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

by Chris Hayes

I’ve come to believe that in the internet age, the psychologically destabilizing experience of fame is coming for everyone.

The Western intellectual tradition spent millennia maintaining a conceptual boundary between public and private—embedding it in law and politics, norms and etiquette, theorizing and reinscribing it. With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.

the master desires recognition from the slave, but because he does not recognize the slave’s humanity, he cannot have it. “And this is what is insufficient—what is tragic—in his situation,” Kojève writes. “For he can be satisfied only by recognition from one whom he recognizes as worthy of recognizing him.”[50] We can only experience the existential satisfaction of recognition from those who we ourselves truly recognize. We can only have our own personhood affirmed by other people we grasp deeply as persons themselves.

And so the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention.

This is the story of Donald Trump’s life: wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can’t quite understand the difference, even though deep in his psyche there’s a howling vortex that fame can never fill.

Because no one really wants mere attention: not Mandela in his cell losing his mind and soul to loneliness, nor Willy Loman trying to peddle his wares, nor even Donald Trump compulsively posting. We want recognition, and attention is a poor but plausible substitute. It’s the synthetic form of a sublime experience.

The core of alienation is a subjective experience of something that should be part of us seeming foreign or alien to us. It’s a sense of dis-integration, the opposite of wholeness.

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.

Capitalism’s central feature, arguably, is that it gets better and better at taking every task of production and reducing it to simplified units of labor. “As the division of labour increases, labour is simplified,” Marx wrote in Wage Labour and Capital. “The special skill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple, monotonous productive force that does not have to use intense bodily or intellectual faculties. His labour becomes a labour that anyone can perform.”[4]

Obviously, no farmer can grow new sets of eyeballs to watch our screens, no stores of human attention lie buried in the ground. There are a certain number of humans, with a certain number of waking hours and a fixed amount of attention to capture. When attention capitalists want to increase the supply, they have no means of creating it; they must instead find new ways to take it from us. And boy do they try.

Unlike the car radio, or the TV set, or a billboard fixed in place, the phone can always be with us, theoretically expanding the supply of attention-paying seconds to every moment we are awake. (Newspapers and magazines used to have this portability advantage over TV and movies, but the phones have dislodged it.)

Anyone who has ever stayed up later than they wanted scrolling through their phone in bed knows how successful attention miners have been in expropriating sleep from us in bulk.

The ecstatic joy of collective attention is the joy of the theater or the stadium concert or attending a basketball game in a packed arena. It’s not just that you have something to put your attention on, but also that you are embedded in a social world in which the power of the focused attention itself feels otherworldly. Most people can remember their first concert, and what’s so sublime about it is precisely this distinct and elevated sense of attention:

This is the core power of religious ritual, too. For much of human history, religious observation, rite, ritual, and devotion have been the central focus of collective attention and shared spectacle. It is the original form of “paying attention together.”

For the first 99 percent of our time on this planet, the only way we could experience ritual or spectacle or athletic competition was in person, with others. Now, most of our attention is focused on a screen in front of us in solitude.

The proliferation of screens allowed for, or coincided with, a proliferation of different things to watch: What could be viable if you had to get only one person in the family to watch it as opposed to everyone? The inexorable logic of attention markets drives toward individuation at both the form and content level, the physical device that acts to grab the attention and the product that is displayed on it. The two act together: the move from movie screen to TV screen to tablet and iPhone is what facilitates the move from mass culture to ever more balkanized subcultures.

The development of digital technology like this has made spectacle increasingly privatized and solitary.

But one way of defining culture is simply what everyone pays attention to, and what they pay attention to together.

Attention capitalism has taken the holistic experience of mass spectacle, the social unity of paying attention together, the ecstasis of being one of many all pointed in the same direction absorbed in the same senses, and divided it into composite processes each experienced individually and alone—watching something, and then sharing it.

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.

The dopamine rush of finding some nugget of information, or some new corner of the mind palace under construction, was real. If you happened to be an insatiably curious kid, with a nerdy compulsion to collect facts and knowledge, this experience was nearly euphoric, like being let loose unattended in a candy shop where everything was free and no one would tell you you’d had enough. This instant access to all the world’s knowledge is still present, of course, omnipresent with the addition of smartphones. But in the pre–social media age, a huge amount of the activity of being online was hunting for information like treasure and then finding it. It’s the sensation I think people of my generation all end up chasing in the commercialized, synthetic form now offered through social media.

In an information-rich world, the 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. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.[12]

For any given organization, the question of information processing isn’t really one of how much information a given system can process—whether that’s a computer or some group of humans. It is, rather, whether a given system for processing information actually reduces the attentional demands on the organization as a whole:

What makes a given information processing system useful to an organization isn’t how much information it generates or even the raw amount of information it can process. Rather, “The crucial question is how much information it will allow to be withheld from the attention of other parts of the system.” In other words, “To be an attention conserver for an organization, an information-processing system (abbreviated IPS) must be an information condenser.”[14] This framework is the opposite of how so many organizations think about information and organizational resources. Simon uses the example of a foreign office whose purview is to process intelligence information. The problem, as this hypothetical foreign office sees it, is not enough communication, not enough information being passed along. “When events in the world were lively, the teletypes carrying incoming dispatches frequently fell behind. The solution: replace the teletypes with line printers of much greater capacity. No one apparently asked whether the IPSs (including the Foreign Minister) that received and processed messages from the teletypes would be ready, willing, and able to process the much larger volume of messages from the line printers.”[15]

Saying no to things, particularly new information, is a hard skill to learn if you are conditioned to information being scarce. Simon, who was born in 1916, noted that for people of his age, informational poverty was a generational inheritance. “Most of us are constitutionally unable to throw a bound volume into the wastebasket.”[19] I’ve often had occasion to note that the Boomers in my life all seem far less disposed to screen information than people my age, born into the teeth of the attention age. Older folks’ phones all ring for every call—they are never on silent—and every app they have, as a rule, can send them notifications so that their phone is constantly going off like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.

the hard limit for all information technologies is the fixed quantity of our attention,

the way spammers use our attention “is exploitative not because they extract some value from it but because in doing so they devalue it for everyone else—that is, in plain language, they waste our time for their benefit.”[47]

They waste our time for their benefit. When you understand it like that, spam isn’t a side problem or trivial problem; it is the problem of our time. Spam is all the things we don’t want to pay attention to that want our attention.

It costs the spammer nothing to distract us. It costs a lot to be distracted.

1993 I could lose hours surfing through? Because people, for zero monetary compensation, will spend tremendous time and effort making things that they want others to see—posting to Usenet newsgroups and writing blogs and chatting in chat rooms and making silly one-page joke pages. All this creativity and humor and knowledge, all of it being done, at some level, in the pursuit of attention, all of it part of a largely noncommercial attention gift economy, where people traded their attention back and forth.

“You must meet the condition of concision,” he once said. “You gotta say things between two commercials or in 600 words. And that’s a very important fact. The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts.”[12] Because, according to Chomsky, unconventional pronouncements, such as “The worst terrorist campaign in the world by far is the one that’s being orchestrated in Washington,” require far more elaboration and explanation than can ever be allowed within these constraints and so normally never make it on air.[13]

constraining the time devoted to discussion of a topic has some substantive effect on the ideas presented—is

But even if it’s not sound campaign advice in every or even most instances, Trump’s attentional dominance flows from the simple and true insight that attention has never mattered more than it does in the attention age, and you have to be prepared to do anything to get it.

When abolitionists were trying to focus public attention on slavery through newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, and novels, they were doing it in an attention market that was wildly underpopulated compared to what we live with now. Same for the civil rights movement of the second half of the twentieth century, when TV came to dominate public discourse. Martin Luther King Jr. and his cohort understood how important TV coverage of their movement was to moving public opinion in their direction.

we all still retain an outdated model of how public conversation happens in America. We are still thinking in terms of debate. We expect or anticipate some attentional regime undergirding the public conversation, so that within the rules and constraints of that regime, we can have genuine debate. But that’s not at all what’s happening.

The most basic attentional regime is the alternating of who is doing the talking in a conversation. It guides nearly all human interaction. Interrupting someone else will always draw the attention toward yourself, but at the cost of violating that basic underlying norm and making you seem obnoxious or unhinged or worse. Trump’s constant interruptions were the logical conclusion of his core insight: that there is no attentional regime anymore.There is no central means of fixing focus on a given question or issue or controversy, which can then be debated.

In our own attention age, the most important trait is the ability to get attention, above all else. The shamelessness to interrupt. While under a functioning attentional regime, other abilities might distinguish one in the public sphere, as the attentional regimes collapse, the ability to get attention becomes more and more essential.

The name “platform” itself speaks to the irreducible truth about what these enterprises are: means of regulating and controlling attention. A platform is one of the oldest technologies for attracting and distributing attention. By simply raising someone a foot or two above a crowd, their voice carries farther and everyone can see them. Just this simple little piece of architecture creates an attentional regime.

Platforms regulate attention to maximize its monetization. This is very different from other attentional regimes, in which the regulation of the attention is a means to some other end: the vigorous debate necessary for democratic deliberation, or the orderly administration of group decision-making, and on and on. Platforms regulate attention to keep your attention on the platform. There is no purpose other than that. That is their value proposition.

A public sphere wholly dominated by commercial platforms seeking to maximize the aggregate amount of attention they draw in order to monetize that attention will produce a public that has a difficult time sustaining focus.

Attention is not a moral faculty. Without concerted effort, habit, and training, what we are drawn to focus on and what we believe to be important and worthy bear no intrinsic relation to each other.

This gap between what gets attention and what, in some more considered sense, we believe is truly important is at least as old as modern media. And to the endless frustration of critics through the decades, the superficial has trumped the profound when it comes to what the public pays attention to. Walter Lippmann found it maddening that the public’s own interests were so reliably childlike, putting their attention on trivial matters rather than substantive ones.

In nearly all areas of policy, from the smallest local township to the federal government, money follows attention,

But our biggest problems and challenges are often literally invisible or silent or happen in secrecy and shadows, producing the opposite of spectacle.

The experience of being a politician largely revolves around navigating the sharp realities of an attentional landscape that feels wholly outside your own making.

When attention becomes the only thing that matters in public life, several other related forms of public discourse bloom like mold and begin to overtake everything else. There are three tendencies in the public discourse of the attention age that are particularly common and insidious: trolling, whataboutism, and conspiracism.

The basic reality of detaching mass communication and socialization from face-to-face communication means that normal inhibitors for all kinds of antisocial behavior are eradicated. People can’t see you, they don’t know who you are, and you can say things in online venues you’d never have the nerve or even impulse to say to people in person. Everyone you encounter is a disembodied little image or username, not fully human, and this form of social interaction makes the true substance of human connection—recognition, love—nearly impossible and replaces it with the chemically similar but wildly less rewarding experience of attention.

A big lie is often more attentionally compelling than a list of small truths.

We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit.

The promise of the information age was unparalleled access to every single last bit of human knowledge at every moment, and the reality is a collective civic mental life that permanently teeters on the edge of madness.