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

by Chris Hayes

The first wave was the Neolithic revolution, which most anthropologists agree began around twelve thousand years ago. That was when hunter-gatherers transitioned to agricultural societies that settled in one place and grew their own food. We usually identify this moment as the beginning of civilization. The basic structure of human life—rooted in agriculture as the central human activity, and the sun and human labor as the main sources of energy—endures until the eighteenth century. That is when the second wave, the industrial revolution, begins. This step change in human development comes from mechanization driven by fossil fuels. Suddenly billions of years of stored solar energy was unlocked for our use. Nearly everything we experience about modern life flows from that. And then, after that, beginning sometime in the postwar period (Toffler says the late 1950s) we get the third wave, the epoch in which computing power and information manipulation transforms the socioeconomics of human life on earth.

While relatively early in identifying this phenomenon, Future Shock lays out what are now a set of commonly held convictions about the growing abundance and accessibility of information: there’s too much of it, we’re constantly overwhelmed and distracted, it’s driving us all a bit mad.

What Simon identified far earlier than most is that as a logical matter, the rising salience of information to a given society implies necessarily a rise in the value of attention. Which is to say: the information age must also be the attention age. The two are inseparable because information consumes attention. The more information there is, the more competition there is for attention, which is by definition scarce. The more demand there is for a scarce resource, the more valuable it is.

What (Herbert) Simon...

Saying no to things, particularly new information, is a hard skill to learn if you are conditioned to information being scarce. Simon, who was born in 1916, noted that for people of his age, informational poverty was a generational inheritance. “Most of us are constitutionally unable to throw a bound volume into the wastebasket.”[19] I’ve often had occasion to note that the Boomers in my life all seem far less disposed to screen information than people my age, born into the teeth of the attention age. Older folks’ phones all ring for every call—they are never on silent—and every app they have, as a rule, can send them notifications so that their phone is constantly going off like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. Earlier generations grew up in environments of informational poverty—if someone wanted to reach you with important news while you were out of the house, they couldn’t. And if you are conditioned for information poverty, you’re likely to have a harder time recognizing how precious attention is.

Even if the product was revolutionary, it was not foreordained that it would be profitable. But Google also developed an ingenious business model. What makes Google so valuable as a for-profit enterprise is that in conserving your attention, it captures your attention. You go to Google to screen out irrelevant information and to reliably focus on the output of Google’s information processing system. This gives Google exclusive access to the most precious resource, which is your attention. And since they have your attention, they can then sell your attention to interested parties.

By 2004, when it went public, 99 percent of Google’s $3.2 billion in revenue came from advertising.[27]

But the biggest problem is one of Google’s own making. If I search, as I recently did, for a “three row ev”—that is, an electric vehicle with three rows—the first FOUR responses are all paid-for ads by various car companies that would like to sell me a three-row electric vehicle. Except the first hit is a Subaru Solterra model that doesn’t actually have three rows. And then the next hit is a Nissan Ariya model for an electric vehicle that…also doesn’t have three rows! The third advertisement is, finally, for an Infiniti QX80, which does indeed have three rows but is…not electric. Then another ad for Polestar, a new EV start-up that doesn’t offer a three-row car. After scrolling down a bit past the first four results displayed, I get to an actual nonsponsored link from an actual publication: “Here’s every three row EV you can buy, now and soon.”[31] Finally, the information I was looking for.

Even though the founders of Google understood full well that the problem of spam, writ large, was the problem their core product was designed to solve, in its chase of profits, Google has ended up spamming its own users. In fact, I’d argue that spam, broadly understood, is the defining problem of the attention age, what smokestack pollution and smog-filled skies were to the industrial revolution.

This is a kind of law of physics in the attention age: you can never defeat spam; you can only manage it. And that’s because spam will exist wherever attention collects, the same way weeds will grow wherever there are the right conditions to grow crops: they thrive in the same soil.

The US Postal Service is one of humanity’s great achievements of communication, and there is a presumptive attention that used to attach to everything that came through the mail slot. Each parcel was, after all, for you: bills, correspondence, all things that required your attention. Of course, it didn’t take long until marketers, fundraisers, politicians, and the like started taking advantage of that with bulk mailing. In 1972 junk mail constituted a quarter of all mail delivered, but by 2019 it was nearly two-thirds. A 2015 review by the Postal Service inspector general found that Americans got eighteen pieces of advertising mail for every one of personal correspondence.[46]

You can easily imagine a world with AI churning on both sides of this attentional battle—AI spam generation and AI-powered spam filters, a little like the tail end of the steroids era in baseball when both the batters and the pitchers were juiced out of their minds. Jonathan Frankle, a computer scientist at the AI firm Databricks, described this scenario to The New York Times’ Ezra Klein as the “boring apocalypse” scenario for AI: “We use ChatGPT to generate long emails and documents, and then the person who received it uses ChatGPT to summarize it back down to a few bullet points, and there is tons of information changing hands, but all of it is just fluff. We’re just inflating and compressing content generated by A.I.”[49]