$15 Trillion vs. You: the Fight to Reclaim our Humanity

How many times have you promised yourself you'd put your phone down more - only to find yourself doom-scrolling at midnight again?Peter Schmidt wants you to know it's not a personal failing, that our ever increasing levels of distraction is by design.He is co-founder of the Strother School of Radical Attention, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit dedicated to "attention activism" - pushing back against the exploitation of human attention by coercive digital technologies.The attention economy is now a $15 trillion industry with one goal: capturing, quantifying, and commodifying your attention. Every time you pick up your phone, you're facing the most sophisticated predictive technology ever built, designed by some of the smartest people in the world, with one purpose: keeping your eyes on that screen.In this conversation:Why phone addiction is NOT a personal failing - it's a $15 trillion power asymmetryWhy social media isn't a town square - "it's a shopping mall where the staff are quietly mugging you"Why attention isn't just your attention span, it's your ability to loveThe one thing you can do this week to start reclaiming your attentionThis Week's Analog Assignment: Get together with your people. In person. Put your phone away. Every time we connect independently of these platforms, we carve out a space that big tech can't touch.Connect with Peter & the School:Strother School of Radical AttentionSeminars & enrollment: schoolofattention.org/enrollThe Empty Cup (School of the Attention's Substack)Friends of Attention book: Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (Crown, 2026)Peter's website: petercschmidt.com