Attention, Distraction, and Curiosity: Remantling Our Mental Infrastructures

This introductory chapter sets the stage for the various contributions assembled in the volume by reframing our current “crisis of attention” within a larger triangulation between attention, distraction, and curiosity. The continuous space between them is approached from the perspective of the Anthropocenic need to re-evaluate our extractivist infrastructures, material and mental, as “negative commons” whose feral effects must be addressed and dismantled. A way out of the binary opposition between attention and distraction is advocated in the direction of a political reconsideration of the ambivalences of curiosity, as the emergence of Curiosity Studies invite us to reflect upon them. A few propositions are made along the way in order to rethink and reorganize our mental infrastructures, so as to make them more compatible with the cohabitation of a diversity of cultures and species on the surface of the planet Earth. A politics of curiosity thus opens alternatives to the attention economy by helping us both to dismantle our feral infrastructures and to remantle more sustainable mental infrastructures.