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

by Chris Hayes

“My experience,” as William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology in 1890, “is what I agree to attend to.”[8]

Because to live at this moment in the world, both online and off, is to find oneself endlessly wriggling on the mast, fighting for control of our very being against the ceaseless siren calls of the people and devices and corporations and malevolent actors trying to trap it.

The alienating experience of being divided and distracted in spite of ourselves, to be here but not present.

My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource—our attention—is also the very thing that makes us human. Unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.

Attention is a kind of resource: it has value and if you can seize it you seize that value.

Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention.

information is infinite and attention is limited. And value derives from scarcity, which is why attention is so valuable.

Attention can be extracted from us at the purely sensory level, before our conscious will even gets to weigh in. In fact, this is how a siren functions.

Information is abundant; attention is scarce. Information is theoretically infinite, while attention is constrained. This is why information is cheap and attention is expensive.