Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (2025)

I read this book (as well as Nicholas Carr's Superbloom, which came out on the same day - see my next entry) for the class I'm currently teaching, Media and Minds. Hayes's earlier book Twilight of the Elites (2012) had impressed me. Hayes seemed to be a creative thinker and observer, who was able to take concepts from one realm and apply them fruitfully in another (I still remember - and use - his adaptation of Robert Michels' "iron law of oligarchy" into an "iron law of meritocracy"). In Sirens' Call, Hayes again produces numerous insights into a field I thought I knew well. Here are some of the major nuggets I took from the book: - just as labor was turned into a commodity in the industrial revolution, attention is now undergoing the same process. Also in a Marxist vein, just as workers felt alienated from their labor, we now all feel alienated from ourselves. - grabbing attention (siren as in the wail of a firetruck) is easier than holding it (siren as in Odysseus's temptresses). Digital platforms try to do both, but have come to rely on the former. - the slot machine is the main model of digital addiction. - boredom didn't exist for hunter-gatherers, but has been historically conditioned, growing over time as our options have increased and as filling the hole left by boredom (and in turn regigging the hole) has become big business. - the explosion of entertainment over the last 150 years has arisen as industrial capitalism has solved the material struggle for existence. Assured of material comforts, we've lost a sense of purpose - what are we living for?I had previously focused on the suppy side - the technologies that made mass media and entertainment possible. Hayes, drawing on Keynes and others, makes a plausible case for demand-side reasons. - attentional regimes, like raising your hand when you want to speak in a classroom. In our current politics, there no longer is one. Anyone who wants can scream for attention at any time, practically in any way. Despite these considerable strengths, perhaps the book could have used another round of editing to make its argument and writing even tighter. For example, it doesn't fully support its central claim, that attention is now the world's most important resource.