and to the extent that you spend any time online, you live in what's called the extractive attention economy. This is a new word I learned recently, extractive attention economy, and this term refers to the way companies try to capture and monetize our attention, and it all happens through the collection and manipulation of data, all the things you click on, all the searches you make on the web, the pages you Visit, online purchases you make, the content and the advertisements that appear on your social feed are not accidental. They're designed to steal, literally, to steal your attention and to get you to consume, to consume products and information. I came upon an interesting podcast by Ezra Klein titled your mind is being fracked. And it was released by the New York Times last year on May 31 2024 and Ezra interviews this history of science professor from Princeton named D Graham Burnett, and they discuss how online habits affect the misuse of our attention. It's a very long interview, longer than our attention span span can bear this morning. So I'm only going to pull out a couple of things that relate to practice. Ezra starts off. I think a lot about the way we talk about attention, because the way we talk about something is the way we think about it. What do you always hear about attention when you're in school? Pay attention as if, as if you have a certain amount of attention in your mental wallet, and we have to spend it wisely. We need to use it to buy algebra rather than buying gossip or jokes or daydreams. And it is interesting that, you know, we use this economic metaphor for attention like it is a commodity to be bought, sold, exchanged, returned. It's a scarce, invaluable resource not to be wasted. Don't waste a moment, as the inscription reads on the wooden block outside the Zen do Ezra says, I wish that was how my attention worked. It certainly did not work that way back then, I graduated high school with a 2.2 because I cannot pay attention. I just can't to information delivered in the form of long lectures. I wish I could. I try my attention just doesn't feel to me like something I get to spend it feels more like taking my dogs on a walk. Sometimes they walk where I want them to. Sometimes I'm in control, and sometimes I'm not in control. They walk where they want to. They get scared by thunder, and they try to run away. Sometimes a dog side eyes them from across the street, and they turn from mild mannered terriers into killing machines. Some sometimes they are obsessively trying to get a chicken bone, and even when I hurry them past it, they spend the whole rest of the walk clearly thinking about that chicken bone and scheming about how to get back there. My attention feels like that to me, and this is what I don't like about the way we talk about attention. We are not always in control of it. We may not even usually be in control of it. The context in which our attention plays out what kinds of things are around us, it really matters, and it's supposed to attention is supposed to be open to the world around us. So this is a really important observation for practice, because there is a tendency right to want to control our attention, the quality of it, the continuity of it. We also want to control our thoughts, the content of them, and also how many we have. We want to control our conditions. We want everything to feel good, to feel pleasant, comfortable. We want it all to be easy, not hard. But that's not what practice is, and that's not things as they are. Ezra then says about being open to the world around us, that openness, it makes us subject to manipulation. You really see that now, when you open your computer on your phone, when you open your computer or your phone, it's like the whole digital Street is covered in chicken bones. And then Ezra says that observation got him interested in this the work of this professor, Graham Burnett, who conducts laboratory studies on attention, and he's also co founder of a non profit organization called Get this the struther School of radical attention. I've never heard of that organization before, so I had to check it out. Check out the website. And here's, here's the excerpt on the homepage about the purpose of this school, radical attention is the root of a shared world. Through it, we form our very selves, build community and care for the planet that sustains us. This faculty, which is at the. Heart of Education, art and politics is immeasurably precious. It is also being stolen from us. Digital platforms, eye tracking technologies and extractive market structures known as the attention economy seek to capture every second of our waking gaze. In doing so, they convert our eyeballs into dollar signs and yield enormous profits at our expense. This poses a great threat our ability to care for ourselves, others and the Earth itself. All this hinges ultimately on our ability to choose where and how we direct our attention to do so we must understand what attention is and might be what it is good for, and how we might use it