Twelve Theses on Attention

Review
"If we want to own our attention again―and use it at full blast to bring the world forth, keep us present, lead us into intimacy and understanding, and feed our souls―we have to declare war with the shallow distractions we have welcomed into our lives. This austere, deceptively gentle book uses its quiet as a camouflage―but it is a call to arms."---Jeannette Cooperman, The Common Reader
A meditation on the ethics and politics of attention
“True attention takes the unlivable, and makes it livable.” So say the Friends of Attention in their visionary and epigrammatic analysis of attentional freedom in our time. Directly confronting the pathologies of our attention economy, this slim text, written by an underground collective of activist-critics, utopian dreamers, and peaceful insurgents, stakes out the terrain of a new politics―one that centers on the truly human use of our capacity to attend.
It is widely recognized that unprecedented technologies, operating at unprecedented scales and with near-total ubiquity, continuously “frack” our faculties of eye and mind, extracting revenue by capturing our most precious and intimate resource: our attention. What can be done? Informed by the radical traditions of figures as diverse as Simone Weil and adrienne maree brown, and drawing on contemporary philosophy of mind no less than the eccentricities of slacker-surrealists, Twelve Theses on Attention offers a surprising and lyrical answer.
The book is richly illustrated with stills from a set of related films by a diverse group of young filmmakers.