The Sirens' Call - How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

From the 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. 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.”

Product details

• Authors: Chris Hayes, Hayes Chris
• Publisher: Penguin Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 28.01.2025
• EAN: 9780593653111
• ISBN: 978-0-593-65311-1
• No. of pages: 336
• Dimensions: 162 mm x 242 mm x 29 mm
• Subjects: Non-fiction book; Social sciences, law, business > Media, communication > Communication science; Media Studies, Economics, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economics / General, POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Media Studies, Political science & theory, Political science and theory