Democracy Requires Attention – Which We’ve Long Since Sold.
Personal8 seconds. That’s supposedly the average human attention span today – shorter than that of a goldfish. The number is largely made up. That the attention span has noticeably decreased, less so.
This has direct consequences for democracy. Democracy is not a passive state – it requires that people weigh complex issues, evaluate sources, tolerate contradicting arguments, and then form their own position. All of that requires one thing: sustained, deep attention.
Exactly that has been systematically eroded for years.
Attention Economy – What That Actually Means
The term sounds harmless. As if attention were simply traded like a commodity. But D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt – the authors of the manifesto ATTENSITY! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement(Crown/Penguin Random House, 2026) – call it by its proper name: Human Fracking. Attensity is no accident as a title: the term traces back to psychologist Edward B. Titchener – the same person who introduced the word Empathy into the English language in 1909. Titchener used Attensity to describe the intensity and depth of attention. That’s exactly what the manifesto picks up on: it’s not about attention as a fleeting resource, but about its quality – how deeply and truly we turn toward something.
Fracking means: you drill deep, you stress the material to exhaustion, you leave behind a depleted landscape. That’s exactly what happens with our attention. It’s not just being used – it’s being industrially exploited. Fragmented, conditioned, sold. The person behind it is beside the point.
The business model works like this: maximum engagement at any cost. Outrage holds longer than joy. Simplification beats nuance. Reflexive reactions replace thinking.
That’s not a bug. It’s the feature.
The manifesto of the Friends of Attention describes what this produces: a sham freedom. Infinite scroll buffets full of apparent choice – that at their core all contain the same thing. Digital systems invite self-emptying: one arranges attractive objects in the empty frame of what was once a person. Convenience, access, belonging – these are the reasons we accept this false freedom.
What This Does to Democracy
Anyone who constantly navigates between push notifications, short videos, and waves of outrage has little capacity left for what democratic participation actually means: reading a long article, taking a counterposition seriously, tolerating uncertainty.
Not because people have become dumber. But because the system actively works against it.
The manifesto names the deeper consequence: impoverishment of desire. When algorithms direct attention only toward a few, ever-same stimuli, a monoculture emerges – like agriculture that relies on a single crop. What gets lost are not just pieces of knowledge. It’s the ability to develop entirely new and unfamiliar forms of wanting and thinking. Those who have never been deeply attentive don’t know what they’re missing.
The consequences are visible: political communication is optimized for 15-second clips. Complex topics – tax policy, foreign policy, climate change – cannot be seriously represented in that format. So they are simplified, emotionalized, polarized. Whoever shouts loudest wins the reach. Not whoever argues best.
This is not a problem of media literacy among individual users. It is a structural problem.
The Systems Are Well Known
The notification system optimized for maximum open rates. The recommendation algorithm that prioritizes engagement over informational value. The A/B testing framework that figures out which stimulus keeps the user on the platform the longest.
Technically well executed. Well documented. Ethically a different question.
The infrastructure of the Attention Economy wasn’t stamped out of nothing by malicious actors. It was – and is – built by developers, architects, product managers, and data scientists. People making reasonable decisions, for systems that are optimized for the wrong thing.
And the pressure to keep optimizing is real. Every company whose business model is based on keeping users on the platform as long as possible will structurally become part of the problem – regardless of how good the intentions are. The metric determines priorities. And as long as the metric is called “session length,” the system will optimize precisely for that.
There’s a second side that’s rarely discussed: users have largely lost the awareness that these platforms are real infrastructure – with real costs. Instead of paying for them, they’d rather accept advertising. And Human Fracking. Most have long forgotten the deal: free usage in exchange for attention. What gets lost in that trade has no price tag.
Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt therefore don’t call for an individual act of will – no detox weekend, no digital minimum. They call for Attention Activism: collective resistance that targets the system, not the individual.
What Attention Activism Concretely Means
The book describes so-called Sanctuaries – places and spaces consciously built against the logic of fragmentation. Theaters, museums, libraries, houses of worship. Places where deep attention is not just possible, but the purpose.
The manifesto goes further: true freedom of attention is not relief – it initially feels like unfreedom. Those who step out of the stream of platforms first notice how conditioned they’ve become. But that is precisely the conscious exercise of a capacity we’ve nearly forgotten. Attention is not passive reception. It is active turning-toward. The manifesto puts it this way: attention is a form of love – it loves the real into being by truly turning toward it.
That sounds idealistic. It is. But the alternative – continuing as before – has real costs. Not just for productivity. For democratic societies.
Conclusion
A shorter attention span robs us of the ability to engage with a question for an extended period – and thus of the foundation for deep thinking. As long as engagement remains the lead metric, the system will optimize precisely against that. And deep thinking is not a nice-to-have skill. It is the foundation for democratic self-governance to function.
The Attention Manifesto puts it succinctly: “Power erodes quietly when people stop paying it attention.” Reclaiming attention is therefore not an act of self-care. It is an act of resistance.
ATTENSITY! gives me courage – not because it provides easy answers, but because it clearly names the problem and shows that counterforces are possible. Not as lone fighters, but as a movement.
The book: ATTENSITY! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement by D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, published January 2026 by Crown/Penguin Random House. The movement’s manifesto: friendsofattention.org/manifesto – The authors in interview: “What Does ATTENSITY Mean?”
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