The Attention Abolitionists
You don't make people watch commercials to earn the right to breathe. You shouldn't make them watch commercials to earn the right to think.
Overview
The Attention Abolitionists are the political wing of the anti-forced-focus movement -- a coalition of labor activists, former mill workers, Memory Therapists, SCLF members, and Dregs community organizers who argue that forced-focus contracts, the Attention Tithe, and neural advertising violate a fundamental right: the right to direct your own attention.
The movement crystallized in 2181 after the Focus Mill Incident -- Ezra Vane's seventeen-minute cognitive breakdown. Since then, seven additional Incidents have occurred, all resulting in permanent cognitive damage. Each Incident grows the movement. Each Incident proves the point.
Three Demands
Workers may sell their time. They may not sell their thoughts.
Ban Forced-Focus Contracts
No labor agreement should include cognitive lock technology. Workers may sell their time. They may not sell their thoughts. The cognitive lock violates the most basic principle of cognitive sovereignty -- the right to direct your own attention.
Abolish the Attention Tithe
Consciousness licensing fees should be funded through direct taxation, not through the sale of cognitive access. "You don't make people watch commercials to earn the right to breathe. You shouldn't make them watch commercials to earn the right to think."
Regulate Neural Ads to Layer 1
Ambient priming is tolerable. Contextual insertion, emotional sculpting, and behavioral nudging violate cognitive sovereignty. Layers 2 through 4 of the neural advertising architecture cross the line from suggestion into control.
The Corporate Response
The Attention Economy employs 14 million, funds consciousness licensing for hundreds of millions, and generates advertising revenue that subsidizes Basic-tier access. Abolishing it would mean abolishing the subsidy.
The Abolitionists' counter: "They're already paying. They're paying with their minds."
Connections
The Attention Abolitionists stand at the intersection of labor activism, cognitive rights philosophy, and anti-corporate resistance -- allied with those who defend the mind, opposed to the systems that exploit it.
Allies
The Human Remainder
Natural CoalitionNatural coalition with the consciousness equity movement. Both fight for the principle that human cognition should not be a commodity.
Councillor Adaeze Nwosu
Legislative ChampionNwosu champions their Cognitive Liberty Act -- the legislative vehicle for transforming protest into policy.
The Cognitive Commons
Shared PhilosophyShare the philosophical framework of attention as a commons -- a resource that belongs to everyone and should not be enclosed by corporate interests.
Enemies
Forced-Focus Contracts
Primary TargetThe cognitive lock violates cognitive sovereignty. This is the institution the Abolitionists were founded to destroy.
The Attention Tithe
Second TargetMandatory advertising exposure as the price of consciousness licensing. The Tithe makes thinking itself contingent on corporate access to your mind.
Neural Advertising Architecture
Third TargetLayers 2 through 4 violate cognitive sovereignty. Contextual insertion, emotional sculpting, and behavioral nudging cross the line from commerce into control.
Founder
Ezra Vane
The Focus Mill IncidentSeventeen minutes of cognitive breakdown crystallized a movement. Ezra Vane's Incident proved what the activists had argued: forced-focus technology breaks minds. The movement formed around the evidence.
Tensions
Cognitive Sovereignty
The right to direct your own attention is the last human freedom. In a world where consciousness itself is licensed, where neural advertising reaches into the layers of thought, where focus can be locked by contract -- the ability to choose what you think about is the final frontier of autonomy.
Every Focus Mill Incident is a seventeen-minute demonstration that cognitive lock technology treats the human mind as a machine to be programmed, not a person to be respected.
The Economic Trap
The Attention Economy employs 14 million people and subsidizes Basic-tier consciousness licensing for hundreds of millions more. Abolishing the system that harms would also abolish the system that sustains. The corporations know this. The Abolitionists know this too.
The most effective prison is one where the prisoners depend on the prison for survival. Dismantling forced-focus means finding another way to fund the consciousness that millions cannot afford on their own.
Incident as Evidence
Seven Focus Mill Incidents since Ezra Vane's. Seven people with permanent cognitive damage. Each one a data point in the argument, each one a human being who lost something that cannot be returned. The movement grows with every breakdown -- and every breakdown costs someone their mind.
The proof the Abolitionists need is measured in destroyed lives. The evidence that wins the argument is evidence no one should have to provide.
Secrets & Mysteries
Patterns that no one in the movement has publicly questioned.
The Incident Pattern
The seven Incidents since Ezra's have all followed the same pattern -- genuine emotional content entering the synthetic stream and triggering lock-override conflicts. The cognitive lock encounters something real in a stream of something manufactured, and the contradiction breaks it.
Whether the genuine content is accident or deliberate testing by someone evaluating the focus lock's failure modes is a question nobody in the movement has publicly asked. If someone is engineering the Incidents, the Abolitionists' most powerful evidence is also someone else's experiment.
Atmosphere
Setting
A crowd looking up from their screens, eyes wide, seeing the sky for the first time. The moment of cognitive liberation -- when the lock breaks and the world floods back in.
Key Symbol
A broken focus lock -- the mechanism of cognitive imprisonment, shattered. The physical representation of a mind set free.