Dear Friend,
As a library, you are the guardian and spirit-home of something absolutely precious: HUMAN ATTENTION.
We all know that when it comes to attention something is seriously wrong. A vast and powerful industry that seeks to monetize the stuff of our minds and senses has pervaded the architecture of ordinary life. The so-called “Attention Economy” (which we view as an operation of HUMAN FRACKING) undermines our relationships to ourselves, to our shared commitments, and to the people and places we care about most.
But our new book, ATTENSITY!, isn’t here to “diagnose” that problem — or scold anybody for their screentime. Our project is right there in the subtitle: A MANIFESTO OF THE ATTENTION LIBERATION MOVEMENT. We are part of a rising movement for freedom, and that movement needs places and times where true and beautiful and actually human attention can escape the deranging and exploitative pressures of the digital frackosphere — and plant the seeds of the world we want. In our book, we call these spaces ATTENTION SANCTUARIES. What they offer is freedom from the dehumanizing churn of the attention economy, and the freedom to imagine (and create) more nourishing ways of being.
If you think you already know such a sanctuary, you’d be right! LIBRARIES are attention sanctuaries par excellence. Your shelf-lined walls protect and produce the many forms of collective attention (to language, to the past, to each other) that equip people to exercise true freedom in an authentically shared world. In our book we call this goodness ATTENSITY, which is our term for new and radical politics of attentional solidarity, resistance, and reinvention. ATTENSITY NOW!
We see your work as part of an urgent effort to reclaim the precious and prismatic possibilities of human attention. We think of you as allies! And we are, after all, nothing more and nothing less than a community of Friends. So will you join the movement, and help to spread the word?
In solidarity,
The Friends of Attention
@schoolofattention
