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.

My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource—our attention—is also the very thing that makes us human. Unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.

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

“Under…Fascism there appears for the first time in Europe a type of man who does not want to give reasons or to be right, but simply shows himself resolved to impose his opinions,” wrote Spanish intellectual José Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses. “Here I see the most palpable manifestation of the new mentality of the masses, due to their having decided to rule society without the capacity for doing so.”[37]

The worker, Karl Marx observed in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”[43]

Attention can be extracted from us at the purely sensory level, before our conscious will even gets to weigh in. In fact, this is how a siren functions.

There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society. To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing.[20]