The Attentional Oligarchy
Years before billionaire owner Jeff Bezos remade The Washington Post’s opinion section as American media’s premier tribune for oligarchy, the newspaper adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
True enough. Indeed, what troubles so many advocates for independent journalism is the prospect that Bezos’s new editorial line will jettison critiques of the many ways in which the billionaire class assaults democracy, creating a “darkness” that is all too likely to confirm the accuracy of The Post’s shibboleth.
But democracy might be just as threatened by the dwindling attention spans of a growing number of American voters who struggle, from election to election, to keep track of the Constitution-shredding lawlessness of cynical politicians—starting with Donald Trump, but certainly not ending with him—who prey on the manufactured absentmindedness of a distracted electorate.
That is no small matter, as Chris Hayes understands.
The MSNBC host has written what will very likely turn out to be the most important political book of the moment. Yet, it comes under the guise—as all important books do—of a statement about the broader condition of society. In The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, Hayes explains how “attention capitalism”—a loose term for the money-making schemes of tech billionaires who build their fortunes by collecting the data that we shed while scrolling endlessly on their social media platforms—has become a dominant force in our lives. This is something most of us know, at least instinctually, from our own experience and from observing those around us—especially our TikTok-obsessed children and grandchildren. But, with this new book, Hayes does what only the ablest public intellectual can. He puts the situation in a broader perspective that flips a recognition switch, by explaining that, “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.”
That sounds apocalyptic. Yet, when Hayes and I talked about his book, he remained hopeful for humanity. “People have a kind of an addictive, love-hate relationship [with the rapid flow of information and entertainment] that is hard for people to deal with. But part of that addictive, love-hate relationship is a product of the technologies—including cable news—that are there to get people to pay attention all the time,” says Hayes, who counsels that it is possible to break such patterns. “More and more people are just turning away from it. Daily active users for most of these platforms are declining . . . . That sense of being fed up—and the sense of alienation—is so profound that people are going to increasingly drop out.”
But just dropping out does not necessarily save society—or change our broken politics. There has to be a middle ground where Americans are informed and engaged, without being overwhelmed, and without being manipulated into cycles of fear and rage.
Hayes describes this as “that loop of conflict, aggressiveness, doom, darkness, and conspiracy that I think is the mode of keeping attention that is fundamentally reactionary.”
This is where the discussion turns to practical politics and “the attentional dominance” that proved to be highly beneficial to Trump in 2024.
Hayes is not one of those authors who claim that their new book explains everything. Indeed, that’s what makes The Sirens’ Call such a vital book.
“Look, I think inflation plus [Joe] Biden’s age gets you a lot of the way there toward the outcome [of Trump’s election victory]. The incumbent President had a very low approval rating. The majority said the country was on the wrong track. Those are bad structural factors for an incumbent party trying to get re-elected—even if the candidate did change,” he tells me. “But the third thing was just the attentional dominance [of messaging from Trump and his Republican allies], and particularly the attentional salience of negativity, and the dominance of negativity, in the atmosphere. That, I think, was a 100 percent dispositive thing that tipped things over.”
In contrast to Trump and a rising class of Republicans who mimic the President’s approach to politics—and now to governance—Hayes explains “the idea that Democrats are sort of conflict-averse, and risk-averse, in ways that mean they get less attention, and that is pretty bad for them in the current landscape. Trump has figured out something about attention that Democrats have struggled to [understand].”
The bottom line, I suggest to him, is that the contemporary reality of how attention capitalism operates—and the GOP’s frequent attentional dominance of the discourse—has been highly beneficial to Trump and Trumpism. “Ultimately, yes,” Hayes replies. “Absolutely.”
This is an immediate lesson from The Sirens’ Call, and an argument for why people who care about the twin crises of communications and democracy in the United States—and, arguably, Western democracy as we have known it in the post-World War II era—ought to pay serious attention to what Hayes is telling us.
That perspective will be needed if the United States and other countries around the world are going to break the grip of the billionaire oligarchs who are buying up media platforms and making them—or simply, for reasons of rank profiteering, allowing them to become—vehicles for propagandistic missives that overwhelm honest debate and amplify the racist and xenophobic fear mongering of rightwing politicians. It gets us to the next stage of an old debate about media and politics that has defined much of my adult life.
When Bezos announced that he was remaking the opinion pages of The Post to serve as a tribune for the worldview of the richest people on the planet, he explained his decision with a laughable assertion that advocacy for his brand of uber-capitalism—billionaire-driven oligarchy—was “underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” Anyone who has ever watched business channels on cable television or read the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal—where support for so-called free markets is used as an excuse to champion corporate monopoly, price gouging, union busting, and grotesque income inequality—knows that the billionaire class gets plenty of attention. Bezos’s move led author Rick Perlstein to email me with a reflection on The Death and Life of American Journalism and other books that Robert W. McChesney and I wrote in the 2000s about the threat posed to journalism and democracy by the ever-expanding corporate control of communications.
Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Ben Bagdikian, Noam Chomsky, and Edward Herman, McChesney and I began writing twenty-five years ago on what we understood as an emerging crisis in American media. Our argument was simple: The rapid prioritization of bottom-line commercial and entertainment impulses over journalistic and democratic values was leading to more inequality, more corruption, more division, and a decay of civil society that could upend honest debate. Bill Moyers embraced the argument and hosted us frequently on his public television show, giving us an opportunity to explain the vital linkages between media and democracy to millions of Americans. Members of Congress including Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, Louise Slaughter, and Jesse Jackson Jr. played critical roles in opening up debates about media ownership issues in the early 2000s, as did Federal Communications Commission members Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, and leaders of Common Cause and MoveOn, as well as The Newspaper Guild, and other unions. But what was most heartening was the embrace of the critique by grassroots activists, who recognized it as a tool for explaining not just the challenges facing journalism but the disintegration of democracy.
The fight for genuine media reform goes on—and is now more necessary than ever in this age of disinformation, misinformation, and propagandistic politics. Yet, it also evolves, as we learn more and more about the pressures on American society that have emerged in a new media age where AI-supercharged communications are more rapid, more immersive, and more manipulative. This new reality is the fertile ground that is explored by Hayes’s book, which, in my view, provides an explanation not just for the political moment but also for how to get out of it.
While The Sirens’ Call has resonated because it reflects on a part of the immediate daily life of iPhone-gripping Americans, Hayes also recognizes that his book points to an activist space “where politics is really exciting”—where concerned citizens might place a new focus on “attentional rebellion” and “attentional politics.”
“Thinking about this as a political problem, or something that has a political valence, is interesting,” says Hayes, adding that seeing the CEOs of X, Apple, and Google in attendance at Trump’s Inauguration, “was sort of clarifying about the attentional oligarchy that’s taken shape before us. It is a political problem that is going to need some political solutions—and not just like, ‘You should put your phone down during dinner.’ Yes, you should put your phone down during dinner. But there’s something much broader here, and I think it’s exciting to think in those terms. One of the things I hope people take away from the book is to think about this as a political problem. By ‘political,’ I don’t mean in the partisan sense of ‘political’ but in the deeper sense of ‘political’—like it is crucial to our collective life and how we self-govern.”
Hayes continues, “I think there’s going to be more and more activism, or organizing, or energy behind ways of thinking about undoing this particular version of attention capitalism that we have.”
As with responses to the climate crisis, Hayes recognizes that people can take a combination of steps to challenge attention capitalism in their personal lives, including “putting the phone down” in addition to regulatory and anti-monopoly interventions that extend from political activism.
“You need things on the regulatory side. But you also need things to be built that are alternatives. I think reviving the noncommercial Internet, creating a new version of a twenty-first-century noncommercial Internet, is also really important,” Hayes explains. “Obviously, digital connection is not going anywhere. That’s going to be there, and I wouldn’t say otherwise. But it doesn’t have to be the case that the structure is four or five companies with billions of users, controlling trillions and trillions and trillions of human attentional minutes. There are other ways that market could be configured with noncommercial spacing. One metaphor I always use is that, when we walk through our physical, public lives, we’re constantly moving through public and private space, commercial and noncommercial space. Increasingly, on the Internet, we’re just in commercial space.”
Addressing the power of those four or five dominant companies won’t be easy in an era where, as Hayes notes, “you see all these tech bigwigs around Trump,” and where the new administration is being guided on many issues by the owner of X. But the point of books like The Sirens’ Call is to push beyond the moment and open up discussions to new ideas and new ways to encourage innovation. “I think a lot of these companies need to be much smaller,” says Hayes, who argues that antitrust challenges to dominant corporations could ultimately provide alternative models that are more likely to serve humanity—and democracy—than the bottom lines of the billionaires. “There’s an antitrust argument around innovation, which is just that big companies stymie innovation and they purchase their competitors, and that’s not good for innovation . . . . And we need innovation.”
Hayes explains that “aside from the regulatory part, which is restraining and cracking down on and reducing the power of [corporations] and restructuring the markets for attentional capitalism, there is also a kind of generative part—which is building a vision of a digital world that is not fully dependent on the extraction, commodification, and marketing of attention.”