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Title details for The Sirens' Call by Chris Hayes - Wait list

The Sirens' Call

How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes
Chris Hayes
Audiobook
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 16 weeks
Place a hold Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
0 of 2 copies available
Wait time: About 16 weeks
An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller
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
“An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics.” —New York Times
“Brilliant book… Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.”—Rachel Maddow
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 28, 2025

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780593951712
      • File size: 256694 KB
      • Duration: 08:54:46

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 11, 2024
      In this expansive account, MSNBC host Hayes (A Colony in a Nation) argues that attention is the most valuable and exploited resource in the world today. Opening with Homer’s vivid image of Odysseus strapped to his ship’s mast to avoid the sirens’ alluring song, Hayes portrays the modern economy as a battle of wills between individuals’ private psyches and global powers that usurp attention to “command fortunes, win elections, and topple regimes.” Casting a wide net that encompasses philosophers, media theorists, psychologists, and classic literature—from Plato, Kierkegaard, and Marx to David Foster Wallace and Arthur Miller—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.” Some of the most relatable and amusing anecdotes come from his own life—like his admission that he has devoured “hours of videos of carpet cleaners patiently, thoroughly, lovingly shampooing old dirty rugs.” Hayes’s final thoughts are shrewd if a bit diffuse: he lauds the group chat as “the only truly noncommercial space we have today,” pinpoints Donald Trump and Elon Musk as some of the world’s biggest attention-grabbers, and suggests the (rather unlikely) possibility of “a mandatory, legislated hard cap on” daily screen time. The result is a savvy, if somewhat free-form, meditation on the modern attention economy.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      After MSNBC host Chris Hayes begins his audiobook with what behavioral science knows about voluntary and involuntary attention, he explains how this fundamental human faculty is being hijacked by corporate America and slick political operatives. Hayes is an authentic narrator of his important message. His easy-listening performance conveys a comfortable command of his emotional tone and engagement with his thinking without underplaying the gravitas of his concerns. He says our attention is becoming a commodity that corporations and political interests are exploiting without our knowledge or consent. Our involuntary attention to messages that can reach us wherever we carry our smartphones is a threat to our autonomy--our ability to make conscious choices about our lives, our values, and the leaders we follow. T.W. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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