How Big Tech Mined Our Attention and Broke Our Politics

New York Times

29-01-2025

On April 15, 1912, shortly after the Titanic collided with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, the ship's radio operator issued a distress call — a formidable display of the power of the radio, a new technology. But a lack of regulation in the United States meant that a cascade of amateur radio messages clogged the airwaves with speculation and rumors, and official transmissions had a hard time getting through. It was an early-20th-century form of information overload. 'The false reports sowed confusion among would-be rescuers,' Nicholas Carr writes in 'Superbloom.' 'Fifteen hundred people died.'
Carr has been sounding the alarm over new information technology for years, most famously in 'The Shallows' (2010), in which he warned about what the internet was doing to our brains. 'Superbloom' is an extension of his jeremiad into the social media era.
Carr's new book happens to be published the same day as 'The Sirens' Call,' by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, which traces how big tech has made enormous profits and transformed our politics by harvesting our attention. Both authors argue that something fundamental to us, as humans, is being exploited for inhuman ends. We are primed to seek out new information; yet our relentless curiosity makes us ill equipped for the infinite scroll of the information age, which we indulge in to our detriment.
'Social media is not successful because it goes against our instincts and desires,' Carr writes. 'It's successful because it gives us what we want.' He lays some of the blame with tech companies, which ply us with the digital equivalent of junk food. They engineer how we relate to one another online by selecting for content that whips up strong emotions to draw us 'deeper into the feed.'
But Carr also suggests that regulation can only do so much: Blaming the technology industry lets us off the hook. This is a book that gestures repeatedly to a tragic, if nebulous, concept of 'human nature.' More communication does not necessarily lead to more understanding. The title refers to a rare 'super bloom' of California poppies in typically arid soil, an episode that drew selfie-taking influencers, flower-trampling crowds and a frenzied backlash. Left to our own devices, so to speak, we can get vain, careless, resentful and cruel.
There's an unmistakable skepticism of progress in this book, at least when it comes to modern communication technology. Our antisocial proclivities were once kept in check by more effortful methods of reaching out to one another. 'The deliberate, reflective practice' of composing a handwritten letter, Carr laments, has been superseded by the 'short, snappy' idiom of texting.
By removing barriers to communication, social media has enabled us to let loose our worst instincts and transmit to a huge audience whatever thoughtlet comes to mind. (Mostly avoiding the subject of Donald Trump, he glancingly mentions 'the election to the presidency of the United States of a malevolent coxcomb with a tweeting habit.') Abundance, in this case, stokes conflict. 'Different points of view are seen not as opportunities to learn but as provocations to attack.'
Instead of the curation imposed by 'the public-interest standard' and 'the fairness doctrine,' a deteriorating media ecosystem selects for clicks. Consider Mark Zuckerberg's explanation of Facebook's bespoke News Feed: 'A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.' The grotesque comparison was an early salvo in our informational war of all against all. 'News, entertainment, conversation and all other forms of human expression would from now on be in direct competition,' Carr writes, 'angling for both the consumer's fleeting attention and the algorithm's blessing.'
It's a phenomenon that Hayes, as a TV news anchor, knows all too well. 'The Sirens' Call' is mostly about the social and political deformations wrought by the new attention economy. But Hayes has also been parsing the predicament of attention for a long time.
'Every waking moment of my work life revolves around answering the question of how we capture attention,' he writes in the book's early pages. And the marketplace has been getting ever more ruthless. 'Increasingly over the course of time I've been on air, my competition isn't just what other cable news shows are on during that time, but literally every single piece of content available in any media: every movie ever made, every TV show ever made, every video on TikTok or Instagram, every app and video game available.'
Of course, it's not as if there's been a dearth of attention paid to the subject of attention. Books like Tim Wu's 'The Attention Merchants' and Shoshana Zuboff's 'The Age of Surveillance Capitalism' have traced how our attention has been measured and monetized — sliced and diced into salable packets so that it's now commodified like never before. A raft of memoirs and self-help books have explored what those markets have done to our individual psyches.
What Hayes offers in 'The Sirens' Call' is an ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics. Where Carr's tone is elegiac and mournful, Hayes's is more pragmatic. He makes ample use of social science studies that parse how human attention works. We get overstimulated when bombarded by stimuli, but we become restless when left alone with our thoughts.
Our phones — 'little slot machines we hold in our pocket' — pull us in both directions, providing us with a simulation of sociability while exacerbating our loneliness, and capture our attention on the cheap. Book publishers and Hollywood producers may have always been preoccupied with the question of how to sustain an audience's attention, but social media entrepreneurs don't have to bother with anything so mysterious (and expensive): 'They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention and then repeat those.'
It turns out that a reliable way of grabbing people's attention is to ping that deep need inside all of us, carried over from our helpless dependency on our caregivers in childhood: Someone is paying attention to me! We typically crave positive forms of attention and shrink back from negative ones — except for people like Trump, whose 'psychological needs' are 'so bottomless,' Hayes says, 'that he'll take attention in whatever form he can get.' Trump has intuited that we live at a time when fortune favors the brazen: 'He'll take condemnation, rebuke, disgust, as long as you're thinking about him.'
Attention isn't a resource like coal or oil, which exist outside us; attention is what makes us human, Hayes maintains, and this particular stage of capitalism is fueled by a fracking of our minds. It's not as if Trump is keen to regulate any extraction industry, let alone the one that helped bring him to the White House. So it isn't surprising that both 'The Sirens' Call' and 'Superbloom' end by emphasizing the need for each of us to reintroduce the friction of the physical world into our informational lives.
Instead of submitting to the endless scroll, Hayes now makes a point of sitting down with a print version of the newspaper. Carr, for his part, extols a 'more material and less virtual existence.' I think they're both right, even if trying to change one's own behavior feels small next to the structural forces delineated in their books. But for now, yes — it's going to take willful acts of sensory deprivation for us to come to our senses.