Tocqueville warned of a "tutelary power" that would keep citizens in perpetual childhood. Today that power has been privatized. The state once spared citizens the trouble of thinking. Now a platform profits from it. Salon Cultivar is one answer: six people across generations, races, and professions, joined by cross-sector experts, one table, phones face-down, practicing attention together on purpose.
Vision: Build Salon as conscious resistance to the attention economy’s human fracking in de-industrialized America.
WHAT WE DID in 2025
Deep Dive. Completed interconnected Strother School for Radical Attention training track, including: Attention Economy 101, Attention Activism 201, monthly Educators for Attention (EfA) calls, and seeded national coalition of attention activists. We built the civic engagement muscle, the language and behavioral science strategies needed for conscious resistance.
Sound Bath Pilot. Ran sound bath attention exercise in rural Ohio with five people using "Deep Hockets" by Pauline Oliveros & SoRA educator guidance.
First Salon Cycle. Completed six sanctuary experiences covering NAFTA/trade/inequality/politics; tech, humans, and the anti-social century; storytelling and impact; rest and productivity; naming history and sustained development; and cycle review and next steps.
WHAT WE LEARNED
Awareness & Liberation. The algorithm's impact is broad, deep, and growing. Awareness does not = liberation from addictive fracking. This is tutelary power in its twenty-first century form.
Naming Comes First. Focus on the attention economy is exploding. Sanctuaries help people resist its fracking. This is a Luddite moment. Will we do better?
The Work Ahead. The question Salon forces: how do we translate the intellectual content of attention activism for the people? How do we sell critical value in a productivity-obsessed culture? The answer is not to unplug. It is to relate, translate and organize.
WHAT WE DO IN 2026
Cycle Two Launch. Build on Salon founders' cycle one reflection & sound bath experience in October 2025. Launch eleven-month cycle in January 2026, deploying attention practices, expanding membership, integrating national attention experts to name the thing, and sitting with local experts to diagnose how the attention economy fracks NE Ohio civic, business, education, health, media, and political sectors. Then do.
Media Partnership. Recruit a local, national, or global journalist to walk with Salon Cultivar in cycle two built for deindustrialized communities in swing states like Ohio.
Scale the Model. We are integrating SoRA learning into regional sustainable development ventures for deindustrialized communities, building national coalition impact through local, Fortune 500, AI sector, and philanthropic partnerships, and producing a documentary film as both attention practice and global invitation into the work.
Impact
"[Rest is] a radical act in our productivity-obsessed culture... [L]earning to pause has become rebellious and essential ... [to] navigat[ing] the tension between doing and being."
~ Final 2025 Salon Cultivar session reflection
"If D. Graham Burnett's New Yorker essay, 'Will the humanities survive artificial intelligence?' is spot on, what then? How do we live? It seems like we fellows show different ways for relational being, sensing, and choosing."
~ Salon Cultivar Founder
"I woke up smiling with the memory of our Sound Bath."
~ Ohio Sound Bath Participant
THis IS what confronting the algorithm looks like on the ground. Not unplugging. Relating, Translating, Organizing.
~ Photos by Molly Lipe (https://www.mollylipephotography.com/)