Fracking the Foum

With the approach of the inauguration we are taking a look at the deep structure of our public realm, and what we can do about it.

Democracy requires a forum: a space where people can share ideas, ask questions, disagree, and seek consensus. It fosters the unique forms of collective attention that make pluralist politics possible. But when the forum is digitized, privatized, and reengineered for corporate profit, the fragile work of self-government is crowded out by an extraction operation that fracks our minds and senses for ever-smaller bits of salable “time on device.” In the face of these changes—as the agora gives way to the algorithm—can we mount a collective form of resistance? Or are we compelled to carry on personal modes of opposition?

Join and the Strother School of Radical Attention for a conversation about the status of attention and the public forum in a moment of political uncertainty.

This event is cheaper to attend if you are a subscriber to New York Review of Architecture. If that is not yet you, subscribe here and then RSVP.

The speakers:

Jael Goldfine is a fact checker at The New Yorker. Her writing on media, culture and capitalism has appeared in Jewish Currents, The Nation, The Guardian, Vanity Fair, GQ, Vulture, New York Review of Architecture, Bandcamp, Study Hall, Stereogum, Paper and Them. Her piece for New York Review of Architecture, “Winter of the Mind,” inspired us to organize this discussion.

Mihir Kshirsagar is a lawyer and advocate who works at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. Most recently, he served in the New York Attorney General’s Bureau of Internet & Technology as the lead trial counsel in cutting-edge matters concerning consumer protection law and technology and obtained one of the largest consumer payouts in the state’s history. Previously, he worked for Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP and Cahill Gordon Reindel LLP in New York City on a variety of antitrust, securities, and commercial disputes involving emerging and traditional industries.

Joanna Fiduccia is a professor of art history at Yale; the author of essays and reviews on contemporary art for publications including Artforum, East of Borneo, Spike, Even, and Parkett, as well as numerous catalogues; and a founding co-editor of the journal apricota. She is a member of the research collective ESTAR(SER) and the Friends of Attention, a group of artists, scholars, and activists concerned with forms of attention that resist financialization.

Some helpful reading:

“Winter of the Mind,” an essay in New York Review of Architecture about the work of the Strother School.

“Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back,” a guest essay in The New York Times opinion section about how the “problem of flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions.”

Host or Publisher New York Review of Architecture