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

by Chris Hayes

Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these instants of attention accrue into a life.

also find myself shrinking more than a little at how much the conversation around the evils of our phones sounds like a classic moral panic.

“Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic,” Cohen writes. Some group or cultural trend “emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions.”[18]

We can also see this familiar pattern when the target is a new technology rather than a cultural trend or group: excitement and wonder that quickly turn to dread and panic.

In 1929, as radio rose to become a dominant form of media in the country, The New York Times asked, “Do Radio Noises Cause Illness?” and informed its readers that there was “general agreement among doctors and scientific men that the coming of the radio has produced a great many illnesses, particularly caused by nervous troubles. The human system requires repose and cannot be kept up at the jazz rate forever.”[20]

Rather, I think these complaints and concerns about accelerating technology and media are broadly correct. When writing was new, it really did pose a threat to all kinds of cherished older forms of thinking and communicating. Same too with the printing press and mass literacy, and then radio and television. And it is when a technology is newest, when it’s hottest to the touch, that it burns most intensely.

To achieve clarity about what it means to be human in this specific era, it’s necessary at each moment to ask what’s new and what’s not, what’s being driven by some novel technology or innovation and what’s inherent in human society itself. For example, it’s not a new phenomenon for masses of people to believe things that aren’t true. People didn’t need Facebook “disinformation” for witch trials and pogroms, but there’s also no question that frictionless, instant global communication acts as an accelerant. Also not new: our desires to occupy our minds when idle. Look at pictures of streetcar commuters of the early twentieth century and you’ll see cars packed with men in suits and hats, every last one reading the newspaper, their noses buried in them as surely as modern commuters are buried in their phones.

there’s also no question that the relationship we have to our phones is fundamentally different in kind than the relationship those streetcar commuters had to their newspapers.

Along with the question of what is and is not new, there’s also the deeper question of what is and is not harmful. It is easy to conflate the two. When tobacco use first exploded in Europe there were those who rang the alarm bells. As early as 1604,

Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books or cigarettes?

Attention is a kind of resource: it has value and if you can seize it you seize that value.

Information is the opposite of a scarce resource: it is everywhere and there is always more of it. It is generative. It is copyable. Multiple entities can have the same information.

But if someone has your attention, you know it. It can’t be in multiple places at once, the way information can.

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

now view audience attention as something like the wind that powers a sailboat. It’s a real phenomenon, independent of the boat, and you can successfully sail only if you harness it. You don’t turn the boat into the wind, but you also don’t simply allow the wind to set your course. You figure out where you want to go (in the case of my show, what I think is important for people to know), you identify which way the wind is blowing, and then, using your skills and the tools of the boat, you tack back and forth to manage to arrive at your destination using that wind power.

But the extraction of our attention happens in a different way. People can be forced to work in all kinds of cruel and oppressive ways, but they cannot be forced to do it purely through the manipulation of their preconscious faculties. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to dig a ditch, you know you are being coerced. If someone fires a gun in the air, your attention will instantly shift to the sound even before you can fully grasp what’s happening. 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.

Attention is prior to other aspects of speech and communication we associate with power—persuasion, argumentation, information. Before you can persuade you must capture attention: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!”[44] Before you inform, insult, seduce, or anything else, you must make sure that your voice doesn’t end up in the muted background static that is 99.9 percent of speech directed our way.

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.

it’s the first of three central aspects of attention. This first aspect of attention is what psychologists call voluntary attention. Voluntary attention is what happens when you sit down to read a novel, or take a test, or have a deep after-hours conversation with your partner.

This form of attention works through negation, as opposed to amplification. What we’re actually doing in our brains is suppressing everything other than what we’re focused on.

Like the wail of the siren, this is an example of the second of three aspects of attention, which psychologists call involuntary attention.

Here we come to the third and final aspect of attention, which is social attention. Whereas voluntary and involuntary attention have been theorized extensively in the psychology literature, social attention as a category requires a kind of philosophical lens.

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. We are creatures that pay attention to things in our environment, yes, but also to other people. In turn we seek their attention on us. There is a reason it is our name, and not some other keyword, that wrenches our attention toward that overheard conversation: We want to know who’s talking about us. Who is paying attention to us. And this social need will always be a central aspect of the complex frictions at work in how our own attention is focused. In fact, it is this facet of attention that the attention merchants of the age have most effectively exploited.

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. We also pay attention to others, and those forms of social attention, the reciprocity of exchanging attention with other humans, are the covalent bonds of human socialization. We think of other people and other people think of us, and a whole life passes around this very loop of thought.

First you need to grab attention: you need people to tune in to your show, or stop flipping the channels when they see it on their screen, or load the video link when a clip passes by their feeds. And once you have their attention, you need to hold it.

today we have an unprecedented amount of data about when people stop paying attention—when they stop watching, or reading, or engaging. Just about every single piece of this data bears out the basic distinction between grabbing attention and holding it.

In cable news, the highest-rated moments of the show are usually the opening ones, known as the A block. Nearly all shows see some drop-off over the hour. This dynamic is even more pronounced for written content, like news websites, which monitor how many people click through to a story and then how many minutes they spend reading

a core insight that unlocks a fundamental truth about the entire experience of the attention age: It is easier to grab attention than to hold it. This may seem almost trivially true on its face, but it has profound and far-reaching implications.

But to the extent that new perceptual stimulus endures, it fades in intensity as our attention adapts, the way our pupils constrict to adjust to bright light. We shift back into a posture of volition—is this something we want to consciously attend to or not? This is the challenge of voluntary attention, and it’s a good degree more difficult. It’s easy to get someone to read the headline; hard to get them to read the article.

That’s because getting a room full of people’s attention is easy so long as you’re allowed to use any method at your disposal. But now let’s imagine you’ve rushed in and pulled this off. The entire room is staring at you as you hold your gun aloft or stand naked before them. Now what? Let’s say now your task is to hold that crowd’s attention, to keep them spellbound for the next two hours. What’s your move? Not such a trivial task!

If you want to grab as much attention as possible at scale, you need to constantly try to solve for this ultimately unsolvable problem. Sometimes you’ll succeed and produce a hit movie or TV show. More often you’ll fail, even when you attempt to hew tightly to the basic contours of attention that are common knowledge among those of us who work in the attention business. Why did one network’s police procedural succeed while another failed? No one knows! Humans are unpredictable, and human appetites, literal and figurative, are vast and strange.

But what if you could avoid this puzzle altogether? Given how much easier it is to grab attention than to hold it, there would be enormous monetary rewards for anyone who figured out a way to bypass holding attention and simply maximize means of grabbing attention iteratively, over and over.

the most successful forms of attention capture of our age almost entirely circumvent the problem of holding voluntary attention, opting instead for an increasingly effective form of iteratively grabbing our attention over and over again. I call this the slot machine model because it takes its basic approach from one of the earliest and most successful attention machines in history. It’s come to dominate our entire world’s attention economy,

Loot boxes, for those who don’t know, are essentially in-game slot machines that randomly dispense goodies.

Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok all rely on this approach. It is, I think, not an accident that the main perceptual structure of the most popular social media platforms, “the feed,” moves like a slot machine—scrolling vertically, endlessly. These apps retain our attention via a structured form of constant stimulus, continuous interruption, never having to do much to hold our attention.

We’ve got three main aspects of attention in our working model: involuntary attention, voluntary attention, and social attention. Compelling attention, that is, grabbing it, is much easier than holding it, since grabbing attention doesn’t depend on unlocking the boundless mysteries of the human soul. That means competitive markets for attention are going to tend toward the slot machine model. But alongside those two aspects of attention is that third potent aspect of attention, social attention. You can’t really understand the attention age without understanding how this too has been exploited.

And unlike the ease with which attention can be captured rather than held, which attention miners have long understood, this feature of attention has only recently been unlocked.

A shorthand for how contemporary digital attention miners extract attention is: hail, grab, hold. Those three methods correspond to the three main aspects of attention: social attention, involuntary attention, and voluntary attention. The first two forms of attention and attentional capture are far easier than the last one, and so the vast resources and technology increasingly brought to bear on this lucrative problem tend to exploit our social identities and our neurological wiring, to compel attention through interruption.

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?

At one level this is an example of the addiction we have to our phones, patting our jacket pockets like the smoker desperately trying to find his pack of Marlboros. But those of us of a certain age remember a similar feeling long before the smartphone: getting to the bathroom with nothing to read, or sitting at the breakfast table before school, bleary-eyed, reading the back of the cereal box because it was the only thing available to occupy your mind. While the state of constant interruption of the attention age may be unwelcome, it grows from a desire that long predates modern life.

Never before in human life on the planet have more people had access to a wider array of diversions at each waking instant. And yet we are increasingly stalked, as the king is, by the sense that it’s not enough. The more diversion available, the more diversion we need, and the more intolerable we find its absence. This is the king’s paradox.

The amusement creep of the king’s paradox is just about everywhere you look. I think nothing of settling onto my couch after a long day at work and putting on a basketball game while scrolling through my phone and sometimes even also scrolling through my laptop at the same time! This would have looked absolutely deranged to me just ten years earlier.

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.

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.

Drudgery existed well before industrial capitalism—harvesting wheat, chopping wood, shoveling stables, and on and on. But preindustrial life moved in more seasonal rhythms and featured more variety in tasks—sowing in the spring, reaping in the fall, hunkering down in the winter. Whereas in the factory, the worker found himself now doing the same single thing day in and day out, no matter the season, all day and all year long.

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.

This is probably the single most common complaint of our age, the inability to focus, the shrinking attention span, the sense of constant distraction. We flee from any moment of time in which our minds might be empty, but in so doing find the reward we seek—to be absorbed, to have our attention fully occupied—harder and harder and harder to find.

Our minds crave things to pay attention to, but above all else we crave connection with other humans. The way out of the trap is to put our attention on other people. What really makes the attention age different from previous eras is that the attention merchants have figured that out, too.

“In great part the history of fame,” Braudy writes, “is the history of the changing ways by which individuals have sought to bring themselves to the attention of others, and not incidentally, have thereby gained power over them.”[32]

Nearly all the social attention we receive in life is from people we know: family, friends, kin, coworkers. This conditions us to care what other people say or think about us, because caring what they say or think is what makes up the reciprocal glue of the relationship. The devilish trick of social attention from strangers is that it comes with no relationship and no reciprocity attached. But you don’t realize that! Or if you do at an intellectual level, you can’t quite internalize it at the deepest level of your psyche.