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

by Chris Hayes

The main truly noncommercial space we have today is the group chat, whether it’s family members exchanging pics of the grandkids’ Halloween costumes, or old friends trash-talking about each other’s favorite teams, or friends collaborating on dating advice. The group chat—people who know each other exchanging texts, memes, clips, jokes—is the source of delight and gossip and bonding and sometimes drama, but drama of the recognizably human form. There is no algorithm in the group chat, and no ads. If someone is trying to get your attention it’s a person you have an actual relationship with, not a stranger trolling you. This is the one space that re-creates the feeling of the noncommercial internet, the experience of trading emails with friends hours away in college, a form of connectivity that was new and intimate and vital in the late 1990s. In 2019, New York magazine declared, “Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again.”