Author: Julia BellIn recent years tech companies have turned attention into a commodity, a resource to be mined and sold.The terms of the deal appear simple: in exchange for our attention we receive information, entertainment,and convenience. But what are the hidden costs? And what happens to our inner lives when we lose the ability to decide how we wish to pay attention?In this essay, at once personal and polemical, meditative and militant, Julia Bell examines big tech’s wide- ranging and extractive assault on human attention, while asking how we might reclaim it. Selected by Ali Smith as one of the five most important books to navigate the next twenty years, this new edition features a new foreword by radical economist Grace Blakeley and an afterword by the author.JULIA BELL is a writer and Professor of New Writing at Birkbeck, University of London. Her work includes poetry, lyric essays and short stories published in The Paris Review, the Times Literary Supplement, The White Review and The New Statesman, and recorded for the BBC. She has published three novels with Macmillan/Simon & Schuster US and is co- editor of the bestselling Creative Writing Coursebook (Macmillan). Her new book Between the Lines: Life Lessons from the Writing Workshop is published by Simon & Schuster in May 2026.ISBN 9781913512996. Peninsula Press. pb. 128 pages. 12.9 x 19.8 cm.not yet published
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