Radical Attention

An essay on the battle for our attention

In recent years tech companies have turned attention into a commodity, a resource to be mined and sold.

The terms of the deal appear simple: in exchange for our attention we receive information, entertainment, and convenience. But what are the hidden costs? And what happens to our inner lives when we lose the ability to decide how we wish to pay attention?

In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell examines big techs wide-ranging and extractive assault on human attention, while asking how we might reclaim it. Selected by Ali Smith as one of the five most important books to navigate the next twenty years, this new edition features a new foreword by radical economist Grace Blakeley and an afterword by the author.