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

by Chris Hayes

“hey sorry I missed your text, I am processing a non-stop 24/7 onslaught of information with a brain designed to eat berries in a cave.”[75]

One of the necessary conditions for sanity is the ability to order one’s thoughts, to control one’s mind, to flash the beam of thought where we want it to go. Those who struggle with various forms of acute mental illness are battling moment to moment to exert this kind of dominance over their own thoughts against intrusions, voices, apparitions, elements of psyche that feel outside of their control that come unbidden. But that precisely describes the nature of our shared public discourse, the burbling, insistent ruckus of a deeply unquiet mind.

It is hard these days to escape a pervasive sense of dread and doom, particularly online. The heady early days of Wired magazine in the 1990s, the era of internet triumphalism and blogging seem now like a fever dream or the cringe-inducing naivete of youth. When I was in my early twenties, I and so many of my cohort truly believed in the power of the internet to fundamentally alter the power dynamics of American political life. We were angry, sometimes despairing, but we also felt that, at least at a technological level, the future belonged to us.

Today I feel very differently. Each new technological innovation forms a knot in my stomach. Each new development in the tech world seems dystopian and foreboding. I am tempted to think this is simply a process known as “aging.” Yes, when you are young, change seems welcome and exciting, and as you age it seems terrifying. Story old as time. And yet there’s something else happening.

If attention is the substance of life, then the question of what we pay attention to is the question of what our lives will be. And here we come to a foundational question that is far harder to answer than we might like it to be. What do we want to pay attention to? If we didn’t have all the technologies and corporations vying for our attention, if our attention wasn’t being commodified and extracted, what would we affirmatively choose to pay attention to?

this may all seem like the misbegotten reverie of a man trapped in his longing for a simpler day, but I actually think there’s a crucial applicable insight in this tale. It’s not like the video store was a nonprofit: it was a commercial enterprise, which offered a service within that era of the attention economy for a price, and sought to turn a profit. Its value was the outgrowth of a technological innovation (the creation of VHS cassettes, later DVDs) and then a set of businesses that grew up around that technology.

I think some useful models in other domains suggest these forms of escape are going to become more and more popular and even lucrative in the coming years.

When you put an album on a record player you are committing your attention to that album. You have bound yourself to the mast.[7]

While I was writing this book, we decided to start getting the daily New York Times delivered, and I was immediately astonished by what a vastly superior product it is.

These may seem like hipster, niche alternatives to the dominant attention market models, but I think (and fervently hope) we will see increasing growth in businesses, technologies, and models of consumption that seek to evade or upend the punishing and exhausting reality of the endless attention commodification we’re living through.

I think it’s very likely we’ll see the growth of all kinds of attentional farmers’ markets for people who want to opt out of constant attention commodification. At first all of this will seem quirky and weird and small and countercultural. Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “Newspapers and physical books? Really?” Yes, really. I can’t predict exactly the forms it will take, but the palpable rebellion to the current dominant experience of near constant alienation means people will opt out, and it’s one of the axioms of American capitalism that where there is consumer demand, there will soon be businesses to serve it.

what if we had places free from commercial imperatives altogether? The overwhelming majority of the time we spend online is on platforms or spaces that are actively attempting to commodify and commercialize our attention. It wasn’t always this way. The earliest version of the internet, and then the one that blossomed in the late 1990s and the 2000s, was built on a whole host of entirely noncommercial structures that allowed people to interact and build community, and share and flirt and chat and the like without any undergirding commercial interest in what they did.

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.”

in the same way you can hang out with your friends at a public park or at a beach instead of at a restaurant or a mall, we should have noncommercial options for this kind of connection.

Just as the alternatives to supermarket chains and fast food grew out of movements of deep ideological resistance to the logic of hypercapitalism in food distribution, so too will the frameworks and models for what comes next for our inner lives. We need a movement that resists the predations of attention capitalism, just as the back-to-the-land movement, and the luddites and trade unions all resisted the forms of commodification and alienation they faced.