This event is in collaboration with New York Review of Architecture.

Any functioning democracy requires a public forum — a space where people can share ideas, ask questions, disagree, and seek consensus. The forum is an indispensable locus of democratic life. It produces the unique and highly contingent forms of collective attention that make politics possible.

In the past quarter-century, the public forum has been digitized, privatized, and reengineered for corporate profit. Platform technologies co-opt our need for sociality into an extraction operation that fracks our minds and senses for ever-smaller bits of salable "Time On Device." The agora has given way to the algorithm. This is bad news for democracy.

On Thursday, January 16th, the New York Review of Architecture and the Strother School of Radical Attention will convene a panel on the status of attention and the public forum in a moment of profound political uncertainty.

Tickets available HERE!

Panelists include:

Mihir Ksirshagar — Mihir is a lawyer and policy analyst dedicated to consumer protection laws and the juncture between human rights and new surveillance technologies.

Joanna Fiduccia — Joanna is an Assistant Professor of the History of Art focused on the connection between politics and art movements and how both are used to represent the state.

Jael Goldfine — Jael is a writer and fact checker writing about media, culture and capitalism. She wrote a piece for NYRA about the Strother School this June.