ABSTRACT
The attention economy as a contemporary process of enclosure has prompted a new arena of struggle: the mindful commons. The dawn of Anthropocene raises challenges with intimations of new Axial age, one that will pivot on the quality and subtlety of our collective attention to attention. The Anthropocene is a sign of the times, an urgent command to abandon any sense that are merely passing through a temporary environmental crisis. The popular embrace of mindfulness and various levels of interest in associated critical Buddhist teachings are an emergent and potential resource for a new front in the struggle to secure a mindful commons as the basis for the essential work of cultivating liberated environments. Mindfulness-based responses have come to be viewed, for most part, as therapeutic interventions and as a source of resilience as citizen-consumers are invited to take more and more responsibility for their fate and compromised well-being. Mindfulness too risks being folded into a governmentalization of well-being.
