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The Sirens' Call
How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
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Narrated by:
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Chris Hayes
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Written by:
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Chris Hayes
About this listen
From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society
We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.” Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.
Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.
©2025 Chris Hayes (P)2025 Penguin AudioYou may also enjoy...
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What the critics say
“Casting a wide net that encompasses philosophers, media theorists, psychologists, and classic literature . . . Hayes unpacks how attention is both a force integral to survival and a resource so sought after that it has become like ‘gold in a stream, oil in a rock.' . . . Relatable and amusing . . . A savvy . . . meditation on the modern attention economy.” —Publishers Weekly
“[Hayes’] facility for lucid synthesis is put to gratifying use in this smart, constructive book . . . He carefully charts how the churning monetization of attention has fundamentally changed news, politics, and leisure time, turning our communications landscape into a kind of ‘failed state’ where common-sense norms have been routed by ‘attentional warlordism.’ Amid the virtual maelstrom, Hayes wants to help readers reclaim a measure of mental tranquility . . . An intelligent, forward-looking analysis of our increasing inability to stay focused.” —Kirkus Reviews
“Chris Hayes sees around corners—not just naming and explaining but also solving problems that the rest of us are only starting to sense. The Sirens’ Call is his biggest idea yet, and his most urgent. Reading it has made me change the way I work and think. Brilliant book.” —Rachel Maddow, host of the Emmy Award-winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC and #1 New York Times bestselling author of Prequel, Blowout, and Drift