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On the uncomfortable invasiveness of grabbing attention
The attention economy feels violating because it is. Attention can be compelled without our consent — and even without our awareness.
This is one of the theses of Chris Hayes' 2025 book The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. Hayes opens the book with a famous passage from Homer's Odyssey in which the hero, Odysseus, has his crew plug their ears with beeswax and tie him to the mast of his ship so he can listen to the deadly song of the Sirens — mind-control monsters who serenade men to their doom. "The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will," writes Hayes. "Increasingly, it feels as if our experience is something we don't fully agree to."
I finished reading The Sirens' Call over the weekend. I was in some ways disappointed by the book; I almost inevitably find myself mentally chanting more science! more science! when I read any nonfiction book by someone who isn't a scientist or science journalist that makes big claims about humanity and society. And while the book promises to "make peace" with the attention economy, it doesn't really point to any meaningful solutions to the problems Hayes diagnoses. However, I think Hayes makes an important and subtle point about attention: taking it is easier than keeping it, and this has major implications for our experience in the modern information environment.
Hayes' claim to expertise on the attention economy comes from his career as a journalist and TV news anchor. In other words, he's built his entire professional life around his ability to grab and hold attention — and, as Hayes argues in his book, they are two different things.
There's no single thing the brain does that maps neatly to what we're talking about when we say attention. Like consciousness, "attention" is a label we've slapped on a pile of many different cognitive processes. But when we say we're paying attention to something, we are often talking about what Hayes calls voluntary attention. Think focus, concentration — a conscious narrowing of our perceptual world down to a point. This is the mental equivalent of throwing on a pair of noise-canceling headphones. It's what you're doing when you watch a movie, follow a lecture, read a book, or spend more than five minutes playing with your child or pet without checking your phone. And if you're anywhere near the ADHD corner of brainspace, you probably know all too well what it's like when this kind of attention doesn't work well. It's hard to hold a conversation with your date when you're simultaneously listening to every single voice in the restaurant.
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