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

by Chris Hayes

A viral meme is our current form of “paying attention together,” but it’s attenuated in this crucial way. The collective rush of watching an opera or concert or singing together at mass has been decomposed into a two-part process, each solitary. I view and then I share. I view and then I share. Then we laugh together but apart. The genius of this innovation from a business standpoint is that it creates two opportunities for attention to be captured and monetized. The joy or outrage in the moment of the thing we see, and the urge to share it. We feel the urge to share because we’re human, but also because, in the moment we see something that captures our attention, we’re alone largely because the market and technologies of attention have rendered us solitary and we don’t want to be alone. So we send the meme to a friend and we wait for the HaHa to appear next to it. And there’s joy in that too. But I don’t think it’s crazy to say all this amounts to a synthetic version of a vital life force that isn’t quite replaceable.