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

by Chris Hayes

The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens’ call.

From inside our own being, attention is what constitutes our very self, but from the perspective of entities outside of us, attention is like gold in a stream, oil in a rock.

When Henry David Thoreau escaped to Walden Pond in the summer of 1845, it was as a refuge from this precise experience, the invasive omnipresence of modernity and the way it can cloud a person’s faculties. Of our so-called modern improvements, he writes, “There is an illusion about them; there is not always a positive advance…Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”[23]

We all intuitively grasp the value of attention, as least internally, because what we pay attention to constitutes our inner lives. When it is taken from us, we feel the loss. But attention is also supremely valuable externally, out in the world. It is the foundation for nearly all we do, from the relationships we build to the way we act as workers, consumers, and citizens.

information is infinite and attention is limited. And value derives from scarcity, which is why attention is so valuable.

Though she wasn’t quite putting it in these terms, what Klein identified is the process by which the attention economy eats the real economy. The bulk of the value of the enterprise of, say, Nike is in its central attentional holding—its instantly recognizable swoosh—not in the technical know-how or factors of production (supply chains, factories, access to labor) that industrial firms of an earlier era would view as their central source of value.

...what (Naomi) Klein...

Which lives we protect and how depends ultimately on which deaths we pay attention to: if ten passenger planes went down tomorrow, for example, all airlines would be grounded. But during the Covid years we came to tolerate an equivalent death toll on a random winter Wednesday. If Al Qaeda sent roving bands of hit squads into nursing homes to live stream the murder of seniors, our societal response would be, I think it’s fair to say, significantly more strenuous, heated, and focused than our collective response to deaths on this scale from an invisible virus happening behind closed doors and away from camera phones.

When, to take one fairly recent example, Russia invaded Ukraine, we went into breaking coverage and took no commercial breaks. Then after a few days, we started taking breaks. After several weeks, we started doing other stories mixed in with the war in Ukraine, but we were still leading with the Ukraine story. Then about a month in we started to sometimes lead with other stories. At forty-five days from the invasion’s start, we would occasionally do a show that didn’t have the war in it at all. A year later we’d go weeks or months without covering the war. The attention was all burned up.

Economist Herbert Simon, whose 1971 essay on the attention economy is one of the single most insightful meditations on attention ever published, observed long before the age of constant smartphone push notifications that a “wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.”[1] Information is abundant; attention is scarce. Information is theoretically infinite, while attention is constrained. This is why information is cheap and attention is expensive.

There are three main aspects of attention, the basic dynamics of which are on display in the cocktail party examples above. First there is voluntary attention: the intentional choosing of focus, the spotlight of the mind being pointed toward something, illuminating it while keeping everything outside its glow in the relative dark. Then there is involuntary attention, constantly operating in parallel to conscious attention, monitoring our environment for threats and disruptions, pushing and pulling away from conscious focus, sometimes expanding to grab our mind fully. And finally there is social attention, the fact that we can be the object of others’ attention, and the inescapable truth that being the object of others’ attention is the foundational experience of having human bonds.

It is easier to grab attention than to hold it.

Even in situations of maximal fight-or-flight terror, as hostages on a plane or soldiers in a trench can attest, it’s easy for attention to wander. Charles Kapar, a USAID official who survived the hijacking of a Kuwaiti airliner in 1984, told a reporter shortly after the incident that even as his life hung in the balance, he tuned out, overcome by boredom. “This fellow [that is, the hijacker] was destroying everything and we were just sitting there. I almost fell asleep I was so bored.”[25]

But the casino engineers on the Strip went to work. They refined the simple slot machine, then expanded it into an entire universe of electronic games of unparalleled potency. The games grew much more profitable than anything else on a casino floor, coming to occupy more and more space with each passing year. “Right now,” sociologist Bo Bernhard told an audience at a gaming conference in 2000, “somewhere out there in a casino, a blackjack table is being sawed down to make room for machines.”[44]

This category of games has occupied a truly staggering number of human hours of attention. In 2013, The Washington Post reported, “Humankind Has Now Spent More Time Playing Call of Duty Than It Has Existed on Earth.” You see, “Every year, Call of Duty players collectively log some 475,000 years of gameplay. Add it up, and over the course of their six-year history, Activision’s 21st-century-themed combat simulations have cost us 2.85 million man-years—more than 14 times longer than humanity has existed.”[48] And that was a decade ago!

This category (first-person shooters) of games...

In the same way great fortunes can be made through just a few cents on the dollar on a transaction billions of times over, the most powerful attention miners of our age don’t need to take all our attention all the time, just a few seconds here and there again and again.

being tagged and brought into a thread is the key driver for engagement in many platforms. Former Google employee Tristan Harris notes that this aspect of a platform like Facebook is optimized by the algorithm to supercharge normal social impulses. “We’re all vulnerable to social approval,” Harris writes. “But now our social approval is in the hands of tech companies. When I get tagged by my friend Marc, I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me. But I don’t see how a company like Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first place…by automatically suggesting all the faces people should tag (e.g. by showing a box with a 1-click confirmation, ‘Tag Tristan in this photo?’). So when Marc tags me, he’s actually responding to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. But through design choices like this, Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval on the line.”[51]

A shorthand for how contemporary digital attention miners extract attention is: hail, grab, hold.

We cannot understand the attention age without reckoning with that part of us that seeks out the sirens, that flees the terror of our own uninterrupted minds. Why are we not satisfied with peaceful silence? In 2014, psychologists at the University of Virginia set about to investigate this question. Subjects were asked to simply sit alone in a room doing nothing for periods between six to fifteen minutes and were later asked about their experiences. They hated it. The researchers then tested just how much they hated it: “Would they rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all?” the authors asked. In one study participants were given the “opportunity to experience negative stimulation (an electric shock) if they so desired.” And guess what? “Many participants elected to receive negative stimulation over no stimulation—especially men: 67% of men (12 of 18) gave themselves at least one shock during the thinking period.”

When we are alone with our thoughts, we naturally begin to contemplate our own death, and it’s intolerable.

The more diversion available, the more diversion we need, and the more intolerable we find its absence. This is the king’s paradox.

The more we have to amuse ourselves, the more easily we are bored, which is why addiction is our go-to analogy for our contemporary relationship to screens and phones. In the same way an addict needs greater and greater quantities of a drug to get the same high, and then eventually, simply to avoid feeling desperately sick, there seems to be a similar process with our need for things to pay attention to.

The Cofán, like many other peoples who live outside of industrial capitalism, spend a lot of time doing what we would call nothing. As Cepek recounts, “I think folks in our society simply have a hard time ‘doing nothing,’ as strange as that might sound. I’m not talking about ‘watching TV’ as doing nothing; I’m talking about just sitting there on a floor, in a chair, in a hammock and looking and thinking. And [the Cofán] seem to enjoy it, or at least not actively avoid it.”[12]

As (Michael) Cepek...

But while some of the key facets of attention are universal, boredom is not. The experience of boredom is contingent. It is culturally, socially, and institutionally produced. What this also means is that the experience of boredom—when it appears, how important it is, whether it even exists—changes across time and the forms of human social and economic organization. Our age features a set of technologies and social conditions that work together to maximize our boredom if we are not constantly diverted from it.

Where do I put my restless mind when I am not at work? The Lumière brothers’ short films were first screened in Paris in 1895,[23] and twenty-five years later Hollywood was pumping out eight hundred films a year.[24] The first American news radio report would be broadcast out of Pittsburgh in 1920,[25] and just over a dozen years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be speaking to an estimated sixty million people—out of eighty-two million adults—about his agenda during his fireside chats.[26] The earliest experimental TV broadcasts began in the 1930s, and by 1947 the National Broadcasting Corporation was airing programs such as Meet the Press.[27] In 1950 only 12 percent of US households had a TV; by the end of the decade it was 88 percent.[28]

Wallace conjured the notion of an infinite entertainment as dystopian warning, but infinite entertainment is now what we confront: A film ends. A TV show ends. A board game, even a long one, ultimately ends. But the scroll on the phone has no finite limit. You could, theoretically, scroll TikTok until the end of your days. It is the source of infinite jest.

(David Foster) Wallace...

we now live in a world that still toils under the tedium imposed by wage labor—millions whose minds are occupied by repetitive tasks that feel like a cage—and then as soon as those hours are done, we turn to our devices as an almost subconscious reflex, a habit developed out of the desire to flee the discomfort of being alone with our thoughts.

Our reliance on stimulation, our inability to “sit in our chamber” or in a hammock in the Amazon for hours at a time, means we are constantly reaching for a place to put our attention, yet the ready availability of diversions also seems to create a world of boredom’s alter ego: distraction. As a rough scheme, we might characterize the different states of mind we experience as rough matches between how much there is to pay attention to: too little, too much, and just enough. Boredom is the state where there is not enough that’s interesting to pay attention to. Distraction is the state of having too much to pay attention to: constant interruption, a sense of being overwhelmed and outmatched. The Goldilocks zone of just the right amount to pay attention to, we can call focus

The way out for Kierkegaard was to understand the distinction between boredom and idleness, for boredom comes from being unaccustomed to or uncomfortable with simple idleness.

You can’t busy yourself out of boredom, because the problem of boredom is deeper than just being occupied, it’s your comfort with your own thoughts.

Boredom is a mental state, one born of a lack of enough to absorb one’s attention. But it’s not a human inheritance; it’s a condition of a certain kind of modernity, and specifically, the one-way ratchet of stimulation and diversion. What if one could liberate oneself from this trap? Not by succumbing to the king’s compulsive desire for ever more diversion and amusement, nor through the quick fix of the entertainment beckoning to us from the screen, but by simply rejecting boredom. By embracing stillness and idleness, by allowing the mind to wander.

In the right amounts, solitude can be a joy and a reprieve. We speak often today of “alone time,” cherished moments where introverts can burrow into themselves away from the consuming energy of social engagement. But when you zoom out, we, as humans, have never spent so much time alone as we do now, at this moment, on this planet.

Social attention is necessary for all the other forms of human socialization, but not sufficient. And that’s in large part because unlike the aspects of relationships that give life meaning, social attention is not inherently reciprocal. This is one of its defining features. Social attention flows in two distinct and, crucially, separable directions. We can put our social attention on others, and they can put their social attention on us, and those don’t always correspond or line up.

This possibility of reciprocity forms the foundation of all social relationships; social attention is the necessary condition for any kind of relationship with other people, even if it is not sufficient for those relationships to flourish. We must pay attention to the people we have relationships with, and they must pay attention to us. But that attention doesn’t have to be positive or nourishing. This is another crucially important and distinct feature of social attention. Unlike the positive aspects of emotional connection that form the foundation of our most important human bonds, social attention can be intensely negative.

For most of our species’ history, those were the two principal categories of human relations: kin and gods. Those we knew and who knew us, grounded in mutual social interaction; and those we knew who didn’t know us, grounded in our imaginative powers.

Sartre illustrates this idea this way: You see a man in a local park, walking across the grass. You know he’s a man, a human consciousness, but the fact of that is still remote, self-contained. It is when you meet his eyes that he is no longer just the possibility of a human consciousness but rather the inescapable certainty of one. “Each look makes us concretely experience…that we exist for all living men.”[37] In other words, it’s seeing him see you, paying you social attention that makes you fully aware that you exist as an object of attention for others. The gaze is the moment that social attention itself captures our attention. It forces a kind of reckoning with how we appear to others.

Understanding the centrality of the desire for recognition is essential in understanding the power and ubiquity of social media. We have developed a technology that can create a synthetic version of our most fundamental desire. Why do any of us post anything? Because we want other humans to see us, to recognize us.

It articulates the paradox of what we might call the Star and the Fan. The Star seeks recognition from the Fan, but the Fan is a stranger, who cannot be known by the Star. Because the Star cannot recognize the Fan, the Fan’s recognition of the Star doesn’t satisfy the core existential desire. There is no way to bridge the inherent asymmetry of the relationship, short of actual friendship and correspondence, but that, of course, cannot be undertaken at the same scale. And so the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention.

This is the story of Donald Trump’s life: wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can’t quite understand the difference, even though deep in his psyche there’s a howling vortex that fame can never fill.

Even the most attention-addicted among us can find they hit their limit. “The amount of attention on me has gone supernova, which super sucks,” Elon Musk wrote in the summer of 2022, as he was in the midst of a deal to buy Twitter and multiple stories came out about the various women he had had children with. “Unfortunately, even trivial articles about me generate a lot of clicks :( Will try my best to be heads down focused on doing useful things for civilization.”[52] That lasted about a week. After trying to back out of the deal, Musk ultimately completed his purchase of Twitter at a wildly overinflated value, and would go on to obsessively post and attract constant attention to himself, even as it clearly destroyed the value of the enterprise he had paid so dearly for, forcing him to sell off Tesla stock at steeply discounted prices to stay ahead of margin calls.[53] So caught in the spiral of social attention was Musk that he was willing to give up a substantial part of his fortune.

Human work has always existed, but wage labor is a creation of industrial capitalism. Human attention has always existed, but “clicks,” “content,” “engagement,” and “eyeballs” are creations of attention capitalism. And to be reduced to a wage or an eyeball is to find oneself alienated from some part of oneself.

You can see how this model, a kind of attentional multi-level marketing scheme, would create the incentives that led to individual salespeople screaming out their product on the sidewalks like news sirens.[10] And it worked. Day’s innovation stuck, and over the course of the nineteenth century grew into an advertising-focused print industry that was the foundation of the first version of mass media. In fact, this basic model—give away the product or charge a nominal cost and make your profit by selling the audience to advertisers—became the dominant business model for most media over the next two centuries: print, radio, TV, and social media.

...worked. (Benjamin) Day's...

Our attention and our labor, both of which existed before any market institutions, have been turned into commodities that can be bought, sold, and traded.

Now, after an estimated $20 billion investment, Apple has introduced the Vision Pro headset, which is an attempt to expand the attentional supply even further. Rather than requiring you to look at the phone, the conceit of the Vision Pro, which allows you to view the world in front of you mixed together with apps, is to make the Apple attentional universe your default resting state, one where your attention is in their hands at all times. Much of the initial visceral revulsion people felt toward the product was a reaction at a deep level to the sheer alienating scope of this ambition.

Another place to look for more attentional supply is to expand the universe of people you can mine attention from, and that includes children as young as literal babies. Any parent who has been haunted by the sounds of CoComelon knows that there is endless content, particularly on YouTube, for babies and toddlers.[27] The CoComelon YouTube channel has almost 180 million subscribers and 182 billion views.[28]

The history of the commodification of attention is that demand always grows, that different entities find new ways of engaging attention and selling that attention to advertisers, but there’s always an inescapable perverse consequence to the proliferation of sales of audience attention: in aggregate the growth of competition in advertising makes each ad less valuable. This is pretty intuitive. If you drove around a deserted island all day with not a sign of commercial life anywhere, and then encountered a single massive billboard for Lexus, it would (a) definitely grab your attention and (b) stick in your memory. Now compare that experience to seeing the exact same billboard, the same size, in Times Square. Odds are you probably wouldn’t even notice it.

Most of the stories people criticize cable news (or local nightly news) over—the disappearance of a young conventionally attractive white woman, or a missing plane, 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 those editorial choices, not a justification for them.

This dynamic of people watching coverage and complaining that the coverage is excessive would be a signature aspect of the Trump years, a particular kind of alienating experience in which audiences rebelled against outlets that were giving them what, according to the numbers, they were demanding. Because what grabs our attention—the sirens—and what we as conscious creatures actually want to view or spend our time on are always at war.

In many, perhaps most, cases, a lie will grab attention more easily than the truth, which is why competitive attention markets in the news context will always push the boundaries of truth.

The contemporary version of this is the social media post that claims to have some mind-blowing secret knowledge and goes viral, only for someone to chime in to say, “Well, actually this just isn’t true.” Maybe the original poster deletes it. Maybe they don’t. Either way, it has achieved its aim, which was to make you look.

For the first 99 percent of our time on this planet, the only way we could experience ritual or spectacle or athletic competition was in person, with others. Now, most of our attention is focused on a screen in front of us in solitude.