Human Fracking: The $17 Trillion War for Your Attention

Human Fracking: The $17 Trillion War for Your Attention

Author: Andrew Keen January 29, 2026 Duration: 55:30
Keen On America
SocietySociety & CultureCommentaryCultureNews

Pay attention to this interview. Because, you see, attention is seriously expensive — the Silicon Valley industry being worth $17 trillion, at least according to the Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett, co-editor of a new manifesto entitled Attensity. For Burnett and his friends in the Attention Liberation Movement, the attention industry is "fracking" the human out of us. Liberating ourselves from its exploitative grasp, then, is an existential challenge. "If we take our attention away," he warns, "it collapses into sand." And so will we. So paying attention involves more than simply putting down our phones. It means joining the Attensity movement and challenging the central attention economy principles of 21st century capitalism.

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