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

by Chris Hayes

Let’s imagine an independent craftsman, say a cobbler, doing his work before industrialization. He has his shop, and he makes his shoes with care and pride. He is present and intentional at each step of the process used to take raw leather and turn it into a shoe. He also has the satisfaction of a kind of telos to his work; he gets to oversee an arc of progression from raw materials to finished product. In the end, he has produced an object that he has authorship of. It is his. And then he can sell it, taking money in exchange for the good. Now compare that experience to someone working in a shoe factory. The factory worker does not have any control whatsoever of the process by which the shoe is made. He applies relatively little technique or craft to the product. He can’t control the timeline, and he does not have a progressive set of tasks that change over time as the shoe goes from raw materials to finished product. Instead, he mans a machine that does the same thing—stamping an insole, for instance—over and over, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. What was once the craftsman’s own—his technique and ability, his object—is now the capitalist’s.