The lament is as old as education itself: The students aren’t paying attention. But today, the problem of flighty or fragmented attention has reached truly catastrophic proportions. By some measures you are lucky these days to get 47 seconds of focused attention on a discrete task. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours. We need a new kind of resistance, equal to the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.

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