Word: human fracking Part of Speech: noun Etymology: Metaphorical; modeled after human trafficking and fracking; attested since the mid-2020s. 1. The use of information technology to exploit human attention in ways that are net counterproductive to the persons thus exploited (because whatever benefit they receive from it, if any, is outweighed by the costs imposed on them, in terms of side effects and externalities). Labels: uncountable Example: From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” […] And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, people who have found a better way to study attention or talk about it or teach it. Then I was reading this piece on attention in The New Yorker by Nathan Heller, and I came across D. Graham Burnett, who’s doing all three. He’s a historian of science at Princeton University. […] Ezra Klein: So you’ve written that our attention is getting fracked. What do you mean by that? D. Graham Burnett: 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. […] 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 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 spume, that foam of our attention, which can be aggregated and sold off to the highest bidder. […] New technologies do really make possible new forms of human exploitation. This is real. […] 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 in lots of different places already. And we need to see what happens with it in the years ahead. Example: In her 1942 essay reflecting on “the right use of school,” the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil laid out her vision for the ultimate purpose of education: not learning some “subject” or “skill,” but rather training attention itself, the actual mental activity that makes all learning possible — the capacity to open the mind, senses, and heart to an object. So what would Weil make of the “attention economy” — a multi-trillion-dollar industry that has arisen in the last twenty years, the unholy alliance of big tech and consumer capitalism? It is safe to say she would be appalled. Just about every human being in the modern world has become a lab rat in an uncontrolled and largely unregulated experiment in “human fracking.” Just as petroleum frackers pump high-volume, high-pressure detergent deep into the earth to bring to the surface a monetizable slurry of oil and gas, human frackers extract the money-value of our eyeballs using a similar operation: look at your little brother on TikTok, and see a pump-derrick sucking advertising wealth out of his face. We regulate the petroleum industry, because we see the dangers of fracking the earth. Human fracking, however, is mostly a free-for-all — a Wild-West gold rush into our brainstems. The attention frackers would have us believe that this is how things have to be. But our ability to give attention is, ultimately, our ability to assess the world with others — and that includes the power to make it otherwise. There is no single fix to this problem, no hack. But as a first step, Princeton students must push for a change in the paradigm surrounding the attention crisis and for a broad coalition to mobilize around the freedom of attention in the name of human flourishing.