My Week at the School of 'Radical Attention'

Nimayi Dixit spent a week attending various activities at the Strother School of Radical Attention in NYC. The school is devoted to exploring the human faculty of attention, and making legible a new kind of 'attention activism', in response to a culture that is degrading our 'attention environments'. Drawing on his experiences and interviews with staff, he maps the school’s activities and reflects on its philosophy and operations.

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If you had inquired as to my whereabouts on June 15th around 1 p.m. Eastern Time, you would have found me sitting on the floor in a spacious corner room of an office building in Brooklyn’s DUMBO district, staring intently at my right hand, trying to bring my mind to focus. 

Seated across from me was my partner in this exercise who was also staring intently at her left hand. 

We were participating in an Attention Lab at the Strother School of Radical Attention (‘SoRA’). The exercise we were doing had a name - ‘Many Hands, Light Work’ - inspired by Langston Hughes’ poem ‘Freedom Plow’. 

For two years this DUMBO corner room has provided space for an intriguing experiment in education, community building, and political organizing around a shared interest in the human faculty of attention and concern for what our modern culture is doing to it.

For the folks at SoRA, attention is an almost reverential object (is that the right word–‘object’?). But it’s something most of us take for granted, and it is precisely into that gap of complacency that the ‘attention economy’ has wedged itself to extract profit and influence. 

The devices in our pockets have become a kind of permanently available escape pod from the discomfort of present reality. Think of how frequently we dive into those screens to fill the gaps of boredom or social unease that permeate the day. The bright screens and the social media feeds are optimized to trigger the right mix of dopamine and other neurotransmitters that keep us scrolling. The financial and cultural power these companies have accumulated by organizing and selling our attention has propelled them to the upper echelons of corporate power in just a few decades.

It’s becoming almost quaint to complain about how addicted we are to our phones. But it is still jarring to confront the truth of it–the sheer quantum of hours we hand over to them. 

I heard the term ‘attention fracking’ for the first time during my visit to SoRA.

I recently spent a week there, immersing myself as a participant in six diverse activities to better understand what exactly is going on. 

I participated in shooting a short film, planned a no-device rave party, sat under the Manhattan Bridge staring quietly at the water, tried to embody the spirit of the pigeon, stalked an Apple store, and, yes, sat on the floor staring intently at my right hand for several minutes. 

I also read a few interesting papers by (mostly left-leaning) intellectuals. And I discussed my observations and interpretations about these things – the subtle nuances of attention – extensively, with anyone who would listen. 

I’m still not sure I know exactly what is going on, but I have a much better sense. What I found is an organization still in its infancy, still finding its footing, animated by a small, but growing group of passionate young people hungry for community, unified by a conviction in the importance of their work, and excited by its novelty. 

History

The school traces its roots back to a somewhat mysterious and amorphous collective of artists, scholars, and activists called ‘The Friends of Attention’ that emerged from the 2018 Sao Paulo biennial. 

On their website, you can find a document called ‘Manifesto for the Freedom of Attention’ (worth a read). Another document is called ‘The Twelve Theses of Attention’ (also worth a read). Thesis VII states:

‘This dialectic [of attentional freedom] has been deliberately manipulated by market structures and technologies to the point that we are increasingly incapable of true attention. Our attention has never been more free, or more continuously entrapped. Our attentional environments are thus catastrophic. True attention is fundamentally endangered.’

This sense of injustice, that our attention is something precious and alive, and we don’t appreciate it, and we are allowing it to be exploited by unscrupulous actors, is inherent to the ethos of this movement. It’s what provided the energy to persist beyond the 2018 genesis point; and it is impossible to miss this moral discontent in the activities SoRA conducts today. 

Fast-forward a few years, as NYC is reorienting post-pandemic, a few from this group, including Princeton history professor Graham Burnett, start hosting ‘Attention Labs’ in a local school. This is where they cross paths with one of Burnett’s former students–Peter Schmidt. 

Today Peter is a young, articulate, charismatic leader within SoRA, serving as its Program Director. Back then, he was a recently graduated environmentalist and aspiring writer who had just left his think tank job and was looking for a way to make himself useful before the NYC rents forced him out.

Right place, right time. 

Peter soon took on the responsibility of nurturing the ‘Attention Labs’ concept, to figure out what the idea “wanted to be.” That seed eventually evolved into the Strother School of Radical Attention – named after the late Matthew Strother, author of the aforementioned theses – a proper institution, 501(c)(3), with a space of its own, a growing team, and a growing set of activities. 

Activities

Pictured above is my understanding of SoRA activities.

Attention Lab

The Attention Labs are most people’s initial point of contact with SoRA. A group of strangers gather in Brooklyn and, over the course of a few hours, participate in two or three custom-designed attention practices. The Labs are usually guided by a couple of experienced facilitators (there are 7 in total). After each practice, participants reconvene to discuss their reflections.

The Attention Lab I attended was facilitated by Connor Griffin and Kevin “Quinn” Marchman. I had a chance to speak with both of them later about their experience at SoRA.

Connor is a pensive mid-twenty-something originally from Seattle and trained in geology. We talked about his quarter-life crisis (right on schedule), struggling to figure out what he wanted to do with his life after graduation. 

“At some point I had a moment of just like ‘I do know what I’m interested in.’ It was just a matter of being scared to commit to it. I had this vague sense that people are lonely, social media is bad, maybe these things are related. It seems like people don’t have the social infrastructure that they used to have in the past…but I had no idea how a person would make a career out of vague anti-tech sentiments.”

Around this time, he heard about SoRA on the Ezra Klein Show. One serendipitous conversation with his aunt about being adventurous in your 20s later, he decided to head cross country to check it out. 

After spending two weeks immersing himself in all of their activities and connecting with the people he met, he decided to shift to New York City permanently. He works now as a tutor while giving much of his free time to SoRA. 

Connor pointed to the immediate sense of community he felt during his two week immersive as a big part of his motivation to make such a significant shift. 

“I was shocked how easy it was to connect with people once there was an object of shared interest.”

Quinn had already been in New York for a couple of years when he decided to check out the school, attracted by an Instagram post. Perhaps ironically, he credits the algorithm with pointing him to the school at a time when he was looking for something like it. 

“It knew that I was looking for a meaningful community of, hopefully friends, that I didn’t have to pay a bunch of money to take part in.”

But the draw of friendship was only one half of his motivation. I was struck by Quinn’s skill as a facilitator during the attention lab. He has a gregarious personality and a voice that carries, probably a result of his training as a theatre student. 

Despite the positive demeanor, he has been passionately concerned for some time about a dark issue–a growing attitude of mean-spiritedness and toxic ideas among school-age boys, driven by their exposure to certain kinds of online content. It’s a trend he’s been aware of for years through his work as a social worker. 

He credits SoRA’s focus on ‘attention activism’ with giving him a more comprehensive understanding of the problem and a language with which to speak about it.

Seminar

Seminars are multi-day deep dives into a niche subject. During my week, I attended three different seminars. One was about slow cinema, one was about paying attention to the weather, and one was about developing a different relationship with creatures that tend to inspire disgust (rats, pigeons, and roaches; I attended the pigeon one). 

Seminars provide an outlet for people to explore specific interests via SoRA and also provides a channel for SoRA to connect with other local institutions. Seminar instructors are often not part of SoRA’s core staff. They are local experts or connected with different organizations who use SoRA’s space to contribute to this burgeoning ecosystem that is interested in attention.

The sessions I attended were rich with information and discussion, though I felt they were somewhat light on actual practices of attention. The particular mix of information and practice may vary from seminar to seminar.

Sidewalk Study

“And then, when we had the workshops, the labs, and the seminars, it became clear to me that we needed a way to continue to bring people out, to spend time together, a kind of low-lift, nimble, iterative, distributed form of community study that didn’t require renting some expensive space in the city of New York.”

This is how Peter Schmidt described the spark that created the sidewalk study. I attended one in downtown Brooklyn. 

There were maybe 15 of us congregated on the steps at the Plaza at 300 Ashland. Together we read an excerpt of Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Harraway and after half an hour of trying to understand what it was talking about, we headed over to the local Apple Store for an attentional practice. 

Our task was to roam around the Apple Store and spend a few minutes training our attention on the devices in the room, then a few minutes on the space and people, and finally a few minutes on the interactions between the people and the technology to observe the degree to which we already exhibit cyborg-like tendencies. 

Then we all walked over to a local park and chatted about our observations well into the night. 

The formula is quite simple: the sidewalk study coordinators choose a text, then develop an attentional practice inspired by the text, and finally choose a location in NYC to conduct the study. There are currently roughly 14 coordinators who develop these studies based on a monthly theme which is determined by Peter. 

Educators for Attention

Educators for Attention is a relatively new initiative that seeks to educate the educators. Just two months in, they already have a roster of over 100 teachers globally who meet once a month via video call to discuss how they can bring attentional practice into the classroom. 

I spoke with Jahony Germosen, who leads this fledgling initiative. She recently graduated from university. 

Jahony was invited to an attention lab by a favorite professor early in the life of SoRA. The experience had a profound impact on her, revealing things to her about her own mind that she wasn’t aware of. 

“That one attention lab really brought to my awareness how everything I was listening to was influencing me. We did a practice where we sit outside and write down our observations. Almost half of my observations were auditory…[other] people were writing down a bunch of visual things.”

She had a stark realization about the uniqueness of her own cognition and about how little attention she’d been paying to this. She also told me that, “literally after that attention lab, my taste in music completely changed.” 

Inspired, she reached out to Peter to get more involved.

Coalition building

“[Coalition building] means building communities around a shared commitment to practices of attention. And building networks of those communities.”

Earlier this year, SoRA put out a call on Instagram for attention activists from across the country. This resulted in a three-month fellowship program where 12 people met on Zoom calls regularly to learn and share ideas. 

A second fellowship program is underway currently with a different batch of fellows, being led by one of the graduates of the pilot program.

SoRA’s goal is to connect with 100 such communities by the end of the year. 

SoRA received applications from various groups devoted to their own activities, but who saw common cause with attention activism. These included kayaking groups, art galleries, and a community choir.  

I asked Peter why these seemingly disparate groups responded to SoRA’s invitation; how did they so easily connect their specific interests with this nebulous concept of attention activism? He responded,

“Everybody knows that something bad is being done to our attention; everybody is looking for something to do about it; everybody feels pretty disempowered by how hard it is to do something about it; and everybody knows what parts of their life feel good. And those are the parts of their life, we have suggested, that entail activity that are fundamentally attention.”

SoRA also hosts an annual retreat devoted to the ‘Politics of Attention’ where it brings these communities together to share knowledge and discuss strategy.

Finances

Seminars require tuition–usually $200 for three sessions–but many other activities are free for the public. Attention Lab facilitators are paid a small stipend. So how does all of this get funded?

I asked Peter and the answer is fairly straightforward so far. It is a mix of private donations, a generous grant from the Annenberg foundation, and revenue from certain paid activities. The Friends of Attention plan to launch a book soon and I’m sure there will be various other forms of productization around the core ideas and activities that SoRA evolves over time. 

One of the most compelling assets, quietly accumulating, is the collection of attention practices.

Attention Practices

There’s a table in the back corner of the SoRA room that has stacks of small white cards on it. Each card contains a printed attention practice. On one side you’ll find a set of instructions for doing the practice, on the other side you’ll find a quote from some text that inspired it. 

The production of new attention practices is decentralized; the collection is always growing. Every sidewalk study becomes an opportunity to create a new attention practice, grounded in some text. Every seminar or attention lab could spark an idea. 

There’s nothing particularly complex about these practices. To most people, they would probably appear as strange, abrupt interruptions in the normal course of regular activity. 

But for those who have already decided to attend a SoRA activity, in that space, with like-minded people, these practices become interesting launch pads for reflection. 

Peter believes these practices offer a viable future for people committed to texts, in a world where large language models are better than humans at producing and synthesizing writing. 

“Creating an [attention] practice is a creative genre…to make a practice is a form of writing that produces the conditions for experience…In the same way that people get off work and write poems on the train, they can write practices…It’s something that eludes capture by AI because for these things to have any use, you need a human in a body to act them out.” 

I’m intrigued, but not entirely convinced. I don’t see why an LLM trained on thousands of attention practices couldn’t come up with its own. Though it’s true that the LLM doesn’t have access to human consciousness in the same way, and so it may lack some necessary empathy.

Still, both my experience at SoRA and my conversations showed me that, for a certain type of person, these attention practices can have a profound effect. And I can imagine that creating fresh practices forces the creator to tap into new regions of the mind. 

“We have a group of people who are so conversant in these tools that they just make stuff up. Quinn has made a number of practices that he facilitates in his labs.”

Philosophy

SoRA sees its mission as helping society cultivate “forms of attention that resist commodification.” They’ve developed a framework for this ‘attention activism’.

The three pillars are: study, sanctuary, and organization. If I had to explain them simply–

• Study: gathering regularly to explore and unfold our understanding
• Sanctuary: creating spaces that are free from commodification of attention
• Organization: organizing to protect against efforts at ‘attention fracking’

The political project

When I think about a school, I imagine a space of learning where people come to be a little more enlightened than they were before, and then set out into the world again with a renewed perspective. 

When I think of political activism, I imagine an energetic effort to organize people around a certain policy objective, to relentlessly forge internal consensus, and then push against some powerful opposing force. 

SoRA aspires to function in both spaces. I was curious about how that would work and whether it creates any conflict. 

Peter mentions that a big part of the motivation for starting the school was the belief that a different kind of school was possible. 

“People who are drawn to school, a life of learning and inquiry…feel a certain type of school is possible which they never got to experience. My north star for a lot of this work returns to this idea that school can be a space for a full person and it can be fully in the world and it can be accessible beyond the enormous cost of higher education right now.”

But it’s not just a school. Peter believes the political dimension is probably unavoidable given the times.

His response is thoughtful. The social media companies are extracting financial profit and influence by harvesting human attention at global scale. In that kind of world, creating spaces that are protected from that kind of extraction to deepen a relationship with our attention is inherently political in his view. 

“There was a time, in the 1930s where, to call yourself an environmental activist, to chain yourself to a pipeline, was not ‘political’ because there was no shared understanding of ‘the environment’ as a political object. And we’re at one of those transition moments where this notion of political activity is expanding…[to include] forming a community of people who are withholding this base commodity [of attention].”

Along with the environmental movement, the example of labor struggles in the 19th and 20th century are an important mythos within SoRA. What was once an innocuous activity–not going to work–suddenly became a powerful political tool–in the form of the labor strike–to force concessions from powerful institutions. 

Peter refers to this as a ‘politics of withholding’, part of a broader concept of ‘waging peace’.

In its coalition building efforts, SoRA does not try to create replicas of itself, but rather seeks to frame diverse activities people do to bring meaning to their lives as ‘attentional practices’. 

These could be anything from gardening to athletics to art; communities that form around a specific practice tend to select for the types of people who find in them some kind of profoundness, a feeling of subjective depth. This explains why the message carries relatively easily.

The pitch is essentially something like: "You enjoy this activity fundamentally because of how it shapes your attention, how you attend to it. There are powerful organizations with a vested interest in taking your time away from these forms of attention in favor of forms that can be more easily commodified and sold. It is important that people like us connect and organize so that we can support each other in creating spaces for these non-commodified, shared attention practices."

SoRA has no explicit list of policy proposals for reigning in Big Tech or tackling the business model of social media. 

It sees its primary role as helping people frame the problem in a new way, so that apparently unrelated groups can start to find common cause with one another. The hope being that, once this network becomes robust and self-conscious, it would catalyze whatever solutions are needed to protect people’s attention.

“We are a school, remember. We’re an organization and a community that’s principally committed to asking questions because we think asking the right questions can powerfully change our relationship to the problem.” 

Still, in my conversations with others, I was told that people are sometimes confused when they come to SoRA, at least initially. It is a school of ‘radical attention’, practicing ‘attention activism’. But the brunt of the activities involve reading papers, doing attention practices, and talking about attention. 

For some, there is a burning question in the back of their minds–when was the ‘real activism’ going to begin?

I prodded Peter on this point. 

“It does require genuine care to convey this idea. It’s typically young folks who are impatient. Our generation has a vision of politics that is so powerfully defined by spectacle, by a practice of politics that’s legible on social media, that there’s very little patience with forms of politics that withhold.”

But he said that they were getting better at answering this question over time, and more people are “starting to get it.” 

The spiritual dimension

There is something about what goes on at SoRA that gently echoes spiritual practice. If you plucked a monk out of a monastery in the Himalayas, fully robed, while deep in contemplation, and had to drop him somewhere in New York, a SoRA attention lab would be one of the more fitting places you could choose. 

SoRA is not explicitly affiliated with any particular spiritual or religious lineage. It is committedly secular. 

In fact, most of the readings we did during my week were by writers who many would categorize as ‘leftist’ or ‘left-leaning’ intellectuals. The ‘Left’ is not generally known for an affinity towards non-material metaphysics. 

But curiosity about the nature of attention, or awareness, or the phenomenology of human consciousness are not a new line of inquiry in the world. There are schools of thought and practice stretching back millenia that have explored these questions, produced diverse insights, and built entire schools of thought on top of these insights. 

It seemed unlikely that SoRA could ignore this indefinitely. I felt that, at some point, a commitment to their subject matter of attention would demand an investigation of the world’s ‘spiritual heritage’; it would almost be a dereliction of duty to do otherwise. 

I brought this up with several folks, seeking to understand how SoRA’s core team members felt about the school’s relationship with ‘spirituality’. 

From my conversations, I sensed a genuine openness to exploring established spiritual practices via the school. They were just early in the process, hadn’t gotten around to it yet. 

“I think that you’re definitely right to identify that spiritual traditions are some of the deep traditions that we ground ourselves in. I think we also take a lot of inspiration from traditions of artists and ways of engaging with art from the humanities more broadly. And there are other deep traditions of attention in the sciences and athletics…that are available for us to draw upon as well.”--Connor 

“I think, as a school, we’re still trying to develop our identity and the way that we practice. And I think there is inherently a spirituality that emerges from all of these things. I don’t think that it’s really straightforwardly connected to any traditions; I would love for it to be. I think lineage of practice is a really beautiful thing that keeps all of us connected to the human project.”--Czarina Ramos (editor of The Empty Cup, a SoRA publication)

“What makes us a school is that we are committed to the many traditions of attentional technique and wisdom that have been passed down to us–artistic, scholastic, religious, and political in some cases. The religious traditions represent a precious and powerful repository of attentional techniques. And we see that as an inheritance in a way. We’re not a religious project, but we do recognize that if we want to take seriously the attentional traditions that have been passed down to us, then religious traditions are front and center in that.

Lots of people who come our way are basically looking for what you might call a ‘spiritual community’ by another name.”--Peter

I was curious about the practical implementation though, so I pushed Peter a bit further.

For various and good reasons, our culture in the West developed strong antibodies to the promotion, in public, ‘secular’ spaces, of things that seemed ‘religious’ in nature. Was there a concern that their audience would be offput if they were asked to engage in practices grounded in these kinds of traditions? 

“No, the scope of our project exceeds the scope of our [current] programming,” Peter responds almost immediately. He referenced a Zen poetry class that they had conducted recently. He also mentioned some possibilities they hadn’t explored yet. 

“We haven’t had a seminar course yet on the Sabbath as a form of attentional sanctuary, but I would love to. Or on the Ignatian meditations as a form of attentional practice. None of that is off limits. It will require, when we do it, a good deal of care and responsibility.”

He added,

“There’s such a hunger for this stuff.”

My reflections

I came across a provocative quote by Rene Girard recently: “No one ever begins anything, except by grace…We never start anything: we always respond.”

SoRA is very much a response to its time. 

I’m interested in how ideas get converted into practical action; how do you actually make things happen in the ‘real world’?

No doubt, the support of the Friends of Attention played a key role in SoRA’s incubation. A non-institutionalized collective of well-connected scholars and artists, with no pressing resource demands of its own, it could provide SoRA with initial resources, guidance, and support to get it off the ground.

You also need a team of dedicated people willing to work for modest pay in the harsh New York City economic climate. 

There is a pattern I noticed in how the SoRA team members attached themselves to the initiative. Initially there is a vague sensitivity to social problems loosely connected with compulsive digital media consumption and usually a strong desire for a community. These draw them to their first SoRA activity. 

And then there is usually some moment, during an attention lab or a sidewalk study, where they catch some insight about their own mind that convinces them that, as the saying goes, “there’s a ‘there’ there.” 

Our day to day lives pull our attention outward with hundreds of little demands. It’s not surprising that, when given a moment to give our attention to attention itself, and the right prompt to cause us to ask a different question, we suddenly realize little nuances about our own minds. Of course it would, we’re looking at it in that specific way for the first time. 

For example, some things I learned or re-learned about my attention during my week there:

1. Cultivating a sense of gratitude for an object allows the mind to settle into focusing on that object more easily.
2. It is near-impossible to pay equal attention to a visual input and sensory input at the same time. However, there is a passive dimension to visual input that, if you ‘hold it’ just right, allows you to focus attention on a feeling-sensation while still sort of registering the visual data pouring in through the eyes. The inverse combination is not as easy.
3. Mental counting significantly aids focus on objects that appear in a group. I was able to more easily focus on minute droplets of water on a leaf when I counted them rather than when I just looked at them. 

I think that’s kind of neat.

Between three worlds

At a point during my conversation with Peter, he brought up Max Weber, the famous 20th century sociologist and writer. Peter said:

“Max Weber was writing exactly 100 years ago trying to speak to how the decline of religion had thrown the realms of science and politics into disarray. Previously the world had been built around knowledge and god and power. Religion kind of fell out and he was like, ‘Oh, these things are getting mixed up in very unhealthy ways.’ Which is true of our time now.”  (emphasis added)

Science–Knowledge. Politics–Power. Religion–Transcendence. 

Weber blamed the collapse of religion in the West for causing these three realms to fall out of orbit. Perhaps that’s right, I don’t know. But I agree that our modern culture relates to these things in an awkward way. 

It was heartening to see Peter acknowledge this complexity. The question of how SoRA fit in this chaotic juncture was playing in the back of my mind throughout my week there. 

Many of my questions were meant to find out how the team thought about it. I got the sense that they weren’t worried about it, they were figuring things out as they went, and pretty open-minded about where things might go. 

I suspect it will be tricky. 

SoRA’s idea of political activism is subtle, and cuts against the popular imagination’s conception of activism; will they be able to inspire enough activists to their methodology? If you try to introduce mental practices rooted in scriptural texts, will that turn off your audience, your political activists? If the political side of things starts to gain traction, will it drain too much energy from the process of study and education? Political pragmatism often forces you to “choose sides”--could it alienate you from an audience that would otherwise benefit from your message? 

I suspect it will be tricky, but the team is thoughtful. 

Young and collegial

Perhaps it’s a bit much to pester a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to grow a nascent organization with such esoteric questions. 

Trying to sort out in advance how you will navigate the complicated relationships between political activism and education and spirituality could send you into a paralyzed navel-gazing. 

That will, hopefully, be sorted out in time. Right now, this young team feels they’ve caught a powerful tailwind in the zeitgeist and are trying to ride it to new heights.

“We perfectly met our moment.” Peter says, describing how the launch of SoRA coincided with the “mainstreaming of attention discourse.”

The operation is small, but it is well thought out and well organized. 

Young people who show commitment and passion for the mission are given responsibilities early. Like a startup trying to grow, there hasn’t been enough time for a complicated hierarchy to ossify (at least as far as I could tell); it’s all hands on deck. 

Nimayi Dixit is Content Director at Tusk & Quill.

All opinions expressed here are solely of the author and do not reflect the views of the author’s employer.