The Sirens Call

 

Chris Hayes, “The Sirens Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, Penguin Press, 2025, 268  pp.

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 for most of human history; the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. 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 attention becoming 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.

My Notes:

Pg. 16:  The brand has now become the dominant feature of the product of today’s best-known manufacturers.  They no longer produce products and advertise them but rather, they buy products and ‘brand’ them; think of Nike’s swoosh.  Or, alternatively, think of a Canadian pet food company called Menu Foods.  In 2007, they were subject to a recall after some of its food was contaminated by a chemical; the food was causing illness and even death in the cats and dogs eating it.  Menu Foods had a hand in producing pet food in its contaminated Chinese factory for just about every single pet food brand in the US.  Nearly all of the big recognizable food conglomerate brands were using Menu Foods, not to mention nearly all of the ‘generic’ brand pet food available.  In total, the Menu Foods recall covered products that had been retailed under 150 different names.

Pg. 23:  Attention now exists as a commodity in the same way labor did in the early years of industrial capitalism.  Labor had previously been regarded as human effort was converted into a commodity with a price. 

Pg. 38:  There are three main aspects of attention.  First, there is voluntary attention: the intentional choosing of focus, the spotlight of the mind being pointed toward something, illuminating it while keeping everything outside its glow in the relative dark (think of willingly talking to someone in a crowded room).  Then there is involuntary attention, constantly operating in a parallel to conscious attention, monitoring our environment for threats and immediately turning to inspect a crashing sound.  And finally, there is social attention; the fact that we can be the object of others’ attention is the foundational experience of having human bonds—notice how we are immediately focused whenever we hear our name mentioned in a conversation we overhear.

Pg. 146:  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.  The very first individual attention technology was the written word.  The earliest literature began as oral traditions, passed down in person, spoken to crowds and shared collectively.  Writing and reading transformed this collective form of communication to an individual one.