Chris Hayes' "The Siren's Call"
Surviving in Today's Attention Economy
I have been Paying Attention to MSNBC’s Chris Hayes for years.
His 8:00 Eastern show “All In With Chris Hayes” is a regular dinnertime watch for us. His longer form podcast, “Why Is This Happening?” is great, even if I don’t always listen. We listened to his Twilight of the Elites, about the rise of the meritocracy1 and it’s impact on society, on a road trip. I read A Colony in a Nation, about the intersections between social class and criminal justice, on my Kindle. He is an excellent writer who dives deeply into his topics.
When I heard that he had a new book coming out titled The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it. Did we need another book about social media, cable television, YouTube influencers, and the crisis of modern print journalism? Even though I like Chris’ insights, I didn’t know what he’d add to the plethora of similar works on the market.
When I heard him interviewed on Kara Swisher’s podcast, I realized it wasn’t that kind of book at all. So I bought a copy.
Sirens’ Call is the kind of book you might expect from a philosophy major from Brown who thinks about deep and interesting things. Yes, Twitter/X, Facebook, TikTok, and Trump all show up in the book. But the insights are buttressed by consideration of the Odyssey (hence the title), William James, Karl Marx, Blaise Pascal, Soren Kierkegaard, Georg Hegel, Neil Postman, Alvin Toffler, and others I didn’t know before.
The central premise of the book is that as the information economy has expanded exponentially through various means, our attention remains a finite resource. There are only so many hours in the day and only so many brain synapses to fire. So we are constantly inundated, resulting in a variety of maladies.
What I want to argue here is that the scale of transformation we’re experiencing is far more vast and more intimate than even the most panicked critics have understood. In other words: the problem with the main thrust of the current critiques of the attention economy, and the scourge of social media is that (with some notable exceptions) they don't actually go far enough. The rhetoric of moral condemnation undersells the level of transformation we’re experiencing. As tempting as it is to say the problem is the phones, they are as much symptoms as cause, the natural conclusion of a set of forces transforming the texture of our lives. The attention economy isn't like a bad new drug being pushed onto the populace, an addictive intoxicant with massive negative effects, or even a disruptive new form of media with broad social implications. It's something more profound and different altogether. My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource — our attention — is also the very thing that makes us human. Unlike coal or capital, which exists outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds (11-12).
Just as Marx analyzed the commodification of labor arising from the industrial revolution, Hayes is exploring the ways in which our attention is commodified by a variety of sources. It results in a similar form of alienation to that of the industrial worker. Our attention is required by others, in smaller and smaller chunks, with little actual return. We have a desire to engage in social attention, where we are recognized or at least acknowledged2, but that rarely happens.
He describes the operation of slot machines in a casino or a first person shooter game like Call of Duty as examples of the ways in which one stays watching for the next new thing (which looks like everything before it). He writes:
It is, I think, not an accident that the main perceptual structure of the most popular social media platforms, "the feed", moves like a slot machine — scrolling vertically — endlessly. These apps retain our attention via a structured form of constant stimulus, continuous interruption, never had to do much to hold our attention. The slot machines we hold in our pocket, available in any instant. They've managed to hold our attention for enormous periods of time just by grabbing it over and over and over again (53).
Twelve days before inauguration day, I wrote a post titled “Don’t Chase the Laser Pointer”. I called for us (especially me) to not be driven by whatever the latest outrage is regarding President Trump.
One of Trump’s most successful political strategies has been to keep himself at the center of the news cycle. From 2015 to 2021 this was done on then-Twitter. Since 2021 it has happened on his Truth Social site. Even though most people don’t follow him on TS, the print media, broadcast media, and social media repeat his “Truths” and proceed to treat them seriously.
We have to stop doing that. We are less likely to make sense of the latest Truth or Mar-a-Lago press gaggle than that cat is to catch the laser dot once and for all.
While I have been moderately successful at limiting my intake of the daily outrage, I couldn’t have envisioned what the last 23 days have wrought. It’s so much worse than before. Now we have Trump making comments about Gaza and the Gulf of whatever, Musk giving press conferences in the Oval alongside his son, and media driven immigration raids3. Even as courts block the most unconstitutional moves, the question seems to always come back to “what will Trump do next?” Chris Hayes says that
Trump’s approach to politics ever since he entered the political race in the summer of 2015 when he entered the presidential race is the equivalent of running naked through the neighborhood; repellent but transfixing.
His competitors found the entire spectacle exhausting and infuriating. No matter what they did — unveil a new plan for tax policy, give a speech on America’s role in the world, show up at a factory to tour their competitiveness agenda — the questions they faced were about Donald Trump (212).
Returning to his central premise, he writes
A public square wholly dominated by commercial platforms seeking to maximize the aggregate amount of attention they draw in order to monetize that attention will produce a public that has a difficult time sustaining focus (220).
What then are we to do in order to retain our attentional resources and thereby our personal well-being? Chris offers some suggestions he has personally found helpful: read a physical daily newspaper that allows you to focus on what you want4, find new information sources (I’m still experimenting with that), take walks without phones or podcasts, or limit screen time5.
I would repeat my earlier idea about not chasing the laser pointer. Much of what has happened since inauguration day doesn’t unfold in nice 24 hour packages. It can be healthy to simply let the story mature until we know what the implications might be rather than freak out over the latest things one of the DOGE boys have done.
This has been a very cursory treatment of Chris Hayes’ book. It is full of interesting philosophical insights, thoughts on the nature of the self, reflections on social progress, and details on what it’s like to host a cable television news program.
Taking back control over our attentional resources is beneficial to our health and wellness. And in some small measure, it reduces the influence of Musk and Zuck and the rest have on our lives.
Forgive me for bragging, but this happened on BlueSky last night.
You may have noticed that love of Meritocracy is back in a backlash against broader social progress.
I’m as guilty of this need as the next person. Someday I’ll be able to write this SubStack without charting the number of views it receives. But I’m not there yet. And did I mention that I have a book dropping tomorrow?
I’m almost finished with Jonathan Blitzer’s Everything Who is Gone is Here about the history of immigration and federal policy. I had started it a while back but picked it up again after hearing Blitzer on Hayes’ podcast. I’ll take it up on here next week.
I get a digital copy of the Denver Post which provides full page content.
He makes an interesting parallel between early 20th century laws limiting child labor or worker hours and how we might think about screens.
I haven't read it, but your post and commentary about him, makes me want to read more.
Thanks, John. This books like more than I thought it would be, too, based on a cursory glance. There's an awful lot of blaming of media and the internet that tends to reduce the agency we humans have. We have to choose, as you put it, not to chase the laser pointer dot (rather than blaming the laser pointer, which itself doesn't have agency). And so on with all media.