The Current - What ‘attention capitalism’ is doing to our minds — and politics

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Journalist Chris Hayes says “attention capitalism” demands we pay heed to everything at once, from social media doomscrolling to the 24-hour global news cycle. In his new book, The Siren’s Call, the MSNBC host explores what that means for our lives and politics — and explains why he thinks Donald Trump’s attention-grabbing antics are “a kind of feral instinct.”

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Here by intervention, I want your attention. Back in 1993, Duran Duran's song, Too Much Information, was all about the lure of television, constantly trying to grab our attention. These days, of course, it's not just TV that is consuming our brains. It is the infinite scroll of Instagram and TikTok, the latest wordle, the latest outrage on X, all part of a system that Chris Hayes calls attention capitalism. In his new book, the MSNBC host argues that our attention has become the world's

most important commodity. It's not only driving our economy and our politics, it's simultaneously destroying our sense of humanity. That new book is called The Sirens Call. Chris Hayes, good morning. Hey, good morning. It's great to be on. It's great to have you here.

I really enjoy this book. This is, I mean, when I say like the most important commodity, people often think of oil and gas and energy. You're suggesting that we live in an attention age. Why would you say that? I think because we all recognize at some level, the sort of what we used to call the information age, just sort of the digital age, right?

That we had this transition from the kind of industrial modes of production that characterize much of the 20th century where oil and gas and steel and making stuff was the sort of center of economic activity to one where the manipulation of ones and zeros, right, is the center of economic activity. But I think the thing we get wrong is we think that the value there is in the information itself, but information is not actually that valuable. It's really cheap and plentiful. It's infinitely reproducible. The thing that's finite, the resource that there's bounds on, the resource that can only be in one place or the other is the attention that we have. And the problem is that, as

Herb Simon pointed out in the 1970s, brilliant political scientist and academic, information consumes attention. So when you live in an era where information is constantly expanding and attention is finite, well then what that means necessarily is that the competition for that finite attention becomes ever, ever more ferocious. You talk in the book about kind of a slot machine model of grabbing our attention. What is that? It's the fact that our attentional faculties are tuned to interruption.

They're tuned to the rustle of the predator and the bushes, right? So we have deep within us this ability to be compelled against our will, even before our will even gets to decide towards something. So that's the way that a siren wailing down the street works, it's the way that a crying newborn works, or a waiter dropping a tray in a restaurant. In all those cases, the interruption is what grabs us before we get to decide whether we want to attend to it. And what happens when you engineer platforms from maximal attentional extraction at scale

is you drive towards this interrupting instinct at the lowest common denominator. It's the way a slot machine works. A slot machine can keep someone spellbound for eight hours, but it never tells a story. It's little interrupting interstitial moments over and over and over again, and that's the way that our algorithms have been engineered. Can I ask you just about the crying newborn thing? How did your sense of attention and our finite nature of attention change when you became a dad?

Profoundly. I mean, I think attention is at the core of parenting and family life. I mean, the thing that you experience when you have a child is that all of a sudden your attention is captured by this creature in a way that nothing ever has been, and it never comes back in some ways. And that feeling of attention almost leaving you, I mean, this sort of so poured onto one other person or two or three other people in my case, is so profound and also so like, constitutive of who we are and how we are. Like our relationship to parental attention, to siblings' attention, to the different vectors of attention in a household are really, really what form us.

And it's inseparable from who we are as people. I really think that, that our social identity is born of the kinds of attention we get and the kinds of attention we don't get and the people we pay attention to in the crucible of our familial upbringing. I mean, you tell a story at the beginning of the book about sitting down and reading with your daughter and you are proud of yourself, as we would be, because in that moment you reject the pull of the phone that is in your pocket.

And you say in some ways that that means that you're alive, that you're still alive. What does that mean? This comes up a lot in this book, this idea of what it means to be alive right now in that attention era. Yeah, I'm glad you said that. I think the book is a book about what it means

to be alive right now and what it means to be a human right now and how to reclaim our humanity. You know, William James, when he writes Principles of Psychology in the late 19th century, he's very obsessed with the notion of free will. And I think I have the same concerns. I mean, the book starts with the story of Odysseus bound to the mass because it's a story about will. And it's a story about the friction between the

different forms of ourself, the self that succumbs to compulsion and the self that can exercise free will. And I think reclaiming that ability to exercise free will, reclaiming a dominion over our own minds as ours is in some sense is the key to the project of being a human. And different eras offer different temptations away from that dominion. And this is the one that we have in our era. I mean, that's hard to get that control back in part because as you've said, there is an industry that is built around trying to harvest our attention.

We have a finite supply of attention. There are only so many humans with so many eyeballs. And so if companies are trying to do that, if they're trying to traffic in our attention and they want to grow, what do they do? Well first, you know, the first part of this growth curve was the deployment of smartphones, right? So if you get these devices in everyone's pockets, then you have a lot more attention you can harvest. But then once everyone has them,

then it does get a bit trickier. So you can start targeting children, right? So you can say, well, we're not gonna cap it at adults. We're gonna start pushing the age boundaries lower. 14, 12, you can put a one and a half year old in front of Coco lemons YouTube page You know, which is what that product is designed to do You can also start to take people's sleep away, right? They can't pay attention to you while they're sleeping But if you start to push back the waking hours and then the the thing that's really wild to me is

You can try to start to have people looking at two or three things at all times. I mean, you know, I caught my kids at one point playing a video game while watching some movie or show in like a little corner box. And I was like, this is, I don't like this at all. This is crazy. Just focus on one thing. They're like, well, you sit in front of the TV with your phone all the time. It's like, touché, buddy.

And this is one of those moments, I'm sure you have this too, I think we all do. I've definitely caught myself sitting in front of the TV, like our big screen TV with my laptop and my phone. And like alternating between three, and I just, I have had the thought that if I showed a picture of this to myself 12 years ago, it genuinely would have looked deranged. Or in the future, people might look back at this moment and say, what were we doing? Yes. Yes.

And I do think that there is, I mean, one of the contentions of this book is that we've hit a kind of dead end here and that we need to get out of it. And I do think that if things go the way that I hope they do and the way that I think they do, we will look back on that, that moment of the laptop and the phone and the TV, the way that you look at images of people on a flight all smoking in 2025. Why do we hate on Apple as much as we do social media companies? If they're the ones, I mean, they created this device that's in front of me that allows those social media companies to harvest my attention.

But it was Apple's creation that gave them that permission in some ways. Why do you think Apple gets a bit of a pass on this? You know, I remember interviewing Tim Cook back in 2018 or 2019, and he was like, we're very proud of the fact that we sell a product that people pay for as opposed to having the audience as our product. And that's true. That really is a difference. I mean, you know, they do fundamentally kind of build a better mousetrap, but the transaction

there is fundamentally different than the transaction of Google or Meta or X. You hand over your money, they give you this physical product that they have engineered and produced. With the other sort of social media platforms and more sort of attention companies, their product is you to the advertiser. They are delivering you. One of the things that you point out in the book is that attention is not a moral faculty. That there are certain things we pay attention to, and you would know this in the industry that we're both in, and there are things that we don't pay attention to. Yes. How do you work that out?

And what's the difference between chasing attention and commanding attention when it comes to figuring out what people will pay attention to? I mean the fact that attention is not a moral faculty is the defining struggle of my professional life. What do you mean? That's what I think about. What I've tried to do all day is try to direct attention and channel the flows of attention in ways that are going to make the world a better place or give people the tools for self-governance or illuminate issues in a way that will lead to some positive

democratic action. And, you know, if I didn't have that desire, the job would be kind of easier because it's just whatever, you know, you just follow whatever was kind of popping. But the thing that I'm always trying to do is try to marshal the kind of force of audience attention and then channel it in directions. And when I say attention is not a moral faculty, you know, we all recognize this. There's a category of English words for this category of things that are intentionally salient, but dubious morally like lurid and prurient and you know obscene. That we know that there's an entire category, people use a cliche of like, it's like a car crash.

You can't look away. That when you have attention capitalism operating the scale it's operating, it's going to drive towards those sorts of things. And what our job is as journalists is, I think, we have a professional ethos that is independent of the pure chasing of the faculty of attention, where we make independent editorial judgments about the import of things.

And our challenge, and sometimes it's really hard, is to try to get people to pay attention to the important things. Can I ask you more about that? Because one of the things that's really interesting in this book is you speaking about your own, I don't know, culpability is the right word, but involvement in this. As somebody who hosts a cable news program and ratings are really important,

and you talk about how it's easier to grab attention in some ways than to hold it. How do you think about that in terms of what people will pay attention to? And your role, I mean, what the role of the media is in our attention deficit world. Yeah.

I mean, I think when I started doing this job and I've now been hosting this show for 12 years and a show for 13 and a half or something, I think I had a much simpler model that was much more about wherever you shine the spotlight, people will look. And I didn't take seriously this sort of reality of audience interest and demand as a kind of exogenous factor. From the perspective of a person who's hosting this show on this network with this audience, there are certain stories that people want to pay attention to and certain stories people don't seem to want to pay attention to. And the first step in trying to come up with some kind of higher synthesis where you can

feel like you're doing something other than just chasing that attention is to make that recognition because then once you make the recognition, I compare it to like a sailboat. The wind is there. You can't control where the wind is and you can't ignore it. You can't just be like, well, I'm not going to listen to the wind. What you do is through the development of technique and craft, you figure out how to tack the boat so that you can kind of sail in the direction you want to go. But that takes skill.

And that's a skill that I think I've really tried to develop, to take audience attention from where it might start and get it somewhere that it might not go if I weren't there. That's a hard needle to thread, right? It's really hard. I mean, you know, I'm pretty tortured by it. There's a lot of things in the world that deserve our attention that don't get it, and you know, it's partly my job to direct that, and a lot of times I feel like I fail. Bingo! Woohoo! Celebrate a win for your community at

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A message from the government of Canada. One of the things, I mean you talked about a car crash that people can't look away from and that's not a value judgment, but it is the kind of thing that people can't turn away from is Donald Trump right now. You say in the book that Trump is the political figure who most exploited the new rules of the attention age and that his approach to politics, this is quite an image, is the equivalent of running through the neighborhood naked, it is quite an image, is the equivalent of running through the neighborhood naked. It is repellent, but transfixing.

Tell me more about what makes Trump so good in this moment. I really think he just has one key insight that is not even a... It's not a theoretical insight that he cogitated on, but rather a kind of feral instinct, but just that all attention's good attention, negative attention is basically as good as positive attention, and what you want to do is maximize the amount of attention. And that's not the way most politicians think. Most politicians, they want positive attention, and if they can't get positive attention, they also will just go with no attention.

Trump, I mean, the way he conducts himself is to try to dominate our attention at all times. It's a strange, it's one of these sort of moments in history when someone's particular gifts or instincts match the kind of era such that it has propelled him to this position, I think. I mean, he got lucky in a lot of ways. He's a guy who's had multiple inheritances in his life and he's kind of burned through them.

But that's his one real skill and that's his one real insight. And the thing about Trump that I will say is that in a weird way, Trump does make my job easier in the sense that I don't feel like, well, we shouldn't be spending time paying attention to him. He is, I think, a unique threat to the American democratic order and the world order and is worthy of sustained mass attention and organizing to resist. People in this country are paying close attention to that because he keeps making these comments about Canada becoming the 51st state, for example. What do you think is driving that?

I'm not... It's a great question. I haven't quite solved for this, to be honest. I think I would say a few things. One is, yes, he has an instinct for attention and he knows that it's provocative and trolling when he calls Trudeau the governor, like he knows what he's doing. It's a troll, it's a needle. I also think that he genuinely has a strong desire for American territorial expansion. That he wants Canada. Yeah. I mean, I think he wants whatever he can get. I mean, these three areas he's focused on, Greenland, Panama, and Canada, I think he views himself as a kind of 19th century imperial monarch.

In that context, and this is true about the way he views trade, that everything is zero sum. Everything is, you're screwing me or I'm screwing you, and I want to be the one screwing other people. I think he genuinely has a project, a true project of territorial expansion and conquest. He wants to make Canada the 51st state. That's not like a joke. It's not a schtick.

He wants to do that. How much attention do you think the average American is paying to what's going on in your country right now? You said that this is a constitutional crisis. You have Donald Trump essentially selling Elon Musk's cars in front of the White House. You have a purge of the US government by Musk as well. How much attention do you think the average American is paying to what's happening? Not a ton.

I mean, I think that's probably the background equilibrium is that news consumption in the US is not that high. It's gotten smaller. So I think one of the things that's actually driving me a little insane is that from up close what is happening is so clear, like that there is a clear and explicit authoritarian project to end the American constitutional order is absolutely obvious day by day in their actions. And combined with the knowledge that the vast majority of Americans have no idea that's true, don't even really maybe have their arms around what that would mean or why it matters,

and the distance between those two is a little difficult to deal with. Because their attention has been steered elsewhere. That's part of it, yes. I mean, I think the death in the US of news as a product that you habitually consume and that's been woven into the algorithmic feed and people increasingly get their news from whatever gets kind of tossed off into the feed. I mean, this is empirically true that the younger and younger cohorts don't have news consumption as a specific activity.

They get news from, quote, social media, which is just like, Lord knows whatever someone says. But yes, I mean, I think you guys in Canada probably have clearer eyes on this. I think this is true of much of the world that's looking at this, spending a lot of attention on it, and is pretty shocked and appalled, again, across different ideological lines of difference. I mean, that's what's sort of interesting is being shocked and appalled increasingly as a kind of unifying experience for the rest of the world as they watch this proceed even if they have intense internal divisions about their own politics or even the global order.

I think that what he's doing is not that clear to the majority of Americans yet. And there's a real question about whether people wake up to it too late. Can I just ask you one final thing just about your day job? And that's you write in the book about social attention and the gaze. You're somebody who is famous. And so people look at you. The gaze is the gaze that you might get when you are out and somebody recognizes you. And this goes back to how we live online and everybody hoping for a viral hit, whatever they post on Instagram or TikTok, that that idea of fame and that experience of fame, which is psychologically destabilizing, you say, is coming for us all.

What do you mean by that? I mean, social attention from strangers is something that we're just flatly not wired for or habituated to because all social attention we receive in our formative years, unless you're like a child star, is from people that you have relationships with. Teachers, friends, family, friends' parents, right? So that when you get social attention from strangers that you have no other relation with, it kind of tricks your brain into thinking like, oh, this person, this random person

on the internet is mad at me. I feel bad because I would feel bad if like my sibling was mad at me or my friend was. But this person isn't a sibling or friend. There's no reason for me to feel bad. Or this person on the street is looking at me in a way that feels like they're coming onto me or they're flirting with me. But they're not flirting with me, they're just recognizing me. But no one looks at you that way.

There's a very specific sort of, oh, wait. And so it really messes with your brain. And I think the kind of Ponzi scheme of social attention that is social media is the promise of recognition at scale. But really all you're getting is attention. And what we really want is recognition. That's to be seen as human by another human. But what we could get is attention. And attention is this sort of synthetic imposter that feels close enough to the real thing to keep chasing it as we've watched Elon Musk do, for instance, but doesn't actually satiate that deep sort of soul desire for recognition. How do we regain control of our attention in the face of that, do you think? It feels like it's, there's a lot of momentum around this, the success of a book like Jonathan

Height's latest, which suggests that people are trying to, at the very least, grapple with this, but these companies seem more powerful than ever. So how do we start to get our attention back? One thing to note is that daily active users from most of these platforms are just declining. I do think there's a little voting with the feet that's happening. Two is organizing and sort of consciousness raising. You're seeing that the anxious generation has spent a year on the bestseller list. The book that I just wrote, Siren's Call, has found a big audience and I think people

feel attuned to it. And I think the reason for that is that people feel this sort of exhaustion at the personal level, you know, the things that Jonathan Haidt talks about in Anxious Generation. I mean, phone free classrooms is just such a no-brainer. And I think actually that same logic is going to be extended increasingly in adult directions. Like, it's just crazy to me if you've ever been in like a conference of adults recently that no one is paying attention to the speaker. Like we tend to externalize our anxiety and neuroses about this entire thing onto kids, but it's like, well, adults are not doing great on this either. So it just seems to me that there's all kinds of spaces where we're just going to say we're not going to have these

devices. Either we put them in these cubbies or these lockers, you just keep them in your pocket. But these are spaces that we're just going to interact with each other or there's a reason that we just don't need them. I think they're going to see more innovation around devices that can hold your phone or stop your phone or dumb phones. But broadly, I think you're going to see a kind of cultural movement to find ways away from it. And then I think you're going to see a kind of cultural movement to find ways away from it. And then I think you're going to see organizing around regulation of the social media companies, and particularly not around speech, but rather around attention. I think it's a really important distinction. Speech is obviously and rightly protected by the First Amendment, but attention isn't.

And I think there's ways to think about attention regulation that evades some of the speech problems. I have to let you go, but I have to just, how are you doing in this? You write in the book about another brilliant book. Jenny O'Dell wrote an astonishing book called How to Do Nothing, which kind of changed my life in many ways. How are you doing when it comes to stepping out of that attention economy, at the very least trying to grab the steering wheel?

If I'm going to be totally honest with you, it's bad right now. And partly that's because the book was my binding myself to the mast. The writing of the book was incredibly fulfilling and very mentally calming in a weird way. I think also being, you know, Jenny O'Dell's book, which is, I agree, just phenomenal and totally unique, she always struck me as a slightly higher being. Yes. You know? She's sort of this spiritual presence that does kind of float above it all, but I'm just

like everyone else. I'm down in the muck and I'm the most online person ever. So I do think that's part of being honest about that and part of the extent the book has sort of found an audience, I think that's part of it. I really enjoyed reading the book and really appreciate the opportunity to have the chance to talk to you about this. We say it's one of the issues of our times,

but that's because it's true. People are trying to figure this out in their own way. Chris, thank you very much. Thank you. Chris Hayes is the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC. His new book is called The Siren's Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Species.