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

by Chris Hayes

Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these instants of attention accrue into a life.

attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”[4]

Moray called this surprising finding the “identification paradox.” “While apparently the verbal content of the rejected message”—that is, the message in the one ear that subjects are instructed to ignore—“is blocked below the level of conscious perception, nonetheless a subject can respond to his own name.”[15]

It is easier to grab attention than to hold it. This may seem almost trivially true on its face, but it has profound and far-reaching implications. This simple truth structures a huge amount of our media consumption, and it explains why our experience of social media has become so dizzying and disjointed.

So powerful is this angst that no amount of wealth or earthly power and comfort is a shield against it. This is even true, Pascal argues, for kings. It seems the king’s mind should be at ease, for unlike nearly everyone else in the kingdom, the king is not required to engage in brutal toil for his own subsistence. And yet that is its own kind of prison: “When we imagine a king attended with every pleasure he can feel, if he be without diversion, and be left to consider and reflect on what he is, this feeble happiness will not sustain him,” Pascal writes. “He will necessarily fall into forebodings of dangers, of revolutions which may happen, and, finally, of death and inevitable disease; so that if he be without what is called diversion, he is unhappy, and more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself.”[5]

embracing stillness and idleness, by allowing the mind to wander.

What really makes the attention age different from previous eras is that the attention merchants have figured that out, too.

Consider the specific and very strange but increasingly central aspect of social attention: social attention from strangers—in other words, being known by people we do not ourselves know. The desire for this form of social attention varies enormously from person to person and over time, but it is a distinctly human desire. Only humans have access to

But if you succeed enough in the former (and this is a bit of hard-earned wisdom) you will begin to fail in the latter. The more people pay attention to you, the more you will encounter people who don’t care for you, who in fact hate your guts. Positive attention from strangers is quickly metabolized and soon almost becomes routine.

The devilish trick of social attention from strangers is that it comes with no relationship and no reciprocity attached. But you don’t realize that!

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.

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. Starvation for many in the modern context is less of a threat than abundance. Cheap processed foods have democratized the ability to overeat, leading to spiking obesity rates around the world—even as there are hundreds of millions who still face the possibility of starvation. We are as a human race “stuffed and starved,” in the memorable phrase of author Raj Patel.[51] And so it is with social attention: we are stuffed with it and starved of it all at once. There are millions still isolated, alone, literally dying from lack of social attention, and yet at the very same time the possibility of too much social attention has now been democratized, possible to achieve for more people than ever before.

There is no luxury past his grasp. But what he wants above all else, to a pathological degree, with an unsteady obsessiveness that’s thrown his fortune into question, is recognition. He wants to be recognized, to be seen in a deep and human sense.

Yet it can’t be purchased at any sum. He tried to buy the recognition of others, but all he got was their attention. And even that will fade soon enough.

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. The laborer is a mere means to an end. “Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to division of labour,” Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto, “the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it i...

The same goes for attention. 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 work has always existed, but wage labor is a creation of industrial capitalism. 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.

In fact, this basic model—give away the product or charge a nominal cost and make your profit by selling the audience to advertisers—became the dominant business model for most media over the next two centuries: print, radio, TV, and social media.

To be clear, this is not just a problem at Facebook. Evidence suggests that an enormous portion of the attention being bought and sold on the internet is being consumed by bots or other programs designed to game these very markets and metrics. A 2018 study by Adobe determined that nearly 30 percent of all web traffic showed what it called “strong non-human signals.”[20]

The alienation we feel is born of the tension between attention as a market commodity and attention as the substance of our lives.

There are many topics—like the particulars of how the electric grid works and how it must be updated for an era of zero carbon energy, or how, according to one renowned philosopher, secular people should think about the meaning of life if there’s no heaven to aspire to—that have made for fantastic podcast episodes and would fall utterly flat as seven-minute prime-time cable news segments.

No matter how persuasive and effective you are, none of it matters if no one’s listening. But that in and of itself is not enough. As is so often the case, attention is necessary but not sufficient. You must have it to do anything else, but by itself it doesn’t do what you need.

The reality of the attention age is that everywhere you look, both formal and substantive attentional regimes have collapsed. And where there is no attentional regime, no formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself. If you can’t be heard, it doesn’t matter what you say. And right now it’s both easier than ever to shout and harder than ever to be heard. The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.

As for the guy with the megaphone prattling on about the cheese cubes? Well, rather than take that one guy’s megaphone away, we just gave everyone at the party their own megaphone. And guess what: that didn’t much improve things! Everyone had to shout to be heard, and the conversation morphed into a game of telephone, of everyone shouting variations of the same snippets of language, phrases, slogans—an endless aural hall of mirrors.

And here’s the source of a whole lot of confusion and dysfunction. 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.

Because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is a very different category from what’s important for sustaining a flourishing society. This tension is the central challenge of working in the attention industry as I do, specifically in journalism.

This is just one example, but it serves as a kind of allegory. In nearly all areas of policy, from the smallest local township to the federal government, money follows attention, and the literal cost of a life depends in no small part on how attention-grabbing the death was.

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

Before trolling took on its contemporary meaning, it was a description of a method of fishing. You put a lure in the water, bright and colorful, meant to mimic a possible morsel of food for a hungry fish, and drag the lure through the water in circles attempting to attract a fish toward the bait. It’s a trick of attention: you try to grab the fish’s attention, trigger the fish’s response mechanism, and by the time it realizes the mistake it’s made, it’s too late.

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?