Nonfiction Reading for Women's History Month

Want to readKindle $16.99

Rate this book

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

Christopher L. Hayes

From the New York Times bestselling author and television and podcast host, a powerful, wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society.

We all feel it — the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed 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 attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated.

Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. The Sirens’ Call is the big book we all need to wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

336 pages, Hardcover

Published January 28, 2025Book details & editions

1,380 people are currently reading

9,668 people want to read

About the author

Christopher L. Hayes

7 books463 followersFollow

Christopher Hayes is Editor at Large of The Nation and host of Up w/ Chris Hayes on MSNBC. From 2010 to 2011, he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. His essays, articles, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, The American Prospect, The New Republic, The Washington Monthly, and The Guardian. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Kate and daughter Ryan.

Author photo credit: Sarah ShatzShow more

Readers also enjoyed

All similar books

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?

Rate this bookWrite a Review

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

4.15

1,084 ratings152 reviews

5 stars

407 (37%)

4 stars

474 (43%)

3 stars

174 (16%)

2 stars

19 (1%)

1 star

10 (<1%)Search review textFilters

Displaying 1 – 30 of 152 reviews

Tim Null

283 reviews168 followersFollowFebruary 14, 2025

Sort of like being back in college studying a combination of history and sociology courses.

“This is the story of Donald Trump’s life: wanting recognition, instead getting attention, and then becoming addicted to attention itself, because he can’t quite understand the difference,…” (p. 112)

69 likes2 commentsLikeComment

David

365 reviews20 followersFollowFebruary 21, 2025

Attention is a deeply important topic to think about in our current age. Not only are many things constantly vying for our attention, but major corporations feverishly spend insane amounts of money trying to capture your attention.

Hayes has an interesting perspective on this. He shares everything from psychological research to anecdotes about the device use of his kids, but he’s also the host of a long-running primetime TV show. As such he’s acutely attuned to what people pay attention to. And, like most of us, he’s dissatisfied with how his own brain works in this new media environment.

One of the purest joys in my life is when I can lose myself in thought. Spending hours immersed in a good book or thinking through how to best explain some tricky concept in relativity. One of the most annoying things is how difficult that is for me to do now, as opposed to when I was younger. Too often I have to fight the urge to check my email or check my phone. Some of this is just about getting older and having more responsibilities, being distracted by household chores and so on. But too much of it is now enabled by technology, and in the modern era, indeed forced upon us by technology. “The frenetic, ever-shorter little bites of communication we mostly consume these days degrade both our ability to sustain focus and the quality of thought being communicated and comprehended” (p. 201).

Hayes convincingly argues that much of our modern world is invading our very sense of self. In the same way that industrialization in the 19th century turned labor into a commodity, we now have turned attention into a commodity. But attention is what we are.

Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these instants of attention accrue into a life. (p. 3)

Hayes cites Marx discussing labor becoming a commodity. “As the division of labor increases, labor is simplified,” he quotes Marx. “The special skill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple, monotonous productive force that does not have to use intense bodily or intellectual faculties. His labor becomes a labor that anyone can perform” (pp. 119–120). Marx says this commodification of labor leads to alienation.

This to me is one reason why I resist generative AI so strongly. “The craftsman has ownership of the object he produces through his labor, even as he then sells it in a market exchange. His effort and skill have been poured into the object, and at the end of the process he is the one who owns the object” (p. 120). This is what it feels like when I write, when I craft an assignment, or when I develop an explanation of some topic. The result is mine, and it makes me proud. Generative AI can produce serviceable descriptions of basic concepts in physics, but it’s just processed pablum that interpolates between all the descriptions that real humans devised. Whereas by creating my own explanations I can gain insight myself, devise something unique, and lead students through their own difficult process of coming to an understanding.

You might think AI (or machine learning in general) is a solution to a key problem of attention. As Herbert Simon noted as far back as 1971, “an information-processing subsystem (a computer or new organization unit) will reduce net demand on the rest of the organization’s attention only if it absorbs more information previously received by others than it produces, that is, if it listens more than it speaks” (p. 165). Isn’t this what large language models do? Absorb nearly all human writing and produce a five-paragraph essay on the theme of doubt in Othello? But no, their generation is unlimited. More and more “journalistic” writing is now AI generated. Internal reports, student papers, etc. Text that used to take a person hours if not days to write now takes seconds. The potential for the production of crap is unlimited.

Hayes makes a good comparison to search engines. As the early World Wide Web grew, it became difficult to find information. Search engines tried to solve this, and Google was extremely successful. It took in an enormous amount of information and produced a very limited number of results that were often highly responsive to the user’s particular query. However, Google is a company. They need to make money. They do so by selling the user’s attention, and directing it to sponsored responses to the query. This has now lead to the enshitiffication of Google, to use Cory Doctorow’s word (p. 252). This is even worse with entities that are struggling more. See how many more search results are sponsored at Bing than Google, or compare the Facebook feed of 2025 (mostly ads or random pages you don’t follow) with what it used to look like in 2010 (almost entirely content from friends).

Any product or service that effectively captures our attention is susceptible to this dynamic: if it’s good at conserving our attention and sustaining our focus, then it’s also a good place to try to wrench away our attention for other purposes, which means it will eventually be a vector for spam… You can easily imagine a world with AI churning on both sides of this attentional battle—AI spam generation and AI-powered spam filters. (pp. 174–175, 182)

The age we’re living through is akin to life in a failed state, a society that had some governing regime that has disintegrated and fallen into a kind of attentional warlordism. (p. 217)

This has consequences, including elevating people with no talent other than attracting attention. People who are utterly shameless and talented at attracting attention—maybe good attention is preferred, but any attention will do—rise in such a slurry. Yes, Hayes discusses both Donald Trump and Elon Musk as avatars of the Attention Seeker.

The promise of the information age was unparalleled access to every single last bit of human knowledge at every moment, and the reality is a collective civic mental life that permanently teeters on the edge of madness. (p. 248)

What can we do?

Personally, I will try to be more intentional about where I give my attention. Before I click over to CNN or the BBC, do I really want to check the news or am I just seeking novelty? Do I need to check my email right now, or can it wait until morning? I haven’t checked Facebook in over a month, and I’m not sure I want to ever check it again.

I will also cultivate deep thinking in my own life, and create the environment in my professional life where my students can think deeply as well. I will run in-person classes where we will write on paper and talk to each other and wrestle with difficult ideas that cannot be reduced to a sound bite.

Personal responsibility only goes so far. As with any massive problem, collective action is important. But personal action can start now.Show more

11 likes1 commentLikeComment

Natalie Wright

52 reviewsFollowFebruary 9, 2025

I think I’m a Marxist now? Not sure if that was what Chris wanted me to take away from this, but oh well.

11 likesLikeComment

Dave Reads

288 reviews12 followersFollowFebruary 8, 2025

Chris Hayes’ book, “The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” examines how the modern attention economy has transformed how and what we communicate, news consumption, and even human cognition. He argues that the constant bombardment of content, driven by social media algorithms and commercial incentives, has created an environment of chaos and distraction. Platforms reward the most extreme, sensational, and outrage-inducing material, while smartphone apps operate on an addictive “slot machine model” that keeps users endlessly engaged. This monetization of attention has fundamentally altered politics, journalism, and leisure, leading to what Hayes describes as a communications “failed state” where rational discourse is undermined by attention-seeking behavior. While some of his proposed solutions are simple, like switching to print newspapers or using basic phones, he also advocates for more radical measures, such as regulating attention markets in the same way labor laws govern working conditions.

Beyond its critique of the digital landscape, Hayes explores the deeper psychological dimensions of attention, noting that humans have always craved it as a form of validation and survival mechanism. He compares the long-form debates of the 19th century with today’s hyper-condensed political discourse. Along the way, he demonstrates how our capacity for sustained focus has eroded. Hayes delves into toxic attention-seeking behaviors like trolling, conspiracism, and “whataboutism,” showing how figures like Donald Trump exploit the modern attention economy by embracing any form of visibility, whether positive or negative.

While the book can sometimes feel dense, Hayes keeps the discussion engaging by drawing on history, philosophy, and social science research to illuminate how our fragmented attention shapes our individual lives and the broader political and social landscape.

Five Key Takeaways

1. The Attention Economy Thrives on Distraction and Outrage – Social media platforms and digital entertainment operate on a “slot machine model” that keeps users engaged by delivering an endless stream of attention-grabbing content. Outrage, sensationalism, and controversy are prioritized because they generate the most engagement, fundamentally reshaping news, politics, and entertainment.

2. Our Ability to Focus Has Diminished – Hayes contrasts modern media consumption with historical examples, such as 19th-century political debates that held audiences’ attention for hours. Today, even presidential debates are reduced to sound bites, reflecting a broader decline in our ability to engage with complex, sustained arguments.

3. Toxic Attention-Seeking Behaviors Dominate Public Discourse – The rise of trolling, conspiracism, and “whataboutism” has eroded meaningful conversations. Figures like Donald Trump have mastered the art of attracting attention at any cost, using positive or negative outrage to stay in the public consciousness.

4. Attention is Both Exploited and Inherently Human – While corporations aggressively monetize our focus, humans are naturally wired to seek attention for validation and connection. Digital platforms exploit this need, creating an illusion of sociability while often deepening feelings of loneliness and isolation.

5. Reclaiming Attention Requires Both Individual and Systemic Solutions – Hayes suggests small personal actions, such as reading print newspapers or using “dumb phones,” as ways to resist the digital economy’s grip. However, he also proposes more ambitious systemic changes, like government regulation of “attention markets,” to curb the relentless commodification of our focus.
Show more

6 likes2 commentsLikeComment

Patrick

444 reviews18 followersFollowFebruary 8, 2025

Chris Hayes’ new book on social media and the “attention economy.” Some interesting parts, and of course the writer knows how to weave an engaging brisk narrative around his points. A lot of fluff, though, and things most readers will already know. I think I would’ve preferred this as a long essay rather than a short book. Good as an audiobook.

6 likesLikeComment

Karen Clements

235 reviews4 followersFollowOctober 16, 2024

Call it 3.5. Thought-provoking analysis of attention, which has become an increasingly valuable and sought-after commodity in this age of social media and information excess.

6 likesLikeComment

simona.citeste

364 reviews269 followersFollowMarch 2, 2025

Atenția privită din perspectiva unui om care lucrează în domeniul captării atenției și viziunea lui despre cât de importantă este în societatea de astăzi.

Nu mi s-a părut foarte ușor de abordat dar o găsesc bine construită și argumentată.
Ca multe alte nonficțiuni se concentrează pe societatea americană și oferă exemple de acolo dar asta nu o face mai puțin interesantă.

5 likesLikeComment

Marianne

12 reviews7 followersFollowFebruary 12, 2025

You probably already feel a certain way about Chris Hayes. You either find him boyishly charming, cute as a button and nerdily sexy or…. wait what was I talking about? Audio read by the author A+, an excellent analysis of an issue we all know deep down is at the heart of what ails us.

5 likesLikeComment

Nick Pageant

Author 6 books918 followersFollowMarch 4, 2025

Very smart. Very entertaining. I am typing this on my IPad and my phone is chirping and this book hit me hard.

3 likesLikeComment

Stefanie Herweck

3 reviews1 followerFollowFebruary 16, 2025

Smarter than expected. I appreciated Hayes’ efforts to ground his analysis of our attentional problems in philosophy and social theory. His “solution” section might have drawn on psychological and sociological thought in much the same way but instead was decidedly skimpy: let’s listen to vinyl and switch from social media to group chats. I was hoping for more.

3 likesLikeComment

Megan

466 reviews70 followersFollowMarch 9, 2025

Lately I’ve started so many reviews acknowledging that Ezra Klein influenced me to pick up whatever book I’m reviewing, that I’m a bit embarrassed. Yet here I go again: I decided to read The Siren’s Call after listening to Ezra’s interview with Chris Hayes (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/op…).

In it, Hayes posits that the commodification of attention has kicked off a process analogous to the commodification of labor during the industrial revolution:

One of the really important ironies here, which I think does map onto labor, is that the aggregate of attention — like lots of attention or the collective public attention — is wildly valuable… And yet even though the aggregate of attention is very valuable, in market terms, our individual attention, second to second, is fractions of pennies.

And that was exactly what it was like with labor. When Marxists would say labor is a source of all value, they were right in the aggregate. Take away all the workers and the Industrial Revolution doesn’t happen. But to the individual worker in the sweatshop, the little slice of labor that you’re producing is both everything you have as a person and worth almost nothing in the market.

And I think we have the same thing with attention, where it’s really valuable, pooled and aggregated. Each individual part of it that we contribute is essentially worthless, is pennies — and then subjectively, to us, it’s all we have.

Wow.

After listening to that podcast episode, I couldn’t stop thinking about his point…. because, here’s the thing: I was there at the center of this revolution, at Google in the mid-aughts, right as the newly invented attention auction was transforming advertising, and with it the internet, and with that our lives. I spent hours every day for months and months on end explaining this auction process to business owners and advertisers, then Google’s own employees (as a corporate trainer). Eventually, I would quit Google to join a start-up (what would become Twitch), and do the same work from opposite side, selling our start-up’s pageviews and video streams to a bevvy of international ad platforms, including Google AdSense.

I was there, and yet I’d missed it. I never once, while I was in tech or in the decade following, reflected on the dynamic Hayes had so succinctly described.

So I pre-ordered the audiobook, and waited…

Ultimately, the book itself does only a little to deepen and expand on what was revealed in the podcast episode…. Most notably, there’s a fairly long discussion of alienation, in which Hayes compares our alienation from labor during the industrial revolution to the alienation we are now experiencing from our attention. While this particular angle isn’t explicitly discussed in the podcast episode, it could be logically deduced if you have even a cursory familiarity with Marx (I’ve never read any Marx myself).

I also appreciated the section in which Hayes contemplates whether his thesis is borne of his own hyper-attunement to economies of attention, given that his work as an anchor and author requires attention-seeking. I am always excited to see an author naming and interrogating his own biases related to the topic at hand.

… And yet… I’m just not sure I got all that much out of the nine hours of audiobook compared to roughly one hour of podcast, though, in the spirit of naming our biases, I probably came to the book with much too high of expectations after having my mind blown by the podcast episode.Show more

2 likes1 commentLikeComment

Nicole D.

1,133 reviews38 followersFollowMarch 2, 2025

It’s interesting that I read this book at a time when I had already given up media. Both social and otherwise. I removed Apple News from my phone; moved Instagram to the last page of my apps, and haven’t watched the news since election day.

The upshot of this book is we are giving our attention away for free, and it’s the most valuable thing we have. We shouldn’t do that. I have had the hardest time physically reading books since the advent of social media. I’d read a page, check my phone, then swear … OK, I’m going to read for one hour, then I can check in on what Zendaya is wearing … 20 minutes later, back on Insta. (Spoiler alert: Zendaya is wearing the same thing she was 20 minutes ago, and p.s. YOU HAVE SEEN EVERY ERAS TOUR CLIP THAT EXISTS) … the point is, focus your attention where it brings you value.

This book … was OK. I love Chris Hayes and the ultimate message was/is important and there were some interesting bits of information, but it wasn’t anything earthshattering. Still recommend it if you struggle with addiction to Social Media.Show more

2 likes1 commentLikeComment

bloopert

39 reviewsFollowFebruary 21, 2025

I feel for Hayes, because I believe this book will unfortunately be bogged down by The Times We Are Currently Living In. Maybe if he’d been able to release this book 6 months ago, it would encourage a more healthy relationship with the attention economy, but I cannot imagine that doomscrolling will go away anytime soon…. 🍊

I really enjoyed the philosophical research and allegories he employed in the first half of the book, but felt myself losing focus when he spent upwards of 20% of the book talking about the burden of fame.

IDK!!! I feel like this is a good jumping off point for someone who’s never thought about their attention being manipulated by Big Tech before, but I found it to be a little shallow at times. I think it’s good for what it is. I can imagine someone buying this in a Hudson News stand before a flight and emerging at their destination a momentarily changed person.

Show more

2 likesLikeComment

Gail

378 reviews11 followersFollowFebruary 16, 2025

HUGE disappointment. Filled with philosophical research that becomes repetitive, this book went nowhere for the most part. There were a couple of chapters that were interesting; they should have been put into a short book, not this one.

Hayes is bright, thoughtful, insightful. He was also a philosophy major, believe it or not. And his deep interest in that academic area was fully evident and explored in this book.

Unfortunately, some of his suggestion near the end of the book for how to reclaim our attention and opt out of the attention grabbing world we live in, are not especially viable in Trump 2.0. Far too much of the last part of his book was written in 2023 which seems like 10 lifetimes ago.

I trudged through this because I’m stubborn and kept expecting it to become more interesting and relevant. I lost a lot of time I’ll never recover.Show more

2 likesLikeComment

Matt

106 reviews5 followersFollowFebruary 4, 2025

A good overview of the issue of attention and modern society and the media; however, it suffers from a lack of original framing. When Hayes wrote A Colony in a Nation, he created a novel lens through which I could view the issue of law and order and how it is disparately applied in America. In Sirens’ Call, I didn’t see a new framing, just a compilation of great insights from Postman, Odell, Saunders, Haidt, Zuboff, and others who have been engaged in this fight for years. Maybe I’ve already gone too far down the rabbit hole on this topic and have lost perspective, thus I think this would be a really impactful book for folks starting to ask questions about why their attention span seems shorter than ever, why the platforms and media we rely on have only gotten worse, and why the technology meant to link us all leaves us craving and hollow.Show more

2 likesLikeComment

Paul

159 reviews13 followersFollowMarch 3, 2025

I’ve read a few books about how modern technology is disrupting the very fabric of our lives – it’s something that I feel at an intuitive level and want help in understanding – and this is the first one I really loved. It covers a lot of ground and doesn’t necessarily boil down to a single description, so here are a few ideas that stuck with me:

• In Chapter 2, Hayes talks about three types of attention: involuntary (hearing a gunshot), voluntary (reading a book), and social (seeing someone looking at you). Our involuntary and social forms of attention are more easily captured, so companies have developed increasingly sophisticated methods of targeting these faculties.

• Chapter 4, on social attention, drags a bit, but then has a thunderbolt of an ending, discussing Alexandre Kojève’s gloss of Hegel’s master-slave relationship. The fundamental human desire is recognition: to have other humans see me in my full humanity. This drive to be recognized leads to struggle in which one individual overcomes another in an attempt to force recognition – but it’s ultimately fruitless, because we can only be satisfied by recognition from those whose humanity we ourselves recognize. Hayes compares this dynamic to that of a star and a fan – because the star cannot truly know the fan, the admiration of the fan cannot satisfy the star’s yearning for recognition. Instead, all the star can get from the fan is a flimsy, ersatz version of recognition – namely, attention. Social media replicates this star-fan dynamic at scale, allowing us to be both stars and fans at once, getting us hooked on attention without ever providing the kind of human-to-human connection that we crave.

• Chapter 5 talks about Marx’s concept of alienation: industrial capitalism takes an intrinsic part of the human experience, work, and commodifies it. Karl Polanyi calls labor a “fictitious commodity,” and Hayes argues that attention follows this same schema: to turn attention into units that can bought and sold in a market, it must first be extracted from us, and this extraction comes at the cost of our very consciousness: “As the harvesting of attention grows in scale and efficiency, the price of each eyeball declines. You can now reach far more people at a cheaper price than you could a hundred years ago. But like the worker who finds their body ground up in an assembly line for a pittance, the thing being cheapened in a market sense isn’t a widget, or oil, or corn, it’s the thing most precious to us: what our mind rests upon, what it considers and where it goes, how we talk to ourselves, and what objects we grasp in the light of consciousness. Over time, the commodified logic of the attention market drives the price of this resource down, which is to say it cheapens the very substance of our life.”

• Chapter 6 discusses the rise of the attention economy as a natural outgrowth of the information age, building on Herbert Simon’s idea that an abundance of information leads to a scarcity of what information consumes: attention. As attention becomes valuable, cheap bids to capture it (spam, broadly conceived) proliferate, because the cost of attempting to capture attention is low and the benefits are potentially high. And while we may think of attention as a finite resource, the rising value of attention has made it worthwhile to extract ever more of it – the fracking of our minds, per D. Graham Burnett. We spend ever more time absorbed in online content, gaining less and less of value from it.

• Chapter 7 covers attention in a public context. Public life once relied on a shared understanding of “attentional regimes” governing what was worth talking about and how that conversation should occur, leading to a two-step process: you bring attention to your message, and then you persuade your audience. But now, those regimes have collapsed, and attention is a free-for-all: “And where there is no attentional regime, no formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen, the need for attention becomes exclusive; it swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole. Attention ascends from a means to an end to the end itself.” This, to Hayes, is the ugly genius of Donald Trump: he abandons the idea of persuasion in favor of an all-out play for attention. “Trump intuited that if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of raising the salience of issues where he and the Republican Party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs.”

I have a real soft spot for this kind of book. Journalists tend to write really good nonfiction, given that their whole job is doing deep research and figuring out how to communicate the essence of big ideas to a general audience. Hayes is good at this, and while he occasionally leans a bit too far into his cable news experience to illustrate his points, the rest of the book is good enough to forgive it. 4.5 stars.Show more

1 likeLikeComment

Eileen Sauer

Author 1 book3 followersFollowFebruary 12, 2025

Interesting insights, given that I haven’t read a lot on this subject yet. Possibly enough insights to influence people towards taking that first tottering step, even if we collectively may not know yet how to solve this problem. I’ve thought for a long time that we vote with our pocketbooks, that this is the best way to effect the changes in this world we’d like to see. Attention seems to be an important facet to that; rather than the tail wagging the dog, maybe we could effect the changes we want by consciously deciding where to focus our attention and recognizing when we’ve been hijacked to our detriment.

Some personal ruminations. When living in Jersey City, especially the last two years there, I spent a lot of time watching the news or binging, surfing, playing games, etc. We were a bit cut off (needed a shuttle to get to downtown Jersey City to get into Manhattan, traffic made driving a challenge all over NJ). Then we moved to Phoenix, and things have changed drastically. Healthier, first off. If you’ve ever read the Fungus Link, health issues we had (both physical and mental) are either slowly disappearing or have outright vanished. And Phoenix is gorgeous, there is no end to the things we could do here, it takes 10 – 25 minutes to drive wherever we need to be. When your outer world is more beautiful than what you see on your screen, you’re less interested in escaping into the online world. Now when I do go online, it’s legitimately to catch up on news or updates from friends, not kill time or escape.Show more

1 like1 commentLikeComment

Robbie Goldman

5 reviewsFollowFebruary 17, 2025

Really liked the first half of the book where Hayes described the different types of attention, the cocktail party effect and how alienation has become so commonplace in the modern era. I was especially interested when Hayes described his experience with the early internet of the 90s and how the first spam messages came to be. I’ve found the remaining remnants of that era online quite interesting, so it’s nice to hear the perspective of someone who was actually on them.

The final quarter or so dives deep into Trump and the current political landscapes impact on attention. Although this should be expected considering the author, I felt as if this could’ve been shortened. There were also a few points where there was clear political bias. I’m completely fine with this in some books, however considering the topic I didn’t think this needed to come out to further prove his points.

Also the ending was a little lacklustre. I personally don’t believe many of the ideas presented are long term solutions. Although this might be less of a critique of the book and more of the depressing outlook we have here.Show more

1 likeLikeComment

Chris Boutté

Author 8 books255 followersFollowFebruary 22, 2025

This book was a lot better than I expected. I really dislike all of the tech doomerism books, and most of them all just say the same things about how social media is shortening our attention span, targeted ads are bad, and all that. Don’t get me wrong, Chris Hayes does discuss that quite a bit in this book, but he has a fresh take and looks at the topic from a lot of unique angles.

While I’m not a major fan of history, Hayes discusses a lot of interesting stuff about how the battle for our attention has evolved over the years. He’s also really good at communicating different studies and technologies in a way that people can understand, and I always appreciate that. I still think the panic over tech is a bit overblown, but this is a great book overall.
Show more

1 likeLikeComment

Jed Walker

178 reviews15 followersFollowFebruary 13, 2025

Hayes does a great job making the case of the cultural problems resulting from our attention economy. It is an important topic we need to take seriously.

However, the considerable nuance he wields describing the complexities of the issue disappear when he moves into analysis and solutions. Aside from several moments of thoughtful examination of his own biases, he largely adopts and employs all of the mainstream media tropes regarding climate change, Trump, and Elon Musk, which seriously limit the pervasiveness of his arguments.

Despite these shortcomings, the discussion is worth considering although it would have been more compelling if it had been edited down by about a third.Show more

1 likeLikeComment

Bobbi

1,237 reviews5 followersFollowFebruary 20, 2025

3-3.5 stars. First of all, I want to say how much I enjoy Chris Hayes on MSNBC. I watch his show all the time.

However, while listening to his book, there were some chapters where I felt like I was in a college lecture hall trying not to fall asleep because the obviously intelligent lecturer was overly excited and his vocabulary was way above my level of understanding. There were other chapters that I totally enjoyed and could relate to, and others that I found very informative.

But I definitely know that had it not been Chris Hayes narrating this book I wouldn’t have finished it.Show more

1 likeLikeComment

Brahm Kornbluth

37 reviews2 followersFollowFebruary 7, 2025

Forget the information age, we are now in the attention age, where attention – our attention – on our phones or TVs or tablets or wherever – is the most valuable commodity, as outlined in the new book The Sirens’ Call from MSNBC host Chris Hayes.

With our current technology, information is infinite, while attention is limited, and as value derives from scarcity, attention is what is truly valuable. And every big rich company is after it.

While this argument isn’t new, it is especially timely with what is happening now in politics and social media and Elon Musk and TikTok and the world, and Hayes provides a good overview of where we are and how we got here.

Hayes acknowledges that as a cable new host his job is to be one of the platforms vying for our attention, and his insight to how the TV business works to get our attention is the most interesting part of the book. Getting our attention is what makes these businesses successful, and it really is a commodity to be chased and bought.

While there is not a lot new here, it is accessible and interesting and thought provoking.

I had the audio book of Sirens’ Call, which I highly recommend, as Hayes is a smart and personable host and guide.
Show more

1 likeLikeComment

Shelley

745 reviews3 followersFollowMarch 7, 2025

This is an interesting and well written book that takes a deep dive into the impact social media has on capturing, exploiting, and altering our attention spans. The information is challenging, yet easy to process and understand. The author does a good job of outlining strategies for regaining control over what we pay attention to and closing the gap between what we say is attention worthy and what we actually spend our time paying attention to.

1 likeLikeComment

Philip Cohen

Author 5 books24 followersFollowFebruary 17, 2025

I highly recommend Chris Hayes’ Siren’s Call, both for his scholarship and the insight he’s gained as an attention craftsperson (creator? merchant?). My favorite part was the chapter on alienation, which raises my question for him:

Hayes says alienation of labor in Marx is “almost directly analogous” to what happens with attention capitalism. But is it analogous — or is it actually the same? This is still capitalism. Capitalism colonizes all it encounters, including attention.

Like labor, he says, attention “is now commodified … that is new, transformative, and alienating … to be reduced to a wage, or an eyeball, is to find oneself alienated from some part of oneself.” (He adds that labor and attention are both fictitious commodities, a la Polanyi.)

Hayes says he is not a Marxist, and I usually believe him. But he doesn’t quite convince me this time. Just gotta close that loop: When our attention is commodified, it’s not parallel to labor alienation and exploitation, it’s the same process extended into new realms. IMO.
Good book!Show more

1 likeLikeComment

Greg Whitaker

6 reviewsFollowMarch 9, 2025

Enjoyed parts of the book but really felt it could have been more succinct and to the point. Author does a good job taking the reader through the erosion of our attention over the past 150 years and our ability to stay engaged. Perhaps I am just a prime example of what he is discussing as I lost my “attention” often in the middle of the book but pushed on and enjoyed the conclusion.

1 likeLikeComment

Captain Absurd

133 reviews11 followersFollowFebruary 10, 2025

everything that is discussed here has been known to us for a long time, the author simply dressed up the commodification of attention in new metaphors and referred it all to recent events

1 likeLikeComment

Yama Chen

222 reviews7 followersFollowFebruary 16, 2025

Too much to be practical.

1 likeLikeComment

Cynthia Kane

92 reviews5 followersFollowMarch 1, 2025

Possibly the most important book I will read this year- i already want to read again. All good common sense and more – which we desperately need to reclaim.
Thank you, Chris Hayes

1 likeLikeComment

416 reviews18 followersFollowMarch 1, 2025

Will have to think about this one a little. Overall I enjoyed it a lot, though some of the sections were better than others and I thought the chapter at the end could have been stronger. The part I think I appreciated most is him detailing how hard it is to attract and retain people’s attention even with a large platform, a problem I think a lot of frustration with mass media overlooks.

1 likeLikeComment

Meredith Lightstone

46 reviewsFollowMarch 7, 2025

Keeping up with our incessant notifications and regulating our nervous systems in the 21st century is like “meditating in a strip club.” We all need to become members of the teen Park Slope Luddite club expeditiously

1 likeLikeComment

Displaying 1 – 30 of 152 reviews

More reviews and ratings

Join the discussion

quotes

Starta discussion Aska question

Can’t find what you’re looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.

Help center

56thst.com

Articles, books and commentary by Joel Snell

SIRENS CALL/ HAYES

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

Christopher L. Hayes

About the author

Christopher L. Hayes

Readers also enjoyed

Ratings & Reviews

Friends & Following

Community Reviews

Join the discussion

Can’t find what you’re looking for?

Company

Work With Us

Connect