In a sun drenched studio nestled under the Manhattan Bridge in DUMBO, a scrappy group of activists are fighting Big Tech in the war for our attention. The Strother School of Radical Attention combats “human fracking” with workshops, seminars and art exhibits aimed at getting us away from our screens in pursuit of deeper connections.
The organization was born out of the Sao Paulo Biennal, an arts fair in Brazil. In 2018, artists and thinkers there began to consider the idea of attention. At the end of the week, several participants decided to take the project one step further.
“The elephant in the room was that about two weeks before the festival convened, Jair Bolsonaro was elected in Brazil,” said the nonprofit's Co-Founder and Program Director Peter Schmidt. “A conversation came up quite uneasily at the end. We said we can't continue to think about attention exclusively in these sort of abstract terms or with our friends in fancy gallery spaces.”
An informal coalition called The Friends of Attention began organizing around the idea of attention as a political good. By 2022, Schmidt and co-founder D Graham Burnett formed The School of Radical Attention, developing workshops and curriculum for the public.
Now, the school offers events featuring subjects like flirting, clowning and weaving. In August of 2025, Schmidt led a seven hour walk from SORA’s DUMBO headquarters to the Northern tip of Manhattan. Schmidt happily reported that all 25 participants completed the mobile study which featured the works of Henry David Thoreau, Rebecca Solnit and James Baldwin, among others.
Schmidt likens attention activism to the labor movement of the 19th century and the invention of the steam engine. “People responded to those new kinds of exploitation with new kinds of politics,” he said.
He imagines the same will happen with our attention. In a world where it’s challenging to hold a person’s attention for more than 47 seconds, the school sees our attention as an important tool of resistance, Schmidt added.
While mainstream spaces often refer to the whir of social media as the attention economy, the school prefers the term “fracking of human attention.” The organization believes that advertisers' and tech companies' diminishment of our attention span is violent, akin to the process of extraction.
A two-plus-hours workshop called an Attention Lab serves as an introduction to SORA. On a recent weekday, the lab hosted 15 people on folding chairs in an intimate circle. Participants were guided through three exercises meant to bolster human connection.
In one exercise inspired by the poetry of Langston Hughes, participants were instructed to first look at their hand, then close their eyes and feel their hands, then look at a partner’s hand while simultaneously feeling their own hand in 90 second increments. Each section ended with the soft chime of a bell. Some students said they noticed new sensations in their fingertips, while others complained about pain. One participant noted the imperfections he saw on his own hands.
At the end of the evening, many students concluded that the Attention Lab was a space for empathy building.
“It’s impossible not to like you people after doing this [exercise]," said Russ Winkler who participated in the workshop.
Yasmine Tiana, a 26-year-old Bed-Stuy resident and facilitator, said she joined SORA as a staff member this month, though she’s been involved with the organization since November. As a former news producer, Tiana wanted to change the way people engaged with the media. She hopes SORA’s work with high school and college students will serve as a necessary intervention in the attention crisis.
“I don’t believe we can have empathy without presence,” said Tiana.
