A friend of mine once told me that “You are where your attention is.” That line always stuck with me. It was a reminder that the most important choice we all make is also the most common one. It’s the decision about what to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to.
One of the primary features of this age of the internet and smartphones and algorithmic feeds is that our attention is everywhere and nowhere at the same time, because we’re endlessly pushed around by a parade of distractions. Your phone is ringing, your Apple Watch is blinking, you got a ping on Slack from a coworker, you’re getting an email notification as you’re sitting down for dinner… it’s always something.
This level of distraction is not an accident. Our devices have engineered the incessant need for stimulus and a whole industry has emerged that’s devoted to capturing our attention and then selling it to the highest bidder.
Chris Hayes is the host of All In With Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the author of a new book called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. The discourse on attention is, shall we say, crowded, but Hayes makes an interesting — and novel — argument about how the rearranging of social and economic life around the pursuit of attention represents “a transformation as profound as the dawn of industrial capitalism.”
I invited Hayes on The Gray Area to talk about what that actually means and why he thinks we haven’t fully appreciated the significance of this transformation. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean Illing
How do you define a word like attention? What are some of the more useful or practical ways to think about what it means in human life?
Chris Hayes
There’s a lot of debate about this. There are some people who say it’s not really even a coherent concept. And some of those critiques I take seriously. In some ways I’m using it in an everyday sense because I think it is naming something real.
So one way to think about attention is the flash beam of thought. That’s a common trope. There’s a William James description of attention that everyone who writes about attention quotes because it’s so good, which is: withdrawal from certain things to focus on others.
If you think about what a stagehand with the spotlight does in a Broadway play… I’m focusing on you right now. If I take a second, there’s a million forms of perceptual stimulus in my visual field right now. I could focus on those. I’m not. I’m focusing on you through an effort of conscious will. So that’s how we think about attention: the ability to willfully focus, basically.
But then there are other dimensions of that. So there’s conscious attention, voluntary attention, then there’s involuntary attention. Right now, if someone busted into my studio and opened that door, I couldn’t not look. It would literally be impossible. Before I had any conscious will over it, no matter how disciplined I am, pre-consciously a system would fire that would wrench my attention towards that door going open. So that’s involuntary attention.
And then the third aspect I talk about is social attention, which I think has its own particular weight and depth. It’s not just that we can pay attention to things and people in the world, it’s also crucially important that people can pay attention to us. We can be on the receiving end of attention, which is another thing that makes it so psychologically and socially and emotionally rich.
Sean Illing
Is it too much to say that you think attention is the most important thing we have?
Chris Hayes
I think it’s the most important thing. And I go back to William James. One of his philosophical preoccupations is free will — whether we have it, what it means to have it. And to him attention is indistinguishable from will because that ability to focus is the essence of will. And for me, if you are not a religious person and you don’t think that the meaning of your existence is imbued by some higher power, what we get is one life. And what we do during that one life is we go around through the world in this one body and brain and from moment to moment we’re paying attention to this or that, and what we pay attention to in the end adds up to a life. It’s elemental in that sense. I don’t think there’s any way to detach what your experience of life is from this faculty.
Sean Illing
The book is obviously about the rise of the modern attention economy and you make the case that this transition is comparable to the emergence of wage labor in the Industrial Revolution. How so?
Chris Hayes
So labor is the product of a specific set of legal market social institutions that produce this thing called a “wage” and a “laborer.” Effort, toil, whatever you want to call it, exists prior to that. Labor has turned into a commodity and there are a bunch of weird things about that. I’m not a Marxist personally, but I think his observations here are quite prophetic.
First of all, just the lived experience of the difference between a guy who runs a shoe shop, who’s a cobbler — which existed prior to industrial capitalism — making the whole shoe. First you’re cutting the sole, then you’re putting the upper on, then you’re putting it together. In the end, you’ve got this thing, it’s a shoe, and now you own it and then I sell it to you. You pay me money, now you own it. We go from that to working in a shoe factory 12 hours a day where someone just stamps soles all day. It’s completely alienating and also it’s a much different experience of life.
The other thing that’s weird about it is that labor in the aggregate is necessary for all of industrial capitalism. It’s incredibly valuable in the aggregate. But each individual slice of it is essentially valueless. But if you’re an individual shoemaker, this is all you’ve got. I have this one body and I go and stamp soles 12 hours a day and I get nothing for it. But that’s it. From my perspective, that’s all I’ve got.
All of these attributes are there for attention. Attention existed before its marketization. It now has a value out in the world. It’s now being extracted at scale. In the aggregate, it’s wildly valuable. Google, Meta, all their money comes from this. I argue in the book that Amazon, to a certain extent, is really an attention company. Individually, they’re paying tiny slivers of cents for your attention at any moment. But to you, it’s all you’ve got. What you’re paying attention to at any given moment is all you’ve got.
Sean Illing
And what do you think is the biggest difference between an economy built around a resource like attention and previous economies built around different kinds of material resources?
Chris Hayes
The argument I make in the book is that what we commonly think of as “The Attention Age” is truly the information age. There’s a switch from physical market production to non-material market production — information economy, claims adjusters, coders, podcasters like you and I, all doing these things that don’t amount to the physical refashioning of the world. And in that world, we think of information as the defining feature, but information is limitless. There’s tons of information. The thing that’s scarce and valuable is attention. So everyone has to fight over that.
And the more information there is — the lower the barriers are to get it in front of someone’s face — the more competitive it becomes. And I think that we’re in a position now, as more and more of the world moves from industrial modes of production to post-industrial modes of production, that the one thing that’s left that’s scarce, that’s finite, that’s the most valuable, is our attention.
Sean Illing
I am constantly making noises about what tech is doing to us, but I don’t really have a compelling response to the arguments that no one’s forced to stare at their phones all day. We’re choosing this. We want this. And that’s not exactly wrong, but I also think our creaturely vulnerabilities are so exploitable that even though we’re not being forced in the literal sense, I’m also not sure we’re really free in any meaningful or recognizable way. At some point, the question about free will becomes hopelessly blurred and maybe even incoherent.
Chris Hayes
I don’t think I can resolve the free will question, but I think you’re right. It implicates our freedom in a profound and deep way. I was joking with my wife the other day that I feel like I’ve written a recovery memoir and I’m still drinking. I’m still fighting all this stuff. I’m not great about it. So I don’t want anyone to think that I’m on some elevated plane here. I’m in the muck with everyone. But when you get that screen time notification that this was your average screen time for the week, that is a profound moment of, “Who am I and what is my will?”
Sean Illing
If we also lack the capacity to pay attention together, what does that mean for democracy?
Chris Hayes
There’s a few things I’d say. One is that I want to try very hard to resist the temptation to dehistoricize everything. As I say in the book, they didn’t need Facebook in Salem to start having viral rumors that so-and-so was a witch. People are very good at spreading disinformation, just analog style, which is the core of the human condition, and that’s our lot. And democracy is incredibly fallible with a bunch of fallible people. So I just want to say that.
But yes, I think there is a profound question about what this is doing to our democracy. And this is particularly true because attention is not a moral faculty. It is distinct from what we think is important. Walter Lippmann in Public Opinion whines about this. He’s talking about Versailles, actually, about the end of the war and the reparations. He says Americans have an incredible interest in this, but they’re not interested in it. He’s like, The same way the child has an enormous interest in his father’s business that he will inherit but is not interested in it.
So this problem is old, but I think it’s so sheer right now. Overcoming the compulsions, the siren’s call, the lowest-common-denominator, tabloid, casino effect of everything in a very competitive attention environment where we’re driven toward the lowest common denominator.
It malforms the public’s ability to reason collectively, to think of issues independent of what just sustains our attention from moment to moment. Because what sustains our attention from moment to moment is distinct from what is important. And we all know that. Everyone understands that. And yet it’s very hard to counteract what’s being done to us through the technologies.
Sean Illing
How do we really know what’s new here and what’s not? As you say, people freaked out about comic books and that was clearly ridiculous in retrospect. But people also worried about cigarettes and that was clearly wise in retrospect. So how do we know the attention economy is cigarettes and not comic books?
Chris Hayes
One way to answer this is to look at the empirical research, like Jonathan Haidt does in The Anxious Generation. Like, what is this doing to us? In the case of tobacco, we just acquired a huge body of evidence: This is terrible for our health. Even though, as I cite in the book, there were people going back to the 16th century who were like, Boy, this sure seems like an awful thing to do. You light this stuff on fire and you put the smoke in your lungs? I don’t think that’s going to work out well.
I think in some ways the empirical question, while important, is also distinct from the deeper philosophical thing, which is just like, is this good? Do we like this? Is this forming my soul well? I don’t need data to tell me that. That’s a human question. That’s why the book is really, to a certain extent, a work of philosophy. You could come back and tell me that the empirical data shows that this isn’t causing more anxiety, it isn’t causing more depression, and fine, that might be true. But the bigger question is that our experience of modernity is an experience of an ever-quickening pace and new forms of alienation that we then have to wrestle with as people. And whatever the data says in the end, we all have to live in this world and in this environment, which I think a lot of us understandably are not enjoying.
Sean Illing
As you point out, the labor movement in the 19th century basically arrived at two big regulatory responses: a ban on child labor and limitations on total hours worked. Any ideas on the equivalent regulations today?
Chris Hayes
I think that’s an interesting place to start. First of all, regulating attention and regulating the extraction of attention is just an area that we need to explore. There’s a lot of controversy about cutting teenagers off from social media. [But] as a general principle, the idea that companies should not be buying and selling the attention of 14-year-olds is just obviously true.
And this goes hand in hand, but before we even get to regulation, we just need non-commercial spaces for connection, just the way that we have non-commercial public spaces. I can meet you in Prospect Park. We can walk on the street. We don’t just exist in a mall. All of digital life has been completely taken over by commercial spaces that are trying to buy and sell your attention.
The regulatory question is a deep one. First of all, there’s constitutional issues because of speech. But I think if you think about it in terms of regulating attention, like, An app just can’t take more than an hour of your attention today — I don’t know. Maybe we pass the law and do that. That seems crazy at some level, but is it? I just think we need to be thinking about regulating attention. Part of that is breaking up the big tech firms, which are too big. But more specifically, this does feel like a place for governments to do something.
Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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