Can He Please Get Your Attention?

​​When I picked up the new book by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, I expected another jeremiad about the hazards of social media and excessive screen time. These dangers have been widely debated in recent years, and I wondered if Hayes had uncovered fresh research. But while these issues are a key part of Hayes’s central argument, his book has a much wider scope. 

Hayes wants to redefine our current era as the “Attention Age”—he doesn’t believe the “Information Age,” as it’s commonly considered, is completely apt. This is because attention, he argues, is a limited resource, like fossil fuels, that the world’s largest companies are going to greater and greater lengths to mine. Information, meanwhile, both valuable and useless, is everywhere.

“The axiom I want to drive home is that information is infinite and attention is limited,” Hayes writes. “And value derives from scarcity, which is why attention is so valuable.”  

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

By Chris Hayes

Penguin Press, 336 pages

Release date: January 28, 2025

Hayes recounts the vast efforts by organizations to grab our attention—particularly but not exclusively on screens—leading to a less contented, less self-directed, and more chaotic inner life. He points to commercial efforts as particularly insidious because corporations understand that “the most important resource of our age is the very thing that makes us most human” and “extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” 

Hayes indicts the world’s top tech firms—Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook), and Amazon—for behaving more like “attention companies,” as their chief goal has become drawing eyeballs rather than providing useful information or services. He provocatively claims that that the most significant societal change brought about by the smartphone was not that it provided quicker access to information, but that it “massively extended the times in which our attention could be captured.” 

Meanwhile, Hayes argues, social media has grown increasingly addictive thanks to the secret algorithms of these firms. Interactions are now based around eliciting “engagement” above all else. Trolling has become rampant. I’ve personally noticed a rise in Facebook posts that purposely make grammatical or factual mistakes just to draw comments, like a Brainy Quotes group that butchers well-known MLK passages or an entertainment group that misidentifies well-known actors. The goal, clearly, is not to enlighten, but to be noticed. 

The danger, Hayes warns, is that we are trading fulfilling, real-life relationships for fleeting online fame. This is not an original observation, but his description of the problem is trenchant:

“The social media combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting our friends to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.”

Hayes takes us through a fascinating discussion of the different types of attention—voluntary, involuntary, and social. He explains why fame is so addictive—it aligns with our need for social attention—and emphasizes that it’s much easier to grab attention than to hold it. Thus the dominant model used by commercial interests is the “slot machine”: the flashing lights, bright colors, news scrolls, quick cuts, and splashy sound bites that have become ubiquitous. 

Hayes effectively illustrates this point with an analysis of his own profession, noting that cable news has been an innovator of the slot machine model. Instead of dedicating itself to holding viewers’ attention through extended discussions of issues, for example, cable news has found it easier to attract viewers by constantly grabbing attention with these techniques.

While Hayes’s book is not blatantly political, one of its most insightful sections compares contemporary political discourse with the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. These debates were often three hours long, and delved deeply into abstract principles and legislative issues, yet they drew huge crowds. Hayes imagines them being held today on television with Senator Stephen Douglas allotted ninety seconds to explain popular sovereignty and then-Congressman Abraham Lincoln thirty seconds to explain Dred Scott. It’s laughable, but the point is cutting: In constantly distracting us, modern technology is dumbing us down.

The Siren’s Call is a thought-provoking and often heady book—Hayes references the work of philosophers, economists, authors, and theorists, from Kierkegaard to Noam Chomsky—that will resonate with many readers. But it does not hold out much hope for a rosy future. “The age we’re living through is akin to life in a failed state,” he laments, “a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism.”

While Hayes predicts a cultural backlash against the commodification of our attention in the form of people seeking out simpler pleasures, like listening to vinyl records instead of streaming music, he foresees the ever-growing attentional demands of business interests making us increasingly alienated and lonely, citing studies showing movement in this direction. And he predicts that conspiracy theories and lies will only become more prevalent. Why? Because lies are almost always more attention-grabbing than the truth. 

The book truly sticks its landing when Hayes gets around to discussing Donald Trump. His assertion that Trump “is the political figure who most fully exploited the new rules of the attention age” seems undeniable. He notes that our traditional model of political debate has collapsed, replaced by a new model in which the most important traits of successful politicians are “the ability to get attention” and “the shamelessness to interrupt.”  

We have, it seems, elected the perfect leader for our impending age of chaos.