The Sirens Call

From the New York Times bestselling author and television 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.

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 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 an epoch-defining transition- attention has become 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.

'In short, attention is now a commodity to be appropriated - with dire implications for our private and political lives - and the smartphone is the facilitator, allowing Orwellian Trump-speak to go largely unchecked. Apart from wax, Hayes posits different ways of resisting the siren's relentless call.'
-Cameron Woodhead and Steven Carroll, The Sydney Morning Herald

'Chris Hayes's spirited new book, The Sirens' Call, takes a strong stand against the temptations of social media and information overload, on the grounds that the human attention span is ill equipped to absorb and act on such a constant stream of data. Among other things, the book ... reveals that Hayes has abandoned scrolling for the old-fashioned pleasure of reading the newspaper in print each day, which sounds like a pretty good prescription to this fan of old media.'
-Gregory Cowles, The New York Times

'In Chris Hayes's recent book, The Sirens' Call- How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, the political commentator identifies what's going on for all of us - and the dangers.'
-Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian