*PATREON EXCLUSIVE* Attention Fracking: How Big Tech Steals Your Mind with Henry Kramer

Emma's class on anti-civilization thought begins in August 2026: https://www.acidhorizonpodcast.com/ahrc-courses/p/anti-civilization-recovering-from-industry-and-progress

Are we free to think, or has our attention already been excavated before we can conceive of thinking? In this episode, Serpetie welcomes Henry Kramer of the School of Radical Attention for a wide-ranging conversation on attention fracking, the colonization of the imagination, and what it might mean to re-enchant our relationship to the more-than-human world. Drawing on depth psychology, phenomenology, and radical politics, we explore whether mysticism and activism can ever really be reconciled--or might it rather be the case that keeping this tension is one of the purposes of imaginal practice. The public podcast feeds feature a preview of the full conversation. The extended discussion involves more on imaginal practices and a shared raw meditation on the experience of grief in our world today. Contributing subscribers can access the full episode.

Henry Kramer: https://henryrkramer.com/

SoRA Website: schoolofattention.org

SoRA IG: @schoolofattention

Henry's IG: @henry.r.kramer

https://substack.com/@henryofmoss

Strother School of Radical Attention: https://www.schoolofattention.org/our-people

https://substack.com/@henryofmoss

Strother School of Radical Attention: https://www.schoolofattention.org/our-people

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hey everyone, good to see you back in the inner chambers of Left Hand. Today we have brought back Henry Kramer, who is one of the panelists at Acid Horizon Research Commons panel entitled, Should We Live in Communes? When I noticed significant alignment between Henry's research interests and my own, I wanted to pull him aside for a little meet and greet like the one that we are going to have today, which we ultimately decided to record and then thought to share with patrons of left hand. In many ways, Henry is an ideal sort of guest for this podcast, as you will soon discover. The conversation carried on long enough that I also decided to offer a significant portion of it as a preview on our main feed. If you want the full conversation, simply become a contributing subscriber to the podcast. Follow the Patreon link below. Another way to support both Emma and I is to enroll in Emma's class this coming August on anti-civilization thought and recovering from progress. It's going to be an in-depth look involving a broad range of thinkers and ideas on the topic, and it will be a space for you to develop your own political and philosophical positions on the matter. Once again, navigate to the show links below to find the class. Okay, let's tap in with Henry right now as we discuss attention fracking and the war on imagination. All right, Henry, well, I just want to say thank you for joining me here today. I became aware of you through Emma, but because Emma was doing the panel discussion on communes for the Acid Horizon Research Commons, and ordinarily I'm just I'm just doing stuff for whatever it is that we do. And the one time I had the opportunity to sort of kick back and just be a true like consumer or spectator observer of something that we were doing, I didn't get a chance to engage with you and some of the interesting things that you were putting forward in the panel discussion. So I just wanted to say thank you, welcome, and welcome back. Thank you for having me back. Just a few things to start. Ordinarily, I kick off these interviews with me giving an introduction of you. I mean, I looked at the School of Radical Attention and some of the work that you've done, but maybe you can just start off by giving us an intro to who you are and the kind of work that you do, and you know what are your sort of dominant research interests?

SPEAKER_00 2:41

Sure. Yeah. So I guess I would describe myself as an interdisciplinary scholar and artist working at the intersection of imagination, phenomenology, our relationship to the more than human world, and spirituality. So, in terms of my tangible work, I teach at Hunter College and the program in religion, primarily classes like modern paganism, eco-spirituality, myth and ritual, theologies of play. So things that land more on the mystical or esoteric side of spirituality and also often involve deep relationship to nature and weave in-depth psychology as well. I also work as academic dean at the Struther School of Radical Attention, which is a Brooklyn-based educational and arts nonprofit that is dedicated to attention activism, which is the pushing back against the exploitation of our attention by big tech. And there I oversee the seminar programs, which are courses that we run in person. So we do do some online courses as well that are on a variety of subjects related to or through the lens of deep attention. I also do some other independent work in organizing projects and writing projects, as well as immersive theater work and acting and improv. I recently organized a uh four-day convergence on myth, mystery, and magic that was just intended to bring together a lot of people whose work in the world has something to do with going into the depths to find boons to return with. And so we did a kind of journey. Yeah, and I've organized other local kinds of events around eco-spirituality and nature connection and land connection and things like that. So I think it's it's been a it's taken a lot of forms, but I would say it's all orbiting around similar themes of deep connection to sort of self and world and working on the philosophical and phenomenological, like felt experiential relationships between self and world.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Yeah, I don't know how much you know about us, our podcast, and the, well, I would say the sibling podcast that we have. In some ways, Acid Horizon as the flagship podcast is probably more representative of what we do. This other podcast, Left Hand, initially started off as a solo project of mine, but brings together, and this is where this discussion will appear for our patrons, but it sort of brought back into the fold, I would say, in a sort of aged interest of mine, which were things like depth psychology, particularly the work of James Hillman, and I would say various offshoots connected to that. I mean, at one time in my younger days, I had flirted with the idea of going to Pacifica University and so forth. And then we'll just kind of doing the flash forward, the fast flash forward on all of it, things like Occupy happened, and I became a little bit more radicalized and involved with political parties and some activism and so forth. And there was a there was very strong tension between those two sides of myself. And then after we started the podcast, I kind of circled back to these other interests. So when I heard you presenting at the the the panel on communes, uh immediately I thought, like, wow, Henry is exactly the type of person that I wanted to have in the orbit of this particular podcast, where it's sort of manifest mission was to bring together psyche and politics, if, if those, if those are things that that are important to a political project. And one of the things that I I've seen personally, and maybe I would say even account for some of the lack or the failings of of the strictly political side of my own work and journey and the people that I see in those spaces, is often this lack of a connection to a deeper sort of well of aesthetic awareness. And often in in the political spaces in which we operate in, or at least some of them, there is a tension between aesthetics and politics, right? And it seems like some of what you're doing is addressing a lot of that. And so I'm I'm just curious. I'm making a lot of assumptions internally and maybe not announcing them, but I'm I'm I'm guessing that perhaps you've followed a similar path. And maybe you can kind of tell us how you got to where you were with with this area of research.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

Yeah, well, this is a, you're right. This is a tension that's really worth kind of exploring. And I think it's it's hard for me sometimes too. It's not like I have, even though I'm interested in both of these things in activism and in-depth psychology and understanding the soul and relationship to the world, like to me, they're always very connected. But that does, that doesn't mean that I like it, it's very easy to see where it can feel, where the tension can feel really present. Like the more you kind of go into the the sort of yeah, the dreamy, like like talking about how we can be animistic and enchanted and have like wonder, and then to see people dealing with unjust wars and oppression and political marginalization. And it's just like, okay, so clearly it there, these things, these explorations are much easier with a lot of privilege and comfort. And that's an uncomfortable thing to sit with, right? I mean, that's like hard, and it's it's definitely something that I would say, I mean, there's a lot of ways to approach this question, right? Of like where the the two might marry. I kind of see it as there are like two simultaneous conflicts happening. One is or struggles happening, I guess we could say. Like one is the material struggle, which it's so clear why that matters, right? It's so clear why people dealing with immediate material suffering and oppression matters. And so it's very easy to see why work that focuses exclusively on that justifies itself, holds itself like it's reasonable in its own right. But I think there's another struggle happening in tandem, which is a cultural struggle, which is the struggle in the kind of imaginal world of concepts, of ideas, of feelings, of experiences, of the stories that we inherit, the dominant stories. And I really like this quote by Diane Deprima, where she says, the only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All other wars are subsumed in it. Because I like this idea that it kind of all starts from, and even going back to someone like Jung, who I mean, famously and and very controversially was apolitical, like during World War II and everything. But like even Jung, if you kind of look at the way he talks about the collective unconscious, he reads these material like conflicts as expressions of cultural stories that are playing out in some kind of invisible place first, the place of psyche first, and then end up expressing themselves in the world. And I do kind of sympathize with that. I mean, I feel like there, there's there's ways these threads are connected that feel like there is there is something like if we look at these stories, I mean, you can see this too in conversations around restoriation, decolonizing ourselves, right? That's a way of kind of working with the stories that we inherit and moving to new stories that are more healing and and restorative and that lead towards right relationship. But yeah, I would say that I feel like yes, change does start from like the bone-deep level of what we truly believe we are and what the world is, like this existential level. And you can't really get there without some amount of depth orientation, like towards what is really what you really believe is true, what's underlying every behavior, although the ways that you kind of carry yourself in the world. And I also believe that at the end of the line, once material conditions are accounted for, which I know is like a pipe dream, like solving the material problems of the world, it's a big ask. But it's the question arises what are we actually striving for once we get there? Like, what does that look like? And you could say, like, it's a it's a problem that we are, I mean, just going straight to Marx, like alienation from the fruits of our labor, right? That's a problem. But why? What does alienation feel like? Why does that feel different from being connected to the fruits of our labor? And what is that subjective experience actually like? Ultimately, it comes back to phenomenology, to attention, to the quality of your world, to the quality of your experience, which are not material at all. Those are the felt, those are your felt conditions rather than your material conditions. And so if we leave that out of the conversation and we only focus on what can be counted, what can be measured, what can be materially done to solve these problems, we are also kind of going in a direction we don't fully, we haven't fully like thought through. We don't, we haven't really, we are, we're not going there intentionally. We're sort of going there automatically, and we risk recreating the same qualitative conditions. So I know that was a that was a pretty rambly answer that pulled on a lot of threads, but no, no, perfect.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Well, let me sort of narrow that down a little bit because and and one of the ideas that perhaps we can bring back in is decolonizing the imagination. I think I have an apt example to sort of pick on here. So let's think about a kind of story that we tell ourselves, no matter what our specific political orientation might be. I would say that broadly speaking, there's this idea that we can produce our new reality somehow, whether that be through collective action or even in some cases through the ingenuity of a particular individual who becomes the sort of shining light of the world and becomes the person that inspires others to do right in the world. I mean, there's various ways of telling the story about how a new world might be produced. I tend to think that sometimes, and this is this was certainly a concern of somebody like James Hillman, is that this very Promethean attitude of seizing the power of production from the gods and creating worlds, as it were, producing new realities is itself perhaps one of the quote-unquote problems that we face in attempting to transform our world, in attempting to liberate ourselves. Perhaps it might be the case that we need to liberate ourselves from this notion of production and this sort of Promethean overreach. Why might that be the case? Because it's that very tendency that imposes upon things like nature, the animal kingdom, and so on and so forth. And perhaps it might even be the case that people who are from non-industrialized societies engendered a set of values and beliefs that did not necessarily put that emphasis on production the way that we do. So even in our revolutionary project, that Promethean conceit might be carried over somehow. But when I think of restoring or a decolonizing thought, this might be one of the things that we want to have in focus.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Yeah, I mean, that's a perfect example. And I think that what you're showing with that example is the way that some of these stories are so embedded that they become invisible. That we're kind of so Ruha Benjamin, who one book for the reading list is definitely her book, Imagination a Manifesto. She speaks about the imagination space, like who is in the imagination space, who is imagining and telling the stories and deciding like what is the water that we're swimming in. And it's often those in power. I mean, it's pretty much always those in power. If there is somebody in power, they're going to be directing the story. They're also going to be directing the counterstory because any counter story is going to be in conversation with that dominant story, such that if you just to take the context of like religious argument, like a fundamentalist versus an atheist, it's like those aren't two opposite perspectives. Those are two Christian cultural perspectives in conversation. So it's still, there's an underlying story there that isn't being addressed, that has that's invisible to both parties. And and I think that this invisibility of these cultures, this kind of the kind of uh insidiousness of some of these narratives only gets revealed when we can become aware of an alternative, when we have the ability to imagine an alternative. Bellhook said, like, before something can be imagined, it isn't possible. Like you have to kind of go, you have to be able to go there in that space of play and possibility or observation and deep listening to those in other situations than you, to like hear how, like in non-industrialized societies, for instance, like how another way something could be. One of my favorite articles is it gets assigned in like a lot of like anthropology 101 classes, because it's a great little, you might have you might have encountered it before. It's called Body Ritual Among the Naserema by Horace Minor. It's a early or 1956, I think, article in American Anthropologist. And Minor is writing a parody piece where he's writing as if he is a really ethnocentric white Western anthropologist studying an indigenous culture called the Naserma and how disturbing and horrific and barbaric and superstitious their practices and beliefs are. Now it turns out that Naserema is just American spelled backwards, and all of the beliefs he's talking about are things that we do every day. But I assign this to my students whenever I'm teaching on indigenous religions, and without fail, like half the class gets fooled by this, this, this article because it's really good. And if you if it's the first day of class and you don't really know what attitude we're taking or what to expect, you might be like, oh, well, this oh, interesting. The Nasurayama have these really weird practices. And then when you pull the rug out from under that deception and you reveal the parody, it suddenly, I mean, it does two things. Of course, it it leads to an immediate like desire to look a little closer and speak with and understand more deeply the perspectives of someone else before you make assumptions about them, because like he's making a lot of assumptions as if he's sort of looking through a telescope on the hill a mile away from the village. You know what I mean? That's the that's the energy it gives off. But it also does another thing, which is disorients the default position. Because a lot of the stories that he, a lot of the things he says are actually critiques of American culture embedded in what it would look like from the outside for a perspective that didn't have the same assumptions that we do. Like he talks about how all how how the Nasurama feel that they are imprisoned in a body and they do everything they all hate their bodies and they do whatever they can to like make their bodies not look like bodies anymore and to, and they're like, they hate aging and they hate all these things that you just are like, oh yeah, we do that. And that's a specific cultural perspective that comes from religious dualism about the divorce between matter and spirit, and the idea that spirits eternal and youthful and abstract and in some other place, and that this is a fallen world. All of these stories that we inherit, regardless of how religious or secular we are. And and minor kind of reveals that these are not actually the defaults that we think we are. This isn't normal human experience or normal human perspectives. These are specific cultural stories that we are so immersed in, they have become completely unseeable to us. And so we have to kind of go deep into our psyches to examine what it is that, and yes, looking at other cultures, obviously, that's one way to do to like hold that lens up, but you also have to have the self-awareness to know what that lens, where that lens is pointing you within yourself, to like know where to actually look for that story. So I would say that's another element of this.

SPEAKER_01 18:49

Yeah. Well, it seems I've jumped far ahead on my list of questions and just went right for the gusto here. But I think we're we're in the right depth right now. It makes me want to then ask well, let's talk about practice and technique and and and the school of of radical attention. So, so right now I'm wondering what it's like to wonder with the school of radical attention. And how does this play out in the form of activities, exercises, artistic projects and endeavors and so forth? How would one come to see, for example, the the story that runs latent within all of us? How does that sort of satiri moment of enlightenment come? Like, aha, I finally see that which has been occluded to my eyes for so long.

SPEAKER_00 19:41

Yeah, I think for the school of radical attention in particular, our concern is with attention being this, like it's it's doing that pulling the rug out from under you and what you think attention is, right? And so we tend to assume attention is this, is just a span, it's an amount of something. It's like it's it's how much you are sort of beaming out your energy at a given object, right? If is it your homework or is it your phone or is it, but you're giving your attention to one thing or some other thing. And it's an amount, right? It's something you can spend that can that can like cost you, that you can either get back or that can be taken from you. We use the term attention fracking as a metaphor for what big tech does to our attention, which is like analogous to fracking, where oil companies will pump a bunch of high-pressure junk into the crust of the earth and get the petroleum to rise to the surface, which is what they can make money off of. So they scrape it off the top and they turn it into money. The six largest companies in the world, the $17 trillion industry, does the same thing to our eyeballs with all of the high engagement shit that's on our phones. And then that makes the attention rise to the surface and they scrape it off of our eyeballs, which is a gross image, but maybe visceral enough to motivate some black lung-like experiences with that. But that assumes like part of the thing is that's happening is not just that our attention is being taken from us, but also that attention itself is being defined for us as this very mechanized, machine-like, quantifiable like amount of a resource that we have, right? Sure, sure. And so part of what we're really concerned with is a cultural shift in definition of what attention is, kind of widening attention to the whole of the ways that our minds and senses engage with the world, to having a thousand and one definitions and to having as many kinds as there are things we could attend to. I hold to a sort of Taoist like mentality that what we are looking at or experiencing is sort of mirrored within us. Like if all of your attention is taken up by a heron flying by, then that there is a heron-ness to the attention, to the experience of the heron from you. So there is something that's changing in you that's widening or deepening in you. The environmental philosopher Paul Shepherd talks about an inner zoology of forms that we have. That's sort of the whole like taxonomy of all the kinds of things we've experienced that is each its own sort of creature within us. And I kind of feel that way with attention as well. And so, to answer your question in the like, how do we actually do this in terms of practice? So, in all of our programming, we incorporate what we what we call attention scores in some capacity. And these are little cards. I might have one around me somewhere, not at the moment, but I could find one. But they're little like cards that kind of give, if you're familiar with like the Fluxus group in New York City, like these little like instruction art kind of pieces where it's like look around you, find what draws you in, discover the diamonds, and then like discover the mess, come back, report on it, discuss. And and there are we have dozens and dozens of these, and they're all like based on an idea from some artist or philosopher or or someone who is, yeah, inspires us to create one of these little practices. And then we run them without prescription, without like this is going to make you feel X, Y, or Z, but as a way of exploring various modes of engaging through these little mini exercises that reveal that attention has so many shapes. I mean, you could almost think of them as little like states of consciousness shift, like moving into various different states of consciousness in very tiny ways.

SPEAKER_01 23:39

Right away, you you've kind of headed off my criticism of the past, which I'm glad you did actually. I came into this conversation thinking about the many ways that we think in terms of attention, currency, right? That was the first thing that you brought up. Also bandwidth. It's interesting that the idiom of technology that we're struggling against has imposed itself on the attentional apparatus, apparatus, yet again. This language is already infused within our noticing of things in the world. And maybe the other one, I mean, even in some of my favorite philosophers like Dulaz and Gattari, when they talk about desire, they talk about it in terms of investment. Once again, we have a banking metaphor, capitalist metaphors abound. You mentioned the heron. Could you say like a little bit more about that? I really like that. So give me maybe another example of a card or how I might elucidate my own taxonomy of attention.

SPEAKER_00 24:28

Yeah, okay. So one practice we have called the Clawed Glass, and I might be misremembering the steps slightly, but you take out your smartphone and you first look at a scene. So we have a space in Dumbo in Brooklyn, and we have access, we have roof access. So we go up, we go up to the roof if the weather is good for this one, and then kind of look out at the Manhattan Bridge. And you take it and you notice what it is.