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0:01:27 A friend of mine once told me that you are where your attention is. That line
0:01:31 always stuck with me. It was a reminder that the most important choice we all
0:01:37 make is also the most common one. We make it a thousand times a day, every day of
0:01:43 our lives. It’s the decision about what to pay attention to and what not to pay
0:01:52 attention to. One of the primary features of this age, the age of the internet
0:01:58 and smartphones and algorithmic feeds, is that our attention is everywhere and
0:02:02 nowhere at the same time because we’re endlessly pushed around by a parade of
0:02:07 distractions. Your phone’s ringing. Your Apple Watch is blinking. You got a ping
0:02:11 on Slack from a co-worker. You’re getting an email notification as you’re
0:02:18 sitting down for dinner. It’s always something. Which is probably why, if
0:02:22 you’re like me, it’s hard to remember the last time you watched an entire movie
0:02:26 or show without checking your phone. Hell, I barely made it through recording
0:02:33 this intro without checking my phone. This level of distraction is not an
0:02:38 accident. Our devices have engineered these impulses and a whole industry has
0:02:43 emerged that’s devoted to capturing our attention in all these ways and then
0:02:49 selling it to the highest bidder. And their tools and tactics are getting better
0:02:58 every day. I’m Sean Elling and this is the Grey Area.
0:03:15 Today’s guest is Chris Hayes. You of course know Chris as the host of All In
0:03:23 with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. But he’s also a writer and has a new book out called
0:03:30 The Sirens Call. How attention became the world’s most endangered resource. The
0:03:36 discourse on attention and digital technology is crowded. So when we have
0:03:40 someone on the show to talk about it, it’s because we think they have something
0:03:49 new to offer. And Hayes certainly does. For him, the reordering of our social and
0:03:54 economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, in his words, a
0:04:01 transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism. It’s a bold
0:04:07 claim and I’m not sure Chris is right about that, but he might be. And in any
0:04:12 case, it’s a smart and ambitious book and I’m excited to have Chris back on the
0:04:19 show to talk about it. Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show. It’s great to
0:04:24 be back. I think you’re officially now a friend of the show. Oh, definitely. Yeah,
0:04:29 absolutely. And is it true? A lot of people are saying that the ideas for this
0:04:35 book were actually planted in our last conversation. Actually, yes. I mean, in
0:04:39 large part, I remember that conversation and also your work, your book, which I
0:04:45 read and really enjoyed. You opened the book with this famous image of Odessius
0:04:51 strapped to the mast of a ship by his own command in order to resist, shall we
0:04:58 say, certain temptations. Why start your story with that story? It’s one of the
0:05:01 most potent images in the entire Western canon and I’ve always been kind of
0:05:07 obsessed with it because it’s a metaphor for so many things. I mean, one, I
0:05:10 think we think of in terms of addiction. If you’ve ever been around to someone
0:05:13 trying to quit smoking and they like buy a pack and then they throw the, they
0:05:17 smoke one cigarette and they throw the pack out, right? As a sort of commitment
0:05:21 mechanism to bind myself to the mast to resist the temptation. So it’s such a
0:05:27 potent metaphor for so many things. But fundamentally, what, what started with, I
0:05:32 was just thinking about the word siren and how weird it was that we, there are
0:05:40 two meanings of that word. One, the, you know, from the Homeric epic, these
0:05:46 creatures, some people say they look like birds. Usually in movies, they’re
0:05:51 just like super hot women that seduce and warble you to death in the words of,
0:05:57 of Homer. And then the thing that’s on top of an ambulance or a cop car. Very
0:05:59 different things, but they’re both doing the same thing, which is they’re
0:06:04 compelling your attention. And that experience of having your attention
0:06:11 compelled and trying to manage that compulsion through, in the case of Odysseus,
0:06:17 extremely elaborate means is to me, the experience of contemporary life at all
0:06:21 times in some ways. And so that was sort of there almost from the beginning of
0:06:28 working on the book. How do you define a word like attention? What are some of the
0:06:34 more useful or practical ways to think about what it actually means in human
0:06:39 life? So there’s a lot of debate about this. There are some people who say it’s
0:06:45 not really even a coherent a concept. And some of the critiques I take seriously in
0:06:50 some ways, I’m using it in an everyday sense because I think it’s useful to use
0:06:55 in the everyday sense because I think it is naming something real. So one way to
0:07:00 think about it is the flash beam of thought. That’s a common trope, right?
0:07:04 There’s a William James description of attention that everyone who writes about
0:07:07 attention quotes because it’s so good, which is withdrawal from certain things
0:07:11 to focus on others. If you think about what a stagehand of the spotlight does in
0:07:17 a Broadway play, like I’m focusing on you right now. If I take a second, there’s a
0:07:24 million forms of perceptual stimulus in my visual field right now. I could focus
0:07:29 on those. I’m not. I’m focusing on you through an effort of conscious will. So
0:07:32 that’s how we think about attention, the ability to focus basically, willfully
0:07:37 focus. But then there’s other dimensions of that. So there’s conscious
0:07:41 attention, voluntary attention, then there’s involuntary attention. Like right
0:07:46 now, if someone, I have a door to my studio right now, if someone busted in
0:07:52 here and opened that door, I couldn’t not look. It would literally be impossible.
0:07:57 Before I had any conscious will over it, before I made any decision, no matter how
0:08:04 disciplined I am, pre-consciously, a system would fire that would wrench my
0:08:09 attention towards that door going open. So that’s involuntary
0:08:13 attention, right? And then the third aspect I talk about is social attention,
0:08:18 which I think has its own kind of particular weight and depth, which is
0:08:22 it’s not just that we could pay attention to things in the world. We can pay
0:08:27 attention to people, and crucially, people can pay attention to us. We can be on
0:08:31 the receiving end of attention, which is another thing that makes it so
0:08:36 psychologically and socially and emotionally rich. Well, you call it the
0:08:39 substance of life, attention. I mean, is that just kind of another way of saying
0:08:43 it’s really everything or the most important thing, certainly one of the
0:08:48 most important things that we have? I think it’s the most important thing, and I
0:08:52 think to go back to William James, one of James’s philosophical preoccupations is
0:08:59 free will, whether we have it, what it means to have it. And to him, attention is
0:09:05 indistinguishable from will, because that ability to focus is the essence of
0:09:14 will. And for me, if you’re not a religious person, so you don’t think that
0:09:20 the kind of meaning of your existence is imbued by some higher power or some sort
0:09:28 of spiritual essence, in a secular sense, what we get is one life. And what we do
0:09:34 during that one life is we go around through the world and this one body and
0:09:39 brain we have, peering out at it, and from moment to moment paying attention to
0:09:46 this or that. And what we pay attention to in the end adds up to a life. And I
0:09:50 don’t think there’s any way to, it’s elemental in that sense. And I don’t think
0:09:54 there’s any way to detach what your experience of life is from this faculty.
0:10:00 We do sort of become what we pay attention to. And given how important it
0:10:04 is, it is kind of nuts. I’ve said this a bunch on the show, and I’ll probably say
0:10:09 it a bunch more, but it’s wild how thoughtlessly we give it away every day.
0:10:13 And I have no doubt, almost no doubt, that when we’re all at the end of our
0:10:17 lives, our biggest regret, certainly one of our biggest regrets, will be that we
0:10:22 gave our attention away to the wrong things. Yes. And I think there’s a
0:10:27 few reasons for that. One is this aspect of compelled attention, right? So we have
0:10:33 these biological inherences that are very deep that have produced a faculty
0:10:38 that’s there to like warn us of danger, right? Or to do all kinds of
0:10:43 things that may be evolutionarily necessary. So that faculty’s always there.
0:10:46 So we’re always being sort of drawn towards certain things, whether we kind
0:10:50 of consciously will it or not, you know, the lurid, the prurient, like this whole
0:10:53 category of things, we have a whole set of words to describe things that draw our
0:10:58 attention, even though we don’t necessarily want to go there. So we’re
0:11:02 always fighting that. And then there’s the fact that we have a hard time sitting
0:11:06 with our own thoughts. So there’s, there’s these sort of two sides of this
0:11:09 coin stuff is always trying to take our attention, but we’re always trying to put
0:11:14 it somewhere. So the and this is an experience of modernity, I think it’s
0:11:18 really interesting in research to the book, talking to reading anthropologists
0:11:25 who work with hunter gatherers, basically, people that live outside of fully
0:11:30 outside of what we call modernity, even outside of like, modernity circa, you
0:11:35 know, 1000 or the Roman Empire, right? They’re hunter gatherers. Don’t have words
0:11:40 for boredom. Don’t really talk about being bored, literally, like, in an
0:11:44 aboriginal indigenous tribe, like the word boredom has to be imported from,
0:11:48 from English to the wallpaper, because they don’t have word for it. So at some
0:11:54 level, this isn’t a elemental human inheritance, but it is constitutive
0:11:57 majority in some ways, being bored. So you’ve got these two things, there’s stuff
0:12:00 always trying to take our attention. And we’re then also always trying to get
0:12:04 it away, because if something isn’t taking it, talk about, you know, sitting at
0:12:11 the breakfast table as a 10 year old, just desperate to read something and
0:12:16 reading the back of the cereal box, like, please, don’t like, you must give me
0:12:21 something to, for my mind to chew on, or it’s gonna chew on itself. Yeah, there’s
0:12:25 that famous Pascal quote, right, that like, all of man’s problems stem from his
0:12:29 inability to sit quietly in a room. Exactly. It’s true. And it’s amazing to
0:12:34 encounter that quote now, right. I mean, he wrote that in 1650, I think,
0:12:38 somewhere around thereabouts. It’s funny because of how much we think of this as
0:12:45 a contemporary conundrum, right? Yeah. That it’s born of, of the smartphone. And
0:12:49 one of the things that I think was so enjoyable about working on this book and
0:12:54 thinking about it is that the conditions of contemporary life, which I think are
0:13:00 distinct in many ways, end up being, drawing an arrow to like the core of the
0:13:05 human conundrum. So you end up kind of wrestling with these deep things that
0:13:11 manifest in different ways under different social or technological conditions,
0:13:16 but fundamentally come back to like, living with our own conscious mind in
0:13:22 the world. Well, you make it really interesting. And as far as I know, novel
0:13:29 argument about the transition we’re experiencing now, comparing it to the
0:13:35 emergence of wage labor in the industrial revolution. And you make the case that
0:13:41 the modern attention economy does to attention something very similar to what
0:13:49 industrial capitalism did to labor. So lay that out for me. Yeah. So labor is the
0:13:55 product of a specific set of legal, market, social institutions that produce
0:14:01 this thing called a wage and a laborer, even though humans are doing stuff as soon
0:14:05 as they get to the planet, right? Effort, toil, whatever you want to call it exists
0:14:11 prior to that. Labor is turning to commodity. And there’s a bunch of weird
0:14:17 things about that. And Marx is, I’m not a Marxist personally, but I think his
0:14:24 observations here are quite prophetic. There’s something weird about it, you
0:14:28 know, like, first of all, just the lived experience of the difference between a
0:14:32 guy who runs a shoe shop who’s a cobbler, which exists prior to industrial
0:14:36 capitalism, where like, you’re making the, you’re making the whole shoe, you know,
0:14:39 first you’re putting, you’re cutting the sole, then you’re putting the upper on,
0:14:41 then you’re putting it together. In the end, you got this thing, it’s a shoe. And
0:14:45 now you own it, and then I sell it to you, Sean. You pay me money, now you own it.
0:14:50 Okay. You go from that to, I work in a shoe factory 12 hours a day where I just
0:14:56 stamp soles all day. I’m completely alienated, like, it is external to me the
0:15:02 shoes I make. I don’t actually own them in a market sense. And also, like, it’s a
0:15:08 much different experience of life. This thing has been taken from me in some
0:15:12 deep sense. Like, I don’t want to stamp soles all day. That’s, that’s like, that
0:15:17 kind of sucks. And maybe making shoes kind of sucks too, but it sucks in a more
0:15:23 interesting way. That’s more mine. So you have this extraction of this thing that’s
0:15:26 so essential to you. And not only extraction of things that are essential to you,
0:15:32 the other thing that’s weird about it is, in the grand scheme, labor in the
0:15:38 aggregate is necessary for all of industrial capitalism. So it’s incredibly
0:15:44 valuable in the aggregate. But each individual slice of it is essentially
0:15:49 valueless. You’re like, this is all I got. I got this one body, and I go and stamp
0:15:53 soles 12 hours a day, and I get nothing for it. But that’s it. That’s, from my
0:15:57 perspective, that’s all I got, right? So all of these attributes are there for
0:16:05 attention, right? Attention pre-exists before its marketization, right? It now
0:16:10 has a value out in the world. It’s now being extracted at scale. In the aggregate,
0:16:17 it’s wildly valuable. Google, Meta, right? All their money comes from this. I
0:16:21 argue in the book, Amazon, to a certain extent, is really an attention company. So
0:16:26 the aggregate is wildly valuable. Individually, like, they’re paying tiny
0:16:30 slivers of sense for your attention in any moment. The amount of advertising you
0:16:34 get shoved in a day, the amount of content you get shoved in a day through
0:16:38 these algorithms, I don’t know, maybe it’s like cost someone somewhere in the
0:16:43 aggregate 20 bucks. But to you, it’s like, that’s all you got. That’s all you have is
0:16:47 what you’re paying attention to in any moment. So that same sense of extraction,
0:16:53 right? A thing in us, it gets named and commodified. A set of institutions take
0:16:58 it from us, assign it a market value. Carl Pogliani, who’s a sort of socialist
0:17:04 economic thinker, calls these fictitious commodities, right? Like, there are certain
0:17:08 commodities that exist in the market. And then there’s certain commodities like
0:17:14 labor, attention, Pogliani argues land. They’re not, like, made for market
0:17:18 production. They’re just out in the world. And yet they get turned into a
0:17:24 commodity. And that, and the, it requires a reorientation of the world, of all
0:17:30 social relations in some ways, to make them function as commodities. So attention
0:17:35 is the most important resource in the world now. And a key argument in the
0:17:41 book is that this is very different from previous eras built around resources
0:17:46 like land or capital or coal or whatever. What is the most significant
0:17:48 difference here for you?
0:17:52 The argument I make in the book is that what we think of as commonly referred to
0:17:56 as the attention age, and you could decide when you want to start that, the
0:18:03 1980s, the 1990s, the 70s, is truly the information age, that you have a switch
0:18:08 from physical market production to non-material market production, information
0:18:14 economy, claims adjusters, coders, podcasters, like you and I, right? All doing
0:18:19 these things that don’t amount to the physical refashioning of the world. And
0:18:23 in that world, we think of it as like information being the defining feature of
0:18:28 it. But information is limitless. Information, there’s just tons of
0:18:33 information. The thing that’s scarce and valuable is attention. So everyone’s
0:18:38 got to fight over that. And the more information there is, the lower the
0:18:41 barriers it is to get in front of someone’s face, the more competitive it
0:18:46 becomes. And I think that we’re in a position now as more and more of the
0:18:50 world moves from sort of industrial modes of production to post-industrial
0:18:54 modes of production, that it’s just necessarily the case that under those
0:18:59 conditions, the one thing that’s left that’s scarce, that’s finite, that’s the
0:19:01 most valuable is our attention.
0:19:08 And I love the point you make in the book that unlike coal or land, which is
0:19:12 outside of us, right, that this resource, attention, is in our minds. It’s in
0:19:17 our heads. And so that involves cracking into our minds, as you put it.
0:19:23 Yeah. Now it’s like traffic or air travel. Like, it’s a thing that we all
0:19:27 just experience as a bummer. Yeah. That you just talk to about like, doesn’t it
0:19:32 suck that, you know, we can’t pay attention. The phones are always going
0:19:32 off.
0:19:40 I am constantly making noises about what tech is doing to us on the show and to
0:19:45 basically everybody in my life to their great annoyance. But I don’t have a
0:19:54 compelling response necessarily to the arguments that no one’s forced to stare
0:19:59 at their phones all day. We’re choosing this. We want this. And that’s not
0:20:04 exactly wrong, but I also think our creaturely vulnerabilities are so
0:20:09 exploitable. And even though we’re not being forced in the literal sense, I’m
0:20:13 also not sure we’re really free in any meaningful or recognizable way.
0:20:16 Well, I mean, I think that’s, I think that’s the deepest question, right? I
0:20:20 mean, I don’t think I can resolve the free will question. Come on. You’re
0:20:24 Christopher Hayes, guy, your podcast. Come on. But, but I, but I think you’re
0:20:29 right. I mean, I do think it implicates, it implicates our freedom in a profound
0:20:33 and deep way. I mean, when you get that notification on your phone, and again, I
0:20:36 want to be very upfront here. I was joking, my wife, that like, I feel like
0:20:39 I’ve written a recovery memoir and I’m still drinking, like people are going to
0:20:43 go to me and like, well, here’s how you do it. It’s like, I’m still fighting all
0:20:46 this stuff. I’m, you know, I’m not, I’m not great about it. So I don’t want
0:20:51 anyone to think that I’m on some elevated plane here. Like I’m in the muck with
0:20:55 everyone. Okay. When you get that notification on the screen time
0:21:01 notification, that like, this was your average screen time for the week. That
0:21:07 is a profound moment of like, who am I and what is my will? And we fail the test
0:21:13 every day. I’m like, what are you talking about with that number? That number is
0:21:18 shocking. The saddest part of my week. Who am I? The saddest part of my week,
0:21:22 every week on Sunday morning between nine and 10, I get the notification from my
0:21:27 phone about the average amount of screen time this week. And it’s horrifying.
0:21:32 It’s a horrifying number. But it’s a horrifying number also in that deep way
0:21:38 of like, what does it say about you? It’s wild. Again, I fuck it. I guess I’ll just
0:21:43 go full philosophy seminar here. But if we no longer have meaningful conscious
0:21:47 control over our attention, at some point, we do reach a level of passivity
0:21:52 that makes us more of an object than a person. Yes. And that has profound
0:21:56 implications for, for instance, democratic theory. Yes. I mean, and when, and
0:22:00 when you, and these are, it’s interesting because there was a round of these
0:22:05 conversations, particularly in the 20s and 30s, the sort of collision of mass
0:22:10 media, mass propaganda, mass advertising, and, and, and, and industrial
0:22:14 democracy all coming together. And these debates that happened during that period
0:22:19 of time, where everyone’s sort of trying to deal with this exact same question
0:22:26 that we’re now dealing with, which is, can people be subjects in a meaningful
0:22:31 sense under these conditions of like, mass media? Like if everyone is just
0:22:38 listening to the same propaganda all day on their radios, in what sense do we
0:22:42 have individual subjects with free wills making decisions about self
0:22:47 governance? You know, and this is the Lipman. This is Lipman’s big experience,
0:22:52 right? He’s the chief propagandist to get us into World War One. And he, and
0:22:55 again, I think it was much easier to manipulate public opinion then, to be
0:23:00 honest. But he does it, and he’s like, oh my God, that was way too easy. What
0:23:05 does it mean about democracy if you can just propagandize a whole population?
0:23:10 And we have a different set of questions now that aren’t about, in some
0:23:14 fascinating way or sort of the converse, right? That was all about massness. It
0:23:20 was like, everyone’s listening to the same thing. So it, it’s subsuming the
0:23:25 individual. And we’re watching fascism as this sort of, this sort of the mob
0:23:28 basically come to life. And the mob is all getting the same propaganda. The mob
0:23:34 is acting as one. We’re now seeing this like weird hyper individuation, which
0:23:39 like, no one seems, it sees exactly the same content all day. And what is that
0:23:45 radical individuation and sort of self selection do to the, you know, the
0:23:46 Democratic project?
0:23:51 I love that you went here because this is where I wanted to go. Well, this is
0:23:56 what what your books about, I mean, in a lot of ways it is. Yeah. And to the
0:24:00 point you’re making here and in the book, if we also lack the capacity to
0:24:05 pay attention together, what the hell does that mean for democracy? I mean,
0:24:09 democracy on some level is a shared culture. So if mass culture isn’t
0:24:15 possible anymore, is democracy? I mean, there’s a few things I say. One is, I
0:24:18 do want to be, I want to always in this book, and I try very hard to sort of
0:24:24 resist the temptation, dehistoricize everything. Like, you know, as I say in
0:24:28 the book, like, they didn’t need Facebook and Salem to like, start having
0:24:33 viral rumors that so and so was a witch. Like people, people are very good at
0:24:38 spreading disinformation, just analog style, which is like the core of the
0:24:43 human condition. And like, you know, that’s, that’s our lot. And, you know,
0:24:46 democracy is incredibly fallible with a bunch of fallible people. So I just
0:24:53 want to say that. But yes, I think there is a profound question about what
0:24:56 this is doing to our democracy. And particularly because, as I write in the
0:25:02 book, and this is really key and it’s something that I live every day,
0:25:11 attention is not a moral faculty. It doesn’t, it is distinct from what we
0:25:18 think is important. You know, Lipman in public opinion lines about this, he
0:25:22 wants about a lot of things. You know, he says, you know, he’s talking about the,
0:25:25 the, he’s talking about Versailles actually, right? So talking about the end
0:25:28 of the war and the reparations, he says, Americans have an incredible interest
0:25:33 in this, but they’re not interested in it. Like, it, we have a, he’s like the same
0:25:38 way the child has an enormous interest in his father’s business that he will
0:25:44 inherit, but is not interested in it. So this problem is old, but I think it’s
0:25:52 so sheer right now that overcoming the compelled, the sirens call the, the, the
0:25:57 sort of lowest common denominator, tabloid casino effect of everything in a
0:26:00 very competitive attention environment where we’re driven towards the lowest
0:26:06 common denominator, we’re driven towards what compels it, malforms the public
0:26:15 collective ability to reason collectively, to think of issues independent of what
0:26:18 just sustains our attention from moment to moment, because what sustains our
0:26:22 attention from moment to moment is distinct from what is important. And we
0:26:26 all know that we, everyone understands that. And yet it’s very hard to
0:26:30 counteract sort of what’s being done to us through the technologies.
0:26:34 And of course, look, the problem isn’t just that we’re losing control over what
0:26:39 we pay attention to. We’re also losing the capacity to pay attention for more
0:26:43 than 10 seconds. You know, I mean, you talk about the, the Lincoln Douglas
0:26:47 debates in the book, we talk about it in ours as well, you know, and it really
0:26:51 is striking how much more sophisticated the language was back then.
0:26:52 It’s wild.
0:26:56 It’s wild. And people had the capacity to pay attention to it for so long. And
0:27:03 there’s just no question that more people think and speak in soundbites now,
0:27:05 because that’s how we consume information. I mean, maybe it started with
0:27:10 the telegraph and radio and TV, but it’s ratcheted up to a whole other level
0:27:14 with digital tech. We are a meme culture now. And if you live in a meme
0:27:18 culture, you’re going to have a meme politics in a citizenry that can only
0:27:21 communicate at the level of memes. I don’t know what you do with that.
0:27:24 Yes, no, you’re right. I mean, and yes, and your discussion, I think your
0:27:29 discussion on Lincoln Douglas actually was what sent me originally back to
0:27:33 read them. I also have no doubt that if those people attending the Lincoln
0:27:38 Douglas debates could go home and stream CSI Toledo or whatever, they would.
0:27:43 Dude, all I mean, go back and like people, that is, again, this is one
0:27:46 of these challenges with this whole discourse is like, what’s distinct?
0:27:52 What’s old? Like, go read, all Marx did is just fight with people online,
0:27:56 essentially, for what his day was. Like, that’s all he spent his whole life.
0:28:01 Like, he was a compulsive poster. He’s constantly having 15 different
0:28:06 factional fights. People always forget the conus manifesto is so funny.
0:28:09 It’s basically, it’s like 15 pages of like, you know, all this stuff.
0:28:12 People know workers of the world unite. And then there’s an addendum that’s
0:28:17 like why every other factional tendency in the broad anti-capitalist movement
0:28:21 is wrong, like goes through each one like this one’s wrong for this reasons.
0:28:24 And then there’s like, there’s like this like weird formation of kind of
0:28:28 monarchist right wing Catholics were also anti-Buschwan anti-capitalist.
0:28:31 They’re wrong for this reason. And literally, just like, it’s just like
0:28:36 a set of fights he’s picking with every different person.
0:28:41 So some of this, again, this is the thing that I say all the time.
0:28:47 Democracy is a technology for managing the conflict endemic to human affairs.
0:28:51 It’s the best technology we have come up with for managing conflict
0:28:56 endemic human affairs, but conflict is endemic to human affairs.
0:29:01 So that, that doesn’t go away. You know, people are going to be disagree
0:29:05 and fight with each other. And the question of how we manage that
0:29:09 is the question of how we collectively govern.
0:29:13 And I do think that like all of us having our brains stripped to the studs
0:29:16 is not helpful in that enterprise.
0:29:19 What a hot take there, Chris.
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0:32:42 You know, we’re talking about TV and, of course, we all know what you do.
0:32:45 You’re the host of a cable news show.
0:32:49 And you grapple with some of these questions in a really interesting way in the book.
0:32:56 You have a point of view as a journalist, as a TV host.
0:33:01 You want to inform and presumably persuade your fellow citizens,
0:33:03 but you also work in TV.
0:33:05 You work in the attention industry.
0:33:09 And the logic of that industry and the logic of that medium
0:33:11 is constantly imposing itself on you.
0:33:13 So how do you navigate this?
0:33:18 How do you play the attention game without compromising yourself?
0:33:19 It’s really hard.
0:33:23 It’s what I spend most of my life thinking about, most of my working life.
0:33:27 I mean, it was the rudest awakening when I moved to Primetime,
0:33:29 partly because the first TV show I had, which was on weekend mornings,
0:33:33 I just didn’t think about intentional imperatives at all.
0:33:37 And I was just like, wouldn’t it be cool to do a two-hour sort of like seminar
0:33:39 about 80 topics at a roundtable?
0:33:41 And then it did well.
0:33:42 It rated pretty well.
0:33:44 And it was like, oh, well, then.
0:33:46 And then I tried to do that at 8 p.m.
0:33:51 after people had just gotten home from like a day teaching third grade
0:33:55 or a shift in the hospice.
0:33:59 And it didn’t really work.
0:34:04 Partly because I think people just started to have different attentional capacity
0:34:08 at 8 p.m. on a weeknight than they do at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning.
0:34:10 Like, you’re pretty clear.
0:34:11 You can sit and think a little.
0:34:19 So I had to deal with those attentional imperatives and I always have to.
0:34:23 I mean, the thing about attention, I say, is that it’s mere.
0:34:25 It’s always necessary and never sufficient.
0:34:29 That’s what’s so fascinating about it.
0:34:31 You always need it to do anything else.
0:34:35 Like, in a relationship, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient.
0:34:37 Like, what you want in a relationship is love.
0:34:41 But you need attention to get love.
0:34:44 Like, you need your spouse to pay you attention and listen to you
0:34:46 and they need you to do the same to them.
0:34:49 But if all you’re doing is paying attention
0:34:51 and sometimes people get into toxic relationships
0:34:53 where they’re paying negative attention to each other
0:34:56 and they’re fighting with each other in this desperate attempt to get that,
0:34:58 it’s not enough.
0:35:02 So that’s the same about the conundrum I have, right?
0:35:05 It’s necessary, but not sufficient.
0:35:10 I need to keep people’s attention as a means to the end
0:35:14 of doing something that I think improves civic life
0:35:16 to be as highfalutinous possible.
0:35:21 When I first started in journalism, I was more of a,
0:35:24 I guess you would call it a take writer.
0:35:26 And I did some cable hits.
0:35:30 And it didn’t go well, in part because
0:35:34 I just didn’t understand how performative it was,
0:35:35 especially when you’re in the guest room.
0:35:39 You know, I wanted to be deliberate and make arguments,
0:35:43 but that’s hard to do when you’ve got a few minutes, maybe.
0:35:44 It’s entertainment, right?
0:35:47 And so you have to capture and hold attention.
0:35:51 And that incentivizes a certain style of communication.
0:35:53 So I kind of just stopped doing TV.
0:35:55 If I did it again, it would go better
0:35:57 because I understand that world now
0:35:59 and I can perform if I need to.
0:36:04 But I didn’t think it brought out the best version of me.
0:36:06 Yeah, I don’t know if it brings out the best version of me
0:36:07 either, to be totally honest.
0:36:10 I mean, one thing that you mentioned there that I think is
0:36:15 part of this discussion is just time and the speed.
0:36:15 That’s right.
0:36:19 People don’t realize how the pace at which they talk
0:36:20 and how compressed it is on television.
0:36:23 And actually, this is a thing I kind of love
0:36:24 about the kind of podcast resurgence.
0:36:28 And to my point about not everything is terrible,
0:36:29 like Lex Friedman is a great example.
0:36:33 He’s a podcaster who has a very, very popular podcast.
0:36:36 I listen to him sometimes, some of them I love,
0:36:38 some of them I’m not that crazy about.
0:36:42 But he’s very deliberate and he’s very slow
0:36:43 and it would never work on television.
0:36:47 And I love the fact that it does work in the medium
0:36:48 he’s working in.
0:36:50 But one thing about TV for people that I haven’t done it is,
0:36:53 if you’ve ever had the experience of going to a batting cage,
0:36:58 and putting it up to like 70, 80, 90, like professional,
0:37:01 and you’re standing there and the ball is just past you
0:37:04 before your muscle even twitch.
0:37:08 You’re just like, whoa, that ball got on me very fast.
0:37:12 That’s how TV feels when you, if you’re not used to it.
0:37:15 It’s just, it’s like trying to hit majorly pitching.
0:37:19 All of a sudden, everything is moving way faster
0:37:22 than it does in normal conversation, in normal thing.
0:37:26 In anything you do normally, it’s happening way, way, way, way faster.
0:37:31 I will say, and it’s not just because you’re a friend of the show.
0:37:33 I think you do it as well as it can be done.
0:37:35 Well, thanks, I appreciate that.
0:37:38 All right, let’s back up a second.
0:37:43 Because I do want to ask, and it’s something you ask in the book.
0:37:47 You point out, every time we have these periods of change,
0:37:51 we do have to pause and ask, what’s really new here?
0:37:52 What’s not?
0:37:55 What’s really harmful and what isn’t?
0:37:57 As you say, people freaked out about comic books, right?
0:38:00 And that was clearly ridiculous in retrospect.
0:38:04 But people also freaked out about cigarettes or worried about cigarettes,
0:38:06 which was clearly wise in retrospect.
0:38:12 So how do we know the attention age is cigarettes and not comic books?
0:38:14 It’s a great question.
0:38:18 I think there’s a few ways to answer this question.
0:38:25 So one, I think, is on the sort of Jonathan Haidt who wrote The Anxious Generation question of,
0:38:31 what does the empirical research say about what this is doing to us, right?
0:38:34 In the case of tobacco, we just acquired a huge body of evidence.
0:38:35 This is terrible for our health.
0:38:39 Even though, as I cite in the book, there were people going back to the 17th century,
0:38:43 16th century, who were like, boy, this sure seems like an awful thing to do.
0:38:46 You light this stuff on fire and you put the smoke in your lungs.
0:38:48 I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
0:38:53 So I think, in some ways, the empirical question, while important, like,
0:38:55 is it making us more depressed?
0:39:01 A very difficult causal question to resolve, as all causal questions are.
0:39:08 Is also distinct from the deeper philosophical thing, which is just like,
0:39:09 are we, is this good?
0:39:10 Do we like this?
0:39:14 Like, is this forming my soul well?
0:39:16 And I don’t need data to tell me that.
0:39:19 That’s a human question.
0:39:25 That’s, in some ways, why the book is really, to a certain extent, a work of philosophy.
0:39:30 You could tell me, you could come back and be like, actually, none of the empirical data,
0:39:33 like, it doesn’t cause more anxiety.
0:39:34 It doesn’t cause depression.
0:39:35 You know, fine.
0:39:37 That might be true.
0:39:43 But the bigger question is like, our experience of majority is an experience
0:39:47 of an ever-quickening pace and new forms of alienation
0:39:50 that we then have to wrestle with as people.
0:39:55 And whatever the data says in the end, we all got to live in this world and in this environment,
0:40:00 which I think a lot of us, understandably, are not enjoying.
0:40:12 Hey, whatcha doing?
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0:40:59 It’s Today Explained.
0:41:02 I’m Noelle King with Miles Bryan.
0:41:04 Senior reporter and producer for the program.
0:41:04 Hello.
0:41:06 Hi, you went to public school, right, Miles?
0:41:08 Yes, go South High Tigers.
0:41:10 What do you remember about school lunch?
0:41:15 Oh, I remember sad lasagna, shrink-wrapped in little containers.
0:41:16 I remember avoiding it.
0:41:18 Do you remember the nugs, the chicken nuggets?
0:41:23 Yeah, if I had to eat school lunch, that was a pretty good option.
0:41:24 I actually liked them.
0:41:28 But in addition to being very tasty, those nugs were very processed.
0:41:32 And at the moment, America has got processed foods in its crosshairs.
0:41:36 It’s true, we are collectively very down on processed food right now,
0:41:40 none more so than Health and Human Services Secretary nominee,
0:41:42 Robert Floride Kennedy, Jr.
0:41:45 I’ll get processed food out of school lunch immediately.
0:41:50 About half the school lunch program goes to processed food.
0:41:55 Hen the man who once saved a dead bear cub for a snack, fixed school lunches.
0:42:00 Today Explained, every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:42:17 Well, the final chapter of the book is titled Reclaiming Our Minds.
0:42:20 So does that mean you have a blueprint for how to unfuck
0:42:23 ourselves in the world?
0:42:26 I need a 10-point, money-back guarantee plan.
0:42:27 I know, I’m bad at this, you know.
0:42:29 It’s the worst part of writing a book.
0:42:33 I know, this is my favorite last chapter I’ve written because I actually do think,
0:42:36 I do think there’s some concrete stuff here.
0:42:42 So the individual stuff, I think, you know, people are doing all the things they’re doing,
0:42:46 mindfulness, playing their phones in boxes, you know, schools, for instance.
0:42:50 I think like schools, it’s crazy to me that schools have only started taking kids’ phones
0:42:52 at class at the beginning, totally crazy.
0:42:53 Insane.
0:42:54 Insane, like what do we do?
0:43:00 Like also, have you ever watched, have you gone to a conference recently or any kind
0:43:02 of adult meeting where people can have their phones?
0:43:05 Like no one’s paying attention.
0:43:08 You just take them for all of that stuff.
0:43:15 So individually, like, you know, taking long walks without listening to a podcast and
0:43:19 letting, being along with your thoughts, like a cult trading, you’re forcing yourself to do that,
0:43:21 even if it’s 20 minutes a day.
0:43:26 I’m gonna do 20 minutes where I take a walk by myself and I think, and I just sit with
0:43:26 my own mind.
0:43:27 I really think that’s useful.
0:43:31 Not just like an individual thing.
0:43:33 And there’s a million different individual things.
0:43:41 Hobbies, habits, things we do that are neither work or the phone, being with other people.
0:43:44 Then there’s like social stuff.
0:43:47 And here’s where I do think the food stuff is really important and interesting.
0:43:53 A bunch of people in the 60s started, for specific ideological reasons, rebelling against
0:43:58 a whole bunch of aspects of industrial food production.
0:44:04 People that started opening up whole food stores, not like the brand name, but like whole grain
0:44:11 stores, health food stores, natural food stores, people starting green markets, farmer’s markets
0:44:15 in the early 1970s, Alice Waters and sort of farm to table stuff.
0:44:23 All this was like a rebellion against basically like the slop people were eating,
0:44:29 the Chef Boyardee, Jell-O-Mold, Peak TV Dinner, 1970s cuisine.
0:44:30 People were just like, “I don’t like this.”
0:44:37 Like, there’s an empirical question about is that stuff good for you and how much is it
0:44:38 causing obesity?
0:44:41 But then there’s also a question like, “I don’t like this.”
0:44:51 And that at the time seemed fringe and bespoke and avant-garde.
0:45:01 It was on to something and has become an entire alternate universe of food production.
0:45:05 Now some of it co-opted, you know, by big agra.
0:45:08 We haven’t like defeated corn syrup, for instance, in America.
0:45:11 But it is so different.
0:45:15 The food landscape, the way we think about food and talk about food
0:45:18 between now and like the 1970s.
0:45:21 And that is the product of activism.
0:45:24 It’s the product of like free spirits.
0:45:26 It’s the product of entrepreneurs.
0:45:29 I think you were going to see something coalesce around attention now.
0:45:35 And again, this is like all this stuff feels like kind of precious and bespoke.
0:45:41 But like jogging and fitness were precious and bespoke at some point.
0:45:43 Like jogging was like a weird avant-garde thing.
0:45:48 That like is a sort of silly thing.
0:45:51 George W. Bush lost his first congressional campaign when he moved back to Texas
0:45:53 because there was an ad by his opponent of him jogging.
0:45:55 He was like, “Get a load of this, dude.”
0:46:01 So I think there are going to be social movements.
0:46:06 And there’s some interesting folks around, you know,
0:46:09 the Struthers School for Radical Attention, which is here in New York.
0:46:11 You may have seen the name D. Graham Burnett.
0:46:15 He did podcasts with Azra Klein and he’s going to have a book about this.
0:46:20 And a whole bunch of people around, there’s like this sort of secret society
0:46:24 they have that was profiled in New Yorker, thinking about this,
0:46:27 rebelling against it in a very similar kind of back to the land way, right?
0:46:34 Like born of a kind of spiritual ideological set of principal commitments to like rebelling against this.
0:46:40 Well, as you point out, you know, in the 19th century, the labor movement
0:46:45 basically arrived at two big regulatory responses, right?
0:46:50 Abandoned child labor and limitations on total hours worked.
0:46:56 What are, what could be the equivalent regulations today?
0:46:58 I mean, I think that’s an interesting place to start.
0:47:02 So I think first of all, regulating attention and regulating the extraction of attention
0:47:05 is just an area that we need to explore.
0:47:11 I mean, there’s a lot of controversy about cutting teenagers off from social media.
0:47:13 A lot of people on the left think it’s bad precisely around
0:47:17 kids having access to LGBTQ information.
0:47:19 And I totally hear that.
0:47:25 Also, they think there’s sort of toxic ways in which like the particulars of a bill can empower,
0:47:27 you know, right wing attorneys general to do bad stuff.
0:47:28 And I totally hear that too.
0:47:31 I think as a general principle, the idea that
0:47:37 companies should not be buying and selling the attention of 14 year olds is just obviously true.
0:47:42 And a huge part of that too, this goes hand in hand.
0:47:45 So when I talk about the sort of social movement before I even get to regulation,
0:47:50 non-commercial spaces for connection.
0:47:54 Just the way that like we have non-commercial public space, I can meet you in Prospect Park.
0:47:55 We can walk on the street.
0:47:57 We don’t just exist in a mall.
0:48:02 So one big part of it too, before we even get to the regulatory part of it,
0:48:08 and this is why I’m saying this, is we need to build non-commercial space.
0:48:15 Like all of digital life has been completely taken over by commercial spaces that are trying
0:48:16 to buy and sell your attention.
0:48:20 And then the regulatory question, I think is a deep one.
0:48:23 Like, first of all, there’s constitutional issues because of speech.
0:48:28 But I think if you think about it in terms of regulating the attention,
0:48:32 like an app just can’t take more than an hour of your attention today.
0:48:35 I don’t know.
0:48:37 Maybe we pass the law and do that.
0:48:42 Like that seems crazy at some level, but is it?
0:48:47 And so I think we need to be thinking about regulating attention.
0:48:49 I think that, and part of that is breaking up the big tech firms,
0:48:50 which are too big and things like that.
0:48:58 But more specifically, like this does feel like a place for governments to do something.
0:49:03 Your book is rightly grounded in political economy,
0:49:05 because that’s the driver of a lot of this.
0:49:08 And it’s just very hard to imagine meaningful solutions
0:49:12 that don’t involve a serious rethinking at that level.
0:49:13 Yeah.
0:49:17 I mean, I think there’s a deeper question about the form of the general form of capitalism
0:49:21 and kind of gilded age oligopoly that we found ourselves in right now.
0:49:24 And all these things are converging at the same point.
0:49:29 I mean, Elon Musk is both kind of an allegory, but also very real.
0:49:34 It’s sort of wild to me how much he just over the course writing the book
0:49:37 became the full embodiment of everything the book says,
0:49:42 both in his own personal compulsions, which he clearly can’t control.
0:49:44 I mean, he’s very obviously addicted to posting.
0:49:48 To his kind of, through his own personal brokenness,
0:49:52 I think finding his way to understanding that attention is the most valuable resource,
0:49:56 to iterating on Donald Trump’s key insights,
0:49:59 to capture it and become the main character all the time,
0:50:01 and then the power that that’s given him.
0:50:06 It’s pretty dystopian, but it is playing out right in front of us.
0:50:08 Do you have any final thoughts you want to add?
0:50:11 I mean, if someone listens to this conversation,
0:50:14 if they go and read your book after listening to this conversation,
0:50:16 what do you hope they take away from it?
0:50:18 Maybe more to the point, what do you hope they do?
0:50:25 I do think there are parent groups that are working.
0:50:26 There are a whole bunch of groups happening.
0:50:30 You can go to the Struthers School for Radical Attention, you can Google that.
0:50:32 There are more and more grassroots groups.
0:50:38 A lot of it have been associated around Jonathan Hyde’s book and kids, particularly teenagers.
0:50:44 But one of the things I think is important is that there’s a little bit of an
0:50:45 instinct to be like, this is a teenager problem.
0:50:53 I sometimes think actually teenagers are better about this than boomers, for instance.
0:50:59 But I think you should find other people
0:51:02 and see if there are ways to plug into local people that feel the same way.
0:51:08 And then I think also doing things like joining a book club.
0:51:13 Collective ways that you manage attention together.
0:51:18 Again, as I start subscribing to a physical newspaper,
0:51:21 going for a walk 20 minutes just for your thoughts.
0:51:27 These are small ways to begin to connect with other people, particularly
0:51:31 around all of us kind of reconceptualizing this collectively.
0:51:34 That’s a good place to end it.
0:51:37 Once again, the book is called The Siren’s Call.
0:51:41 How attention became the world’s most endangered resource.
0:51:46 I legitimately love the book and I appreciate having a chance to read it.
0:51:48 And I’m glad you wrote it.
0:51:50 Chris Hayes, thanks buddy.
0:51:50 Sean, that was great.
0:51:51 Thank you so much.
0:52:06 All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:52:08 You know I did.
0:52:12 And in case you’re wondering, my screen time was actually down this week.
0:52:13 Was it down a lot?
0:52:16 No, but it was down.
0:52:18 And that’s a start.
0:52:23 As always, we want to know what you think of the episode.
0:52:26 So drop us a line at TheGrayArea@Vox.com.
0:52:30 And please rate, review, subscribe to the podcast.
0:52:31 That stuff really helps.
0:52:38 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:52:43 fact-checked by Kim Eggleston, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
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0:01:27 A friend of mine once told me that you are where your attention is. That line
0:01:31 always stuck with me. It was a reminder that the most important choice we all
0:01:37 make is also the most common one. We make it a thousand times a day, every day of
0:01:43 our lives. It’s the decision about what to pay attention to and what not to pay
0:01:52 attention to. One of the primary features of this age, the age of the internet
0:01:58 and smartphones and algorithmic feeds, is that our attention is everywhere and
0:02:02 nowhere at the same time because we’re endlessly pushed around by a parade of
0:02:07 distractions. Your phone’s ringing. Your Apple Watch is blinking. You got a ping
0:02:11 on Slack from a co-worker. You’re getting an email notification as you’re
0:02:18 sitting down for dinner. It’s always something. Which is probably why, if
0:02:22 you’re like me, it’s hard to remember the last time you watched an entire movie
0:02:26 or show without checking your phone. Hell, I barely made it through recording
0:02:33 this intro without checking my phone. This level of distraction is not an
0:02:38 accident. Our devices have engineered these impulses and a whole industry has
0:02:43 emerged that’s devoted to capturing our attention in all these ways and then
0:02:49 selling it to the highest bidder. And their tools and tactics are getting better
0:02:58 every day. I’m Sean Elling and this is the Grey Area.
0:03:15 Today’s guest is Chris Hayes. You of course know Chris as the host of All In
0:03:23 with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. But he’s also a writer and has a new book out called
0:03:30 The Sirens Call. How attention became the world’s most endangered resource. The
0:03:36 discourse on attention and digital technology is crowded. So when we have
0:03:40 someone on the show to talk about it, it’s because we think they have something
0:03:49 new to offer. And Hayes certainly does. For him, the reordering of our social and
0:03:54 economic conditions around the pursuit of attention is, in his words, a
0:04:01 transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism. It’s a bold
0:04:07 claim and I’m not sure Chris is right about that, but he might be. And in any
0:04:12 case, it’s a smart and ambitious book and I’m excited to have Chris back on the
0:04:19 show to talk about it. Chris Hayes, welcome back to the show. It’s great to
0:04:24 be back. I think you’re officially now a friend of the show. Oh, definitely. Yeah,
0:04:29 absolutely. And is it true? A lot of people are saying that the ideas for this
0:04:35 book were actually planted in our last conversation. Actually, yes. I mean, in
0:04:39 large part, I remember that conversation and also your work, your book, which I
0:04:45 read and really enjoyed. You opened the book with this famous image of Odessius
0:04:51 strapped to the mast of a ship by his own command in order to resist, shall we
0:04:58 say, certain temptations. Why start your story with that story? It’s one of the
0:05:01 most potent images in the entire Western canon and I’ve always been kind of
0:05:07 obsessed with it because it’s a metaphor for so many things. I mean, one, I
0:05:10 think we think of in terms of addiction. If you’ve ever been around to someone
0:05:13 trying to quit smoking and they like buy a pack and then they throw the, they
0:05:17 smoke one cigarette and they throw the pack out, right? As a sort of commitment
0:05:21 mechanism to bind myself to the mast to resist the temptation. So it’s such a
0:05:27 potent metaphor for so many things. But fundamentally, what, what started with, I
0:05:32 was just thinking about the word siren and how weird it was that we, there are
0:05:40 two meanings of that word. One, the, you know, from the Homeric epic, these
0:05:46 creatures, some people say they look like birds. Usually in movies, they’re
0:05:51 just like super hot women that seduce and warble you to death in the words of,
0:05:57 of Homer. And then the thing that’s on top of an ambulance or a cop car. Very
0:05:59 different things, but they’re both doing the same thing, which is they’re
0:06:04 compelling your attention. And that experience of having your attention
0:06:11 compelled and trying to manage that compulsion through, in the case of Odysseus,
0:06:17 extremely elaborate means is to me, the experience of contemporary life at all
0:06:21 times in some ways. And so that was sort of there almost from the beginning of
0:06:28 working on the book. How do you define a word like attention? What are some of the
0:06:34 more useful or practical ways to think about what it actually means in human
0:06:39 life? So there’s a lot of debate about this. There are some people who say it’s
0:06:45 not really even a coherent a concept. And some of the critiques I take seriously in
0:06:50 some ways, I’m using it in an everyday sense because I think it’s useful to use
0:06:55 in the everyday sense because I think it is naming something real. So one way to
0:07:00 think about it is the flash beam of thought. That’s a common trope, right?
0:07:04 There’s a William James description of attention that everyone who writes about
0:07:07 attention quotes because it’s so good, which is withdrawal from certain things
0:07:11 to focus on others. If you think about what a stagehand of the spotlight does in
0:07:17 a Broadway play, like I’m focusing on you right now. If I take a second, there’s a
0:07:24 million forms of perceptual stimulus in my visual field right now. I could focus
0:07:29 on those. I’m not. I’m focusing on you through an effort of conscious will. So
0:07:32 that’s how we think about attention, the ability to focus basically, willfully
0:07:37 focus. But then there’s other dimensions of that. So there’s conscious
0:07:41 attention, voluntary attention, then there’s involuntary attention. Like right
0:07:46 now, if someone, I have a door to my studio right now, if someone busted in
0:07:52 here and opened that door, I couldn’t not look. It would literally be impossible.
0:07:57 Before I had any conscious will over it, before I made any decision, no matter how
0:08:04 disciplined I am, pre-consciously, a system would fire that would wrench my
0:08:09 attention towards that door going open. So that’s involuntary
0:08:13 attention, right? And then the third aspect I talk about is social attention,
0:08:18 which I think has its own kind of particular weight and depth, which is
0:08:22 it’s not just that we could pay attention to things in the world. We can pay
0:08:27 attention to people, and crucially, people can pay attention to us. We can be on
0:08:31 the receiving end of attention, which is another thing that makes it so
0:08:36 psychologically and socially and emotionally rich. Well, you call it the
0:08:39 substance of life, attention. I mean, is that just kind of another way of saying
0:08:43 it’s really everything or the most important thing, certainly one of the
0:08:48 most important things that we have? I think it’s the most important thing, and I
0:08:52 think to go back to William James, one of James’s philosophical preoccupations is
0:08:59 free will, whether we have it, what it means to have it. And to him, attention is
0:09:05 indistinguishable from will, because that ability to focus is the essence of
0:09:14 will. And for me, if you’re not a religious person, so you don’t think that
0:09:20 the kind of meaning of your existence is imbued by some higher power or some sort
0:09:28 of spiritual essence, in a secular sense, what we get is one life. And what we do
0:09:34 during that one life is we go around through the world and this one body and
0:09:39 brain we have, peering out at it, and from moment to moment paying attention to
0:09:46 this or that. And what we pay attention to in the end adds up to a life. And I
0:09:50 don’t think there’s any way to, it’s elemental in that sense. And I don’t think
0:09:54 there’s any way to detach what your experience of life is from this faculty.
0:10:00 We do sort of become what we pay attention to. And given how important it
0:10:04 is, it is kind of nuts. I’ve said this a bunch on the show, and I’ll probably say
0:10:09 it a bunch more, but it’s wild how thoughtlessly we give it away every day.
0:10:13 And I have no doubt, almost no doubt, that when we’re all at the end of our
0:10:17 lives, our biggest regret, certainly one of our biggest regrets, will be that we
0:10:22 gave our attention away to the wrong things. Yes. And I think there’s a
0:10:27 few reasons for that. One is this aspect of compelled attention, right? So we have
0:10:33 these biological inherences that are very deep that have produced a faculty
0:10:38 that’s there to like warn us of danger, right? Or to do all kinds of
0:10:43 things that may be evolutionarily necessary. So that faculty’s always there.
0:10:46 So we’re always being sort of drawn towards certain things, whether we kind
0:10:50 of consciously will it or not, you know, the lurid, the prurient, like this whole
0:10:53 category of things, we have a whole set of words to describe things that draw our
0:10:58 attention, even though we don’t necessarily want to go there. So we’re
0:11:02 always fighting that. And then there’s the fact that we have a hard time sitting
0:11:06 with our own thoughts. So there’s, there’s these sort of two sides of this
0:11:09 coin stuff is always trying to take our attention, but we’re always trying to put
0:11:14 it somewhere. So the and this is an experience of modernity, I think it’s
0:11:18 really interesting in research to the book, talking to reading anthropologists
0:11:25 who work with hunter gatherers, basically, people that live outside of fully
0:11:30 outside of what we call modernity, even outside of like, modernity circa, you
0:11:35 know, 1000 or the Roman Empire, right? They’re hunter gatherers. Don’t have words
0:11:40 for boredom. Don’t really talk about being bored, literally, like, in an
0:11:44 aboriginal indigenous tribe, like the word boredom has to be imported from,
0:11:48 from English to the wallpaper, because they don’t have word for it. So at some
0:11:54 level, this isn’t a elemental human inheritance, but it is constitutive
0:11:57 majority in some ways, being bored. So you’ve got these two things, there’s stuff
0:12:00 always trying to take our attention. And we’re then also always trying to get
0:12:04 it away, because if something isn’t taking it, talk about, you know, sitting at
0:12:11 the breakfast table as a 10 year old, just desperate to read something and
0:12:16 reading the back of the cereal box, like, please, don’t like, you must give me
0:12:21 something to, for my mind to chew on, or it’s gonna chew on itself. Yeah, there’s
0:12:25 that famous Pascal quote, right, that like, all of man’s problems stem from his
0:12:29 inability to sit quietly in a room. Exactly. It’s true. And it’s amazing to
0:12:34 encounter that quote now, right. I mean, he wrote that in 1650, I think,
0:12:38 somewhere around thereabouts. It’s funny because of how much we think of this as
0:12:45 a contemporary conundrum, right? Yeah. That it’s born of, of the smartphone. And
0:12:49 one of the things that I think was so enjoyable about working on this book and
0:12:54 thinking about it is that the conditions of contemporary life, which I think are
0:13:00 distinct in many ways, end up being, drawing an arrow to like the core of the
0:13:05 human conundrum. So you end up kind of wrestling with these deep things that
0:13:11 manifest in different ways under different social or technological conditions,
0:13:16 but fundamentally come back to like, living with our own conscious mind in
0:13:22 the world. Well, you make it really interesting. And as far as I know, novel
0:13:29 argument about the transition we’re experiencing now, comparing it to the
0:13:35 emergence of wage labor in the industrial revolution. And you make the case that
0:13:41 the modern attention economy does to attention something very similar to what
0:13:49 industrial capitalism did to labor. So lay that out for me. Yeah. So labor is the
0:13:55 product of a specific set of legal, market, social institutions that produce
0:14:01 this thing called a wage and a laborer, even though humans are doing stuff as soon
0:14:05 as they get to the planet, right? Effort, toil, whatever you want to call it exists
0:14:11 prior to that. Labor is turning to commodity. And there’s a bunch of weird
0:14:17 things about that. And Marx is, I’m not a Marxist personally, but I think his
0:14:24 observations here are quite prophetic. There’s something weird about it, you
0:14:28 know, like, first of all, just the lived experience of the difference between a
0:14:32 guy who runs a shoe shop who’s a cobbler, which exists prior to industrial
0:14:36 capitalism, where like, you’re making the, you’re making the whole shoe, you know,
0:14:39 first you’re putting, you’re cutting the sole, then you’re putting the upper on,
0:14:41 then you’re putting it together. In the end, you got this thing, it’s a shoe. And
0:14:45 now you own it, and then I sell it to you, Sean. You pay me money, now you own it.
0:14:50 Okay. You go from that to, I work in a shoe factory 12 hours a day where I just
0:14:56 stamp soles all day. I’m completely alienated, like, it is external to me the
0:15:02 shoes I make. I don’t actually own them in a market sense. And also, like, it’s a
0:15:08 much different experience of life. This thing has been taken from me in some
0:15:12 deep sense. Like, I don’t want to stamp soles all day. That’s, that’s like, that
0:15:17 kind of sucks. And maybe making shoes kind of sucks too, but it sucks in a more
0:15:23 interesting way. That’s more mine. So you have this extraction of this thing that’s
0:15:26 so essential to you. And not only extraction of things that are essential to you,
0:15:32 the other thing that’s weird about it is, in the grand scheme, labor in the
0:15:38 aggregate is necessary for all of industrial capitalism. So it’s incredibly
0:15:44 valuable in the aggregate. But each individual slice of it is essentially
0:15:49 valueless. You’re like, this is all I got. I got this one body, and I go and stamp
0:15:53 soles 12 hours a day, and I get nothing for it. But that’s it. That’s, from my
0:15:57 perspective, that’s all I got, right? So all of these attributes are there for
0:16:05 attention, right? Attention pre-exists before its marketization, right? It now
0:16:10 has a value out in the world. It’s now being extracted at scale. In the aggregate,
0:16:17 it’s wildly valuable. Google, Meta, right? All their money comes from this. I
0:16:21 argue in the book, Amazon, to a certain extent, is really an attention company. So
0:16:26 the aggregate is wildly valuable. Individually, like, they’re paying tiny
0:16:30 slivers of sense for your attention in any moment. The amount of advertising you
0:16:34 get shoved in a day, the amount of content you get shoved in a day through
0:16:38 these algorithms, I don’t know, maybe it’s like cost someone somewhere in the
0:16:43 aggregate 20 bucks. But to you, it’s like, that’s all you got. That’s all you have is
0:16:47 what you’re paying attention to in any moment. So that same sense of extraction,
0:16:53 right? A thing in us, it gets named and commodified. A set of institutions take
0:16:58 it from us, assign it a market value. Carl Pogliani, who’s a sort of socialist
0:17:04 economic thinker, calls these fictitious commodities, right? Like, there are certain
0:17:08 commodities that exist in the market. And then there’s certain commodities like
0:17:14 labor, attention, Pogliani argues land. They’re not, like, made for market
0:17:18 production. They’re just out in the world. And yet they get turned into a
0:17:24 commodity. And that, and the, it requires a reorientation of the world, of all
0:17:30 social relations in some ways, to make them function as commodities. So attention
0:17:35 is the most important resource in the world now. And a key argument in the
0:17:41 book is that this is very different from previous eras built around resources
0:17:46 like land or capital or coal or whatever. What is the most significant
0:17:48 difference here for you?
0:17:52 The argument I make in the book is that what we think of as commonly referred to
0:17:56 as the attention age, and you could decide when you want to start that, the
0:18:03 1980s, the 1990s, the 70s, is truly the information age, that you have a switch
0:18:08 from physical market production to non-material market production, information
0:18:14 economy, claims adjusters, coders, podcasters, like you and I, right? All doing
0:18:19 these things that don’t amount to the physical refashioning of the world. And
0:18:23 in that world, we think of it as like information being the defining feature of
0:18:28 it. But information is limitless. Information, there’s just tons of
0:18:33 information. The thing that’s scarce and valuable is attention. So everyone’s
0:18:38 got to fight over that. And the more information there is, the lower the
0:18:41 barriers it is to get in front of someone’s face, the more competitive it
0:18:46 becomes. And I think that we’re in a position now as more and more of the
0:18:50 world moves from sort of industrial modes of production to post-industrial
0:18:54 modes of production, that it’s just necessarily the case that under those
0:18:59 conditions, the one thing that’s left that’s scarce, that’s finite, that’s the
0:19:01 most valuable is our attention.
0:19:08 And I love the point you make in the book that unlike coal or land, which is
0:19:12 outside of us, right, that this resource, attention, is in our minds. It’s in
0:19:17 our heads. And so that involves cracking into our minds, as you put it.
0:19:23 Yeah. Now it’s like traffic or air travel. Like, it’s a thing that we all
0:19:27 just experience as a bummer. Yeah. That you just talk to about like, doesn’t it
0:19:32 suck that, you know, we can’t pay attention. The phones are always going
0:19:32 off.
0:19:40 I am constantly making noises about what tech is doing to us on the show and to
0:19:45 basically everybody in my life to their great annoyance. But I don’t have a
0:19:54 compelling response necessarily to the arguments that no one’s forced to stare
0:19:59 at their phones all day. We’re choosing this. We want this. And that’s not
0:20:04 exactly wrong, but I also think our creaturely vulnerabilities are so
0:20:09 exploitable. And even though we’re not being forced in the literal sense, I’m
0:20:13 also not sure we’re really free in any meaningful or recognizable way.
0:20:16 Well, I mean, I think that’s, I think that’s the deepest question, right? I
0:20:20 mean, I don’t think I can resolve the free will question. Come on. You’re
0:20:24 Christopher Hayes, guy, your podcast. Come on. But, but I, but I think you’re
0:20:29 right. I mean, I do think it implicates, it implicates our freedom in a profound
0:20:33 and deep way. I mean, when you get that notification on your phone, and again, I
0:20:36 want to be very upfront here. I was joking, my wife, that like, I feel like
0:20:39 I’ve written a recovery memoir and I’m still drinking, like people are going to
0:20:43 go to me and like, well, here’s how you do it. It’s like, I’m still fighting all
0:20:46 this stuff. I’m, you know, I’m not, I’m not great about it. So I don’t want
0:20:51 anyone to think that I’m on some elevated plane here. Like I’m in the muck with
0:20:55 everyone. Okay. When you get that notification on the screen time
0:21:01 notification, that like, this was your average screen time for the week. That
0:21:07 is a profound moment of like, who am I and what is my will? And we fail the test
0:21:13 every day. I’m like, what are you talking about with that number? That number is
0:21:18 shocking. The saddest part of my week. Who am I? The saddest part of my week,
0:21:22 every week on Sunday morning between nine and 10, I get the notification from my
0:21:27 phone about the average amount of screen time this week. And it’s horrifying.
0:21:32 It’s a horrifying number. But it’s a horrifying number also in that deep way
0:21:38 of like, what does it say about you? It’s wild. Again, I fuck it. I guess I’ll just
0:21:43 go full philosophy seminar here. But if we no longer have meaningful conscious
0:21:47 control over our attention, at some point, we do reach a level of passivity
0:21:52 that makes us more of an object than a person. Yes. And that has profound
0:21:56 implications for, for instance, democratic theory. Yes. I mean, and when, and
0:22:00 when you, and these are, it’s interesting because there was a round of these
0:22:05 conversations, particularly in the 20s and 30s, the sort of collision of mass
0:22:10 media, mass propaganda, mass advertising, and, and, and, and industrial
0:22:14 democracy all coming together. And these debates that happened during that period
0:22:19 of time, where everyone’s sort of trying to deal with this exact same question
0:22:26 that we’re now dealing with, which is, can people be subjects in a meaningful
0:22:31 sense under these conditions of like, mass media? Like if everyone is just
0:22:38 listening to the same propaganda all day on their radios, in what sense do we
0:22:42 have individual subjects with free wills making decisions about self
0:22:47 governance? You know, and this is the Lipman. This is Lipman’s big experience,
0:22:52 right? He’s the chief propagandist to get us into World War One. And he, and
0:22:55 again, I think it was much easier to manipulate public opinion then, to be
0:23:00 honest. But he does it, and he’s like, oh my God, that was way too easy. What
0:23:05 does it mean about democracy if you can just propagandize a whole population?
0:23:10 And we have a different set of questions now that aren’t about, in some
0:23:14 fascinating way or sort of the converse, right? That was all about massness. It
0:23:20 was like, everyone’s listening to the same thing. So it, it’s subsuming the
0:23:25 individual. And we’re watching fascism as this sort of, this sort of the mob
0:23:28 basically come to life. And the mob is all getting the same propaganda. The mob
0:23:34 is acting as one. We’re now seeing this like weird hyper individuation, which
0:23:39 like, no one seems, it sees exactly the same content all day. And what is that
0:23:45 radical individuation and sort of self selection do to the, you know, the
0:23:46 Democratic project?
0:23:51 I love that you went here because this is where I wanted to go. Well, this is
0:23:56 what what your books about, I mean, in a lot of ways it is. Yeah. And to the
0:24:00 point you’re making here and in the book, if we also lack the capacity to
0:24:05 pay attention together, what the hell does that mean for democracy? I mean,
0:24:09 democracy on some level is a shared culture. So if mass culture isn’t
0:24:15 possible anymore, is democracy? I mean, there’s a few things I say. One is, I
0:24:18 do want to be, I want to always in this book, and I try very hard to sort of
0:24:24 resist the temptation, dehistoricize everything. Like, you know, as I say in
0:24:28 the book, like, they didn’t need Facebook and Salem to like, start having
0:24:33 viral rumors that so and so was a witch. Like people, people are very good at
0:24:38 spreading disinformation, just analog style, which is like the core of the
0:24:43 human condition. And like, you know, that’s, that’s our lot. And, you know,
0:24:46 democracy is incredibly fallible with a bunch of fallible people. So I just
0:24:53 want to say that. But yes, I think there is a profound question about what
0:24:56 this is doing to our democracy. And particularly because, as I write in the
0:25:02 book, and this is really key and it’s something that I live every day,
0:25:11 attention is not a moral faculty. It doesn’t, it is distinct from what we
0:25:18 think is important. You know, Lipman in public opinion lines about this, he
0:25:22 wants about a lot of things. You know, he says, you know, he’s talking about the,
0:25:25 the, he’s talking about Versailles actually, right? So talking about the end
0:25:28 of the war and the reparations, he says, Americans have an incredible interest
0:25:33 in this, but they’re not interested in it. Like, it, we have a, he’s like the same
0:25:38 way the child has an enormous interest in his father’s business that he will
0:25:44 inherit, but is not interested in it. So this problem is old, but I think it’s
0:25:52 so sheer right now that overcoming the compelled, the sirens call the, the, the
0:25:57 sort of lowest common denominator, tabloid casino effect of everything in a
0:26:00 very competitive attention environment where we’re driven towards the lowest
0:26:06 common denominator, we’re driven towards what compels it, malforms the public
0:26:15 collective ability to reason collectively, to think of issues independent of what
0:26:18 just sustains our attention from moment to moment, because what sustains our
0:26:22 attention from moment to moment is distinct from what is important. And we
0:26:26 all know that we, everyone understands that. And yet it’s very hard to
0:26:30 counteract sort of what’s being done to us through the technologies.
0:26:34 And of course, look, the problem isn’t just that we’re losing control over what
0:26:39 we pay attention to. We’re also losing the capacity to pay attention for more
0:26:43 than 10 seconds. You know, I mean, you talk about the, the Lincoln Douglas
0:26:47 debates in the book, we talk about it in ours as well, you know, and it really
0:26:51 is striking how much more sophisticated the language was back then.
0:26:52 It’s wild.
0:26:56 It’s wild. And people had the capacity to pay attention to it for so long. And
0:27:03 there’s just no question that more people think and speak in soundbites now,
0:27:05 because that’s how we consume information. I mean, maybe it started with
0:27:10 the telegraph and radio and TV, but it’s ratcheted up to a whole other level
0:27:14 with digital tech. We are a meme culture now. And if you live in a meme
0:27:18 culture, you’re going to have a meme politics in a citizenry that can only
0:27:21 communicate at the level of memes. I don’t know what you do with that.
0:27:24 Yes, no, you’re right. I mean, and yes, and your discussion, I think your
0:27:29 discussion on Lincoln Douglas actually was what sent me originally back to
0:27:33 read them. I also have no doubt that if those people attending the Lincoln
0:27:38 Douglas debates could go home and stream CSI Toledo or whatever, they would.
0:27:43 Dude, all I mean, go back and like people, that is, again, this is one
0:27:46 of these challenges with this whole discourse is like, what’s distinct?
0:27:52 What’s old? Like, go read, all Marx did is just fight with people online,
0:27:56 essentially, for what his day was. Like, that’s all he spent his whole life.
0:28:01 Like, he was a compulsive poster. He’s constantly having 15 different
0:28:06 factional fights. People always forget the conus manifesto is so funny.
0:28:09 It’s basically, it’s like 15 pages of like, you know, all this stuff.
0:28:12 People know workers of the world unite. And then there’s an addendum that’s
0:28:17 like why every other factional tendency in the broad anti-capitalist movement
0:28:21 is wrong, like goes through each one like this one’s wrong for this reasons.
0:28:24 And then there’s like, there’s like this like weird formation of kind of
0:28:28 monarchist right wing Catholics were also anti-Buschwan anti-capitalist.
0:28:31 They’re wrong for this reason. And literally, just like, it’s just like
0:28:36 a set of fights he’s picking with every different person.
0:28:41 So some of this, again, this is the thing that I say all the time.
0:28:47 Democracy is a technology for managing the conflict endemic to human affairs.
0:28:51 It’s the best technology we have come up with for managing conflict
0:28:56 endemic human affairs, but conflict is endemic to human affairs.
0:29:01 So that, that doesn’t go away. You know, people are going to be disagree
0:29:05 and fight with each other. And the question of how we manage that
0:29:09 is the question of how we collectively govern.
0:29:13 And I do think that like all of us having our brains stripped to the studs
0:29:16 is not helpful in that enterprise.
0:29:19 What a hot take there, Chris.
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0:32:42 You know, we’re talking about TV and, of course, we all know what you do.
0:32:45 You’re the host of a cable news show.
0:32:49 And you grapple with some of these questions in a really interesting way in the book.
0:32:56 You have a point of view as a journalist, as a TV host.
0:33:01 You want to inform and presumably persuade your fellow citizens,
0:33:03 but you also work in TV.
0:33:05 You work in the attention industry.
0:33:09 And the logic of that industry and the logic of that medium
0:33:11 is constantly imposing itself on you.
0:33:13 So how do you navigate this?
0:33:18 How do you play the attention game without compromising yourself?
0:33:19 It’s really hard.
0:33:23 It’s what I spend most of my life thinking about, most of my working life.
0:33:27 I mean, it was the rudest awakening when I moved to Primetime,
0:33:29 partly because the first TV show I had, which was on weekend mornings,
0:33:33 I just didn’t think about intentional imperatives at all.
0:33:37 And I was just like, wouldn’t it be cool to do a two-hour sort of like seminar
0:33:39 about 80 topics at a roundtable?
0:33:41 And then it did well.
0:33:42 It rated pretty well.
0:33:44 And it was like, oh, well, then.
0:33:46 And then I tried to do that at 8 p.m.
0:33:51 after people had just gotten home from like a day teaching third grade
0:33:55 or a shift in the hospice.
0:33:59 And it didn’t really work.
0:34:04 Partly because I think people just started to have different attentional capacity
0:34:08 at 8 p.m. on a weeknight than they do at 9 a.m. on Saturday morning.
0:34:10 Like, you’re pretty clear.
0:34:11 You can sit and think a little.
0:34:19 So I had to deal with those attentional imperatives and I always have to.
0:34:23 I mean, the thing about attention, I say, is that it’s mere.
0:34:25 It’s always necessary and never sufficient.
0:34:29 That’s what’s so fascinating about it.
0:34:31 You always need it to do anything else.
0:34:35 Like, in a relationship, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient.
0:34:37 Like, what you want in a relationship is love.
0:34:41 But you need attention to get love.
0:34:44 Like, you need your spouse to pay you attention and listen to you
0:34:46 and they need you to do the same to them.
0:34:49 But if all you’re doing is paying attention
0:34:51 and sometimes people get into toxic relationships
0:34:53 where they’re paying negative attention to each other
0:34:56 and they’re fighting with each other in this desperate attempt to get that,
0:34:58 it’s not enough.
0:35:02 So that’s the same about the conundrum I have, right?
0:35:05 It’s necessary, but not sufficient.
0:35:10 I need to keep people’s attention as a means to the end
0:35:14 of doing something that I think improves civic life
0:35:16 to be as highfalutinous possible.
0:35:21 When I first started in journalism, I was more of a,
0:35:24 I guess you would call it a take writer.
0:35:26 And I did some cable hits.
0:35:30 And it didn’t go well, in part because
0:35:34 I just didn’t understand how performative it was,
0:35:35 especially when you’re in the guest room.
0:35:39 You know, I wanted to be deliberate and make arguments,
0:35:43 but that’s hard to do when you’ve got a few minutes, maybe.
0:35:44 It’s entertainment, right?
0:35:47 And so you have to capture and hold attention.
0:35:51 And that incentivizes a certain style of communication.
0:35:53 So I kind of just stopped doing TV.
0:35:55 If I did it again, it would go better
0:35:57 because I understand that world now
0:35:59 and I can perform if I need to.
0:36:04 But I didn’t think it brought out the best version of me.
0:36:06 Yeah, I don’t know if it brings out the best version of me
0:36:07 either, to be totally honest.
0:36:10 I mean, one thing that you mentioned there that I think is
0:36:15 part of this discussion is just time and the speed.
0:36:15 That’s right.
0:36:19 People don’t realize how the pace at which they talk
0:36:20 and how compressed it is on television.
0:36:23 And actually, this is a thing I kind of love
0:36:24 about the kind of podcast resurgence.
0:36:28 And to my point about not everything is terrible,
0:36:29 like Lex Friedman is a great example.
0:36:33 He’s a podcaster who has a very, very popular podcast.
0:36:36 I listen to him sometimes, some of them I love,
0:36:38 some of them I’m not that crazy about.
0:36:42 But he’s very deliberate and he’s very slow
0:36:43 and it would never work on television.
0:36:47 And I love the fact that it does work in the medium
0:36:48 he’s working in.
0:36:50 But one thing about TV for people that I haven’t done it is,
0:36:53 if you’ve ever had the experience of going to a batting cage,
0:36:58 and putting it up to like 70, 80, 90, like professional,
0:37:01 and you’re standing there and the ball is just past you
0:37:04 before your muscle even twitch.
0:37:08 You’re just like, whoa, that ball got on me very fast.
0:37:12 That’s how TV feels when you, if you’re not used to it.
0:37:15 It’s just, it’s like trying to hit majorly pitching.
0:37:19 All of a sudden, everything is moving way faster
0:37:22 than it does in normal conversation, in normal thing.
0:37:26 In anything you do normally, it’s happening way, way, way, way faster.
0:37:31 I will say, and it’s not just because you’re a friend of the show.
0:37:33 I think you do it as well as it can be done.
0:37:35 Well, thanks, I appreciate that.
0:37:38 All right, let’s back up a second.
0:37:43 Because I do want to ask, and it’s something you ask in the book.
0:37:47 You point out, every time we have these periods of change,
0:37:51 we do have to pause and ask, what’s really new here?
0:37:52 What’s not?
0:37:55 What’s really harmful and what isn’t?
0:37:57 As you say, people freaked out about comic books, right?
0:38:00 And that was clearly ridiculous in retrospect.
0:38:04 But people also freaked out about cigarettes or worried about cigarettes,
0:38:06 which was clearly wise in retrospect.
0:38:12 So how do we know the attention age is cigarettes and not comic books?
0:38:14 It’s a great question.
0:38:18 I think there’s a few ways to answer this question.
0:38:25 So one, I think, is on the sort of Jonathan Haidt who wrote The Anxious Generation question of,
0:38:31 what does the empirical research say about what this is doing to us, right?
0:38:34 In the case of tobacco, we just acquired a huge body of evidence.
0:38:35 This is terrible for our health.
0:38:39 Even though, as I cite in the book, there were people going back to the 17th century,
0:38:43 16th century, who were like, boy, this sure seems like an awful thing to do.
0:38:46 You light this stuff on fire and you put the smoke in your lungs.
0:38:48 I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
0:38:53 So I think, in some ways, the empirical question, while important, like,
0:38:55 is it making us more depressed?
0:39:01 A very difficult causal question to resolve, as all causal questions are.
0:39:08 Is also distinct from the deeper philosophical thing, which is just like,
0:39:09 are we, is this good?
0:39:10 Do we like this?
0:39:14 Like, is this forming my soul well?
0:39:16 And I don’t need data to tell me that.
0:39:19 That’s a human question.
0:39:25 That’s, in some ways, why the book is really, to a certain extent, a work of philosophy.
0:39:30 You could tell me, you could come back and be like, actually, none of the empirical data,
0:39:33 like, it doesn’t cause more anxiety.
0:39:34 It doesn’t cause depression.
0:39:35 You know, fine.
0:39:37 That might be true.
0:39:43 But the bigger question is like, our experience of majority is an experience
0:39:47 of an ever-quickening pace and new forms of alienation
0:39:50 that we then have to wrestle with as people.
0:39:55 And whatever the data says in the end, we all got to live in this world and in this environment,
0:40:00 which I think a lot of us, understandably, are not enjoying.
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0:40:59 It’s Today Explained.
0:41:02 I’m Noelle King with Miles Bryan.
0:41:04 Senior reporter and producer for the program.
0:41:04 Hello.
0:41:06 Hi, you went to public school, right, Miles?
0:41:08 Yes, go South High Tigers.
0:41:10 What do you remember about school lunch?
0:41:15 Oh, I remember sad lasagna, shrink-wrapped in little containers.
0:41:16 I remember avoiding it.
0:41:18 Do you remember the nugs, the chicken nuggets?
0:41:23 Yeah, if I had to eat school lunch, that was a pretty good option.
0:41:24 I actually liked them.
0:41:28 But in addition to being very tasty, those nugs were very processed.
0:41:32 And at the moment, America has got processed foods in its crosshairs.
0:41:36 It’s true, we are collectively very down on processed food right now,
0:41:40 none more so than Health and Human Services Secretary nominee,
0:41:42 Robert Floride Kennedy, Jr.
0:41:45 I’ll get processed food out of school lunch immediately.
0:41:50 About half the school lunch program goes to processed food.
0:41:55 Hen the man who once saved a dead bear cub for a snack, fixed school lunches.
0:42:00 Today Explained, every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts.
0:42:17 Well, the final chapter of the book is titled Reclaiming Our Minds.
0:42:20 So does that mean you have a blueprint for how to unfuck
0:42:23 ourselves in the world?
0:42:26 I need a 10-point, money-back guarantee plan.
0:42:27 I know, I’m bad at this, you know.
0:42:29 It’s the worst part of writing a book.
0:42:33 I know, this is my favorite last chapter I’ve written because I actually do think,
0:42:36 I do think there’s some concrete stuff here.
0:42:42 So the individual stuff, I think, you know, people are doing all the things they’re doing,
0:42:46 mindfulness, playing their phones in boxes, you know, schools, for instance.
0:42:50 I think like schools, it’s crazy to me that schools have only started taking kids’ phones
0:42:52 at class at the beginning, totally crazy.
0:42:53 Insane.
0:42:54 Insane, like what do we do?
0:43:00 Like also, have you ever watched, have you gone to a conference recently or any kind
0:43:02 of adult meeting where people can have their phones?
0:43:05 Like no one’s paying attention.
0:43:08 You just take them for all of that stuff.
0:43:15 So individually, like, you know, taking long walks without listening to a podcast and
0:43:19 letting, being along with your thoughts, like a cult trading, you’re forcing yourself to do that,
0:43:21 even if it’s 20 minutes a day.
0:43:26 I’m gonna do 20 minutes where I take a walk by myself and I think, and I just sit with
0:43:26 my own mind.
0:43:27 I really think that’s useful.
0:43:31 Not just like an individual thing.
0:43:33 And there’s a million different individual things.
0:43:41 Hobbies, habits, things we do that are neither work or the phone, being with other people.
0:43:44 Then there’s like social stuff.
0:43:47 And here’s where I do think the food stuff is really important and interesting.
0:43:53 A bunch of people in the 60s started, for specific ideological reasons, rebelling against
0:43:58 a whole bunch of aspects of industrial food production.
0:44:04 People that started opening up whole food stores, not like the brand name, but like whole grain
0:44:11 stores, health food stores, natural food stores, people starting green markets, farmer’s markets
0:44:15 in the early 1970s, Alice Waters and sort of farm to table stuff.
0:44:23 All this was like a rebellion against basically like the slop people were eating,
0:44:29 the Chef Boyardee, Jell-O-Mold, Peak TV Dinner, 1970s cuisine.
0:44:30 People were just like, “I don’t like this.”
0:44:37 Like, there’s an empirical question about is that stuff good for you and how much is it
0:44:38 causing obesity?
0:44:41 But then there’s also a question like, “I don’t like this.”
0:44:51 And that at the time seemed fringe and bespoke and avant-garde.
0:45:01 It was on to something and has become an entire alternate universe of food production.
0:45:05 Now some of it co-opted, you know, by big agra.
0:45:08 We haven’t like defeated corn syrup, for instance, in America.
0:45:11 But it is so different.
0:45:15 The food landscape, the way we think about food and talk about food
0:45:18 between now and like the 1970s.
0:45:21 And that is the product of activism.
0:45:24 It’s the product of like free spirits.
0:45:26 It’s the product of entrepreneurs.
0:45:29 I think you were going to see something coalesce around attention now.
0:45:35 And again, this is like all this stuff feels like kind of precious and bespoke.
0:45:41 But like jogging and fitness were precious and bespoke at some point.
0:45:43 Like jogging was like a weird avant-garde thing.
0:45:48 That like is a sort of silly thing.
0:45:51 George W. Bush lost his first congressional campaign when he moved back to Texas
0:45:53 because there was an ad by his opponent of him jogging.
0:45:55 He was like, “Get a load of this, dude.”
0:46:01 So I think there are going to be social movements.
0:46:06 And there’s some interesting folks around, you know,
0:46:09 the Struthers School for Radical Attention, which is here in New York.
0:46:11 You may have seen the name D. Graham Burnett.
0:46:15 He did podcasts with Azra Klein and he’s going to have a book about this.
0:46:20 And a whole bunch of people around, there’s like this sort of secret society
0:46:24 they have that was profiled in New Yorker, thinking about this,
0:46:27 rebelling against it in a very similar kind of back to the land way, right?
0:46:34 Like born of a kind of spiritual ideological set of principal commitments to like rebelling against this.
0:46:40 Well, as you point out, you know, in the 19th century, the labor movement
0:46:45 basically arrived at two big regulatory responses, right?
0:46:50 Abandoned child labor and limitations on total hours worked.
0:46:56 What are, what could be the equivalent regulations today?
0:46:58 I mean, I think that’s an interesting place to start.
0:47:02 So I think first of all, regulating attention and regulating the extraction of attention
0:47:05 is just an area that we need to explore.
0:47:11 I mean, there’s a lot of controversy about cutting teenagers off from social media.
0:47:13 A lot of people on the left think it’s bad precisely around
0:47:17 kids having access to LGBTQ information.
0:47:19 And I totally hear that.
0:47:25 Also, they think there’s sort of toxic ways in which like the particulars of a bill can empower,
0:47:27 you know, right wing attorneys general to do bad stuff.
0:47:28 And I totally hear that too.
0:47:31 I think as a general principle, the idea that
0:47:37 companies should not be buying and selling the attention of 14 year olds is just obviously true.
0:47:42 And a huge part of that too, this goes hand in hand.
0:47:45 So when I talk about the sort of social movement before I even get to regulation,
0:47:50 non-commercial spaces for connection.
0:47:54 Just the way that like we have non-commercial public space, I can meet you in Prospect Park.
0:47:55 We can walk on the street.
0:47:57 We don’t just exist in a mall.
0:48:02 So one big part of it too, before we even get to the regulatory part of it,
0:48:08 and this is why I’m saying this, is we need to build non-commercial space.
0:48:15 Like all of digital life has been completely taken over by commercial spaces that are trying
0:48:16 to buy and sell your attention.
0:48:20 And then the regulatory question, I think is a deep one.
0:48:23 Like, first of all, there’s constitutional issues because of speech.
0:48:28 But I think if you think about it in terms of regulating the attention,
0:48:32 like an app just can’t take more than an hour of your attention today.
0:48:35 I don’t know.
0:48:37 Maybe we pass the law and do that.
0:48:42 Like that seems crazy at some level, but is it?
0:48:47 And so I think we need to be thinking about regulating attention.
0:48:49 I think that, and part of that is breaking up the big tech firms,
0:48:50 which are too big and things like that.
0:48:58 But more specifically, like this does feel like a place for governments to do something.
0:49:03 Your book is rightly grounded in political economy,
0:49:05 because that’s the driver of a lot of this.
0:49:08 And it’s just very hard to imagine meaningful solutions
0:49:12 that don’t involve a serious rethinking at that level.
0:49:13 Yeah.
0:49:17 I mean, I think there’s a deeper question about the form of the general form of capitalism
0:49:21 and kind of gilded age oligopoly that we found ourselves in right now.
0:49:24 And all these things are converging at the same point.
0:49:29 I mean, Elon Musk is both kind of an allegory, but also very real.
0:49:34 It’s sort of wild to me how much he just over the course writing the book
0:49:37 became the full embodiment of everything the book says,
0:49:42 both in his own personal compulsions, which he clearly can’t control.
0:49:44 I mean, he’s very obviously addicted to posting.
0:49:48 To his kind of, through his own personal brokenness,
0:49:52 I think finding his way to understanding that attention is the most valuable resource,
0:49:56 to iterating on Donald Trump’s key insights,
0:49:59 to capture it and become the main character all the time,
0:50:01 and then the power that that’s given him.
0:50:06 It’s pretty dystopian, but it is playing out right in front of us.
0:50:08 Do you have any final thoughts you want to add?
0:50:11 I mean, if someone listens to this conversation,
0:50:14 if they go and read your book after listening to this conversation,
0:50:16 what do you hope they take away from it?
0:50:18 Maybe more to the point, what do you hope they do?
0:50:25 I do think there are parent groups that are working.
0:50:26 There are a whole bunch of groups happening.
0:50:30 You can go to the Struthers School for Radical Attention, you can Google that.
0:50:32 There are more and more grassroots groups.
0:50:38 A lot of it have been associated around Jonathan Hyde’s book and kids, particularly teenagers.
0:50:44 But one of the things I think is important is that there’s a little bit of an
0:50:45 instinct to be like, this is a teenager problem.
0:50:53 I sometimes think actually teenagers are better about this than boomers, for instance.
0:50:59 But I think you should find other people
0:51:02 and see if there are ways to plug into local people that feel the same way.
0:51:08 And then I think also doing things like joining a book club.
0:51:13 Collective ways that you manage attention together.
0:51:18 Again, as I start subscribing to a physical newspaper,
0:51:21 going for a walk 20 minutes just for your thoughts.
0:51:27 These are small ways to begin to connect with other people, particularly
0:51:31 around all of us kind of reconceptualizing this collectively.
0:51:34 That’s a good place to end it.
0:51:37 Once again, the book is called The Siren’s Call.
0:51:41 How attention became the world’s most endangered resource.
0:51:46 I legitimately love the book and I appreciate having a chance to read it.
0:51:48 And I’m glad you wrote it.
0:51:50 Chris Hayes, thanks buddy.
0:51:50 Sean, that was great.
0:51:51 Thank you so much.
0:52:06 All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
0:52:08 You know I did.
0:52:12 And in case you’re wondering, my screen time was actually down this week.
0:52:13 Was it down a lot?
0:52:16 No, but it was down.
0:52:18 And that’s a start.
0:52:23 As always, we want to know what you think of the episode.
0:52:26 So drop us a line at TheGrayArea@Vox.com.
0:52:30 And please rate, review, subscribe to the podcast.
0:52:31 That stuff really helps.
0:52:38 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:52:43 fact-checked by Kim Eggleston, and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:52:47 New episodes of The Gray Area drop on Mondays.
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0:53:15 [end]
0:53:25 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Where is your attention right now? Where was it a minute ago? A second ago? Where will it be a minute from now?
One of the primary features of this age — the age of the internet and smartphones and algorithmic feeds — is that our attention is everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
This is no accident. Our devices and apps are engineered to constantly alert us to things that are important and to things that are not. That’s because holding our attention is valuable. The time we spend reading, watching, and listening to content on our digital devices has been commodified, and that commodity is fueling the economy of the digital age.
Today’s guest is Chris Hayes, the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and author of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Chris speaks with Sean about how the attention industry is changing our economy, our society, and ourselves.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling).
Guest: Chris Hayes, host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and author of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.
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