#rp25 Speaker D. Graham Burnett: Fracking Focus

Human experience has become the new ressource of exploitation – and attention the ultimate commodity. By reducing the latter to a measurable and marketable product, today’s digital interfaces strip away important aspects of human being – amongst them contemplation, creativity, care. And concern is widespread: only recently, in January, the New York Times predicted that 2025 will be “a turning point in the war for attention.”

Drawing on historic parallels, a lineage of artists and writers, and contemporary experiments in artificial intelligence, at #rp25, D. Graham Burnett calls for new forms of resistance and offers a vision of “attention activism” that brings together collective movements and individual practices that resist exploitation and restore our individual and shared flourishing.

D. Graham Burnett is a writer, teacher, and maker based in New York City. Born in France, he trained in the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, and currently holds the Henry Charles Lea Professor of History and History of Science at Princeton University. He is the author of a number of books on technology, nature, and politics. Burnett is associated with the speculative collective ESTAR(SER), and was a 2023 visiting artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland.