This text is part of an experiment I undertook with Ben Guzovsky; the cited texts are mine, but the material linking those citations is not. If you have landed on this page directly, click here for an introduction and a little context. Thank you! —DGB
Is Phone Addiction My Fault? What You’re Actually Up Against
No. Historian D. Graham Burnett and his co-authors, the Friends of Attention, argue that reaching for your phone, or losing an hour to a feed, is not a failure of willpower. They say you are up against an industry built to overpower your intention, and that the shame many people feel is misplaced.
Is phone addiction my fault?
The Friends of Attention, the collective behind the 2026 book Attensity! (edited by Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt), take up the question directly:
When your hand reaches, subconsciously, reflexively, for your phone (first thing in the morning, in the middle of a conversation, in the middle of a thought), or when you get stuck in an infinite scroll for an hour when you meant to look for a minute, that is not because you lack the personal willpower to escape. Rather, it is because trillions of dollars of military-grade research and technology, and thousands of the most highly trained and paid engineers in the world, are aligned behind overpowering your intention.
— The Friends of Attention (eds. D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, Peter Schmidt), Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, Crown, 2026
They go on to say that people, “especially young people,” sometimes feel private shame when their will proves insufficient. Their answer is blunt:
Individual humans are no match for this infrastructure. (To believe otherwise is, itself, to fall for a trick—the result of human frackers successfully obscuring the intensely capitalized and stupefyingly sophisticated engineering behind your cheerful homescreen.) And so. One might consider that, perhaps, the appropriate feeling is not personal shame, but political anger. We don’t need superhuman personal willpower. What we need is our friends.
— The Friends of Attention (eds. D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, Peter Schmidt), Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, Crown, 2026
Loh made the same point to The Washington Post in January 2026: against a trillion-dollar industry bent on keeping you on your device, “the answer to that is never going to be your personal willpower.” Princeton Alumni Weekly, reviewing the book in May, quotes the same passage and also records a skeptic. The psychologist Gloria Mark told the magazine that “Some people do have a lot of trouble staying away from social media,” while “others can come and go as they like.”
If the feeling is common, that is part of the point. At the Vassar keynote, The Miscellany News reports, Burnett asked the audience, “Do you ever feel concerned about your attention span?” The reporter describes a unanimous response of raised hands and nodding heads. A problem that nearly everyone in the room shares is unlikely to be a problem of nearly everyone’s character.
Why can’t I stop scrolling?
The Friends of Attention answer with a comparison between a Girl Scout troop and TikTok. The passage ends with a line that has traveled widely, including into Princeton Alumni Weekly:
The Girl Scouts are a semi-stable legacy nonprofit organization. TikTok is one of the most ruthless, data-intensive, and successful commercial entities in human history. It isn’t an “accident” that the latter is replacing the former! It’s literally the beast of Mammon feasting on the bunny rabbit of good intentions—ravenously snacking on a global FIELD of such bunnies. You like TikTok? So do we! It’s very likable. That’s why it is winning. Heroin would win, too, if, gradually, General Mills were permitted to add it to our breakfast cereal.
— The Friends of Attention (eds. D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, Peter Schmidt), Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, Crown, 2026
The book’s claim is about who is on the other side of the screen. “The attention frackers care nothing for boundaries,” the Friends write. “They care about money.” The Washington Post’s Sophia Nguyen summarizes the book’s argument this way: “The problem isn’t that you, personally, are addicted to your phone.”
Is social media designed to be addictive?
Ask Burnett and he points past the gadget to the money. In a 2026 interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Matthew Clemente asked what the root cause is. Burnett answered:
For us, the core issue is not “phones” or, for that matter, “social media.” We like to point out that if your grandmother had designed the iPhone, you’d use it to call your grandmother. The actual problem isn’t the technology—it’s the business model. It is the heedless, greedy, seven-trillion-dollar commitment to a hyperintensive extraction of the money value of human attention. That’s what we call “human fracking.” Fracking the earth for hydrocarbons involves pumping high-pressure, high-volume abrasives and detergents into deep tectonic structures—to break up the foundational architecture of those layers and force the oil and gas to the surface. Human fracking isn’t even analogous. It’s more like homologous. It involves pumping into human faces high-pressure, high-volume abrasives and detergents (in the form of algorithmically determined rage-bait and high-affect “content”) to break up our attention and force it to the surface, where it can be auctioned off to the highest bidder. This system “works”—it maximizes time-on-device and is authentically amoral. The AI systems that optimize our feeds do so with a relentless and computationally sophisticated focus on “engagement” because that is money for the companies who have wagered on this business. This is literally a bio-hack at the scale of whole societies. How else do you get human beings—who have evolved as cognitively and sensorily and culturally complex creatures—to spend half their waking hours staring at small glowing screens?
— D. Graham Burnett, interviewed by Matthew Clemente, “Fighting the Frackers”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2026
Burnett and the pediatrician James Sargent put it just as plainly in JAMA Pediatrics in 2026: “the problem is the business model, not the smartphone and not social media itself.”
Nor is this anti-technology. Reporting on his November 2025 keynote at Vassar, The Miscellany News quotes him: “I’m not anti-tech. I’m anti-exploitation.” The target is a method of extraction, which he calls human fracking. For the money behind it, see how much your attention is worth.
Burnett and Peter Schmidt, in a 2024 Daily Princetonian op-ed, say it is the whole population that is being tested on: nearly everyone has become “a lab rat in an uncontrolled and largely unregulated experiment” in what they call human fracking. A lab rat does not fail the experiment by finding it hard to leave the maze.
Designers know what works on a person. A Die Zeit reporter, describing Silicon Valley’s “persuasive technology” (the Like button, autoplay, infinite scroll), sums up the idea as “never give the user a clean moment” to ask whether you still want to be there. That is the reporter’s phrasing, not Burnett’s. But Burnett has traced the same logic back a century. Writing in Asterisk, he recounts how the advertising psychologist Howard Nixon found in 1924 that “irrelevant illustrations do attract more attention and hold interest longer than do relevant ones.” Surprise holds the eye, whether or not it serves you. (The longer story is in the history of eye-tracking.)
Do screen time and focus apps work?
Burnett and Eve Mitchell, a psychotherapist, are skeptical of the whole category. In Psychology Today they describe the “pseudo-remedies” that have grown up around the attention economy, among them “mindfulness apps, screen time limiters, AI assistants”:
On the border where the attention economy meets the field of therapy, a variety of pseudo-remedies have emerged to address these harms (mindfulness apps, screen time limiters, AI assistants, the gamification of executive functioning). These spurious solutions shuffle the responsibility of psychological damage onto the individual, extracting even more attention and packaging it as data to be harvested.
— D. Graham Burnett and Eve Mitchell, “How Therapists Can Heal Our Attention”, Psychology Today, 2026
Princeton Alumni Weekly adds a small, concrete example. Strother School instructor Nick Plante told the magazine that many people he works with have tried app-blocking devices such as Brick, but that users can “easily override such systems.” (That is the magazine’s paraphrase of Plante, not Burnett.)
Burnett and Sargent make the comparison to tobacco explicit. Social media companies, they write in JAMA Pediatrics, are “like their tobacco industry forebears” in having veiled and marginalized research on the harms of their products. The cigarette era is a reminder that reassurance can be sold alongside the product, and that the person holding the cigarette was never the whole story.
The deeper complaint is about the framing. In their 2026 New York Times essay, Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt argue that a narrow view of attention has become so dominant that it “pervades efforts at resistance.” Their phrase for what it does to us is vivid:
It starts with the way we think about attention in the first place. An industry estimated to be worth $7 trillion views attention in the narrowest possible way: as something that can be measured in terms of device-engaged, task-oriented productivity, then optimized and operationalized and profitably controlled. That narrow view of attention has become so dominant that it even pervades efforts at resistance, including the countless well-meaning calls to “improve focus” or “avoid distraction.” In our efforts to liberate ourselves, we have become anxious accountants of our own attention.
— D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, “The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie”, The New York Times, 2026
For how that narrow view was built, see where “attention span” came from. For a look at how the machine side differs, see AI attention versus human attention.
What is the right way to talk about it?
Burnett and Schmidt tell one small story in the Daily Princetonian in 2024. At a summer workshop, they write, an activist from the Strother School named Amalia Mayorga “replaced the phrase” “I spend too much time on my phone” with “my behavior is being modified.” They add that she “observed how profoundly the matter changed.” One sentence puts the problem on you. The other names something being done to you.
The Friends of Attention carry the same shift into feeling. They suggest that “the appropriate feeling is not personal shame, but political anger.” And their answer to the willpower question is “We don’t need superhuman personal willpower.”
What to do instead
The Friends of Attention conclude that “What we need is our friends.” That is a collective answer, not an individual one, and it is the work of the Strother School of Radical Attention, the nonprofit school that Burnett co-founded. You can learn more at schoolofattention.org.
Frequently asked questions
Is phone addiction my fault?
Not according to Burnett and the Friends of Attention, who write that reaching for your phone “is not because you lack the personal willpower to escape.” They point to engineering and money aligned against your intention.
Why is my phone so hard to put down?
In Burnett’s account, the platforms are paid for engagement. He describes a system that “maximizes time-on-device” and is “authentically amoral.” The difficulty is a feature of the business model.
Is social media designed to be addictive?
Burnett would say the design target is your time and eyes, because that is what is sold. In his words, “the problem is the business model, not the smartphone and not social media itself.” Skeptics, like the psychologist Gloria Mark, note that people vary widely in how hard they find it to stay away.
Do screen time apps and focus apps work?
Burnett and Eve Mitchell call such tools “pseudo-remedies” that shift responsibility onto the individual. Princeton Alumni Weekly reports that app blockers like Brick can be overridden by their users. Burnett’s co-authors say the answer is collective.
Further reading
- The Friends of Attention; D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, eds., Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement (New York: Crown, 2026).
- D. Graham Burnett, interviewed by Matthew Clemente, “Fighting the Frackers,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 8, 2026.
- D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt, “The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie,” The New York Times, January 10, 2026.
- D. Graham Burnett and Eve Mitchell, “How Therapists Can Heal Our Attention,” Psychology Today, January 12, 2026.
- D. Graham Burnett and James D. Sargent, “Digital Media, Attention Fracking, and Youth Mental Health,” JAMA Pediatrics, 2026.
- D. Graham Burnett and Peter Schmidt, “Turning the tide on ‘human fracking’,” The Daily Princetonian, September 12, 2024.
- Sophia Nguyen, “These ‘attention activists’ are here to help you put down your phone,” The Washington Post, January 17, 2026.
- Harrison Blackman, “The Attentionauts,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, May 2026.
- “A conversation with Dr. Burnett: human fracking and attention,” The Miscellany News, November 13, 2025.
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