How to Escape Attention Fracking

Is there any more unhelpful term in popular use today than “attention”? Experts have been telling us for some time that we live in something called The Attention Economy. Daily, we’re accosted with statistics about students unable to read entire books, children (and their parents) spending a third of their lives online. Our attention, we’re told, has been “monopolised”, “hacked” and “monetised”. So every moment of procrastination, each distracted hour spent scrolling, is cast in this story as a failure to resist the all-out technocorporate assault on that nebulous thing we call our attention. This cycle of anxious guilt goes on. It becomes harder to think, the more we think about ourselves. Finally we collapse in exhaustion, burnt out, unable to work, unable to attend.