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

by Chris Hayes

It’s the promise of something more interesting, the buffet of possible interactions, that makes it even harder to focus on the conversation in front of you.

Attention is so central, so oddly distributed, so valuable in the aggregate but so cheap and fleeting in our actual lives. It’s devalued even as it’s celebrated. The attention age has made Willy Lomans of us all.

The manager at a tony Manhattan department store called it “the disease of the ’80s.”[40] A CBS record executive declared that it was “the end of meeting people. It’s like a drug: You put the Walkman on and you blot out the rest of the world.”[41] “In seeking a sort of emotional climate control wherever we go,” one critic asked, “are we not simply proving anew our growing determination not to deal with one another?”

If humans had struggled for thousands of years with a dearth of calories, they were—at least in certain societies and classes—now wrestling with the ramifications of an abundance. So it is with information today: we were once starved and are now stuffed.

“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.”

But now imagine someone enters the class whose compensation is dependent on how much she can get the students to pay attention to her rather than whatever else they’re supposed to be paying attention to. She makes funny noises, starts showing a movie in the corner on her phone, sets up a video game system. And now imagine there are multiple people in the room who have this incentive and they’re competing. Very obviously the teacher would have no chance, and no learning would get done. It sounds like a ludicrous thought experiment, I know, but it also happens to be a decent approximation of how we now conduct our public discourse.

“hey sorry I missed your text, I am processing a non-stop 24/7 onslaught of information with a brain designed to eat berries in a cave.”

The Friends of Attention, and the associated school, the Strother School of Radical Attention, are among the groups organizing grassroots resistance to the current forms of attention capitalism.[12] I think these are vital enterprises and you should look into joining them if you agree with the basic thrust of this book.