Big Tech Is Fracking Your Brain. Here’s How.

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Just like the oil rigs are pumping detergent into the ground to extract that black gold. [music] In that same way, the tech company, Big Tech, is pumping us AI slop to get this hot commodity of attention.

[00:00:16]>> Human fracking is the project of doing anything to get money. If they figure out how to get their blood siphon into your attention and suck it out and cash it out, you will have a thinner life. And And you And in a deep way won't be free.

[00:00:38]Welcome to Talking [music] with Natasha live on your feeds. Do you feel like you're getting fed AI slop, [music] doom scrolling till your brain is numb? Well, there is a reason for that, [music] and my next guest knows a lot about it. This is Dr. D. Graham Burnett. Thank you so much for joining me. Pleasure to be here.

[00:00:56]>> Great to have you. Thanks for Princeton University professor, um co-author of Attentionality, co-founder of the School of Education, Attention out in Brooklyn.

[00:01:06]And you cover really interesting concepts, this idea of human fracking.

[00:01:12]Explain that to people who might not know. What is human fracking? Excellent.

[00:01:16]Yeah, so uh I'm a historian of science and technology. And one of the things that's interested me over the last few years is the way that the attention economy has kind of jumped the shark. That it's become an extractive industry that extracts money from our eyeballs, from your eyeballs, from my eyeballs, from the eyeballs of the children. So, we use that language of human fracking to emphasize the sort of violent and extractive nature of the modern attention economy, which doesn't just sort of wait for you to like looking at something on your phone.

[00:01:53]Yeah. Yeah.

[00:01:54]>> They are continuously pumping Yeah. into our faces kind of high pressure, high volume detergent to kind of break up the structures of our deep minds and consciousness >> Mhm. and force to the surface a little bit of that eyeball time that they can auction off. And that's like a perfect analogy to how petroleum fracking works.

[00:02:18]It is interesting that just like the oil rigs are pumping detergent into the ground to extract that black gold. In that same way, the tech company, Big Tech, is pumping us AI slop to get this hot commodity of attention. It's real.

[00:02:37]It's real. And you know, people will often think at any given moment on the device, I'm looking at something I want to be doing.

[00:02:48]But what we miss is the extent to which we are literally being reprogrammed by these not just AI slop, but by the extremely sophisticated AI algorithms that are studying us all the time to try to figure out what will hang on to us.

[00:03:07]What could I give that person next? What could I give Natasha next that would hang on to her for another second? So, we think we're doing what we want, but in fact, it's like a bio hack at the scale of society. It's unprecedented.

[00:03:22]If we continue at this rate, what does the next 5 to 10 years look like for humanity? Mhm.

[00:03:28]Well, I mean, I'm I'm kind of more a historian than like a prognosticator, so >> You're warning us.

[00:03:36]I do not get to that point.

[00:03:38]>> the past. The future's always a little harder, but I I guess I would just say, what are y'all out there feeling? And I think a lot of people feel, wait a second, I'm being changed Mhm. by my device and not necessarily in ways I like. Yes, I like having my community.

[00:03:56]Yes, I like being able to catch up with my friends and the things I follow. But, what I don't like is the way I'm sitting with a friend, and that friend is kind of like, I can tell, checking like checking distracted. Or, I'm trying to have a little family time, and I can't get any of the members of my family to get up out of their devices long enough that we can actually have a family moment. Or, I myself, when was the last time I was able to do some of those things I like doing, like read a book or daydream, and take a walk without feeling tethered to the information system that's always in my pocket. So, I do think that this is the moment where we as a people and as a communities start to sort of push back against the way Big Tech has heedlessly and with malice of forethought placed their bottom line, money, over our well-being. Yeah, that's really what's at stake.

[00:04:58]>> We're starting to see some of the pushback in the form of lawsuits. So, families are suing Meta, other tech giants, claiming that their algorithms are addicting to their children and causing harm. So, do you see that as the beginning of what could be this revolution?

[00:05:16]I see the revolution happening on a whole bunch of fronts. It's like the youth movement of the kids who are like getting dumb phones and sort of becoming like neo-Luddites, like pushing back against the machine. It's very much the work of Jonathan Haidt and others who are saying we got to keep the phones out of schools, tablets out of schools. It's parents coming together to support each other in not giving their kids like full access to all the socials too early.

[00:05:46]When a few parents do, then it's very hard to hold the line. It's like, you know, I would know from my own experience child rearing. So, it's happening on a lot of fronts, and I think the thing that I would put to your listeners as the thing they should be kind of thinking with is this language of attention. I think attention is a really powerful like way to invoke what we want, what we need, and what is being harmed by this $17 trillion industry that has arisen in a very short time, and that does not have our best interests at heart. have to pro- you have to protect your attention.

[00:06:27]That's the core message that the authors of this book, Attensity, which is kind of cool cuz it's a collectively authored book. Well, I'm one of the people who put the book together, but it was created by a community of people who call themselves the friends of attention.

[00:06:44]And that kind of says it all. Community of folks who believe that our human attention is what we build our relationships with. It's what we build our experiences of a day from.

[00:06:56]Attention, real human attention, is how we make worlds in which we can flourish.

[00:07:05]And the human frackers want attention as black gold.

[00:07:11]We need attention to build meaningful lives, and so we got to be very careful about letting them get their paws on our attention. Speaking of your book, I I loved it. It's fascinating. And what I also really liked, and maybe this is intentional, but the way that you've actually put the book together, too, with you've got you've you've done it you've done so that you've got this one manifesto, right? And then you've highlighted different sentences, and then each sentence is its own chapter of the manifesto, was that intentional and is that It's interesting that you're talking about attention and that's the way that you're grabbing my attention as a reader when I'm reading this. Yeah, I mean we really thought a lot about this book because I think we all realized that it's not easy to find time to sit underneath a book. Mhm.

[00:08:03]And we wanted to make a book that's really a manifesto. So like a manifesto calls out. And so at the heart of the book is this two-page proposition.

[00:08:14]And then each sentence gets a little gloss. So it's almost like a hypertext.

[00:08:20]We're not anti-tech. We think tech's cool. So the book's almost built like you click on each sentence of the manifesto and it pops open into a little mini essay. But it's meant to be readable a lot of ways. You can kind of browse >> And interactive. Very much so. And you read the manifesto, you get it. You get interested in one bit of that, you can go read that section where we kind of expand on that. And it also was such an interesting attentional experience to write the book with like 25 >> Mhm.

[00:08:50]I feel like that could be an experience.

[00:08:52]It's not something I would recommend to everyone. You You really know who your friends are when you've been working on a book together for four years. Um but yeah, we want this book to be the calling card for change in this space where we really need it.

[00:09:07]>> Mhm. How do you handle social media?

[00:09:10]What's your What's your day-to-day consumption look like? Oh my gracious.

[00:09:14]If my kids are watching, they're so making fun of me right [laughter] now because they know that their dad is by no means fully plugged in in the social media ecosystem. But I will say I've learned a lot about those spaces from my teenage daughters. So my um my 17-year-old daughter has sort of about 25,000 followers on Tik Tok. She makes edits. She's pretty successful. I I often like to make fun of myself by saying that like my 17-year-old has multiple edits that have been seen by millions and millions of people and I have Yeah. exactly nothing that's [laughter] been seen by millions and millions of people. I don't think you have a profile. I was trying to find your profile. Yeah.

[00:09:56]>> No. I lie low. Um, but that said, um, I am very active with the Struthers School of Radical Attention on social media. So, I want to say again, not anti-tech.

[00:10:12]We are anti-exploitation.

[00:10:14]And so, the school, which is a non-profit school in Dumbo in Brooklyn, where we think about attention, bring people together for classes and free workshops, we have a goodly little following on our socials and we use that as a way of communicating with our people. And the friends of attention, the kind of coalition that authored the book together, that was basically born digital. I mean, that was a community that arose passionately across the pandemic when we were all so severed from each other.

[00:10:44]And what we needed was, of course, we needed, you know, Google and Zoom to find each other. Um, so, I do make a practice of getting up in the morning and having my breakfast and doing a little reading or writing before I look at my phone, get into my email, look at any of my socials. Um, and I do think that's a like habit that is like was, um, but I learned that from others and I'm sure many of your listeners have built their own kind of strategies for this sort of thing.

[00:11:17]>> there's a lot of people, first thing they do, they wake up in the morning, they grab for their phone. It's real.

[00:11:21]And I think that that is what starts your day off, getting fed.

[00:11:26]That's how it is. You're getting fed on on social media on this platform. Yeah.

[00:11:30]I think that thing that's probably most important to emphasize is that our work in the friends focuses not on individual practices and disciplines, but on the idea that what we need is community on this.

[00:11:48]>> Mhm. So like the issue of there being a problem with attention spans and the way social media is kind of commodifying our eyeballs, Mhm.

[00:11:58]I bet all your listeners have heard that story 25 times. They know that. They feel it in their bones. The big pivot of our book is to say stop thinking of this as a personal discipline problem >> and start looking for your friends.

[00:12:18]This is a situation that calls for collective action, not personal shame or like, you know, no So when you're doom scrolling late at night and you wake up in the morning you're like, I'm so tired. Why did I doom scroll for an hour last night? You shouldn't feel bad about that. You should realize that that is being done to you by one of the very largest, most technologically sophisticated, deep-pocketed industries in the history of human civilization.

[00:12:52]So on the other side of that little screen is military-grade hardware, all the most brilliant scientists leaving college these days, and trillions of dollars of private equity. Mhm. So you are not just having a tough time cuz you're really loving your It's literally enemy action.

[00:13:16]And just as they've got rank-and-file troops arrayed against you, what you need to do is find your people and begin developing collective habits and practices to remember and hold space for the forms of attention that are good. We'll often say to people, and we could even do this now. We ask people, instead of talking about like how their doomscrolling habits, we flip it. We're like, let's do an attention inventory. When and where do you feel good after an hour?

[00:13:51]When do Like, let's do an inventory of that time where you finish an hour of doing something and you're like, I feel great. What is that? When is that? I mean, even ask you, if you had to think about like I'm thinking about it right now. I think like if I go for a run through Central Park, I feel really good. I'm not I was in the moment, it was something I was doing, I'm breathing fresh air, I'm seeing greenery, I'm not on my phone, I'm just listening to music, and I feel good after it.

[00:14:19]Perfect. So, right there we see, you know, that for Natasha, like there's this joy place when you leave your device at home, or maybe you're listening to music, that's totally groovy if you're listening to music. Um then what we say to people is, okay, let's build that out. Protect that and build that out. Maybe what you need to be doing is getting together with a few friends to do that run and make it a regular and then maybe actually you even take like, you know, half an hour to change and then you have brunch with some friends, no devices. Yeah. That having like a little community of people or supporting each other in doing something other than being subject to the relentless conduct of the frackers, that's how we begin to come together and make change in our lives. And fight back. Yeah. And I I want to say too that like political action, legislation, regulation, you mentioned litigation, those are all good habits and practices, too.

[00:15:21]But in a sense, even more basic is the work of our beginning with our people to think about how our attention makes our lives.

[00:15:33]That's like the substrate work where we find the goodness. And the companies are not going to help us do it. No app is going to protect you. No pharmaceutical is going to fix it.

[00:15:43]>> to hold this thought, and we got to take a quick commercial break, but when we come back, I really want to talk to you about sanctuary spaces and these mindfulness apps and whether or not they actually work to help us take a little mental breather. So, stay with us. We will be back in just a moment.

[00:16:11]A bit. Hey guys, welcome back. I'm here with Graham. We're talking about how to protect your attention and to be more mindful, to know what is going on, and to be aware of what exactly the algorithm is doing to you, what it's feeding to you, and be just hyper aware about it. Um, what do you make of these digital detoxes that people might do on a weekend?

[00:16:34]I'm in favor. You know, our work is about emphasizing movement energy. So, we're about bringing people together to do this kind of work, but we're in favor of mindfulness. We're in favor of, you know, your app that helps you with mindfulness. And if a digital detox or a full-on sort of disconnect or some deleting, uh, little hygiene, all that is part of the larger work that we call attention activism.

[00:17:02]And I really want to hit that for your listeners. Like think about like the crisis of the environment in the 1950s and 1960s.

[00:17:11]There was like a new movement that arose where people came together to try to protect the environment. A very diverse movement of people. Like there were, you know, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts cleaning up parks. And there were, you know, duck hunters that wanted to protect wetlands. And there were all co-executives who wanted to like promote some recycling.

[00:17:32]There were hippies. There were all kinds.

[00:17:34]>> Yeah. We need a movement that's diverse like that. Not to protect the external environment, although that's got enough issues, to protect the internal and social environment of our attentional lives.

[00:17:46]>> Yeah. That's the heart of what we're calling for with attention activism. Do you think AI is going to be that um catalyst in a way? Because I I mentioned this because there were a bunch of commencement speakers recently and they mentioned AI and then all of a sudden you have this room, this arena filled with young graduates booing the commencement speaker when they brought up AI.

[00:18:09]>> Yeah. Are you they're going to take my jobs? They're going to take my livelihood. Do you think how are I we have we've got a question in our live chat right now. Are young people getting sick of hearing about AI? That would seem to be evidence that they are. Yeah, and um I did a a long essay on AI and higher education for the New Yorker last year. This is stuff I think about a lot.

[00:18:30]Uh it's it's called will the humanities survive AI. You know, in a lot of ways what's most scary really is that AI is kind of the killer app for the human fracking project. Because those same super intelligent systems that will mop the floor with you or with me at chess or go or any game you want to play, that's the same super intelligent systems that are being given the task of turning us into money.

[00:19:00]In other words, those systems are being fed your data and they're trying to solve the following problem. How do I keep Natasha on her phone >> hooked all day.

[00:19:12]>> Yeah. Cuz if I can get her for 9 hours looking at her screen, that's worth an additional $4 to my bosses. If I can only get her on for 7 hours, that's I'm down $4. Those AI systems are solving the problem of maximizing time on device by means of continuous surveillance, listening to you, paying attention to what holds your attention, um and that is not good for us.

[00:19:41]There's even concern that we're headed for something like, not just an attention economy, but an intimacy economy.

[00:19:48]>> Mhm. Where as we begin to communicate >> how to go on dates, how to love. They don't know how to do things anymore.

[00:19:55]Yeah, well, I mean, there's all that, but to the extent what people increasingly find most frictionless is their interactions with chatbots and LLMs. Yeah. Those systems are going to be working on the same human fracking economic model as our socials, meaning you're having conversations with your chatbot now, pretty soon it's going to be having one of those.

[00:20:19]And, you know, Natasha, I I really feel you on what a hard day you've had. Maybe you'd like to just put your feet up and grab a Coke, huh?

[00:20:27]>> [laughter] >> You feel it. And it's like we're this close on this already. And those folks are not >> you mean like product placement kind of stuff, too? You bet.

[00:20:35]>> Yeah. I mean, do you remember before we had product placement on I mean, all the TikTokers out >> remember that there used to be ads on TikTok or remember >> Yeah. And there were and there didn't learn a lot of ads in our chatbots now, but don't you worry, there will be. Of course, any way to make money. For sure.

[00:20:53]>> Any way to make money, that's the bottom line.

[00:20:55]>> Well, and that's what we mean by human fracking. Human fracking is the project of doing anything to get money out of humans. And in the like old days, they got money out of humans by like making you dig ditches. It was about muscle labor. Mhm. Increasingly now, it's about eyeball labor, mind time. That's where the money is being made. And it's human fracking. And the only way we fight back is to insist that our attention is the stuff out of which we make the goodness of our lives.

[00:21:31]It's what we make our relationships out of. Your life is what you've attended to. Mhm. And so, if they figure out how to get their blood siphon into your attention and suck it out and cash it out, you will have a thinner life. And and you in a deep way won't be free.

[00:21:53]Because attention is at the origin point of human freedom. Mhm. Our ability to want what we want to want, that's attentional.

[00:22:05]So, at the at the most ambitious, this book is a book that calls for nothing less than a kind of political revolution in which we take back our attention and insist that we can make worlds with our attention, uh rather than just feed the pockets of a small number of tech bros.

[00:22:27]Yeah. And the tech bros. And there's not much regulation, but we're starting to see some pushback against that, wanting to regulate these algorithms. And we were talking in commercial break about I wanted to get my nails done a certain way. And I looked up the nails, and then all of a sudden, I that's all my feed was was the nails. I'm like, "Oh my god, is there anything else going on in the world? Why am I only getting fed this?"

[00:22:50]Or even if you're talking to someone, and it's so freaky, you look and it's like you're getting fed ads. They're listening. They definitely listen. Um and it is deeply unsettling. And that's something like kind of as we were saying at the at the top of the show, like I'm actually an academic historian.

[00:23:08]And I want to emphasize for your listeners how historically unprecedented what we've been living through is. This is not just continuation of business as usual. There have been advertisements for a long time.

[00:23:24]>> Mhm. But the thing that's happened in the last 10 or 15 years is a totally unprecedented transformation of the advertising industry, which now has us all the time so close and can do anything to us. That's not what was going on 50 years ago or 100 years ago.

[00:23:45]This is new and you're right that the law has not yet responded to it. We don't have the regulations we need. Um we can hope for that.

[00:23:55]But there are also ways in which this human fracking has had bad effects on our democracy.

[00:24:04]>> Mhm. It turns out like to be >> I know, it makes us so politicized, even more polarized on on social. Just as we were saying, like rage bait is time on device and that's what the systems want.

[00:24:17]And indeed I would argue that there are forms of attention, attention to the dignity of others, which are absolutely necessary for democracy. And the human frackers don't care about that.

[00:24:31]Have you gotten pushback to everything that you're saying?

[00:24:34]Any pushback? I mean, the truth is um not really. I I think everyone understands that something really bad is happening.

[00:24:45]I mean, you know, in the late 1950s um you know, there was a book that got written Silent Spring about the sort of way DDT was harming the environment. There was no like pushback. Yeah.

[00:24:59]>> Except from the bad actors, the polluters.

[00:25:02]>> Right. Like so big tech would not be happy with what you're saying.

[00:25:04]>> The truth is it's so bad even big tech at this point is sort of like quick to try to whitewash what they're doing.

[00:25:10]>> ban you or something or or even like they post any videos about it, they might One can always wonder if you're getting that kind of effect, but what I would say basically at this point is that there is such widespread recognition of the scale of this problem and the scope that we can really begin to say no. We need something different.

[00:25:28]And we see that happening. The language of attention activism is moving people.

[00:25:33]Just one quick anecdote on this. We put out a call on our socials for people who think of themselves as attention activism. Within 2 weeks we had hundreds of people writing in. We have a map on our website, the Struthers School of Radical Attention, where you can actually see all the different people doing attention activism projects all over the United States, in Europe, Australia. It's really spreading. Latin America. So, this is a real thing that's happening. Yeah, what I'm hearing is everyone is feeling the same way. It's just you're putting words to the feeling and it's like, oh yeah, I I >> Sure. I'm feeling that, too. And it's relevant to educational spaces. You know, I'm a teacher and if there are teachers out there listening, we just say, you know, we think a lot about the classroom as a kind of sanctuary space for attention. In fact, one of the core points we make when we talk about attention activism is that we need sanctuaries. We need protected spaces.

[00:26:27]And what does that look like practically in a house? It literally looks, I mean, my best example is something everyone's going to be familiar with. It's that coffee shop on your block that has like a no laptop policy like after 4:00 p.m.

[00:26:39]or whatever. I mean, that is literally an institution that's trying to say, "Hey, we want things happening in this space here other than everybody just being on their devices." Yeah. And in your home it may be as simple as saying, "We're going to do two dinners a week where everybody's going to leave their phones and not bring them to the table.

[00:26:58]It depends on where you are as a family or community, but it's all about communities making commitments together for what they're going to do to protect and nurture their attention.

[00:27:10]We have 1 minute left. I can't believe it. Time went by so fast. It's so interesting to talk to you.

[00:27:16]Where can people learn more about what you're doing, the books you're writing, and also the school of attention in Brooklyn?

[00:27:23]By the way, it's after named after Matthew Strother. Yeah, former student of mine who passed away way too young from from cancer at the age of 35. And the friends, literally his friends, came together to make the school in his honor. So, the school is in Brooklyn.

[00:27:40]Check us out, school of attention.org.

[00:27:42]And the friends of attention are also online. The book is Attensity. We have a couple of online classes, Attention Activism 101 and 201 that people can take. We're a nonprofit, and we are out there to fight the human frackers. No human fracking. That's what we say.

[00:28:00]>> want to get fracked. No way.

[00:28:02]Graham, great to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining me today.

[00:28:05]>> Natasha, such a pleasure. Thank you.

[00:28:07]>> Appreciate you. And thank you everyone for joining us. Again, you can watch our episodes. You can rewatch this on Spotify, Pandora, Fox Local, YouTube.

[00:28:15]And we'll see you next time. Thanks so much for joining us. Bye.