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The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Albanese is fighting an election in the attention economy. The deciding votes will come from those least engaged
Beyond the electoral contests of party, policy and personality lies a more primal battle: the fight for our attention in an era when democratic deliberation is, in the words of MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes, 'like trying to meditate in a strip club'. Candidates mount the stage for their poll dance, performing before an electorate for whom information is infinite and ubiquitous, but whose attention is both limited and contested. As Hayes writes in his compelling new book The Sirens' Call, politics plays in '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'. This deafening white noise presents a material challenge for the incumbent Labor government as it seeks a second term. Results of the last Essential Report highlight their quandary with voters struggling to recall Labor policy achievements, even when prompted, yet ready to accept they were important initiatives once they paid attention. Watching the way two of the core planks for the ALP case for re-election landed over the past fortnight – the Reserve Bank's decision to reduce interest rates and the Medicare bulk-billing announcement – reinforces the government's attention-deficit challenge. Labor has seized on the first reduction in interest rates since the Reserve Bank began tightening monetary policy as proof that its strategy to reduce inflation without driving the nation into recession had been successful. But findings in our latest report show how quick voters are to dismiss the interest rate cuts. Apart from those who are directly impacted by mortgages, the Reserve Bank decision does not appear to have cut through as something that will benefit voters personally. On the economic level, falling interest rates, low unemployment and the halving of inflation is a great story. But, like the Harvey Norman ad promises, the current public response is 'no interest'. The inherent challenge for the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is that a soft landing, by definition, means there is no body count. 'Plane lands without casualties' is just not news. Labor might point to the surge in unemployment in New Zealand, where a new conservative government has introduced the sorts of job cut policies that Peter Dutton is championing, but whoever paid attention to what is happening over the ditch? Labor is desperate for our attention, the opposition not so much. With very limited policies and a leader who only a mother could love, the Coalition are running small target to convince us that things just need to get 'back on track'. A tell of the Coalition's desperation to minimise our attention came in last weekend's remarkable decision to match Labor's Medicare rebate announcement before the PM's speech was even over. Recognising the Coalition's brand weakness on health (Peter Dutton was voted by doctors as the worst health minister in 35 years), the decision to match Labor was calculated to minimise the attention placed on the issue. A second question shows why 'funding Medicare' is not the hill Dutton wants to die on. This entire table should offer some succour to Labor supporters disheartened by opinion polls suggesting the Coalition is 'ahead' in the horse race (our poll has the two ponies pretty much even). On the core areas of Labor brand strength – health, wages and climate – Labor is more trusted. On the Coalition traditional ground of economic management and international relations it's line ball. On cost of living, Labor is modestly ahead. The challenge for both parties is that mass of voters who see 'no difference'. Which brings us to Hayes' colourful description of politics in the age of attention capitalism – Big Tech's business model that exploits our engagement with the world and turns it into a tradable commodity. Trump dominates our newsfeeds but even where local issues cut through, antisemitism, thwarted terror attacks and China panics are much more clickable than urgent care clinics, cheaper childcare and aged care reform. 'Without a 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,' Hayes argues. A final table illustrates this point elegantly. More than half the voters say they are paying little or no attention to the upcoming election. Those paying the least attention are those who are least likely to have settled on their vote. To spell it out: the election will be decided by the people paying the least attention and with the lowest commitment to their ultimate choice. They will cast their ballot while viewing politics out of the corner of their eye. This is what Scott Morrison instinctively mastered in 2019. There wasn't even an attempt to win any debate, just a series of photo ops and memes. Then that attention became a negative and he effectively voiced the Labor campaign against him in 2022. This time around Anthony Albanese wants, needs, voters to focus on policy which requires deeper attention before they can make an informed choice. While people say they will weigh up the parties before they vote, will they be able to find the headspace to do so? In contrast, Dutton just wants our instinctive reactions. Do we feel better off than three years ago? Does Albanese seem weak when he balances nuance? Does nuclear look like a plan if you don't check the numbers? It is here, amid the lights and the shouting and the mass of writhing bodies that the 2025 federal election will be fully revealed. Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company. He is a Per Capita board member
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Chris Hayes on why Trump is winning the attention war and Democrats are "scared of new things"
Chris Hayes knows a thing or two about getting attention, given that he has hosted his Emmy Award-winning MSNBC talk show "All In with Chris Hayes" for more than a decade. That helps explain why his new book, "The Sirens' Call," which focuses on exactly that topic, debuted at the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. When I spoke to Hayes about his new book for "Salon Talks," he observed that attention is like oxygen: Humans need it to survive. 'A newborn infant is totally helpless and it dies unless it is attended to. So from the moment we come into the world, our survival depends on attention from others,' Hayes explained. Throughout life, in fact, we all strive for attention to varying degrees. (As a needy person myself, this is an acute daily exercise!) But something deeper is at work in what Hayes calls the 'attention industry,' which seeks to secure our attention for profit. In every minute of our waking lives, social media platforms compete for our attention with all kinds of entertainment and commentary, even including a 'Dog With a Blog,' as Hayes mentioned. Of course we also see a nonstop contest for attention by politicians. Discussing Donald Trump, Hayes remarked that 'his desire for that attention is so deep, it's coming from such a deep place, he needs it so pathologically.' That need seems to drive Trump's every action, as we have all witnessed over the past decade. Democrats, by contrast, appear to be losing the war of attention. Some Democrats in Congress are trying to take Trump on directly, Hayes notes, 'but fighting back or getting attention might not be the same thing.' One important element is what Hayes calls the operating DNA of the two parties. "Democrats want to get some bills through Congress," Hayes told me, "and what Republicans want to do is go on podcasts." The challenge for Democrats, he believes, is to focus on new ways to attract attention — and to overcome their 'risk aversion to trying new things.' This may be a generational or institutional issue, but it's high time for Democratic leaders need to realize that if they can't win the battle for attention, they may not be able to survive. Watch my "Salon Talks" episode with Chris Hayes on YouTube to hear more about Hayes' theory of attention, how cable news has changed over the last 10 years and why Trump is so well suited to harness the attention industry. The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length. I'm smarter now from reading your book! I don't say that too often about other people's books. Honestly, that is the best thing an author can hear. The thing when you write a book is you want: a) people to read it, which is not nothing — as I document in the book, we're all distracted; and b) people to find it useful. My favorite thing is when people read something that you've written, and they feel like it generates their own thoughts. Like, "Oh, I started having these thoughts about things." That's sort of the sweet spot. You talk about people going into solitary confinement as a form of punishment. Is attention like oxygen? Do we need it to survive? Yes — social attention, that specific form of attention. One of the things I try to do in the book is map out these dimensions and distinctions. One really important form of social attention is so elemental to human life that it is the necessary precondition to survive. A newborn infant is totally helpless and it dies unless it is attended to, so from the moment we come into the world, our survival depends on attention from others. When you read about people that have been exposed to prolonged periods of isolation, it's a form of torture, it's a form of madness. That's because that social attention from other people is like the lifeblood of human existence. You write, "I don't think you can understand the attention age without grappling with the experience of … I've returned again and again to alienation as the best available descriptor for something I can't quite name about what it feels like to be alive right now." Why do you feel that way? Alienation is one of those concepts that I've always been a little suspicious of because it could be so fuzzy and all-encompassing. The specific thing I'm talking about here is a sense that a thing that should be inside you is outside of you. A thing that you should have control over and be internal to you has been taken from you and it is now alien to you. I think we feel that way about our own attention, about our own minds. This feeling of constantly being compelled to pay attention to something, maybe against our will, maybe eliciting some part of our will that we feel icky about, and then that attention being outside of us and not something that properly we control. It's that feeling of alienation, this kind of mental carsickness that we all walk around with, that stuck-in-traffic feeling but in your mind that I think has really become the mood of the times. We can be alienated from our own attention and then alienated from each other through technologies that are defined with increasing sophistication and the use of machine learning running experiments over a billion users to find the particular individual thing we will want to spend time with that might be different than the spouse sitting next to us on the couch. Every new media invention has caused : radio, TV, the Walkman. The Museum of Modern Art has an exhibit about the earliest days of Impressionism and you read the articles like, "It's the devil's work, it's going to destroy society." Exactly. Those are really wild, the reviews of the [1913] Armory Show when it comes to New York and the Impressionism period. My favorite example of that is a quote I have from, I think, the 1890s, where someone's writing about the scourge of magazines and the thing he says is, like, "Nowadays after dinner by the fire, a whole family is sitting, each looking at their own magazine and not paying attention to each other." It's so perfect. Then a few years later everyone is over the panic, the technology is normal and the next thing becomes demonized. How do you separate yourself from that cycle when talking about social media? I think there's two answers to that. One is that if you go back, you can look at this resistance to new technologies as moral panic, but also as capturing something true. People weren't wrong to recognize that TV was a revolutionary technology that was going to totally alter how politics was conducted, how commerce was conducted and how people lived their lives in the domestic sphere. All of that was true. So first of all, we're dealing with a technology on the order of, at the very least, TV, which is to say it's going to have seismic implications. Two, I think there's a bunch of things that differentiate this technology. Its ubiquity, which is totally distinct. You carry it around, you have this portal to it. Its sophistication, in terms of the scale at which it's operating over a billion users — there's never been a medium that operates over a billion users. Then, crucially, this social aspect where it is able to talk to you individually in a way that no technological media forum has ever been able to do. The closest you could get was to look into the camera and try to sell to a generic housewife, or Uncle Sam pointing in the poster. This can actually talk to Dean Obeidallah. This technology can have people tag and mention you. It can weaponize that need for social attention at scale in a way nothing else ever has before. There are valid concerns about the technology we have today, but what about AI? I have a bunch of complicated thoughts and I still feel like I am in the beginning of a learning curve. There's a Sam Altman quote where he talks about the machine learning that's employed on algorithmic social media as being the very first alignment problem of AI, meaning it's useful to understand that algorithmic social media is really the first mass consumer product driven by large language models or machine learning at scale. It is learning what people like and don't like and learning in real time and getting more and more sophisticated. The fact that that can produce a set of incentives that are misaligned with what we want from humans or produces a lot of swastika content, that's a big problem that portends something profound about AI in the future. In terms of the specifics of AI, one of the crazy things is that social media has this thing where they can get Dean's attention on Bluesky, but there's a person connected to that. Now imagine a world in which AI can do that, and imagine a world in which there is no regulatory demand that you know when you're talking to a computer, a bot or a human. That to me is the most obvious point. You can start to scale this sort of social tent. Imagine people friending you six months before an election and they're talking to you. You have shared interests and then they start to say things about the election and they're kind of trying to drive you toward a certain point of view. And then it turns out, "Oh, that's just an AI bot that was deployed at scale." There are serious ethical questions here. Donald Trump has harnessed the attention industry that we live in. Is it that he works the system well, or is it the system going, "OK, we can use this person to do what we need to do, which is to monetize"? I think it's sometimes that a man meets his moment. In this case, it's sort of a dystopian version of this, where a person whose desire for attention is so defining and pathological that it's genuine and authentic in a way that's unthinkable. He is not an authentic person insofar as he lies all the time, but his desire for that attention is so deep, it's coming from such a deep place, he needs it pathologically. He entered politics at the moment when attention is the most valuable resource, and from this sort of feral instinct he backed into this realization: All attention is good attention, even negative attention; the point is to dominate attentional space. If you look at his first few weeks in office, he comes out every day behind the Resolute Desk. I've never seen it before. Every day, four o'clock, Resolute Desk, Oval Office. It could be the most insane surreal thing you've ever seen, like Elon Musk twitching with his four-year-old in front of him, but you're watching. That's the point, and I think the central insight that has helped him. Democrats are losing the war of attention. I have members of Congress on my radio show, and they get slightly defensive when I go, "You guys are not fighting back hard." They'll list what they're doing. I'm like, "Well, it didn't make press coverage." That's the thing: "Are you fighting back?" or "Are you getting attention?" might not be the same thing. That's what they are not getting, that's the disconnect. I thought when they went outside USAID, I thought that worked. I don't know if they had a mic set up or maybe just a megaphone, but there were protesters there. That was the first time where I was like, "OK, there's something happening here that's new, that's different, you're trying to break through." But a huge part of it is just this default institutionalism, this hidebound risk aversion that I think has become a real cultural problem in the Democratic Party. This kind of stasis, not wanting to try new things and being scared of new things. I also think there's a real problem, which they've found themselves in for perfectly good reasons: They really are more comfortable governing than being powerless in opposition. Republicans are the other way around. What Democrats want to do is try to get bills through Congress, and what Republicans want to do is go on podcasts. What happens is when the Democrats are in power and Republicans are out of it, they're each suited to their roles. When it flips, what you have is Democrats struggling to get attention and Republicans having a hard time governing, and instead going to war against their own government. Democratic leadership during the election campaign would say, "Donald Trump's a fascist, he's going to take away our freedoms, our democracy, everything." After he wins, they're like, "Let's find common ground." How does that work? I think that was a pretty rough message twist. I don't think their worst fears have been disproven by his actions in the first three weeks. Let me defend them this way. Here's their logic, and I don't think it's ludicrous: We believe this is true, that he is a threat to democracy. We made this argument consistently and forthrightly to the American people and they were like, "Eh, I don't care." Then I think what they said is, "Look, if people don't care about that argument, if that's not breaking through to people, we shouldn't keep trying it. We should try something new. What we're going to try is we'll work with him on areas we agree, but what about the price of eggs?" Now, again, that has a certain logic to it and in the latest polling, even a very good poll for him that came from CBS where he had positive approval, 77% of people said he wasn't doing enough about prices. You had inflation come in hot this week. So it's not crazy, but there's something a little narratively incoherent as he lays waste to the government to be like, "Well, what about the price of eggs?" Like, OK, yes, but ... Politics is about figuring out effective means of public communication, particularly when you're in the minority. They literally have no power to set an agenda, they have to react to the agenda. One of the things you have to do is try different messages, try to do different things, and one of the things I think you can say is, "Look, he has given the keys to the government over to a billionaire to enrich themselves, to screw over working people, to push through big tax cuts and what is happening to your costs?" There's a way to unify those messages. Some Democrats are doing a good job. I think it's hit-and-miss. It's a little generational, too. One of the things that I think is really important is that there's this entire industrial complex around Democratic politicians, PR people and comms people. Everything has to be vetted because blah, blah, blah. AOC just goes on Instagram and she talks to people. Maybe she's going to say some things that are going to be taken out of context and she's going to get killed in the New York Post for it, and that does happen. But she is trying her level best to authentically communicate, without these filters. There's a lot to learn from that, which is just go talk to people. On any platform you can find, go talk to people. Your book is about attention, and you've been on TV now for more than a decade. What have you learned about getting attention over this year? How has it changed for you in terms of trying to get the viewership attention? One is just the constant change of the universe we live in. When I started doing this show, I remember we had the showrunner for 'House of Cards,' Beau Willimon, on [as a guest]. It was 2013 or '14, because the big thing was, Netflix has a show now. That was the reason we booked him, it was a political drama, but the big story was, "Whoa, Netflix making content." Radical transformation! TikTok didn't exist, none of that. In every moment, everyone who's doing something like what you and I are doing is competing with every other piece of content ever made in human history. I see it with my kids sometimes, they'll be rooting around on Disney and discover a canceled sitcom from 2002 that they watch every episode of. 'Dog With a Blog.' That's a real show. There's a show called 'Dog With a Blog' about a dog with a blog. Didn't last very long. My daughter loves it. The point of that is the competition is incredibly fierce, more intense than it's ever been. It's hard to move people off the platforms they're on, that's the other thing. I have a podcast that comes out weekly — we reach a bunch of people that don't watch my TV show. A lot of people watch my TV show and don't listen to the podcast. I hope there's a lot of people that read this book who don't do either. I'm on Bluesky and I'm on X and I'm on Threads, and part of the reason that I'm on all these different places is that different people, different generations, different demographics, get information in different ways. You kind of have to be in all these different places. If there were things you couldn't talk about on your show, would you choose to talk about them in a book? Is there ever push and pull from the big world of corporate media? No. I think I had this conception when I was younger: "Corporate media won't let you say X or Y." I've really not had that experience. People talk about advertisers all the time. No one knows my advertisers less than me. I talk to viewers who will mention my advertisers all the time. I'm like, "I've never seen an ad for my own show. I have no idea who my advertisers are. In fact, you know much better than I because you actually watch it from the outside. I sit there in the studio like ... 'Four minutes.'" That part of it is just not a factor. What is a factor is format. That's the big factor. What can you do in an eight-minute cable news block, versus what can you do in a 45-minute podcast, versus what can you do in a 300-page book, versus what you can do in an essay, in a tweet or a Bluesky post. That's where I think you hit limitations in format. I did this podcast with this guy, David Roberts, who's a great writer on the green economy, and we talked about the electrical grid for 50 or 55 minutes and it was fascinating. You can't really do that on a cable news show, there's too much detail to fill up. One thing that's great is with these different formats, at the same time we have this lowest-common-denominator sirens' call of the casino-fication of content and the algorithmic drive to short video, and next to that we have these boundless human appetites for all sorts of different things. People listen to four-hour podcasts, people get really into shows about history or astrophysics. People are interested in different stuff and a more diverse landscape allows you to meet those different needs in different places and create small-scale but sustainable outlets. The question is, which of those two impulses is ascendant?
Telegraph
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How smartphones turned Western society into a ‘failed state'
It seems to me, and might seem to you, as though headlines have always ticked across the bottom of our TV screens during news broadcasts. Strange, how quickly technological innovations lose their novelty. This one is only 23-and-a-half years old: the 'ticker' was reserved for sports scores until the day in 2001 when two hijacked passenger jets were flown into New York's World Trade Center. Fox News gave its ticker over to the news service that day; MSNBC and CNN quickly followed. Cable channels, you might say, quickly and seamlessly went from addressing their viewers' anxieties to stoking them. That's Chris Hayes's view, and he should know: the political commentator and TV news anchor hosts a weekday current affairs show on MSNBC. The Sirens' Call, his new book, is first of all an insider's take on the persuasion game. Hayes is a hard worker, and a bit of a showman. When he started, he imagined his regular TV appearances would bring him some acclaim. 'And so,' he writes, 'the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention.' This experience is now common. Thanks to the black mirrors in our pockets, we're now all stars of our own reality TV show. To explain how he and the rest of smartphone-wielding humanity ended up in this peculiar pickle – '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' – Hayes sketches out three kinds of attention. There's the conscious attention we bring to something: to a book, say, or a film, or a painting. Then there's the involuntary attention we pay to environmental novelties (a passing wasp, a sudden breeze, an unexpected puddle). The more vigilant we are, the more easily even minor stimuli can snare our attention. This second kind is the governing principle of advertising, an industry that over the last two decades has metastasised into something vast and insidious: call it 'the attention economy'. Everything is an advertisement now, especially the news. The ticker and its evolved cousins, the infinitely-scrolling feed (think X) and the autoplaying video-stream (think TikTok) exist to maintain our hypervigilance. You can, like Hayes, write a book so engaging that it earns the user's conscious focus over several hours. If you want to make money, though – with due respect to Scribe's sales department – you're better off snaring the user's involuntary attention over and over again with a procession of conspiracy theories and cat videos. The third form of attention in Hayes's typology is social attention: that capacity for involuntary attention that we reserve for events relating specifically to ourselves. Psychologists dub this the 'cocktail-party effect', after our unerring ability to catch the sound of our own name across a crowded and noisy room. Social attention is extraordinarily pregnant with meaning, and without a steady diet of it, we suffer. Why do we post anything on social media? Because we want others to see us. 'But,' says Hayes, 'there's a catch... we want to be recognised as human by another human, as a subject by another subject, in order for it to truly be recognition. But We Who Post can never quite achieve that.' In feeding ourselves with the social attention of strangers, we have been creating synthetic versions of our most fundamental desire. 'This is the story of Donald Trump's life,' Hayes explains, by way of example: 'wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can't quite understand the difference, even though deep in his psyche there's a howling vortex that fame can never fill.' Elon Musk gets even harsher treatment. 'What does the world's richest man want that he cannot have?' Hayes wonders. 'What will he pay the biggest premium for? He can buy whatever he desires. There is no luxury past his grasp.' The answer, as Musk's financially disastrous purchase of Twitter demonstrates 'to a pathological degree, with an unsteady obsessiveness that's thrown his fortune into question, is recognition. He wants to be recognised, to be seen in a deep and human sense. Musk spent $44 billion to buy himself what poor pathetic Willy Loman [in Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman] couldn't have. Yet it can't be purchased at any sum.' We're not short of books about how our digital helpmates are ushering in the End of Days. German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer's How to Stay Smart in a Smart World (2022) gets under the hood of systems that ape human wisdom just well enough to disarm us, but not nearly well enough to deliver happiness or social justice. The US social psychologist Jonathan Haidt took some flak for over-egging his arguments in The Anxious Generation (2024), but the studies he cites are solid enough and their statistics amount to a litany of depression, self-harm and suicide among young (and predominantly female) users of social media. In Unwired (2023), Gaia Bernstein, a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, explains how we might sue GAMA (Google, Amazon, Meta, Apple) for our children's lost childhood. Among a crowded field, Hayes singles out Johann Hari's 2022 book Stolen Focus for praise, though this doesn't reflect well on Hayes himself, whose solutions to our digital predicament are weak beer compared to Hari's. Hari, like Gigerenzer and Bernstein, had bold ideas about civil resistance: he used his final pages to construct a bare-bones social protest movement. Hayes, by contrast, believes that the markets will somehow self-correct: 'I think (and fervently hope) we will see increasing growth in businesses, technologies, and models of consumption that seek to evade or upend the punishing and exhausting reality of the endless attention commodification we're living through,' Hayes says. But what evidence has he to bolster such a hope? The spread of farmers' markets in American cities and the resurgence of vinyl in record stores. Hayes is the very picture of an intelligent, engaged commentator, and I came away admiring him. But if I were an investor I would show him the door.
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Chris Hayes: Elon Musk's behavior driven by psychology of social attention addiction
MSNBC host and bestselling author Chris Hayes joins Morning Joe for a wide-ranging discussion on the themes from his new book 'The Sirens' Call' on how tech companies compete for attention and how President Trump benefits. Mara Gay and Eddie Glaude Jr. also join the discussion.
New York Times
29-01-2025
- General
- New York Times
How Big Tech Mined Our Attention and Broke Our Politics
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.
