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The Accidental Favor: Attention, Deep Time, and the Body's Long Memory

The Accidental Favor: Attention, Deep Time, and the Body's Long Memory

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Summary

 What if the corporations farming our attention accidentally gave us the most radical favor in the history of collective awakening? In this episode, I trace a 600-year arc, from Gutenberg's printing press to the iPhone, to ask what actually happened to human attention, and why so many of us are collapsing under the weight of our own feelings right now. The answers I explore involve deep time, the colonization of the body and imagination, the rise of authoritarian movements, the difference between wellness and manageability, and why somatic reckoning might be one of the most quietly revolutionary forces of our era. We move through the astrology of the week of May 4–10, 2025 — a week of intense squares giving way to gentle visionary flow — and I share a time-bending story about a typewriter, a Friday ritual, ancestral wisdom, and finding my way back to my body and a different scale of time. Topics include: the attention economy, the precuneus and what the scroll literally does to your sense of time, Gutenberg and the printing press, the worship of the written word as a pillar of white supremacy culture, academic institutional complicity in the Palestinian genocide, authoritarianism and the outsourcing of feeling, somatic therapy and decolonization, ancestral healing and listening darkly, and what it means to come home to the body's long memory. CHAPTER MARKERS 00:00 — The premise: your attention was never lost, just redirected 01:49 — Opening & grounding practice 03:19 — Astrology of the week: overview 03:31 — Monday May 4: Mars square Jupiter — care, desire, and the rigged game 08:03 — Tuesday May 5: Mercury square Pluto — owning your wants, colonial shadows 10:08 — Wednesday May 6: Pluto retrograde — presence over force 11:06 — Thursday–Saturday: the simmer 12:28 — Sunday May 10: Sun sextile Jupiter — visionary flow and identity work 14:00 — The Descent: what the scroll does to your brain and sense of time 17:01 — Deep time and the 600-year arc of human attention 18:15 — Gutenberg, the Bible, and the colonization of imagination 21:58 — The most accidental favor in collective history 23:09 — Authoritarianism, madness, and what gets called sane 25:46 — Somatics, decolonization, and the body's reckoning 30:56 — Personal story: my dad, a typewriter, and time travel with ancestors 37:46 — Summary, questions for the week & close CITATIONS & RESOURCES Primary Sources Alexis Pauline Gumbs — Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020) Alexis Pauline Gumbs + Barbara Holmes — On Listening Darkly (transcript) Alexis Pauline Gumbs — You Are Loved (podcast episode) Prentis Hemphill & The Embodiment Institute — embodimentinstitute.org Khara Scott-Bey, somatic therapist — kharascottbey.com White Supremacy Culture — whitesupremacyculture.info Aneeza Pervez — Witnessing Silence: The Palestinian Genocide, Institutional Complicity, and the Politics of Knowledge (2025) — Globalisation, Societies and Education On Attention, Social Media & the Brain Large meta-analysis links TikTok and Instagram Reels to poorer cognitive and mental health — PsyPost Study on social media and attentional capacity — PubMed Social media use and cognitive function — PMC Social media, not gaming, tied to rising attention problems in teens — The Conversation On Madness, Empire, and Social Control Mab Segrest — Administrations of Lunacy: Racism and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum (2020) — on how the American asylum system was built to contain bodies that couldn't be made productive under capitalism and Jim Crow Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth (1961) — on colonialism, madness, and the psychopathology of the colonized Frantz Fanon — Black Skin, White Masks (1952) — on race, identity, and the psychological violence of colonialism On Print, Media & Cognitive Change Walter Ong — Orality and Literacy (1982) — on how writing restructures consciousness Neil Postman — Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) — on media and public discourse Marshall McLuhan — The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) — on print culture and cognitive change An old argument against writing — on Socrates and the critique of the written word
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