Word.ws English Dictionary

human fracking

human fracking noun: the use of information technology to exploit human attention in ways that are net counterproductive to the persons thus exploited (because whatever benefit they receive from it, if any, is outweighed by the costs imposed on them, in terms of side effects and externalities).

Noun

human fracking (uncountable)

  1. The use of information technology to exploit human attention in ways that are net counterproductive to the persons thus exploited (because whatever benefit they receive from it, if any, is outweighed by the costs imposed on them, in terms of side effects and externalities).
    • From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.” […] And so I keep looking for episodes we can do on this, people who have found a better way to study attention or talk about it or teach it. Then I was reading this piece on attention in The New Yorker by Nathan Heller, and I came across...2024 May 31, Ezra Klein, quoting D. Graham Burnett, “Your Mind Is Being Fracked. The historian of science D. Graham Burnett on what’s at stake in the rise of an extractive attention economy and how...
    • In her 1942 essay reflecting on “the right use of school,” the French philosopher and activist Simone Weil laid out her vision for the ultimate purpose of education: not learning some “subject” or “skill,” but rather training attention itself, the actual mental activity that makes all learning...2024 September 12, D. Graham Burnett, Peter Schmidt, “Turning the tide on “human fracking””, in The Daily Princetonian

Examples of human fracking in a sentence

  • Human fracking, however, is mostly a free-for-all — a Wild-West gold rush into our brainstems.2024 September 12, D. Graham Burnett, Peter Schmidt, “Turning the tide on “human fracking””, in The Daily Princetonian:
  • It has been driven by a remarkable new way of extracting money from human beings: call it “human fracking”.2026 January 18, “How can we defend ourselves from the new plague of ‘human fracking’? Big tech treats our attention like a resource to be...

Origin of human fracking

Metaphorical; modeled after human trafficking and fracking; attested since the mid-2020s.

Questions about human fracking

What does human fracking mean?
Human fracking means the use of information technology to exploit human attention in ways that are net counterproductive to the persons thus exploited (because whatever benefit they receive from it, if any, is outweighed by the costs imposed on them, in terms of side effects and externalities).
How do you use human fracking in a sentence?
Human fracking, however, is mostly a free-for-all — a Wild-West gold rush into our brainstems.
What part of speech is human fracking?
Human fracking is a noun.

Words near human fracking in the dictionary

  1. human flag
  2. human flea
  3. human fleas
  4. human flesh search engine
  5. human flesh search engines
  6. human fracking
  7. Human Genome Project
  8. human geographer
  9. human geographers
  10. human geography
  11. human hand

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: human fracking (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “human fracking.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/human_fracking. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.