A few years back, my old pal Bennett announced on the twitters that it was going to be the year of attention. This struck a chord with me, as I consider my time and attention to be precious. I may give it to you, but I don’t owe it to you and you can’t demand it of me. It’s mine to use as I choose.

The ability to focus, to pay attention to one, and only one, thing so that you can get below the surface and do the hard labor of thinking deeply, was never a human strength. But the claim of the moment is that attention spans are at 47 seconds and students’ ability to pay attention is worse, in a different way, than it’s ever been.

The lament is as old as education itself: The students aren’t paying attention. But today, the problem of flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions. High school and college teachers overwhelmingly report that students’ capacity for sustained, or deep attention has sharply decreased, significantly impeding the forms of study — reading, looking at art, round-table discussions — once deemed central to the liberal arts.

Why the writers relate this to the “liberal arts” is unclear, and seems gratuitous and self-serving. It relates to anything and everything, but apparently they either believe the liberal arts matters more to us or to them such that it was worthy of inclusion.

We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.

Granted, there is an important argument that the distinguishing factor today from the past is that we now hold the world in our smartphones, which both feed us whatever the algos believe we want to see to keep us obsessively available for its Pavlovian ding. But blaming human frailty on things is facile. Nothing is our fault. Everything is someone or something else’s fault. We have no agency, no power over our own lives? Well, that seems to be what they’re saying.

In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution enabled harrowing new forms of exploitation and human misery. Yet through new forms of activity such as trade unions and labor organizing, working people pushed back against the “satanic mills” that compromised their humanity and pressed money out of their blood and bones. The moment has come for a new and parallel revolution against the dishonest expropriation of value from you and me and, most visibly of all, our children. We need a new kind of resistance, equal to the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.

There are some other views of the industrial revolution that didn’t involve Satan and recognized wonderful achievements in the human condition. While the Wobblies had all the cool songs, they never really caught traction. Using the labor movement as the launching pad for a “new and parallel revolution against the dishonest expropriation of value” from us might be more about the writers’ politics than about attention at all.

This is going to require attention to attention, and dedicated spaces to learn (or relearn) the powers of this precious faculty. Spaces where we can give our focus to objects and language and other people, and thereby fashion ourselves in relation to a common world. If you think that this sounds like school, you’re right: This revolution starts in our classrooms.

The writers offer a scheme where people spend half an hour just sitting in public, writing down what they experience, and then comparing with others. In their vision, or perhaps delusion, part of what they learn from the exercise is how people of different identities see things differently, because there can be no act permitted that doesn’t enhance equity.

The implications of such a shift are vast. For two centuries, champions of liberal democracy have agreed that individual and collective freedom requires literacy. But as once-familiar calls for an informed citizenry give way to fears of informational saturation and perpetual distraction, literacy becomes less urgent than attensity, the capacity for attention. What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.

So if one doesn’t agree that individual and collective freedom requires literacy, does that mean one isn’t a champion of liberal democracy? But I digress.

Like the three writers of the op-ed, all member of the Friends of Attention collective, I too care deeply about the ability to focus, to pay attention. I, too, am a friend of attention without capital letters. But unlike these scoundrels, the value of attention is not merely in furtherance of a cause, and more specifically, their cause. I agree that the capacity to pay attention, to think deeply, to focus, is critically important and is being stolen from us by shiny images on glossy screens. But like a con artist, our attention isn’t being taken from us by force. We’re giving it away. We’ve been enticed and have handed it over willingly.

To be fair to these writers, they couldn’t make me read what they wrote. It was my decision to spend my time and attention on their words, from attention fracking to attensity. They caught my interest because I, like them, am an “attention activist,” so it was entirely my fault that I squandered my valuable attention on their attempt to steal attention for their own nefarious purposes. If I were them, I would feel Satanically exploited, but since I’m not them, I’m just sorry that I allowed my attention to be wasted.