Dozens of millennials and members of Generation Z gathered in Brooklyn apartments and converted office spaces this spring to set their phones aside for evenings of reading, drawing, and face-to-face conversation — part of a small but growing rebellion against what participants call the corporate harvesting of human attention. The gatherings are the American face of an international “attention liberation” movement whose advocates say Big Tech has made its products too addictive for the industry’s own corrective tools to fix.
Two decades after Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, participants in the movement — which spans several dozen groups in the United States and Canada, and has chapters in five European countries — say the apps and feeds that dominate modern life have become “insidious and extractive” and require collective resistance.
“The products have become more insidious and more extractive, exploitative,” said Dan Fox, 38, a stand-up comedian who works in marketing for Brooklyn-based Light Phone. Fox hosted a recent gathering in his apartment where more than a dozen people surrendered their phones to a metal colander before spending two hours reading, drawing, and talking. Members of the movement “want to start a revolution,” he said.
Fox traces his conversion to a 2015 Tame Impala concert at Radio City Music Hall, where he said most of the audience spent the show filming rather than watching. “I realized the phones are literally getting in the way of the things I love,” he said.
Light Phone, the company Fox represents, markets its devices as a deliberate alternative to mainstream smartphones, boasting of the absence of social media, clickbait news, email, internet browsers, and what it describes as “anxiety-inducing infinite feeds.”
A growing body of literature
D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton University and co-author of “Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement,” described the movement’s core aim as the reclamation of what screen-based apps have displaced.
“People need to rewild their attention,” Burnett said. “Their attention is the fullness of their relationship to the world.”
Author Chris Hayes’s recent book “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endorsed Resource” has joined “Attensity” in a growing canon the movement’s members cite. Burnett said he expects the movement to spread beyond its current footprint.
Apple and other technology companies say they have taken steps to help users reduce time spent on their devices, including features that track usage and a low-stimulation gray display mode. Activists say those measures fall short of what is needed.
Brooklyn, Amsterdam, and beyond
At a second Brooklyn gathering, held in an early-20th-century cardboard box factory converted to office space, nearly 20 people in their 30s stared at their phones briefly before setting them down and studying their own palms — an exercise intended, the organizers said, to demonstrate what sustained attention to real-world sensation feels like.
Participants introduced themselves as if at a support group. “I don’t feel good about my relationship with my phone. I feel like an addict,” said Riley Soloner, who teaches theatrical clowning and works as an usher at Carnegie Hall. He arrived carrying a backpack of paper books.
Across the Atlantic, people filed into a neo-Gothic cathedral in the Netherlands for a meeting of the Offline Club. “We create our events and gatherings with different themes,” said co-founder Ilya Kneppelhout. “Really something that makes you slow down and reflect, go inward.”
Several dozen attention-activism groups operate across the United States and Canada. Chapters have also formed in Spain, Italy, Croatia, France, and England.
A campus technology ban
Members of Oberlin College’s Harkness Housing and Dining Co-op banned technology from their shared spaces in January and ran the monthlong experiment without email or spreadsheets. Junior Ozzie Frazier, 21, said residents responded with something unexpected.
“People expressed a feeling of relief about not needing to be checking their emails, or checking their texts or checking the news. That allowed us to spend a lot of time just talking to each other,” Frazier said. Residents began checking out library CDs and gathering for arts and crafts nights, live music, and board games. “A lot of people felt very connected to each other. Not having the devices gave them some kind of mental space,” Frazier said.
Wilhelm Tupy, a retired judo champion and business consultant from Vienna, visited Brooklyn’s School of Radical Attention during a recent trip and said he found a community aligned with concerns his athletic career had sharpened.
“Discipline is not enough nowadays,” he said. “It’s becoming more and more difficult to keep the attention and to keep the focus on goals and whatever you want to achieve and want to do.”