The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Christopher L. Hayes

An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller

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

“An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.” —New York Times

“Brilliant book… Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.”—Rachel Maddow

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 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 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, Psychology, Technology, Audiobook, Sociology, History

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 2025

About the author

Christopher Hayes is Editor at Large of The Nation and host of Up w/ Chris Hayes on MSNBC. From 2010 to 2011, he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, and The Guardian. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Kate and daughter Ryan.

Author photo credit: Sarah Shatz

Reviews

[Tim Null · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sort of like being back in college studying a combination of history and sociology courses.

"This is the story of Donald Trump's life: wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can't quite understand the difference,..." (p. 112)

[Natalie Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I’m a Marxist now? Not sure if that was what Chris wanted me to take away from this, but oh well.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Attention is a deeply important topic to think about in our current age. Not only are many things constantly vying for our attention, but major corporations feverishly spend insane amounts of money trying to capture your attention.

Hayes has an interesting perspective on this. He shares everything from psychological research to anecdotes about the device use of his kids, but he’s also the host of a long-running primetime TV show. As such he’s acutely attuned to what people pay attention to. And, like most of us, he’s dissatisfied with how his own brain works in this new media environment.

One of the purest joys in my life is when I can lose myself in thought. Spending hours immersed in a good book or thinking through how to best explain some tricky concept in relativity. One of the most annoying things is how difficult that is for me to do now, as opposed to when I was younger. Too often I have to fight the urge to check my email or check my phone. Some of this is just about getting older and having more responsibilities, being distracted by household chores and so on. But too much of it is now enabled by technology, and in the modern era, indeed forced upon us by technology. “The frenetic, ever-shorter little bites of communication we mostly consume these days degrade both our ability to sustain focus and the quality of thought being communicated and comprehended” (p. 201).

Hayes convincingly argues that much of our modern world is invading our very sense of self. In the same way that industrialization in the 19th century turned labor into a commodity, we now have turned attention into a commodity. But attention is what we are.

Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these instants of attention accrue into a life. (p. 3)

Hayes cites Marx discussing labor becoming a commodity. “As the division of labor increases, labor is simplified,” he quotes Marx. “The special skill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple, monotonous productive force that does not have to use intense bodily or intellectual faculties. His labor becomes a labor that anyone can perform” (pp. 119–120). Marx says this commodification of labor leads to alienation.

This to me is one reason why I resist generative AI so strongly. “The craftsman has ownership of the object he produces through his labor, even as he then sells it in a market exchange. His effort and skill have been poured into the object, and at the end of the process he is the one who owns the object” (p. 120). This is what it feels like when I write, when I craft an assignment, or when I develop an explanation of some topic. The result is mine, and it makes me proud. Generative AI can produce serviceable descriptions of basic concepts in physics, but it’s just processed pablum that interpolates between all the descriptions that real humans devised. Whereas by creating my own explanations I can gain insight myself, devise something unique, and lead students through their own difficult process of coming to an understanding.

You might think AI (or machine learning in general) is a solution to a key problem of attention. As Herbert Simon noted as far back as 1971, “an information-processing subsystem (a computer or new organization unit) will reduce net demand on the rest of the organization’s attention only if it absorbs more information previously received by others than it produces, that is, if it listens more than it speaks” (p. 165). Isn’t this what large language models do? Absorb nearly all human writing and produce a five-paragraph essay on the theme of doubt in Othello? But no, their generation is unlimited. More and more “journalistic” writing is now AI generated. Internal reports, student papers, etc. Text that used to take a person hours if not days to write now takes seconds. The potential for the production of crap is unlimited.

Hayes makes a good comparison to search engines. As the early World Wide Web grew, it became difficult to find information. Search engines tried to solve this, and Google was extremely successful. It took in an enormous amount of information and produced a very limited number of results that were often highly responsive to the user’s particular query. However, Google is a company. They need to make money. They do so by selling the user’s attention, and directing it to sponsored responses to the query. This has now lead to the enshitiffication of Google, to use Cory Doctorow’s word (p. 252). This is even worse with entities that are struggling more. See how many more search results are sponsored at Bing than Google, or compare the Facebook feed of 2025 (mostly ads or random pages you don’t follow) with what it used to look like in 2010 (almost entirely content from friends).

Any product or service that effectively captures our attention is susceptible to this dynamic: if it’s good at conserving our attention and sustaining our focus, then it’s also a good place to try to wrench away our attention for other purposes, which means it will eventually be a vector for spam… You can easily imagine a world with AI churning on both sides of this attentional battle—AI spam generation and AI-powered spam filters. (pp. 174–175, 182)

The age we’re living through is akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism. (p. 217)

This has consequences, including elevating people with no talent other than attracting attention. People who are utterly shameless and talented at attracting attention—maybe good attention is preferred, but any attention will do—rise in such a slurry. Yes, Hayes discusses both Donald Trump and Elon Musk as avatars of the Attention Seeker.

The promise of the information age was unparalleled access to every single last bit of human knowledge at every moment, and the reality is a collective civic mental life that permanently teeters on the edge of madness. (p. 248)

What can we do?

Personally, I will try to be more intentional about where I give my attention. Before I click over to CNN or the BBC, do I really want to check the news or am I just seeking novelty? Do I need to check my email right now, or can it wait until morning? I haven’t checked Facebook in over a month, and I’m not sure I want to ever check it again.

I will also cultivate deep thinking in my own life, and create the environment in my professional life where my students can think deeply as well. I will run in-person classes where we will write on paper and talk to each other and wrestle with difficult ideas that cannot be reduced to a sound bite.

Personal responsibility only goes so far. As with any massive problem, collective action is important. But personal action can start now.

[CatReader · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chris Hayes is an American political commentator and host of various MSNBC shows. In the vein of fellow TV personality Dan Harris extolling the virtues of meditation like no one had ever thought about it before (see 10% Happier), Hayes discovered that American society in 2025 is sustained and monopolized by an attention economy and that he, too, was having trouble focusing, so he decided to write a book to tell people about it, with a very heavy and unrelenting dose of his own political views (which Harris, to his credit, doesn't indulge in). Groundbreaking stuff. Books about the attention economy have become so oversaturated in recent years (and even before that -- Hayes does talk extensively about the 1980s classic on this topic, Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business) that I guess you have to be a pseudo-celebrity or well-known figure to get a book deal about this topic with a major publishing house these days.

Having read dozens of books in this genre (as this is a topic I think about frequently, and am always looking for new insights about and strategies to counter), I didn't find Hayes' effort particularly original or novel. He cites Postman, Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again) and Tim Hwang (Subprime Attention Crisis (all three of which I'd recommend) as well as Jenny O'Dell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, which I would NOT recommend) and ruminates on insights they've already thoroughly explored. He talks about how first 24/7 cable news networks, then smartphones, then social media have further diminished attention spans and led to polarization of public discourse where the loudest, most outrageous voices rise to the surface -- and here he really loses the plot, spending what felt like hours perseverating on Donald Trump and Elon Musk, basically proving that he himself is guilty of the same traps he warns readers to not fall into. Where was his editor? Facepalm.

At the end of the book, probably at his editor's prompting, Hayes attempts to offer solutions to resisting the attention economy -- this section was exceedingly brief and basically consisted of "screw capitalism that enabled this system to take root." Problem solved.

My conclusion -- you can either take Hayes' word for things and embrace a victim mentality -- poor capitalism killed your attention span and is ruining your life and your children's future, woe is me -- or you can realize you always have some degree of choice about where you focus your time and attention, and take a proactive approach in creating positive habits and behaviors to spend your finite life on things that matter most to you.

Further reading: books on this topic I've read and would recommend (in addition to those linked above):
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
Hamlet's BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age by William Powers | my review

My statistics:
Book 82 for 2025
Book 2008 cumulatively

[Breann Hunt · Rating 2 out of 5]

(2.75)
When you write a book that centers on a relatively intuitive framework or thesis, you either need to keep it short-- manifesto level-- or go in so hard and so deep you prove your thesis beyond reproach.

This book did not succeed at either option.

For "proof", the author relies on anecdotes and what I can generously call a "reporter's intuition", but by which I really mean vibes. I genuinely felt I could not in good conscience trust any of the stats casually thrown around for fear that they were cherry-picked, or from unrepresentative samples or simply from some tweet Mr. Chronically Online stumbled across during his research. I never felt like he substantially proved anything for me. In fact, the most compelling parts were often the citations of other books he referenced.

[Dave Reads · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chris Hayes’ book, “The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource” examines how the modern attention economy has transformed how and what we communicate, news consumption, and even human cognition. He argues that the constant bombardment of content, driven by social media algorithms and commercial incentives, has created an environment of chaos and distraction. Platforms reward the most extreme, sensational, and outrage-inducing material, while smartphone apps operate on an addictive "slot machine model" that keeps users endlessly engaged. This monetization of attention has fundamentally altered politics, journalism, and leisure, leading to what Hayes describes as a communications "failed state" where rational discourse is undermined by attention-seeking behavior. While some of his proposed solutions are simple, like switching to print newspapers or using basic phones, he also advocates for more radical measures, such as regulating attention markets in the same way labor laws govern working conditions.

Beyond its critique of the digital landscape, Hayes explores the deeper psychological dimensions of attention, noting that humans have always craved it as a form of validation and survival mechanism. He compares the long-form debates of the 19th century with today's hyper-condensed political discourse. Along the way, he demonstrates how our capacity for sustained focus has eroded. Hayes delves into toxic attention-seeking behaviors like trolling, conspiracism, and "whataboutism," showing how figures like Donald Trump exploit the modern attention economy by embracing any form of visibility, whether positive or negative.

While the book can sometimes feel dense, Hayes keeps the discussion engaging by drawing on history, philosophy, and social science research to illuminate how our fragmented attention shapes our individual lives and the broader political and social landscape.

Five Key Takeaways

1. The Attention Economy Thrives on Distraction and Outrage – Social media platforms and digital entertainment operate on a "slot machine model" that keeps users engaged by delivering an endless stream of attention-grabbing content. Outrage, sensationalism, and controversy are prioritized because they generate the most engagement, fundamentally reshaping news, politics, and entertainment.

2. Our Ability to Focus Has Diminished – Hayes contrasts modern media consumption with historical examples, such as 19th-century political debates that held audiences’ attention for hours. Today, even presidential debates are reduced to sound bites, reflecting a broader decline in our ability to engage with complex, sustained arguments.

3. Toxic Attention-Seeking Behaviors Dominate Public Discourse – The rise of trolling, conspiracism, and "whataboutism" has eroded meaningful conversations. Figures like Donald Trump have mastered the art of attracting attention at any cost, using positive or negative outrage to stay in the public consciousness.

4. Attention is Both Exploited and Inherently Human – While corporations aggressively monetize our focus, humans are naturally wired to seek attention for validation and connection. Digital platforms exploit this need, creating an illusion of sociability while often deepening feelings of loneliness and isolation.

5. Reclaiming Attention Requires Both Individual and Systemic Solutions – Hayes suggests small personal actions, such as reading print newspapers or using "dumb phones," as ways to resist the digital economy’s grip. However, he also proposes more ambitious systemic changes, like government regulation of "attention markets," to curb the relentless commodification of our focus.

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

1000x better than the anxious generation. The parallel between overconsumption of food and overconsumption of information was good. Lmk if anyone reads this so we can book club

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chris Hayes' new book on social media and the "attention economy." Some interesting parts, and of course the writer knows how to weave an engaging brisk narrative around his points. A lot of fluff, though, and things most readers will already know. I think I would've preferred this as a long essay rather than a short book. Good as an audiobook.

[Alan Chrisman · Rating 4 out of 5]

We've been told we live in information age, but it's really the "attention age." We're constantly being bombarded for our limited attention spans by social media, corporations, etc. We're addicted to wanting constant attention. But even he fails by end of book, except for some band aid suggestions, to what will work to reclaim our focus-not look constantly at screens and turn off our devices. The author, a CNN news host, admits he wants and needs to get and keep our attention too for his job and his own personal experiences make the book seem more down- to-Earth and he shows how we got here.

[Daniel · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is, perhaps, the worst book I have ever read.

You as an individual already intuitively understand everything the author is trying to say if you have used a smartphone once.

I need to learn to DNF holy shit.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

You probably already feel a certain way about Chris Hayes. You either find him boyishly charming, cute as a button and nerdily sexy or.... wait what was I talking about? Audio read by the author A+, an excellent analysis of an issue we all know deep down is at the heart of what ails us.

[Karen Clements · Rating 3 out of 5]

Call it 3.5. Thought-provoking analysis of attention, which has become an increasingly valuable and sought-after commodity in this age of social media and information excess.

[Chris Boutté · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a lot better than I expected. I really dislike all of the tech doomerism books, and most of them all just say the same things about how social media is shortening our attention span, targeted ads are bad, and all that. Don’t get me wrong, Chris Hayes does discuss that quite a bit in this book, but he has a fresh take and looks at the topic from a lot of unique angles.

While I’m not a major fan of history, Hayes discusses a lot of interesting stuff about how the battle for our attention has evolved over the years. He’s also really good at communicating different studies and technologies in a way that people can understand, and I always appreciate that. I still think the panic over tech is a bit overblown, but this is a great book overall.

[simona.citeste · Rating 4 out of 5]

Atenția privită din perspectiva unui om care lucrează în domeniul captării atenției și viziunea lui despre cât de importantă este în societatea de astăzi.

Nu mi s-a părut foarte ușor de abordat dar o găsesc bine construită și argumentată.
Ca multe alte nonficțiuni se concentrează pe societatea americană și oferă exemple de acolo dar asta nu o face mai puțin interesantă.

[Sydney · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was in middle/high school my mom always insisted that my husband was going to be like Chris Hayes (?) and as a result I’ve had a decade-long, substantively unfounded, contrarian repulsion to anything he says or does.

Well now I have to eat my heaping slice of humble pie I guess because I really liked this book!

[Daphyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read anything like this. The idea that our attention is a commodity being packaged, bought, and sold and that it is influencing every area of our life. It’s an incredible book. It a perfect 5 stars when explaining the issue and only falls a bit in my opinion in the last chapter when discussing possible solutions. Highly recommend.

[Gail · Rating 2 out of 5]

HUGE disappointment. Filled with philosophical research that becomes repetitive, this book went nowhere for the most part. There were a couple of chapters that were interesting; they should have been put into a short book, not this one.

Hayes is bright, thoughtful, insightful. He was also a philosophy major, believe it or not. And his deep interest in that academic area was fully evident and explored in this book.

Unfortunately, some of his suggestion near the end of the book for how to reclaim our attention and opt out of the attention grabbing world we live in, are not especially viable in Trump 2.0. Far too much of the last part of his book was written in 2023 which seems like 10 lifetimes ago.

I trudged through this because I’m stubborn and kept expecting it to become more interesting and relevant. I lost a lot of time I’ll never recover.

[Avis Shrestha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Any book that starts with an Odysseus anecdote is on its way to being a hit for me. Hayes’ argument comparing the current alienation we are all experiencing to Marx and labor is compelling. Interesting read - I’ve told multiple people about it and finished, not common for me. Every time the author altered his voice for quotes, I laughed or smiled.

[Deepika]

Accuse me of being shredded in a spiral of confirmation bias, but spending over a decade succumbing and resisting and succumbing to the siren’s call — the ever-refreshing feed of these apps, the bottomless pits of the Internet — has made me think of attention every single day of my life in the last two years. Attention has begun to feel like a commodity, something that can be squandered. I love the way Chris Hayes gently argues — attention is a part of one’s essence, and the more it goes without one realising, the more it leads to alienation from oneself. There is no elegant solution. Attention cannot be regulated by an external body. Although Hayes debates that technological revolution of this era has all the downsides of the Industrial Revolution, he opines that no regulatory body is going to lock up Instagram and impose a daily curfew in most parts of the world. So, he invokes a slogan from the labour movement: ‘Eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, and eight hours of what we will.’ For some of us, the personal constitution is conveniently typical that mining attention is simply a scratch on our skin. Using and enjoying those eight hours don’t have to be architected. For some of us, the personal system is different from the established convention that we feel targeted and robbed of those eight hours and most times more than that, and having one’s attention mined leaves a festering, deep wound one’s psyche that needs more than strength, support, and kindness to heal.

I often tell the people in my life that I am the happiest at the museums and art galleries. Staying amidst such precious relics from the past and engaging with them should overwhelm me. But no. They let my feet feel like roots. I now know why — it’s all that empty space, the walls which stand there only to politely steer my attention toward art. It’s easy to stand in front of them and take deep breaths and reflect about the nature of light. Nothing else seeks attention. Just the art.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read a few books about how modern technology is disrupting the very fabric of our lives – it's something that I feel at an intuitive level and want help in understanding – and this is the first one I really loved. It covers a lot of ground and doesn’t necessarily boil down to a single description, so here are a few ideas that stuck with me:

• In Chapter 2, Hayes talks about three types of attention: involuntary (hearing a gunshot), voluntary (reading a book), and social (seeing someone looking at you). Our involuntary and social forms of attention are more easily captured, so companies have developed increasingly sophisticated methods of targeting these faculties.

• Chapter 4, on social attention, drags a bit, but then has a thunderbolt of an ending, discussing Alexandre Kojève’s gloss of Hegel’s master-slave relationship. The fundamental human desire is recognition: to have other humans see me in my full humanity. This drive to be recognized leads to struggle in which one individual overcomes another in an attempt to force recognition – but it’s ultimately fruitless, because we can only be satisfied by recognition from those whose humanity we ourselves recognize. Hayes compares this dynamic to that of a star and a fan – because the star cannot truly know the fan, the admiration of the fan cannot satisfy the star’s yearning for recognition. Instead, all the star can get from the fan is a flimsy, ersatz version of recognition – namely, attention. Social media replicates this star-fan dynamic at scale, allowing us to be both stars and fans at once, getting us hooked on attention without ever providing the kind of human-to-human connection that we crave.

• Chapter 5 talks about Marx’s concept of alienation: industrial capitalism takes an intrinsic part of the human experience, work, and commodifies it. Karl Polanyi calls labor a “fictitious commodity,” and Hayes argues that attention follows this same schema: to turn attention into units that can bought and sold in a market, it must first be extracted from us, and this extraction comes at the cost of our very consciousness: “As the harvesting of attention grows in scale and efficiency, the price of each eyeball declines. You can now reach far more people at a cheaper price than you could a hundred years ago. But like the worker who finds their body ground up in an assembly line for a pittance, the thing being cheapened in a market sense isn’t a widget, or oil, or corn, it’s the thing most precious to us: what our mind rests upon, what it considers and where it goes, how we talk to ourselves, and what objects we grasp in the light of consciousness. Over time, the commodified logic of the attention market drives the price of this resource down, which is to say it cheapens the very substance of our life.”

• Chapter 6 discusses the rise of the attention economy as a natural outgrowth of the information age, building on Herbert Simon’s idea that an abundance of information leads to a scarcity of what information consumes: attention. As attention becomes valuable, cheap bids to capture it (spam, broadly conceived) proliferate, because the cost of attempting to capture attention is low and the benefits are potentially high. And while we may think of attention as a finite resource, the rising value of attention has made it worthwhile to extract ever more of it – the fracking of our minds, per D. Graham Burnett. We spend ever more time absorbed in online content, gaining less and less of value from it.

• Chapter 7 covers attention in a public context. Public life once relied on a shared understanding of “attentional regimes” governing what was worth talking about and how that conversation should occur, leading to a two-step process: you bring attention to your message, and then you persuade your audience. But now, those regimes have collapsed, and attention is a free-for-all: “And where there is no attentional regime, no formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself.” This, to Hayes, is the ugly genius of Donald Trump: he abandons the idea of persuasion in favor of an all-out play for attention. “Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of raising the salience of issues where he and the Republican Party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs.”

I have a real soft spot for this kind of book. Journalists tend to write really good nonfiction, given that their whole job is doing deep research and figuring out how to communicate the essence of big ideas to a general audience. Hayes is good at this, and while he occasionally leans a bit too far into his cable news experience to illustrate his points, the rest of the book is good enough to forgive it. 4.5 stars.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very welcome wake-up call for my own habitual attention-wasting. Where I think it fell short for me was on the systemic suggestions, which, to me, feel quite farfetched.

[Jon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nothing really new or groundbreaking, but it did convince me to keep my phone in a box all day, so that's something.

[Conner · Rating 4 out of 5]

The biggest take-away for me is looking at my phone a lot less. “Attention is limited, information is infinite.”

[Shelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an interesting and well written book that takes a deep dive into the impact social media has on capturing, exploiting, and altering our attention spans. The information is challenging, yet easy to process and understand. The author does a good job of outlining strategies for regaining control over what we pay attention to and closing the gap between what we say is attention worthy and what we actually spend our time paying attention to.

[Shane Fallen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is a combination of stating the obvious, poor reductivism, and blaming capitalism for people’s decisions. He claims he’s not a communist, but cites communism often.

Overall this is a book written by a philosophy major who wants to be a philosopher. it is nonsensical and useless. Read it and see for yourself

[Scout Senyk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite the content of the book I really struggled to pay attention to this book. He had some good points in the beginning but I felt it just got really repetitive in the end, and tbh I just got tired of hearing the word "attention" repeated over and over again.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decided to give this a read because the author, Chris Hayes, is one of the people who I think has pretty good takes about what is wrong with this country and the world broadly and what ought to be done about it. I think MSNBC's stereotype as "left-wing Fox News" has never been warranted but to the extent it exists it's because of Hayes (and Rachel Maddow) in the prime time slots. So, in search of a thing to read, I gave his latest a spin.

It starts with an invocation of the origin of the siren in the journey of Odysseus, in which the man is warned to lash himself to the mast while his crew have their ears plugged up by balls of wax to prevent falling under the siren's song. This is a thought to which he returns a few times in a metaphorical way for how to negotiate the modern attention economy, supercharged by smartphones and access to limitless algorithmic scrolling social media on the same.

This is not a dry text. Though it cites a wide variety of things that go all the way back to the Plato/Socrates days when the old men complained about how people writing things down would ruin their ability to have oral debates, it's all told in a fairly breezy, informal, and conversational kind of voice that neither assumes nor demands any familiarity with schools of thought. Closer to the present but still quite far from our own lives, Hayes quotes Blaise Pascal with this insight: "I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber." This is not universally true, as Hayes examines some cultures that don't have any concept of boredom, but that's a line that resonated with me, and I think Hayes's case for how social media has really enabled people to avoid this is an interesting take.

I found it to be an interesting survey of the different inflection points through human history, most particularly over the last 100 years or so, where changes in media and communication methods led to something old being lost and something new being created. Hayes, with the perspective of a television news host who absolutely must engage with the attention economy or his show will be canceled and he and his hard-working staff will lose their jobs, makes a compelling case for both how this is only the latest new disruptive media event but also how there is something new and different about the ability to access large swaths of human knowledge entirely from things we keep in our pockets or our purses.

It probably helps me connect to Hayes's point of view about all of this because he and I are in the same rough "Xennial" age cohort (Hayes 1979, myself 1983) where we were born into and lived many of our early years in an analog period that transitioned to the digital age. I related to this paragraph (172/396 on my e-book) strongly:

When I was a child, we had a rotary phone; if you called someone while they were on the other line, you got a busy signal. We had a TV with seven stations and no VCR. But more important than any of that, I lived through the transition, as a curious and nerdy child, from having just the information contained in the books I owned to having access to all human knowledge.

It was at my grandparents house where there was the rotary phone, not my house, and I feel like even today for me the thing that is more transformative is not the access to the knowledge but the vastly reduced barriers to communicating and forming at least some level of connection with people the world over. Still, I feel this. The world changed a lot and I share Hayes's disappointment that what seemed wondrous and affirming of connections with other people has turned into something that is, for many, a source of alienation.

While I did mostly enjoy the journey, I found a couple of things to be frustrating that keep this from being like, a seminal writing about this topic. One is that Hayes introduces an extended simile comparing something to the experience of being at a cocktail party, which to him seems to be assumed to be a universal experience. Being a plebeian loser who has never been to any such party, I didn't really get what he was saying nor understand returning to it frequently.

The other big critique that I would say is that the whole thing is not very focused when it comes to trying to offer solutions to these problems that have appeared. Returning again to the sirens of The Odyssey, Hayes offers that to some degree it is up to the individual to lash ourselves to the mast, just commit to something and experience it. (His frame of reference here is the difference between having to go into a Blockbuster and rent one movie for the weekend rather than, you can choose between a limitless number of movies on a streaming service.) But on the societal or political level there's no point A to point B theory - probably because Hayes doesn't have one, which is fine to some degree but I feel like "What should we do about this?" is important to have an answer for when addressing a topic like this. His most concrete suggestion is that perhaps part of the answer will be like a social media equivalent of the renewed prevalence of vinyl records, in which a sizable enough minority of people to support a profitable enterprise willingly do something separate from prevailing technology (endlessly scrolling algorithmic feeds).

Perhaps it is again my being a loser that prevents me from relating, as Hayes suggests that something like Signal group chats that connect people directly could be part of the escape. (I imagine Hayes might have wished he had written some different suggestion here after Signal came to prominence in the "Leaky Pete" scandal about the incompetent Republican secretary of defense at this writing.) I hate group chats! Rather, I like group chats a lot when I am participating in them on a computer, and have zero interest in participating in them through my phone. I suppose I am an idiosyncratic weirdo in this way as "the group chat" certainly seems to be an understood phenomenon by a variety of people I follow on social media. I am in zero group chats and I am fine with this.

So I guess I have to figure out my own answer to the question. One part of it is existing as much as I can on social media where I can actually view the posts of people I have chosen to follow in chronological order. (Twitter, for all that it has been degraded, does at least still allow a person to view the timeline in order, for the person who is savvy enough to select "following" instead of its default "for you.") Ten years ago or so, this useful social media used to include Facebook, but now I cannot even get its algorithm to regularly show me things posted by my wife even though I set her, my mom, and my sister as my only three "favorites" whose posts are supposed to be prioritized. What a useless piece of shit website. But it makes Zuck a lot of money so I guess it's not exactly useless for him.

[Carli · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️💫/5. This is an ambitious undertaking, in which the author examines how the things that started out as small entertainment have consumed us, and how it is threatening the way we live. Basically, the constant call (the sirens, if you will) of social media, immediate news updates, and entertainment at our fingertips is breaking down the wall between public and private, changing our way of life for the worse. The sociologist in me enjoyed this, though I feel like he was a little long-winded with his historical comparisons. A worthwhile listen, though I would possibly read it in print if I did it again. #grownupreads

[hannah peterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funnily enough, this had a hard time keeping my attention. Made some good points but not executed in the best way/ideas needed more time to simmer. Everything felt too new but also nothing new was said? “Phone bad” okay but what are we gonna do about it??

[Nick Pageant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very smart. Very entertaining. I am typing this on my IPad and my phone is chirping and this book hit me hard.