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

Summary

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.