hole, woof, gusher. We've tapped all that out. The only way you can get the remaining petroleum and natural gas resources out of the deep earth is to pump down in there, high pressure, high volume detergent, which forces up to the surface, this kind of slurry, mixture of natural gas, crude oil, leftover detergent and juice and nasty stuff, which you then separate out and you get your monetizable crude. This is a precise analogy to what's happening to us in our contemporary attention economy. We have a, depending on who you ask, 500 billion, 3 trillion, 7 trillion dollar industry. which to get the money value of our attention out of us is continuously pumping into our faces. High pressure, high value, detergent in the form of social media and non-stop content that holds us on our devices. And that pumping brings to the surface that spew that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder.

I would love for us to use this whole conversation to sort of roll up on the shores of that deepest question again and again. So let me go add it one way. I'm in the process of finishing a history of science book about the laboratory study of this thing called attention since about 1880. in laboratories using experiments. Scientists have since the late 19th century sliced and diced a human capacity that they've called attention and it is that work that they did that has made it possible I would argue to price the thing called attention that we're invoking when we use that fracking metaphor. It's entangled with the idea of stimulus in response. The earliest experimental work on attention is about sitting folks in laboratory chairs and showing them certain kinds of displays, a cursor, a flash, that triggering or targeting conception of attention has been the primary way that scientists, experimental psychologists, engineers, have conceptualized and placed in evidence a thing called attention. when they started doing sort of early eye tracking experiments to sort of follow where people's gaze went, how much information they could take in at a glance and figuring out how to quantify that. Largely, it should be said, financed by friends in the emerging advertising industry. There was a kind of unholy symbiotic relationship that emerged between certain forms of experimental psychology and those who were trying to study how to sell mouthwash and cigarettes. When those folks were doing that kind of work, they were certainly talking about a thing that was attention. They could call it attention. It means very similar to the thing that right now, the most powerful computational technologies, the most sophisticated programmers, and the most intricate algorithms are madly working to aggregate an auction continuously.

I love that question. Well, let's do unholy. And maybe you'll give me two. In the interwar period, a set of experiments called pursuit tests were used to train and assess the capability of military aviators. Pursuit tests were attention experiments, a little like four runners of video games. Imagine a cursor that moves around on a non-computer screen. This is manual like a clockwork cursor that's traveling back and forth in front of you. And you have a little envelope, a mechanical envelope that you have to move manipulate kind of with a joystick to keep bracketing that cursor as it moves around in front of you. And then we hook you up to a rebreather so that you're gradually deprived of oxygen. It's a big twist.

Yeah, we might also hook you up with headphones and run a lot of really loud and distracting noise through them. And we could also ask you to pedal or do other exhausting things with your body with their whole set of ways we could complicate this ecology. And then as you gradually lose consciousness, you're asked to continue for as long as you can manipulating this envelope around the cursor. This was understood to be an intentional test. It's cybernetic, as you can see. It's a way of integrating humans with machines. It uses attentionality as a way of measuring the kind of mechanization of the human subject in relation to a machine. Some people are better at it than others. And let me assure you, if you're going to put somebody in the cockpit, I'm one of these very expensive fighter planes, you want somebody who's really good at that. So I would call that one kind of unholy. I mean, let's be clear.

Yeah, but we don't want to sound paranoid either. I'm in favor of fighter pilots who are able to potentially. Yeah, we're never the less you can get a little shiver when you think about the way now. We've been if you like cybernetically integrated into our devices and you can see aspects of that reality. prefigured in the genealogy of experimental work on attention that I'm describing. I'll give you another one. The development during the Second World War of Radar created unprecedented opportunities for defense capabilities in relation particularly to German U-boats. Nevertheless, no matter how good your radar is, if the person looking at the radar screen isn't paying attention to it, You're totally screwed. A really intense set of classified experiments took place during the Second World War, to assess a very new problem, how long could people pay attention to screens? And what could you do to optimize their ability to keep paying attention to screens for long periods of time? That work gives rise to an understanding of the way people cease to pay attention. What comes to be called the vigilance decrement, the drop-off in vigilance to a statistically low frequency phenomenon, and that work, too, can give you a little shiver to come to understand that there is, again, this deep techno-scientific story of studying a thing that we recognize as attention, but studying it in this highly instrumentalized way that is entirely bound to questions of stimulus and response, to triggering and targeting. And we see the legacy of that kind of work to this day in the way we think about attention. That attention was sliced and diced in laboratories. And that very same thing is what's now being priced with these calamitous effects in the way we experience ourselves.

You put your finger on really the heart of the matter. So I want to suggest that part of what makes the conversation around attention right now both so difficult and so important is that secreted within that term are in fact two very different projects bumping up against each other. In a laboratory you use instruments as it turns out if you use instruments to get at a thing called attention, you end up finding an instrumentalized form of attention. Is that form of attention real? Absolutely. In fact, the technology is for making it real. are powerful. You can quantify it. You can place it in evidence experimentally. Is it part of what's in that sort of worker conception of attention that you invoked? Yes, as it happens, it is. But that other thing that you're kind of calling in when you talk about meditation, you talk about awareness when we invoke the sort of experience of being the kind of ecstasy that can come with us certain durational flow of immersion in a person, a conversation, a book, the experience of reading, and object. That comes from a different place. It's also in the language of attention and it has its own separate history. If you want to see both those operating now, let me give you two recent theorists of attention. Both very prominent, whose accounts of what attention is are absolutely contradictory, perfectly paradoxical, but sort of both interestingly true. To business school, theorists, dabbing, important back, do a book called The Attention Economy. I think it's 2001. They don't actually coin the phrase, but they're responsible for it sort of exploding into the collective conversation. How do they define attention in that book? They say, attention is what triggers, catalyzes, awareness into action. Attention is what catalyzes, awareness into action. definition that couldn't be more different. The recently deceased French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in a beautiful and difficult book called Taking Care of the Youth and the Generations, centers that book on attention. What does he say attention is? He says attention, playing with the Atonra in French, is waiting. The exact opposite of a catalytic triggering, it's waiting. It's in fact for him infinite waiting. And what are you waiting on when you attend to an object waiting on it? He says you're waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object. which long webs of connectedness are a mirroring of the rich long webs of connectedness that are in you. So let's imagine for a second that there was a painting on the wall of this studio and you and I were looking at it together. We might look at that painting, it might be let's say religious icon or something. And you and I would bring to the experience of looking at it what we kind of We would notice colors, we would think about other images like it we might have seen. We would think about the other images that might not be here, but that could be or the symbolic things that are in it. And as we experienced that kind of web of things that are in the image, we'd really be sort of seeing a long web of connectedness that's in ourselves. And so for Stegler, Attention is waiting on the disclosure of those long webs of connectedness, which are a mirroring of our own infinitude in the world. Attention, infiniting, attention, triggering, sharp contrast. And let me try to bring in like a third thing that I think is kind of exquisitely poised over and outside of that contestation between those two. In the early 20th century novel, wings of the dove, the American novelist Henry James describes a really beautiful and intense scene in which a very, very ill woman, terminally ill woman, has a fleeting encounter with the doctor. She desperately needs, she believes the doctor knows what she needs to survive. She hopes that this doctor can kind of get her past her anguish. The doctor is very busy and James depicts the scene where the two of them sit for a moment. And he describes the doctor as placing on the table between them, a clear, clean, crystal cup empty of attention, an empty crystal cup of attention with the doctor places on the table between them. And that sort of figuration of attention is a kind of an empty cup that we place between ourselves and the object of our attention is like, I think it exquisitely invokes that idea of eminence, that kind of negative capability. anything's possible here, the gesture of generosity. It has a little bit of that sense of waiting, but it also has a sense of solicitation, something needs to happen. So it includes elements of that catalytic, and it includes elements of that kind of mirroring, waiting image. And so when I have to sort of talk about what I think attention is, I'll often use that image. Like what's attention? Attention is that kind of empty cup we can place between ourselves and the things we care about in the world, see what happens. you.

Let me give you one of the most amazing arguments about attention that's ever been made by anybody. By my distinguished colleague, Jonathan Crary, Jonathan Crary is an artist, or in at Columbia University. In a book called Suspensions of Perception, Puppest Round 2000, he made a super challenging argument about where that language of attention comes from and why in the late 19th century, the same time that the scientists start studying at laboratories, everybody starts getting worried about it and talking about it in a very particular way. Career argues that you don't see a lot of discussions about attention in the 1780s, 1790s, even 1820. It's not a thing. He says that worry about attention comes into being across the second half of the 19th century in a very particular way because of a very specific set of transformations in the experience of personhood. Imagine white guys and wigs with knickers on. I thought of themselves as a little bit like a camera obscure, right? Those boxes that have a little pin hole in them, like a four-runner of the camera. In the mind, it's like that box. This world out there, there's a world in here. This is a nice mapping function between those two worlds, and therefore I, as a property, white male subject, and good in the world, because the world is out there and in me, and relatively unproblematic way. Kerry argues, I think correctly, that that way of conceptualizing the human, the classical model of human subjectivity implodes across the second half of the 19th century. What kills it? What does it in? We discover that, in fact, everybody doesn't have the same picture inside themselves as what's out there in the world that were these oozy things made of meat, you know, and that actually our eyes have blind spots, and suddenly the sort of physiological complexity of sensation makes a mince meat of the classical model. So then we are are you in this kind of blooming buzzing confusion of modernity now that you're like an opaque thick meat creature instead of this nice camera obscure creature. Well, carry argues that attention is born. in that moment as a way of saying again that I hold together as one being as I confront or encounter the world. Where are you? You are where your attention is. Your will, maybe? That's that idea that somehow will has something to do with it, and that for William James, attention and will are almost an extracable, right? That free will itself, if it existed, it's locus was the moment in which I could choose to give my attention here versus there. And while everybody recognized that there was involuntary attention, there was this deep sense that attention was born in the late 19th century as a new language for talking about the coherence of the human subject.

It's a great question again, and I share your interest in those forms of attention. I do want to say that while it is certainly true, that people have been concerned about how to hold before their minds and their senses, objects. since forever, and that religious spaces have been central zones for that sort of combat of the senses and the will. If one actually digs in on that stuff, the language often isn't sort of the language we would use. contemplation, for instance, was a central preoccupation of monks, but if you had brought them the kinds of questions that are getting asked by the early 20th century concerning that sort of stimulus response phenomenon, or even the ways that William James will talk about attention, that would have been unrecognizable to them. That said, much of my own interest in intention actually comes out of my own meditation life as well. I care deeply about the spiritual traditions that inform our resources as we begin to think about what to do now. And there are some 20th century thinkers who have commented in really profound ways on the relationship between prayer and the sort of thing we are now worried about when we talk about attention. The great French mystic Simone vee comes to mind. So Simone vee who kind of skirted up to the edge of Christianity in different ways but never kind of crossed over. was a political activist, a labor activist, and ultimately a kind of social justice martyr across the era of the Second World War, wrote passionately that pure, unmixed attention is prayer. So for her, that if you like apathetic attention, attention that won't have an easy object or end or purpose. When I say apathetic, I invoke the tradition of negative theology, right? To theological traditions, One where you try to get at God directly, one where you say, look, God's so beyond us, we're not going to get to God. We're finite creatures, God's infinite. Our best chance to get anything like the God's base is to sort of enumerate everything that's not God. to get out God via the via negative way. So we will enumerate the cloud of unknowing rather than getting all puffed up with ourselves that we're having a conversation with God. I would argue that Simone days account of attention. as a sort of radical pure emptying of oneself, an openness to eminence, is apophatic. It's an attention that isn't triggerable. It won't target. You can't bring it out in stimulus and response experimentations because it waits in a kind of ecstatic and infinite openness for that which it knows not.

I'm sympathetic to that critique of all this. By the same token, people have been deeply right, again and again, that things were changing and things have changed in ways that were catastrophic in addition to changing in ways that have been transformative and good. And some measure of what we need out of historical consciousness is the kind of critical discernment to make those judgments. So was there a moral panic about advertising in the early 20th century? There sure was. Why? Because people started experimenting with projecting advertisements using very bright lights, arc lamps on the underside of clouds. Everyone was like, this is horrible. I don't want to read soap ads like on the night sky. And then people began to think it would be amazing to sort of have amplified screaming ads floating in the air over cities so that you would have continuous barages of sound advertisements in space. Also horrible. New technologies do really make possible new forms of human exploitation. This is real. The factory system Certainly improved life in lots of ways. It made available much less expensive textiles, for instance. But you'd have to be out of your mind not to recognize that the aggregation of labor in the satanic mills of Lancashire created monstrous new labor conditions against which people had to gather together and mount resistance. I would argue that we are in a moment now. in which this human fracking and the essentially unregulated commodification of this precious stuff out of which we make ourselves the instrument of our being. This is creating conditions that are at odds with human flourishing. We know this. And we need to mount new forms of resistance. We don't know yet what the forms of resistance will be, just like those early resistors in the factory system didn't yet understand the way that labor politics and trade unionism would emerge as meaningful technologies of collective action. We don't yet know what forms of resistance are going to emerge. That is what we need is like all hands-on deck for a kind of attention activism that raises our awareness. And this work is happening and lots of different places already need to see what happens with it in the years ahead.

Yeah. Well, we're even to begin home. I haven't. I mean, uh, Those who have worried the things we're getting worse have been essential to are being clear-eyed about our condition. Again, and again, the process by which money value has displaced other languages of value. big picture. That's one of the enormous secular trends. One can discern of last 150, 200 years. And I would say many of the things you just invoked are in effect explicable out of that dynamic. Now I don't want to sound reactionary when I say that. And I also don't which to kind of invoke some fantasy utopia of the past. But we are more severed from each other. Now, then at any time in human history, even as we have this kind of Earth's experience of our being aggregated in new and powerful ways, we've seen dynamics that simultaneously severed us from each other and created new aggregations. For instance, the rise of nationalism across the 19th century which was a kind of a harrowing ideology that created new forms of collective identity and displaced experiences of intimacy at the same time with monstrous consequences. So it's totally reasonable, I believe, to be extremely uneasy about the dynamics that we're seeing.

Yeah, it's a very hard question. In a sense, you're asking both the question about authority. And also asking the question about prescription. We're going to prescribe for people. This versus that and who will prescribe. You know, I think of the extraordinary definition of education that guitarist's feedback offers, which is the non-coercive rearranging of desire. What's education? The non-coursive rearranging of desire. And that brings for you. Have to say it does. It's not how my education felt to me. Well, I don't think a lot of our educations work that way. So I would say that that's a richly humanistic and at the same time critical kind of education. It's not especially an account of education that can do us to making optimized workers in the labor force. But let's just sort of unpack it for a second. We organize our lives around desire and some basic sense. You say, who we just tell people that they shouldn't want, enjoy, receive that little dopamine hit feel good when they're scrolling through TikTok mode. Okay. Our desires can go lots of different places. It's also possible for us to put our desires in places that ultimately lead to our being unhappy and lonely, not flourishing. The question of how to organize our desires, how to know what it is we want. that is what we really want or what in wanting most dignifies and extends our experience of being as opposed to, again, severing and publishing us. That's the hard work of education and people have to work that stuff out for themselves, but also they have to work that stuff out with other people. That's in a sense why the humanistic tradition brings with it tradition. Stuff, the kind of best that's been thought and said, text objects here. Here, look at this. It's not, look at this. I'm going to force you. It's, I want you non-coursively to discover that in being with this in these ways, something good will happen.

So when I ask you back a question in response to that, which is just, where do you anchor your intuition? That it is, say, better to read a book than it is to scroll on TikTok for four hours.

I'm enormously moved by what you're saying. The dynamics that you're describing are not unfolding in empty space. They're unfolding in relation to a basically unbridled dynamic of financial optimization. Like we just can't leave capitalism out of this. The system in which we operate is centrally driven by return on investment, not by human flourishing. And there may be no other way to organize large modern complex societies, but we would be insane not continuously to hold before us the essential adversary here. The corporations are not on our sides and the fact that a major split of our contemporary economy has figured out how to monetize, not just our labor, but our actual ability to give ourselves to what we care about is extremely bad for our ability to continue to be non-inhuman beings.

Absolutely.

You invoke religion as one of the sort of traditions on which one has been able to draw for a discourse of value that would not reduce to money value. I would invoke two other kinds of institutions that have been really important. There's the space of education. I mean, I basically believe that a lot of what we do in the humanities. is a training of attention. And partially that's like why we have to hold on to and protect spaces for humanistic work in our education because a lot of the other stuff can be instrumentalized. It's part of the reason it's getting increasingly exterminated from universities because you can't monetize it. But I say all of that just because interpretation or meaning is so inextricable from the labor of attention. And there's a third, which I also think is interesting to consider, which is spaces of art, music, aesthetics. I mean, artists have always made fun of the bourgeois collector who showed up with a giant bag of money and said, you know, show me the most expensive thing and I'll take it and of the people in the know in the space of the arts would sort of snicker and say, you know, how calo that he walked out with that, that's not the good stuff. So each of those spaces spaces religion and institutions of education study teaching and learning and then museums and spaces of artistic production, symphonies music. Each of those institutions has meaningful traditions of non-instrumentalizable attention.

I think you put your finger exactly on that duplex nature of our discourse around attention. Both those notions are in the language of attention that we use. And I would argue that what's important now is that we have the richest conversation about attention to surface it as our collective concern in the way that this podcast and all the podcasts you've done on this and wide range of authors like Jenny O'Dell and James Williams and Tim Muou, all these folks have written on us, we need more of all of that because, and here's where your language of health is exactly right. what we need is a kind of almost revolutionary rising of our awareness around the importance of this stuff. I'm old enough to remember a period back when nobody went running. James F. Fix, right? He wrote the book running in what was it? 77. Before that, regular people didn't go jogging, they didn't go running. People ran where people were sort of athletes or people in sort of school because they were doing collective sports. Also there weren't gyms that regular people went to, right? There were places like Gold's Gym where you could go if you were a powerlifter or a boxer. I'm talking 1974, 75. The whole idea that ordinary people would sort of concern themselves with their fitness is something that's emerged over the last 40 years. It's staggering to consider the scale of the collective awareness of our physical well-being. Now does that mean that health itself is a new idea? No. People have been worried about their house in forever, but the specific activation of fitness. That's relatively new thing, and it's really changed in our lifetimes. And I'm proposing to you that that's going to happen again. Over the next 40 years, a collective recognition that are wellness in our intentional lives, our hygiene and health in our attention is going to be constitutive of our experience of being, this is what's going to happen. It's going to reshape education, which as you've signaled, needs to be forward and about attention, that's what it needs to teach. And it's going to transform our other ways of being together.

Yeah, I love this stuff. I mean, we think of the school as sort of a little bit like back mountain college, sort of creative artistic collaboration, a little bit like something like the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, like continuing education for people who want to read together and think and be together in person in a place. And then a little bit like the kind of radical labor schools of the teens and twenties, like the schools created by the international ladies, garment workers, union, which were more like activists, projects to promote certain kind of politics. So that's kind of the triangle in which we place the school. The school does not promote some single programmatic theory of attention. On the contrary, we're interested in all the different traditions that can inform how we take attention forward. We had a senior Zen student to a course on Zen meditation as an intentional form. Class on cinematography as a medium in which attention is choreographed cinematically. a class on perfume where smell as a sensory modalities centered as a sort of intentional form. We run workshops and as a separate from the classes we do free workshops and the workshops are sort of opportunities to actually do some intentional stuff together exercises in which people will, for instance, listen four times to the same four minute piece of music under, again, different sort of Mental orientations, but collectively, then take some notes and talk out what happened as they sort of used their attention. And possibly the coolest thing we do at the school are these things called sidewalk studies. in which between five and ten people will get together usually a bar cafe and they'll read carefully selected paragraph closely together and talk about it seminar style having a drink that paragraph is on a card when you flip the card over There's a thing to do together, like a street action, like a kind of situation, a style activity. So, an example would be like a great, odd reward passage on food in the city. The action is going into a bodega and actually examining the bodega for where surveillance is happening, where nourishment is happening. And then moving to the second bar and talking through what it was like to sort of be in the space of the bodega with the Audre Lord passage in our heads together. And there are dozens and dozens of these exercises that are continuously being invented by folks in the school and doing them together. They do it because it's a way of being together and practicing attention together to generate forms of solidarity.

Absolutely. It's a do by doing kind of thing. You actually have to come together with other people and surface the question of attention and then experience what giving one's attention with others can do to be reminded of how precious that feature of our being is and discover what can be returned from the world to themselves out of opening themselves to it intentionally.

Okay, so this would be an example of one of the exercises we might do at one of the attention labs at the Strother School. And we always like to make clear that we borrow from lots of different traditions. So this is very much like the kinds of exercises that the wonderful sound artist, genius, Pauline Oliveros, would use in her practice. It's not exactly like her stuff, but we always kind of talk a bit about pulling all the barrels when we set this one up. And there are other sound artists who inform the kind of stuff we care about and they lock wood and others. The exercise is going to have four phases. I understand that you've got a sort of sound piece queued up. We've got it. Okay. We're going to actually play it four times. Sir, listeners have to be ready. You're going to hear that piece of music, which is about how many minutes would you say?

Okay, so it's 30 seconds. We normally do this for the little longer, but alright. So wherever you are, get ready. You're going to hear this 30 seconds sound piece four times. And I'm going to give you the mood under which you'll attend to it. First, just listen. Okay, first, listen.

What have you heard before? Third lesson. Discover. What do you hear for the first time? and for finally, don't listen. What do you find when you don't listen? So let's talk back in fourth, an observation about each of the phases. What happened in the first phase? A few of them.

For me in the first time through I was acutely attuned to a thousand questions sort of pulling me in all directions because I'm accustomed to doing these kinds of things like roll long time so you no longer more immersive more people, so a lot of anxieties to whether this kind of thing can work in this setting. So the truth is, I became aware about midway through that I was effectively not listening to the thing at all on the first time through trying, but trying but failing for me on the first one. We go to the second, listen, where we were trying to hear something that we'd heard before, recall.

Super interesting. This is so embarrassing, but I heard the birds for the first time in the second phase. That's not, so it was a double catastrophe because I was like, how the heck did I not hear the birds in the first phase? My listening was so bad in phase one. And two, wait a second, I'm not supposed to discover new things until phase three, so I had phase catastrophic disaster and felt that about myself. But then sort of rounded on that and became aware of that sort of inexorable March time that comes in and the sort of harrowing fatalism that when associates with that musical mode. And so I had gotten to that in the first listen and was able to be like, okay, we can't remember that. I'm remembering that. Third listen, were you able to discover anything new?

Yeah, and I love discovery for me involved a loop into how this piece came to be. I heard a twang that felt guitar-like, but I'm almost certain that the music was composed electronically. So I had a little moment of your engineer or your creatives, whoever's back there are making this and where they add a machine, what kind of machine, what kinds of clips or samples were they growing on. So my kind of discovery in a sense was the sources and being recalled to the question of the sources of these sounds, these acoustic experiences. Final phase four, you tried not to listen as what happened.

What did you do with the rest of you to not listen? Because of course, our ears are funny. You can't close your ears. So the stuff's going to keep coming in. It's not like our eyes.

Yeah, I did exactly the same thing. Did you close your eyes in the first three phases? Did you keep them open as you're in listening? You did. You kept them open at all. That's interesting. I closed them, but I opened my eyes in the final phase and had a little taste. It was quick, but a little taste of that, like a foretaste of the ecstasy of trying to awaken my visual field. and brighten it such that it would sort of displace my acoustic experience. So I kind of had hypervision for a second and an effort to sort of blast out of my ears the acoustic experience by overwhelming it with the other sensory modality. And that felt those little tremor of the good stuff where you can sort of feel an activation of what you can do with your attention. As an aspect of being, I must say I enjoyed that.

Yeah. Um, I want to just admit that I'm not super sure. And that kind of uncertainty is part of it. And what I can assure you is that when seven or eight people got together in Brooklyn and do something like this for half hour, 45 minutes, we all come out of it feeling so good. It just feels so right to be with ourselves and what our minds and senses can do and with other people in relation to what's in the world this way. And I think that at this moment we need to carve out more spaces for these kinds of activated experiences within our teaching and learning environments.

Yeah, it's a great question. And for my answer, I'm going to read one of the 12 thesis on attention written by the friends. Thesis 9 of the 12 thesis reads sanctuaries for true attention already exist. They are among us now. But they're endangered and many are in hiding, operating in self-sustaining, inclusive, generous and fugitive forms. These sanctuaries can be found, but it takes an effort of attention to find them. And this seeking is also attention's effort to heal itself. So my answer is find a sanctuary. It's there. And your listeners out there, they all have their different sort of sweet spots where they're able to protect themselves from the frackers. It might be gardening. It might be that they actually can weld and like when they've got their visor down in their kind of in the puddle of the hot metal, that's when everything is sewn out. They may be knitting and they may be doing Zumba class. I don't know what it is they're doing that's near you and what you would find and make possible but find your people and out of finding your people and with a measure of intentionality insisting upon the sanctuary where you are resistant to being fract Attention can begin to heal, and that seeking out of the sanctuary space is itself already part of the healing.

Oh, there's so many great books and all we need to do is protect the ability to read them and will be good. Well, let's start with one that I think is a deep and challenging and important book in this kind of attention space. And it's by my esteemed colleague Natasha Dalshul down at NYU. It's called Addiction by Design. Natasha Daushul is a science and technology study scholar, an anthropologist by training, and she did an extraordinary book on video poker machines gambling machines in Vegas. It's a kind of a pre-smart phone book about the engineering of addiction by the folks who designed those gambling machines and the environments in which they sit. And if you want to have a kind of harrowing inwardness with the sophisticated dark pattern technologies that can be achieved even in the most primitive technologies, those machines are not fancy in important ways, right? They are a kind of 19th century printing press to a modern full-color laser printer in relation to what we have now in our pockets. But already to see how sophisticated the design of those systems were to suck people in and hold them. It's amazing. Natasha Daush will addiction by design. A second book that I love and that also comes out of my field and then I think is a deep and hard but beautiful and important book for thinking about the history of science would be the book Objectivity by Peter Gallison and Lorraine Daston both of whom are really great historians of science. That book is a history of something that seems impossible to historicize. I mean, objectivity doesn't have a history. I mean, objectivity is just being objective. That's like trans historical. And they do an extraordinary and counterintuitive job of showing, erratically, historical, or conceptualization of objectivity itself is how entangled it is with shifting ideas of subjectivity, for instance, or the way that it plays off of the emergence of mechanical technologies for making inscriptions. So, objectivity by Peter Galson and Lorraine Daston. And then I guess my wildcard book would just be a book I love and a book about the imagination belief dreams and about America. It's by Herman Melville. Of course, the author of Moby Dick, a book I also love, but I'm going to invoke his much stranger book The Confidence Man. which is a book about how belief happens and who the people are can make us believe and about the sort of entanglement of hope and belief. And it's very much a book about this strange country that I love and believe in and that has to make us all also very uncomfortable a lot of the time, Herman Melville's the confidence map.