The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource - Hardcover

Hayes, Chris

 
9780593653111: The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593653114 ISBN 13: 9780593653111
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

The #1 New York Times Bestseller • One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading List Picks

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC 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

“An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.” —New York Times

“Brilliant book . . . Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.” —Rachel Maddow

"A useful primer on how social media and the attention economy have warped our democracy and reshaped our lives." —Barack Obama

We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. 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 a transi­tion whose only parallel is that of labor in the nineteenth century: Attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.

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. As Hayes shares, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolution­ary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic frame­work so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Chris Hayes is the Emmy Award–winning host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the New York Times bestselling author of A Colony in a Nation and Twilight of the Elites. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and children.

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Chapter 1

The Sirens' Call

Let us begin with a story from Odysseus's journey. In book twelve of the Odyssey, our hero is about to depart the island of the goddess Circe when she gives him some crucial advice about how to navigate the perils of the next leg of his voyage.

"Pay attention," she instructs him sternly:

First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men's bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.

Odysseus listens as Circe provides him with a plan: stuff wax in the ears of your crew, she says, so they cannot hear the Sirens, and have them bind you to the mast of the ship until you have sailed safely past.

Odysseus follows the plan to a tee. Sure enough, when the Sirens' song hits his ears, he motions to his men to loosen him so that he can follow it. But as instructed, his crew ignores him until the ship is out of earshot.

This image is one of the most potent in the Western canon: Odysseus lashed to the mast, struggling against the bonds that he himself submitted to, knowing this was all in store. It has come down to us through the centuries as a metaphor for many things. Sin and virtue. The temptations of the flesh and the willpower to resist them. The addict who throws his pills down the toilet in preparation for the cravings to come, then begs for more drugs. It's an image that illustrates the Freudian struggle between the ego and the id: what we want and what we know we should not, cannot have.

Whenever I've encountered a visual representation of the Sirens, they are always, for lack of a better word, hot. Seductive. From Shakespeare to Ralph Ellison and down through literature, the Sirens are most often a metaphor for female sexual allure. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Bloom describes the man who has taken up with Bloom's wife as "falling a victim to her siren charms and forgetting home ties."

Given this, it is a bit odd to reconcile the original meaning of the word with how we use it today, to describe the intrusive wail of the device atop ambulances and cop cars. But there's a connection there, a profound one, and it's the guiding insight for this book and central to understanding life in the twenty-first century.

Stand on a street corner in any city on earth long enough, and you will hear an emergency vehicle whiz past. When you travel to a foreign land, that sound stands out as part of the sensory texture of the foreignness you're experiencing. Because no matter where you are, its call is at once familiar and foreign. The foreignness comes from the fact that in different countries the siren sounds slightly different-elongated, or two-toned, or distinctly pitched. But even if you've never encountered it before, you instantly understand its purpose. Amidst a language you may not speak and food you've never tried, the siren is universal. It exists to grab our attention, and it succeeds.

The siren as we know it now was invented in 1799 by Scottish polymath John Robison. He was one of those Enlightenment figures who dabbled in everything from philosophy to engineering, and he originally intended the device as a form of musical instrument, though that didn't take. What we think of as the siren didn't reach its current form and function until the late nineteenth century. In the 1880s, a French engineer and inventor who had created electric (and therefore mostly silent) boats, utilized electric-powered sirens that worked to prevent boating accidents. (He even had a boat called La Sirène.) In relatively short order, the technology made its way to land vehicles like fire trucks, replacing the loud bells they'd formerly used to clear the way.

The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens' call.

Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these instants of attention accrue into a life. "My experience," as William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology in 1890, "is what I agree to attend to." Increasingly it feels as if our experience is something we don't fully agree to, and the ubiquity of that sensation represents a kind of rupture. Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured. Our inner lives have been transformed in utterly unprecedented fashion. That's true in just about every country and culture on earth.

In the morning I sit on the couch with my precious younger daughter. She is six years old, and her sweet soft breath is on my cheek as she cuddles up with a book, asking me to read to her before we walk to school. Her attention is uncorrupted and pure. There is nothing in this life that is better. And yet I feel the instinct, almost physical, to look at the little attention box sitting in my pocket. I let it pass with a small amount of effort. But it pulses there like Gollum's ring.

My ability to reject its little tug means I'm still alive, a whole human self. In the shame-ridden moments where I succumb, though, I wonder what exactly I am or have become. I keep coming back to James's phrase "what I agree to attend to" because that word "agree" in his formulation carries enormous weight. Even if the demand for our attention comes from outside us, James believed that we ultimately controlled where we put it, that in "agreeing" to attend to something we offered our consent. James was rather obsessed with the question of free will, whether we in fact had it and how it worked. To him, "effort of attention"-deciding where to direct our thoughts-was "the essential phenomenon of will." It was one and the same. No wonder I feel alienated from myself when the attention box in my pocket compels me seemingly against my own volition.

The ambulance siren can be a nuisance in a loud, crowded city streetscape, but at least it compels our attention for a socially useful purpose. The Sirens of Greek myth compel our attention to speed our own death. What Odysseus was doing with the wax and the mast was actively trying to manage his own attention. As dramatic as that Homeric passage is, it's also, for us in the attention age, almost mundane. 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.

That's basically the world we've built for our minds. Well, maybe not "we," per se. Our agency in the construction of the business and institutions of the attention age is a matter of considerable debate. The combination of our deepest biological instincts and the iterative genius of global capitalism means we are subject to an endless process of experimentation, whereby some of the largest corporations in the history of humanity spend billions to find out what we crave and how much of that they can sell us. From inside our own being, attention is what constitutes our very self, but from the perspective of entities outside of us, attention is like gold in a stream, oil in a rock.

My professional life requires me to be particularly consumed by these questions, but I think we all feel this to some degree, don't we? The alienating experience of being divided and distracted in spite of ourselves, to be here but not...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593653114
ISBN 13 
9780593653111
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
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Deutschland

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