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

by Chris Hayes

The worker, Karl Marx observed in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, “does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”[43]

8% in and we’re quoting Marx? This is why I love Chris Hayes lol

It felt a bit odd to find myself in competition with my own screen to win the battle.

Karl Marx identified this transformation as the root of alienation: the division of labor reduced men to a single dimension.

Love the Marx discussions!

Jenny Odell’s brilliant book about “resisting the attention economy” is literally called How to Do Nothing. She writes that “to do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there.”[46]

Over one quarter of US households contain just a single person.[19] The numbers are higher in much of Europe, reaching up to 60 percent in the Swedish city of Stockholm.[20]

In one oft-cited study the negative health effects of persistent loneliness were roughly the same as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.[23]

There was a profound asymmetry to these experiences. Any positive words would barely register, but insults and criticisms rippled out through my consciousness, sometimes ruining whole days.

I think anyone who has used social media as a public forum can relate to that, fame or not.

what Loman or anybody wants is more than mere attention. We crave attention as a means to an end, but when starved we take it as an end in and of itself. So what is it we actually want?

What does the world’s richest man want that he cannot have? What will he pay the biggest premium for? He can buy whatever he desires. 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. It’s what Willy Loman wanted and it’s what ended up killing him. Musk spent $44 billion to buy himself what poor pathetic Willy Loman couldn’t have. 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.

Oof

“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 is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.”[3]

What’s most useful about Marx’s account for what we’re discussing here is how it identifies the root of alienation in a set of technological and economic changes that utterly transform one’s inner life and experience of the world.

In fact, Hwang argues, the entire ad-tech market has dangerous similarities to the US housing market right before the great financial crisis of 2008.

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.

I know the Internet is full of digital ghosts but I never connected these dots. That’s hilarious and, a little disturbing? Like the tech has become its own self-fulfilling economy, no humans required.

Commodities, Polanyi says, are “objects produced for sale on the market.”[22] But fictitious commodities (labor, for example) are traded and priced like commodities in a market economy even though they are not produced for the market as such. Our attention and our labor, both of which existed before any market institutions, have been turned into commodities that can be bought, sold, and traded.

“too good to check.” Something that’s “too good to check” is a story whose details are so attention-grabbing and engrossing you almost don’t want to find out if they’re true, for fear it will ruin what makes the story so compelling.

In describing this experience, Bo Burnham, a performer who has made a critique of the attention age the central focus of his work, uses the metaphor of colonization. “We used to colonize land, that was the thing you could expand into. And that’s where money was to be made,” he says. “They are now trying to colonize every minute of your life…. They’re coming for every second of your life.”[37]

For the first 99 percent of our time on this planet, the only way we could experience ritual or spectacle or athletic competition was in person, with others. Now, most of our attention is focused on a screen in front of us in solitude.

As they would subsequently argue in their get-rich-quick advice book about marketing on the internet, there was no actual community on the internet, just people and their collective reserves of attention.

Valid point though.

Brunton says the way spammers use our attention “is exploitative not because they extract some value from it but because in doing so they devalue it for everyone else—that is, in plain language, they waste our time for their benefit.”[47]

The basics of the problem track along the same lines: capitalism functions on infinite growth but requires resources and inputs from the earth—oil, wood, copper, and so on—that are finite. Eventually there’s going to be a reckoning, either in mass shortages, soaring costs, environmental ruination, or some cataclysmic combination of all three.

I’m glad that it’s being talked about somewhere because it certainly seems like an unapproachable topic in economics courses.

The Limits to Growth, put out by the international think tank the Club of Rome in 1972, used sophisticated computer modeling to project a future of spiking prices, mass scarcity, and disaster.

: Notes for later research :

If I want your attention for any reason, I might begin by asking you for information, such as who you are and what you do, not necessarily because that is of great interest to me, but because it is a good way to get your attention.

If Zelensky is a natural performer, Musk is the opposite: he is a black hole of negative charisma. But he so desires attention, he’s willing to pay top dollar for it. Zelensky traded attention for material resources, while Musk has traded material resources, literally tens of billions of dollars, for attention.

LOL DAMN

The first speaker gave an hour-long speech. The second speaker responded with a ninety-minute rebuttal, which was followed by a thirty-minute response from the first speaker. This meant three hours of straight speechifying, longer than most movies and football games.

(Debate during the Lincoln era.)

These attentional regimes are so ubiquitous they’re largely assumed. But they are like a building’s foundation beneath the frost line: without it, everything meaningful—fact-finding, deliberation, decision—collapses.

“You gotta say things between two commercials or in 600 words. And that’s a very important fact. The beauty of concision is that you can only repeat conventional thoughts.”[12]

- Noam Chomsky

“Senator Douglas, you have ninety seconds to explain popular sovereignty.” “Congressman Lincoln, we’ll give you thirty seconds to respond to Mr. Douglas on Dred Scott.” It would be, inevitably and unavoidably, a far, far stupider, shallower enterprise.

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he writes. “They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.”[16]

The age we’re living through is akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism.

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.

if what you are fishing for is attention, then the easiest lure, the brightest and shiniest, the most impossible to ignore, is to be ostentatiously cruel, or outrageous, or offensive.

We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us, all part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit.

In 2023, the American Dialect Society named “enshittification” as its word of the year.

Thank you Cory Doctorow.

We can have alternate forms of attention markets, but 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.

The group chat, he argued, had become an “outright replacement for the defining mode of social organization of the past decade: the platform-centric, feed-based social network.”

I actually love this idea

labor movements and various radical and reformist thinkers, critics, parties, and political tendencies began to first build solidarity and community around resistance to these new exploitative forms of life and then subsequently to articulate a role for the government to step in and regulate key aspects of the labor-for-wages market exchange.

At the same time, there seems to still be a widespread understanding that the way the labor market currently exists is not good for us so I’m not sure that this argument is a good way to instill hope in where we’re headed. Labor in the US in particular has created a generation of people who are a sort of economic underclass.