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

by Chris Hayes

It’s an image that illustrates the Freudian struggle between the ego and the id: what we want and what we know we should not, cannot have.

The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens’ call.

“My experience,” as William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology in 1890, “is what I agree to attend to.”[8] Increasingly it feels as if our experience is something we don’t fully agree to, and the ubiquity of that sensation represents a kind of rupture. Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured. Our inner lives have been transformed in utterly unprecedented fashion.

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.

Attention is a kind of resource: it has value and if you can seize it you seize that value. This has been true for a very long time. Charismatic leaders and demagogues, showmen, preachers, great salespeople, marketers, advertisers, holy men and women who rallied disciples, all have used the power of attention to accrue wealth and power.

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.

This first aspect of attention is what psychologists call voluntary attention. Voluntary attention is what happens when you sit down to read a novel, or take a test, or have a deep after-hours conversation with your partner.

Like the wail of the siren, this is an example of the second of three aspects of attention, which psychologists call involuntary attention. And like voluntary attention, the basic dynamics here are so familiar and intuitive that it can seem at first to hardly merit much inspection. We experience this all the time: a loud noise or bright light or other perceptual signal grabs our attention and interrupts our focus.

The need for this is obvious. We can’t allow ourselves to become so focused that we fail to perceive danger—too rapt in the caveman’s story of the hunt to notice the roar of a lion just a few feet away.

We need the ability to suppress nearly all the stimuli coming into our brains in order to function, but we also need to monitor the same stimuli to make sure none of it is so vital that it must command our attention. Our brains must set the threshold of focus high but not too high, a kind of Goldilocks porousness of focus that normally holds but can also be penetrated at an instant.

What matters for our purposes here is the distinction between these two aspects of attention: voluntary and involuntary. In the former mode, we are in control; our conscious mind is choosing where to focus and our brain uses its ability to suppress irrelevant stimuli. In the second mode, our conscious mind is no longer in control: our attention is directed independent of our will or desire.

the cocktail party effect.[11] Now, you might say this is an example of the second aspect of attention, involuntary attention, and at one level, sure. Like the shattering of the glasses a few moments before, what happened here was that something outside your cone of focus drew your attention without your willing it so. But overhearing your own name in another conversation is orders of magnitude more complex and astonishing as a feat of perception, so much so that I think it belongs in its own category.

But something far more complicated and subtle is at work in hearing your own name in a parallel conversation. That moment of recognition necessarily implies that even as you were focusing on one conversation and tuning out the others, some component of your brain was, like a sentry, eavesdropping on all the other conversations within earshot, transcribing and processing the words in those exchanges, on the lookout for some keywords—in particular your name. That’s pretty wild! Think of the sheer processing capacity needed to pull this off. Your conscious brain is hard at work making conversation, while in the background your own mental Cocktail Party NSA wiretaps all the other conversations with a list of keywords that will ring some kind of internal alarm. All of this is happening in real time, in hundredths or thousandths of seconds.

Here we come to the third and final aspect of attention, which is social attention. Whereas voluntary and involuntary attention have been theorized extensively in the psychology literature, social attention as a category requires a kind of philosophical lens. Being the object of another person’s focus is absent from James’s straightforward definition.

There are three main aspects of attention, the basic dynamics of which are on display in the cocktail party examples above. First there is voluntary attention: the intentional choosing of focus, the spotlight of the mind being pointed toward something, illuminating it while keeping everything outside its glow in the relative dark. Then there is involuntary attention, constantly operating in parallel to conscious attention, monitoring our environment for threats and disruptions, pushing and pulling away from conscious focus, sometimes expanding to grab our mind fully. And finally there is social attention, the fact that we can be the object of others’ attention, and the inescapable truth that being the object of others’ attention is the foundational experience of having human bonds. We also pay attention to others, and those forms of social attention, the reciprocity of exchanging attention with other humans, are the covalent bonds of human socialization. We think of other people and other people think of us, and a whole life passes around this very loop of thought.

Our biological predilection for fat and sugar has been exploited by the massive global food conglomerates that dominate modern industrial food production.

Social attention from strangers is the psychological equivalent of empty calories, and the tantalizing opportunity of the buffet of social attention that our phones now provide can lead us to gorge.

And how do these fighters turned clerks deal with the boredom induced by their current lives? They rush, of course, toward the attentional sinkhole that is the modern internet. “I sometimes miss the jihad life for all the good things it had,” said twenty-five-year-old Abdul Nafi. “In our ministry, there’s little work for me to do. Therefore, I spend most of my time on Twitter. We’re connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujahedin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter.”[2]

Attention is as old as the species, and grabbing others’ attention for social purposes is as old as shamans and poets and conversation. But that attention is now commodified and can be traded, bought, and sold in sophisticated, instantaneous algorithmic auctions that price a second of our eyes’ focus. That is new, transformative, and alienating.

Human attention has always existed, but “clicks,” “content,” “engagement,” and “eyeballs” are creations of attention capitalism. And to be reduced to a wage or an eyeball is to find oneself alienated from some part of oneself.

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.

Smartphones and immersive headsets represent one way to increase the supply of attention, which is to expand the total potential waking hours in which attention can be extracted. Notice I say “waking” hours, because there’s another frontier for expanding the supply of attention, our sleep.

there’s always an inescapable perverse consequence to the proliferation of sales of audience attention: in aggregate the growth of competition in advertising makes each ad less valuable.

And from the earliest days of markets for attention, people have understood that competitive attention markets have a tendency to race toward the bottom.

Places like Times Square, or a casino floor, or a carnival. When competition for attention is at its fiercest, amidst an unregulated free-for-all, you tend to get sensory overload.

With each new technology, and with each new development, the experience of shared spectacle is replaced with isolated attention. What was once collective experience becomes solitary.

Not only that: the people screaming the loudest still get the most attention, partly because they stand out against the backdrop of a pendulating wall of sound that is now the room tone of our collective mental lives. Suffice it to say, the result was not really a better party, nor the conversation of equals that many of us had hoped for. And it was in this setting that the guy with the loudest megaphone, the most desperate, keening need for attention in perhaps the nation’s history, rose to power.

In our feudal attentional world, the platforms act as the controlling sovereign in the territories within their control, with rules of conduct, enforcement mechanisms (often lackluster), and punishments for violations.

The platforms are attempting to regulate attention because that is what they are monetizing.

With ever more competition for attention, with a near total breakdown of noncommercial attentional regimes, and with ever more sophisticated technologies in place for capturing and monetizing our attention, the question of which issues we pay attention to determines more about the trajectory of our democracy and culture than they ever have.

This simple truth has profound implications for our civic health. Because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is a very different category from what’s important for sustaining a flourishing society.

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.

In her book about navigating interpersonal conflict, Amanda Ripley uses the term “conflict entrepreneurs” to describe people who thrive on drama and discord.

We are not destined to have the current form of attention capitalism forever, or even for that much longer.

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. We see the impulses toward these movements everywhere, from the runaway success of critiques of the current attentional status quo in the documentary The Social Dilemma and in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation. But there are also people working to create a grassroots movement of attention resistance.

The Friends of Attention, and the associated school, the Strother School of Radical Attention, are among the groups organizing grassroots resistance to the current forms of attention capitalism.[12]

In the legal context, one of the biggest challenges is that attention is a difficult thing to regulate because in the US it is so connected to and difficult to sever from speech.

But there are ways to regulate attention that plausibly sidestep the speech question by simply imposing totally non-viewpoint-specific limitations that apply across the board.

I am fully aware that heavy-handed regulation of attention markets like a cap on hours would face steep political and legal opposition.

You can feel that this era is ending, that the power of attention capitalism is so formidable that the state is going to find ways to bring it to heel.

But there’s another way to view efforts to regulate the marketing of our attention. One of the earliest slogans pushing the eight-hour workday was, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will.” It feels as if more and more of that time is now taken from us, not willed by us. Our control over the space of our mind, stolen away. Are we really spending the precious hours of our waking, nonworking lives doing “what we will”? Or has the conquering logic of capitalism penetrated our quietest, most intimate moments? We don’t have to accept this. It does not need to be this way.