Chris Hayes

From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society.

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.” Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

How attention became the world's most endangered resource

The sirens' call

Bastien Vaucher

What we need to survive is more than mere attention: we need care. But attention is a necessary precondition for care. In this way, we are creatures whose very survival depends on attention. We perish in neglect. As part of that inescapable inheritance, we will forever be invested in other people paying attention to us. We are creatures that pay attention to things in our environment, yes, but also to other people. In turn we seek their attention on us.

Information is the opposite of a scarce resource: it is everywhere and there is always more of it. It is genera-tive. It is copyable. Multiple entities can have the same information.

Think for a moment about your personal data, information about who you are and what you like. Maybe there are half a dozen firms that have it or maybe there are a hundred, or maybe a thousand, and while it might have some effect on you in terms of which advertising you get, you don't really know and functionally it doesn't really matter.

But if someone has your attention, you know it. It can't be in multiple places at once, the way information can.

Attention is as old as the species, and grabbing others' attention for social purposes is as old as shamans and poets and conversation. But that attention is now commodified and can be traded, bought, and sold in sophisticated, instantaneous algorithmic auctions that price a second of our eyes focus. That is new, transformative, and alienating.

Now, after an estimated $20 billion investment, Apple has introduced the Vision Pro headset, which is an attempt to expand the attentional supply even further. Rather than requiring you to look at the phone, the conceit of the Vision Pro, which allows you to view the world in front of you mixed together with apps, is to make the Apple attentional universe your default resting state, one where your attention is in their hands at all times. Much of the initial visceral revulsion people felt toward the product was a reaction at a deep level to the sheer alienating scope of this ambition.

But if the written word stood out as a particular and distinct form of solitary attention for several centuries, what has become clear over the last century, at least, is that the implacable logic of attention capitalism drives each medium, each form of attention capture, to be as portable as a newspaper. With each new technology, and with each new development, the experience of shared spectacle is replaced with isolated attention. What was once collective experience becomes solitary.

Slack emerged as a solution to the attentional cost of traditional email, which had ceased being a useful IPS for many people because it was outputting too much information and consuming too much attention. But as Slack ramped up in usage and volume, it began to re-create exactly the problem it was supposed to solve. In an essay posted to Medium called "Death by a Thousand Pings: The Hidden Side of Using Slack," one early adopter laid out the inevitable trajectory from time-saver to time-waster, from attention-conserving software to attention-burning software: "I found myself compulsively checking Slack even when I had no need to. And as a result, I was in a constant state of distraction."

Huxley's vision was the opposite. In Brave New World the problem isn't too little information but too much, or at least too much entertainment and distraction. The populace is rendered docile and anesthetized by a constant stream of hedonistic delights and brain-addling amusement. "What Orwell feared," Postman writes, "were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read  one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrele-vance."

We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit. Under these conditions anything resembling democratic deliberation seems not only impossible but increasingly absurd, like trying to meditate in a strip club.

« Bound yourself to the mast » a reference to Ulysse’s journey, sailing past the sirens.

There are several reasons for this surprising resurgence. The physical and visual package of a vinyl album makes it far more desirable and collectible as an object. Vinyl LPs also offer a far better sound quality than the compressed audio files of streaming services. Ulti-mately, listening to music on a record player releases you from the endless anxiety of choice that comes from digital forms of media where in every single moment you can skip to the next song, or decide you don't want to listen to what you're listening to. When you put an album on a record player you are committing your attention to that album. You have bound yourself to the mast.

I think we are very likely to see the growth of a parallel market for alternative attention products, like the markets for natural food, organic farming, and farmers' markets. I can't say what this will look like, though there are some places where you already see the beginnings: the stubborn resistance of book buyers to switch over to e-books, the persistence of New York Times physical-newspaper subscribers. You can see it in more and more parents taking dramatic action to ban screens for their children, and schools doing the same thing.

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