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

by Chris Hayes

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

For as Kojève recounts, 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.

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.

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.

Under these conditions anything resembling democratic deliberation seems not only impossible but increasingly absurd, like trying to meditate in a strip club.