The Sirens' Call
how attention became the world's most endangered resource
-
- 16,99 €
-
- 16,99 €
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author and television and podcast host, a powerful, wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society.
We all feel it — the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, ‘With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.’ Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated.
Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. The Sirens’ Call is the big book we all need to wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this expansive account, MSNBC host Hayes (A Colony in a Nation) argues that attention is the most valuable and exploited resource in the world today. Opening with Homer's vivid image of Odysseus strapped to his ship's mast to avoid the sirens' alluring song, Hayes portrays the modern economy as a battle of wills between individuals' private psyches and global powers that usurp attention to "command fortunes, win elections, and topple regimes." Casting a wide net that encompasses philosophers, media theorists, psychologists, and classic literature—from Plato, Kierkegaard, and Marx to David Foster Wallace and Arthur Miller—Hayes unpacks how attention is both a force integral to survival and a resource so sought after that it has become like "gold in a stream, oil in a rock." Some of the most relatable and amusing anecdotes come from his own life—like his admission that he has devoured "hours of videos of carpet cleaners patiently, thoroughly, lovingly shampooing old dirty rugs." Hayes's final thoughts are shrewd if a bit diffuse: he lauds the group chat as "the only truly noncommercial space we have today," pinpoints Donald Trump and Elon Musk as some of the world's biggest attention-grabbers, and suggests the (rather unlikely) possibility of "a mandatory, legislated hard cap on" daily screen time. The result is a savvy, if somewhat free-form, meditation on the modern attention economy.
