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

by Chris Hayes

The central locus of economic activity has moved from those firms that manipulate atoms to those that manipulate bits.

In order to walk upright, the hips and birth canal of women had to narrow, while the brain of the fetus kept getting larger. The combination meant that, as Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens, “Death in childbirth became a major hazard for human females. Women who gave birth earlier, when the infant’s brain and head were still relatively small and supple, fared better and lived to have more children. Natural selection consequently favoured earlier births.”[22] Giving birth to utterly helpless little creatures had enormous consequences for our species.

What we need to survive is more than mere attention: we need care. But attention is a necessary precondition for care. In this way, we are creatures whose very survival depends on attention. We perish in neglect. As part of that inescapable inheritance, we will forever be invested in other people paying attention to us.

In 2014, the then-CEO of Chartbeat, which measures web traffic, said that 55 percent of people who land on a page last less than fifteen seconds.[24]

It was with the purpose of studying these novel American modes of incarceration that Alexis de Tocqueville made his famous 1831 trip to America. He saw it for what it was: “This absolute solitude, if nothing interrupts it, is beyond the strength of man; it destroys the criminal without intermission and without pity; it does not reform, it kills.”[6]

In one oft-cited study the negative health effects of persistent loneliness were roughly the same as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.[23]

Sony was so concerned about the hermetic loneliness of the experience that its first model had two headphone jacks and a button to talk to the other person plugged in if you felt too alone.[43] The New York Times reported that “the orange button was like a panic button, an emergency ‘share’ feature,” and that a Sony cofounder later wrote that “the company was hesitant to release a product that could be considered selfish.”[44]