The Sirens’ Call, by the American television host Chris Hayes, cites a lot of big thinkers – Pascal, Thomas Hobbes, JM Keynes – to support the thesis that holding our attention is central to being human. Our deep collective unease, Hayes argues, is a consequence of the attention-grabbing content constantly shovelled into our minds, usually through our smartphones. In the classical analogy that gives the book its title, we haven’t yet developed the coping strategies to resist the sirens’ call.
But no one put it better than the US author and broadcaster Garrison Keillor, who predicted the wasteland of dead-eyed internet addiction and what it would do to people before the iPhone was ubiquitous. “The internet will eat you alive. With newspapers, you’re in and out, 20 minutes,” Keillor wrote in a 2007 column for Salon. “It’s your life, you choose.” Alongside prophetic analysis of the bleak fate we were hurtling towards, Keillor also identified (and brought to life) the best riposte to endless scrolling: style! Contrast a lumpen torso tangled up in wires and headphones with Cary Grant tucking a broadsheet under his arm.
Amid the search for protections against the epidemic of overdosing on meaningless information – such as regulating Big Tech and banning smartphones in schools (both good ideas) – other measures are nearer at hand. The liberal in me doubts that regulation is the complete solution. We need to draw on ridicule, too, and call out uncivilised habits for what they are: sad and anti-human. Smartphones are necessary evils, for work and admin. But living through a phone is giving up on life.
Hayes is a fascinating guide across this familiar territory: our frantic yet gradual self-strangulation by digital addiction. Just as industrialised food leaves us both “stuffed and starved”, the economic incentive structure of the “attention economy” perfects what grabs our attention, whether it leads anywhere interesting or – more likely – not.
“My experience is what I agree to attend to,” William James argued in 1890. And it’s not hard to see where Hayes will take his own argument: “Increasingly it feels as if our experience is something we don’t fully agree to, and the ubiquity of that sensation represents a kind of rupture.” Living inside today’s avalanche of artfully packaged digital information makes it hard to attend to anything. The convergence of work, leisure, utilities, entertainment and personal brand into one device leaves us at the mercy of almost involuntary glances and clicks. Here Hayes agrees with the argument put forward by the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his 2024 book The Anxious Generation: smartphones create anxiety by undermining sustained attention.
The impoverishment happens at opposite ends of the spectrum: both our solitude and sociality are interrupted by the no man’s land that lies in between. First, we’re losing the art of navigating the bridge from boredom into creativity. One of my strongest memories from childhood is daydreaming on long car journeys. I’d allow my thoughts to wander aimlessly, then try to trace them back to the beginning, seeing if I could remember the unlikely jumps and chance connections. I was fascinated by undirected thought. Secondly, the atomisation of always staring at a screen inevitably means we “pay attention together” less often and more superficially. (Anyone who regularly walks to a sports stadium on a busy match day will have experienced the subliminal sense of reconnection and ritual.)
On a societal level, there are two sides to the attention economy: first grabbing people, then fleecing them. This is where today’s “brightest and best” make their billions. Imagine that every packet of cigarettes also passed on to the manufacturer exactly how to manipulate and sell other stuff to the smoker. That’s the current mechanism of the attention economy.
I only learned part-way through the book that Hayes is famous – he has an hour-long evening show, All In with Chris Hayes, that airs every night on cable television in the US – which gave me a nicely neutral lens on what he has to say about fame. And it’s the best writing in the book, perhaps because fame provides Hayes’s central insight. He summarises the paradox of his journey to becoming a public figure:
I have, as a core constitutive feature of my personality, the desire for an audience… and more than that I want them to like me. But if you succeed enough in the former… you will begin to fail in the latter. The more people pay attention to you, the more you will encounter people who don’t care for you.
He’s addicted and disillusioned in equal measure, a double-edged relationship with his own career and success. This self-reflection as a professional broadcaster leads Hayes to understand how similar susceptibilities drive people to self-broadcast on social media, even though it makes them miserable. Social media, he concludes, “channels our most basic impulses… into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways”. Something that seems almost human has become the pre-eminent obstacle to being human.
So Hayes’s inner journey brings acuity to his social observations. He sees his own psychological conflict playing out at democratic scale. And he’s right. If you’ve ever been in the company of a certain type of professional entertainer (especially television careerists) you will have experienced first the personable front, second the insatiable neediness, third the weary shadow of sadness. Social media has simply industrialised that condition, by turning everyone into the game-show host of their own life – with the added tragedy of not first filtering out people who lack any talent for it. Light entertainment was bad enough when it was limited to light entertainers. Now it’s a ubiquitous style for stepping through life.
Hayes implies a brilliant point that I’ve not encountered before. Why is everyone so jaded all the time? The same reason that the television host is jaded at home. They’ve used up their energetic narcissism in public and all that’s left is the exhausted narcissist in private.
All of which, Hayes might say, leads on nicely to the current president of the United States. Hayes follows the popular analysis that Donald Trump has ridden to power thanks to an impoverished public square: “The incentives of the attention age create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary.” Hayes says he is reluctant to analyse Trump, but the adjectives start to flow anyway, and quickly we are deep into Trump’s “sad feral psychological needs”.
But this analysis of Trump – we used to debate like Lincoln, now we are just shouting at each other – conveniently downplays another precondition that facilitated Trumpism: the smug but articulate emptiness of Clintonian snake-oil doublespeak. Trump didn’t create the political vacuum, he exploited it. Which is why the Democratic Party could not have gifted him two easier opponents to defeat. Trump’s weird talent – for giving the impression of speaking plainly and authentically, even when it’s incoherent – tapped in to the deeper conviction that the previously dominant form of political discourse was essentially polished evasion washed down with glib and convenient abstract nouns. The political class – the professional caste of politicians and media insiders to which Hayes belongs – is an agent in that story as well as an observer.
Nevertheless, although well executed, I found the book’s form slightly unsatisfactory. It has the American trait of feeling worked at, as though it’s gone through many pairs of hands on the way to being more ambitious and “evidenced”. But the robustness doesn’t quite hold, and I wanted form to travel in the other direction, towards a distillation of what Hayes, and only Hayes, knows in his bones.
After all, Hayes is rightly interested in social counter-rhythms: from the revival of music on vinyl to non-industrialised food. Here’s another for the list: can’t publishers lead writers towards an inspired long essay rather than the compromise of an intermittently interesting book? Relatively few “ideas” books are suited to being conventional book length. Publishers tend to take an idea and bulk it out: a thicker spine, an air of the zeitgeist, a professional and authoritative heft. But in seeking to capture the moment, something more permanent is passed up. I wish Hayes had been given (or presented himself) with the following brief: 100 pages, as if they were last thing he’d ever write.
Even with that caveat, The Sirens’ Call is persuasive, important and wise. I’ve only one further cavil, and it’s more a question of perspective than opinion: Hayes writes with the apostate’s zeal. Once an excitable believer in the joys of the internet, he has now turned against it. Good, another sound advocate on board. But it’s worth remembering the types of thinker who saw it going dreadfully wrong, right from the beginning. My English teacher, whenever he walked past the computer room at school, would mutter, “They don’t look very well, do they?”
So while I admire Hayes’s practical lens – near the end of the book he points towards the various organisations and movements which are trying to address our inattention epidemic – the crisis calls for a more fundamental rethink about society, beyond the daily struggle with numb-scrolling.
There must be a pull towards humanity as well as a push away from tech. And the positive side of that ledger will rely on enlightened educators, architects, inventors and employers all doing their bit. We will all be dead soon enough, and it would be nice to leave behind something that transcends a social media timeline ready to be repackaged as advertising fodder by the least glamorous cabal ever to stumble into office as unearned masters of the universe.
My cricket coach used to tell me, “Concentration is the absence of irrelevant thought.” At the time, I thought he was teaching me sport. I now see he was showing me how to live.
The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s most Endangered Resource
Chris Hayes
Scribe, 336pp, £20.00
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[See also: How rotted is your brain?]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone