The Sirens' Call Quotes

“Information is abundant; attention is scarce. Information is theoretically infinite, while attention is constrained. This is why information is cheap and attention is expensive.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“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.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“The physical and visual package of a vinyl album makes it far more desirable and collectible as an object. Vinyl LPs also offer a far better sound quality than the compressed audio files of streaming services. Ultimately, listening to music on a record player releases you from the endless anxiety of choice that comes from digital forms of media where in every single moment you can skip to the next song, or decide you don’t want to listen to what you’re listening to. When you put an album on a record player you are committing your attention to that album. You have bound yourself to the mast.[7]”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Attention is not a moral faculty. Without concerted effort, habit, and training, what we are drawn to focus on and what we believe to be important and worthy bear no intrinsic relation to each other.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“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.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“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.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“The promise of the information age was unparalleled access to every single last bit of human knowledge at every moment, and the reality is a collective civic mental life that permanently teeters on the edge of madness.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is a very different category from what’s important for sustaining a flourishing society.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“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. In a society where the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force has come apart, different factions and power centers arise based on their ability to conquer and impose their will through coercion and violence. While in a functioning government the route to power might lie in persuasion or charisma or mass mobilization or the ability to deftly manipulate elite party structures and alliances, in failed states power tends to be stripped down to its most brutal essentials, chiefly the use of force.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Infinite Jest”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Addiction by Design,”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“The Phantom Public”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“The Social Dilemma”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“The culprit, based on the Program for International Student Assessment, which collects the data, is pretty clear. As The Atlantic characterized the findings, “In sum, students who spend more time staring at their phone do worse in school, distract other students around them, and feel worse about their life.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“I’ve often had occasion to note that the Boomers in my life all seem far less disposed to screen information than people my age, born into the teeth of the attention age. Older folks’ phones all ring for every call—they are never on silent—and every app they have, as a rule, can send them notifications so that their phone is constantly going off like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July. Earlier generations grew up in environments of informational poverty—if someone wanted to reach you with important news while you were out of the house, they couldn’t. And if you are conditioned for information poverty, you’re likely to have a harder time recognizing how precious attention is.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“The manager at a tony Manhattan department store called it “the disease of the ’80s.”[40] A CBS record executive declared that it was “the end of meeting people. It’s like a drug: You put the Walkman on and you blot out the rest of the world.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“thinking of nothing makes boredom impossible, because you’ve ceased chasing stimulation.”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Death by a Thousand Pings: The Hidden Side of Using Slack,”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other,” he writes. “They”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Having a teenage daughter is like having an office crush; you're thinking about them a lot more than they're thinking about you.”
― Christopher L. Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

“Chronic neglect,” notes the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, “is associated with a wider range of damage than active abuse, but it receives less attention in policy and practice.”[2]”
― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource