THE SIRENS' CALL: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource by Chris Hayes – a review

More than ever, the argot of fevered capitalism pervades our discourse. Such often-heard terms as consumerism, consumption, and commodification are charged concepts often invoked to critique the excesses of our social existence, allegedly reduced to economic barrenness at the expense of humanistic enrichment. Getting and spending co-opt the better parts of our lives.

In relevant discussions, what comes foremost to mind is the pursuit and acquisition of material possessions that greatly define the aspirations of the American people at large. Relentless advertising has led us to believe that ownership of things is the primary route to happiness. We are socialized to believe that value is invested in tangibles – cars, clothes, electronics, the newest gadget, and countless other objects that it is the genius of capitalism to continuously spew forth. Capitalism's creativity is vested in its ability to create new needs which it then seeks to satisfy, and this it does feverishly.

Notably, in his book, The Sirens' Call, Chris Hayes identifies the object of greatest value not as a material possession but as attention – a phenomenon as invisible as the wind. As the fish that exists in a watery environment of which it is unaware because of its ubiquity, at first glance, few may identify attention as our most valued resource, even though, as Hayes contends, “attention is the substance of life.” It is a function of Hayes' insight and creativity to bracket out attention as a phenomenon to be commodified. But not only that. Its exploitation is a major driver of the American economy and its marketing. In this digital age, attention has become a centerpiece of our lives.

Chris Hayes is best known as a TV journalist and host of his news show on MSNBC. The Sirens' Call reveals him to be an astute thinker, a capable researcher, and an engaging writer who applies what could otherwise be a theoretical and dry treatise to issues of the moment, both political and personal.

The major driver of Hayes' thesis is the dynamics of the market. The salience and power of the digital powerhouses – Google, Meta, Apple, Amazon, and their ilk – that, like a global vortex, have swept us up to meet their competitive, profit-seeking ends. To do so, they must attract, grab, and hold our attention. One cannot read The Sirens' Call and escape the conclusion that we all, to the extent that we have given ourselves over to digital realities (and how many haven't?), are the objects of massive manipulation.

Hayes has a message that he conveys with urgency. Not only is the quest for attention something that pervades our day-to-day existence through the aggressive presence of the mammoth digital companies, but it is a reality that takes residence in our inner lives. As Hayes notes, “My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most importance resource – our attention – is also the very thing that makes us human. Unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” Hayes makes clear that attention is not information. Information is infinite; attention is finite. Its scarcity is the source of attention's value. When it comes to Amazon, he tells us this gargantuan retailer is not primarily about the products it sells, which he asserts is an afterthought. Amazon is an attention and logistics company. The multiple products that appear on your screen are evidence of this fact.

The pursuit of attention is, again, pervasive and aggressive. "Centering attention as a resource and understanding both its existential primacy and its increasing social, political, and economic domination is the key to understanding a lot of disparate aspects of twenty-first century life...Public discourse is now a war of all against all for public attention. Commerce is a war for attention. Social life is a war for attention. Parenting is a war for attention. And we are all feeling battle weary.”

Hayes is at his most engaging when describing the personal effects of the battle for attention, especially as manifest by electronic media. It is a political and economic reality of modern life that informs the emotional well-being of men, women, and children, including Hayes himself. His book is sprinkled with personal examples. We gain insight into the personal angst of Hayes as a cable news notable:

“Most of the stories people criticize cable news (or nightly local news) over – the disappearance of a young conventionally attractive white woman, or a live shot of an empty podium awaiting candidate Trump – are the product of intense competitive pressures and a desire to grab and hold audience attention. That's an explanation of these editorial choices, not a justification for them.

But speaking from personal experience, I can say that the moments when I felt the competition most intensely were the times when I probably did my worst work. When you are most worried about losing attention, you get thirsty and desperate and try to grab viewers by the lapels. Listen to this! The is big! This is important! You try to juice every word in the script – make things bigger, more terrifying, more surprising, you end up chasing stories of perhaps dubious editorial value because the desperate scramble for numbers overrides all other judgments and concerns.”

The frenetic reality that consumes Hayes' professional life is merely an instance of the reality that informs all of our lives. Hayes burrows deeper by placing the role of attention within a historical analysis. He analogizes current realities to the beginning of the industrial revolution and the changes it made in the lives of workers and how they perceived themselves. Here, Hayes makes use of Karl Marx's theory of alienation to describe our current plight. This is not Marx of Capital, but the thought of the younger Marx as explicated in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The worker, according to Marx, experiences multiple forms of alienation. Prior to the factory, the maker of shoes could exercise his skills through completing the entire task. In the factory, his labor is reduced most likely to one isolated skill, endlessly repeated. In short, he becomes alienated from his creativity. Moreover, the finished product belongs to the owner and not to him. The worker's labor becomes commodified and bought and sold. Moreover, within the context of industrialized capitalism, the worker becomes isolated and alienated from his fellow workers. His outer and inner lives are transformed.

And so it is with us. “The defining experience of the attention age is a specific kind of alienation. It's a feeling that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken from us against our will. This comes from the sophisticated development of attention markets, which have figured out ways to extract and commodify more and more of our attention, more and more efficiently. But our attention is not like other commodities: it's a fictitious commodity, a market good with a price but also something inseparable from our very humanity. The alienation we feel is born of the tension between attention as a market commodity and attention as the substance of our lives.”

Like the isolated worker in the factory, attention technologies are successfully isolating individuals from each other. What was once a collective experience - think of listening to music, sports events, religious practice, even watching TV - has become progressively individualized, isolated experiences. Hayes notes, “The advent of screens – tablets, smartphones, cheaper and cheaper flat-screen TVs that could be put in multiple rooms - changes this (i.e., social) behavior. Like listening to music on the Walkman and now our phones, paying attention to motion pictures has moved from a family experience to an individual one. These days, during 'screen time,' each of the children is on an individual device, each watching something different, each paying attention alone.”

Clearly, The Sirens' Call is written out of the distress of a young, sophisticated professional, well placed to experience and comment on the reality that molds our values and shapes our interests. But he is hardly the only one. As Hayes states, “I bet you could spend day and night in any city or town canvassing strangers and not find a single one who told you that they felt like their attention span was too long, that they were too focused, who wish that they had more distractions, or spend more time looking at screens.”

I am among the discontented. Many will defend social media by stating that it has enabled them to reconnect with long-lost friends or provide delight in sharing an experience with others. No doubt these blandishments are present and help explain the powerful attraction of digital technologies. Hayes affirms this as well. But as with a growing number of social critics, I conclude that the negative consequences of replacing real-time engagement with others with relations on screens outweigh the benefits.

On frequent drives to New York, I am stopped at a light and take notice of the pedestrians crossing the street. I remain amazed at the number of people gazing down at their phones, not at their fellows, not at the sights the City has to offer, and not even at the traffic they need to avoid to keep themselves safe. I conclude that there is something weird in this pervasive choice to be where one is but not really present. It is not uncommon to see couples in restaurants on what is presumably a date or a romantic evening and find each on his or her cell phone. In times past, when I invited my grandchildren for dinner, the first thing one or two would invariably do was to scroll through his or her cell phone at the table, something I find unacceptable. As a clergyman, I would often bring people together in groups for either business meetings or discussions on topics of common interest. As the leader, it would often take some effort to create focus and sustain interest. Often in the midst of conversation, a participant would pop up from his seat, phone to his ear, and hurry to the door, no doubt excusing himself on the presumption that the phone was silenced. What remains often unconsidered is that his act of self-exemption often undercuts the mood and changes the experience of all others.

We live in a time of increased isolation and loneliness, wherein people, especially of younger generations, are losing the ability to engage in the simple act of conversation with each other. People report that they have fewer friends. Americans suffer, I believe, from a condition of hyper-individualism, which is leaving undeveloped the social nature that is intrinsic to our humanity. As Christopher Hayes makes dramatically clear, this is not a matter of happenstance. It is driven by powerful economic forces that have captured, hold, and exploit our attention.

This leaves the question: what is to be done? While this book is intended for a popular audience, Hayes follows a pattern I have found characteristic of academic writing. Texts dealing with society are often constructed around a problem for which the author provides a probing analysis, as Hayes does here. Yet having handily analyzed the problem, the solutions provided are relatively thin.

Hayes briefly looks at the regulation of social media, noting the great changes brought by labor laws in an earlier era. But he rightly acknowledges difficulties given the (appropriate) strength of the First Amendment). New directions, he surmises, may emerge out of the reality that people have different impulses. In light of prevailing trends, vinyl records have made a comeback. On a personal note, he mentions that for the first time, he is receiving on a daily basis the print edition of the New York Times, and how it provides a different and, we may conclude, more enriching reading experience than the digital version. More germane is his brief observation as to how organic food and local farming movements developed in opposition to corporate giants that deliver processed food, which dominate the American diet. It is his hope that such tendencies open the possibility for the development of non-commercial forms of the internet. But Hayes needs to develop these thoughts more fully to demonstrate how they will make a significant difference and avoid being merely passing fads.

But one solution Hayes barely entertains is far more radical and is a choice I have personally made. It is simply to turn off the screens. Clearly Hayes' professional life would not allow this. Moreover, as a man in his mid-forties he is scarcely older than the internet itself. As for myself, I am almost twice his age and was socialized to a reality in which the digital technologies lay decades in the future. I admit that as someone who started to use computers later in life, its foothold on me has been less secure.

We can all exercise choices, and there are always choices to be made. One way of avoiding the predation of the attention-grabbing technologies that so concern both him and me, as noted, is to simply lend them no attention. It is to make the choice to turn off the ringer on the phone. It is to abjure soundbites and tweets and to read books. It is to spend time with cherished friends in real time, and stay off of screens. If we cannot change the world, at least we can say “no” to the corporate manipulators that have come to so dominate our social reality and take steps to return our lives to ourselves.

Chris Hayes has written an important and timely book. Implicit in his thesis are the questions, How do I wish to shape my life? What choices will I make toward that end? Where will I turn my attention?