The Decibel - Big Tech hijacked our attention. Chris Hayes wants to win it back

Episode Date: March 1, 2025

Presenting Machines Like Us, a Globe and Mail podcast on technology and people.We are living in a world of perpetual distraction. There are more things to read, watch and listen to than ever before �� but our brains, it turns out, can only absorb so much. Politicians like Donald Trump have figured out how to exploit this dynamic. If you’re constantly saying outrageous things, it becomes almost impossible to focus on the things that really matter. Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon called this strategy “flooding the zone.”As the host of the MSNBC show All In, Chris Hayes has had a front-row seat to the war for our attention – and, now, he’s decided to sound the alarm with a new book called The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.Hayes joins Machines Like Us host Taylor Owen to explain how our attention became so scarce, and what happens to us when we lose the ability to focus on the things that matter most.

Hi, it's Manika. Today, we're bringing you an episode from another Globe and Mail podcast, Machines Like Us. It's a show about technology and artificial intelligence. Host Taylor Owen interviews entrepreneurs, journalists, scholars, and lawmakers on the technologies that are changing our world, as well as transforming and potentially endangering our lives. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can subscribe to Machines Like Us

wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Machines Like Us. Do I have your attention right now? I'm guessing probably not. Or at least not all of it. I'm going to assume you're listening to this on your commute or while you're washing the dishes or checking your email. But I say that without any judgement, because this is the world we now live in. We scroll through social media when we watch TV, and we do our work in 5 minute increments when we're not being interrupted by texts, emails, and Slack notifications. There are just more things to read, to watch, and to listen to than ever before.

There are just more things to read, to watch, and to listen to than ever before. But our brains can only absorb so much, which, it turns out, might be a problem. Politicians like Donald Trump have figured out how to exploit this dynamic. If you're constantly saying outrageous things, it's almost impossible to focus on what's actually important. Chris Hayes has spent the better part of a decade trying to make sense of all this noise. As the host of the MSNBC show All In, Hayes spends an hour every night

trying to focus our attention on the things that matter most. And that experience, those years in the trenches of the attention economy, have led him to write a new book. It's called The Sirens Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. So I wanted to have him on the show to explain how our attention became so scarce and what happens to us when we lose the ability to focus on the things that matter most. You're an insanely busy person. You have a talk show, you're at the center of American politics. Why spend some of your attention writing a book about attention?

I mean, honestly, it's a weird thing where like, forcing myself to work on an intellectual project like that is weirdly therapeutic for my own dealing with it. Like people, people interviewing me, you know, well, what do you what, what's your solution to this? It's like, well, kind of writing the book was the solution. When I start the book with the the Odysseus on the mass, like him binding himself to the mast is a classic commitment method. And for me, having to write the book was a commitment method and it forced me to read deeply, think seriously, like try to develop ideas longer than 10 second Instagram reels. And that to me is really therapeutic. Your show and your voice is at the center of some big debates.

I mean, the future of democracy, the future of the planet, the decline of America in many ways. I mean, what why attention? I mean, is that the root cause for you of all those other things? Is it a first principle to get out everything else you deal with every night? Yes, definitely. I mean, I think it's particularly when I think about where attention flows and how it affects

what we do or don't do. This particularly true in climate, which is something I've been thinking about and working on a lot where it's been a real uphill battle to concentrate and focus the necessary amount of attention on it. So I think that attention is kind of prior to all that stuff ultimately, and that's part of the reason that I wanted to write the book. I think we're roughly the same age. And I hear a lot of people in our generation talking

about this, even just using the word attentional. I mean, that's something that you hear more and more amongst people who maybe have lived through both sides of this. Is there something particular going on here? And if so, what's changed for us recently that makes this the big deal? CB I do think there's a cohort effect here, which is that we were the first digital native generation, but digitally native in an open internet. And we've experienced the open internet being closed. We got all of the sort of upside promise, the utopian vision, the connection, and we felt it too. I mean, I remember when going to college and I could email my friends from high school every day, this was, you know, transformational. I remember I could look up any fact I needed at any time.

Like this stuff really was transformational. It felt like it had that feeling when you like arrive in a new city when you're traveling and you check in, you drop your bags, you're like, where should we go? What should we go do? It had that feeling all the time. It's all upside and now it feels like being stuck in traffic. It feels like car sickness. So what changed there? So give me your high level summary of the evolution from that open to a world where our attention is now co-opted in negative ways. I think the biggest answer in terms of specifics of how the internet functions is that we had this brief period of essentially an open internet with open protocols. The open internet worked on open protocols. It worked on non-commercial collaboration. It had thriving commerce on it, but the actual universe

you engaged in, email being a perfect example, were open protocols. And that's been enclosed. It's like a classic enclosure problem, where open, free public space no longer exists. And now all of the space exists inside algorithmic platforms designed to maximize attention minutes. So these platforms are good at capturing our attention.

Like what's the problem with that? So like you outline an intentional problem, right? Which is in this current ecosystem. It's incredibly hard to hold our attention. It's easy to grab it. But platforms are actually pretty good at holding our attention. What's wrong with the way they've decided to use that power and that capacity? Well, there's a few things. One is that attention isn't an end of itself in human interaction, it's always a means to an end. So if you're thinking about any human interaction, attention

has to be regulated in some ways. We learned this the first day of preschool. There's an attentional regime, you're taught, you raise your hand if you have to go to the bathroom, you clap three times, the teacher claps three times. This goes all the way up through agendas for meetings, church services, the floor of the US Senate, everything, right? You use the word attentional regime a lot in the book. And I like that, right? These are the rules we get, the norms and rules we live by. Exactly.

And those norms and rules are there because you use attention for something else. But when attention is the sole end, you get this sort of breakdown where you can't really use it for anything else. And so in the sense of what it does to public discourse, it sort of destroys the possibility of attention being marshaled for some other end, it becomes an end in of itself. Or grabbing your attention is the end, right? Like repeatedly grabbing, which is the easy thing. Yes. And this is the other thing is like the sort of iterative what I call slot machine model where

You're not really trying to hold attention You're just trying to grab it iteratively for hours and hours at a time And I think that just does something destructive to our souls Fundamentally, I think it collapses us in on ourselves Is it the medium or the message there? I mean, is it possible to put good content into the attentional fragmentation machine, slot machine and get a good outcome? That's a great question, because I think there's this it's important to sort of keep this dichotomy, which is that it's possible to do awesome work in all of these formats. I mean, I've learned stuff from TikTok videos.

I've laughed my butt off at extremely, extremely funny 10 second videos that were like genuine products of talent and skill. The problem is the kind of homogenization process that it's doing, right? The fact that it's driving towards this sort of dead end end point. Again, you could have a world of short video that wasn't algorithmically controlled by machine learning. To me, it's more the fact that this optimization problem has been unleashed on all of us at this scale with this level sophistication that tends to sort of crowd out sort of full flourishing of different forms of grabbing attention. The optimization problem being keep us on the platform for as long as possible so we seem as many ads as possible. Exactly. Yes, exactly.

Everybody who produces media at the moment sits in this attentional regime and follows these similar rules. You have to produce a show every night. You have an hour a night of attention to grab or to hold and your incentives are also to grow and grab. How do you think through that responsibility and how you adjudicate your time and effort? So one thing that's been really important is I haven't I've stopped looking at ratings about five years ago and I've never looked since, which I think has been really useful. Do you know directionally where they're going?

I generally do, but I don't actually know that that fine grain. I still have the show. So that's basically the feedback I have. It's a binary. It's a binary rating. Exactly. I think of it like passing the bar, you know, here in the US when you take a law exam. Yeah. So that's actually one thing that's been fairly useful and important for me. I do think that if you start looking at the fine grain feedback of the metrics, you can start to get obsessed and pulled away

from your mission. The second thing is, I think over the course of the 12 years I've been doing it, I do have now a kind of almost tactile sense of where these sort of attentional flows are going and what stories are capturing people. And what I try to do is find the Venn diagram between where that attention is flowing and what I think is important.

And try to at least start the show in that space, which is to say, a thing that people are interested in that I also think is important. And then move maybe over the course of the show to things that I also think might be important, but aren't getting the same level of attention I think they should. And so that's the basic formula, you know, start from where people are at with things that I think really matter. And then try to see how I can move into things that might be outside of people's attention, but I also think matter. One thing I was, I mean, the cable news demographic is a generally older one, right? I'm not sure exactly

how yours breaks down, but I think of the Baby Boomer audience and our parents' generation as the core. It sure is, yeah. And something you really see in them is anecdotally, they care deeply and passionately about the thing that happened that day because they watched it on cable news or the thing that happened yesterday. So the thing you thought they should care about yesterday is the thing they're passionate and energized and angry about today. Is that healthy? Is that the right way of thinking about attention and what's important and what matters and

politics? Maybe just take politics. Is that a good way of thinking about politics? I think it can be bad. I think it could be distorting. I mean, it's a little hard right now in the context of this conversation because it's like, the US is in the midst of possibly a genuine like, apoccal, like destruction of the entire constitutional order. And trust me, we feel in Canada, let me tell you. Well, right. Yeah, you might be part of it soon.

I mean, you laugh, but we're actually taking it pretty seriously at the moment. Oh, you should you should absolutely take his areas. I think he's 100% serious. It's not like some new thing that authoritarian, aspiring leader wants territorial expansion by, you know. Particularly big, close proximity neighbors who are under defended and have lots of resources. Yeah, so I guess the reason I'm saying this

in this context is like, I think sometimes the instinct to cable news is to make people freak out about stuff that in the long arc of history looks a little silly or doesn't matter that much. And that's absolutely a thing cable news has done. But the biggest things that we've freaked out about on my show have been the once in a century pandemic that killed a million Americans. Well, today could be the single worst day ever during this pandemic so far. Tonight, a record 100,000 Americans...

And the first violent attempt to stop the transfer of power since the firing of the cannons on Fort Sumter. The President of the United States is clearly a danger and threat to the Republic and needs to be lawfully... I'm comfortable with being like people should have freaked out about those things. Those were worth overcompensating your attentional focus on. Exactly. And right now I think that's also true about what's happening. So like it definitely is the case and I'm sure you can pull up blocks in my show, episodes of my show, where our tone was a little grabbing of the lapels for a thing

in the long arc of history isn't going to look that important. Although that's also just a daily journalism problem everywhere. But the biggest stories we covered where we have been really trying to be like this really matters, I've I feel pretty comfortable that they really did. And that's true right now. Yeah. that they really did. And that's true right now, yeah. AC That's sort of counterfactual here too, because there are a number of moments where big publics have been able to focus on one thing for sustained periods of time. And like COVID is clearly one, Black Lives Matter is probably one. I think of the trucker convoy here, right, where a small group of people captured the attention of a country for three

months every single moment, right? And so, is that the sort of flip of this that we actually can pay attention to things collectively all at once? And how does that happen in this fragmented ecosystem that's broken in the other ways, you say? CB I mean, we can, but it's so alchemical, isn't it? Like, it's just, it's so hard to figure out and reverse engineer or reconstruct why those moments happen. And there's also the problem, too, of like, Zeynep Tufekci and there's this great book called Twitter and Tear Gas,

where she's talks, wrote about a decade ago, which is about mass protests in the digital age. And one of the things she says is like, yes, you can sort of get this viral attentional focus, but it's much harder to build things underneath it that create the sort of sustainable institutions that can drive social change. And I do think there's a sort of this kind of whipsaw effect that we all feel can make it very hard to produce the stuff underneath that's less sort of

intentionally salient that does actually over the long term produce social change. So you wrote this book before Trump too. And how do you reflect on where we are now? I mean, it feels like these variables are not just different in scale and degree, they are in kind. I mean, the idea that Musk would own one of these platforms outright and be manipulating it to the degree he is, I don't think is something we really… We kind of flirted with that with maybe Zuckerberg was torquing the platform a little bit on the edges, but not like Zuckerberg literally controlling an audience of hundreds of millions of people to torque their views on things. How do we even come to terms with that in the framework you set out in the book? Or is it even right anymore? Well, I think it's right in the sense that

I think Musk is like the worst possible avatar of everything the book says about the A, attention is the most valuable resource, B, that it's being aggregated and extracted at scale by a set of platforms that have, you know, not maybe our best interest at heart or doing it for other reasons. I mean, what he's added to that is like, to go back to my original point about like, you know, my original point was they're doing it just to maximize attention. He's actually doing it for a purpose. He has a project. Right. I mean, it might even be better if he was just trying to do it

to maximize attention that, you know, we get more dumb videos. Then he's just Zuckerberg again. Right. Another like oligopolist aspiring monopolist. Right. Exactly. Which is actually less insidious. But instead, what we have is him kind of backing into the same insight Donald Trump did, which is, attentional dominance is the route to power. And combining that with wealth and the actual owning

of a network to produce something that I don't think any of us truly saw coming. I mean, it really does. It has kind of a science fiction novel feel to it at this point. How much intentionality was there do you think with him? It does feel like you backed into it, like you said. It does. I mean, you know, I've talked to the folks, Ryan McCarthy and Kate Condor, who did character limit, which is a great book. And I talked to other people that reported on for a while. I think there's a sort of, I think he his brain broke on Twitter. I mean, he just we've that's the other thing that is like why it Musk is just the most the sort of terminal endpoint of everything I say in the book, which is that his own cycle psychology has been so warped by exactly the attentional dynamics I talk about.

I mean, he's so destroyed by being online. It's so corroded his ability to be like a human with faculties. And so I think that part of it is just sort of feral instinct. Part of it is he does have, he's a smart guy, obviously, and he does have a plan here, which I think is to take over the country. What does that look like, do you think? What's the objective there? Well, I think it means having access

to all the payment systems of the world's most powerful government that's $6 trillion through a back end that you can control unilaterally, which he now has. To what end? I don't know. I mean, I think to the end of saying who gets paid and who doesn't, to the end of saying what the US government does and doesn't do, I mean, that seems sort of the end. I mean, that's absolute power ultimately.

I mean, that's- Yeah. Yes. I think that's what he wants. I think that's what he wants. And I think Trump is old enough. Trump wants to be the ceremonial president more than he wants to be the actual president, so it's a sort of useful division of labor. But the two of them do, they're the two people that understand the attention needs the best. I mean, they really do. And they're using that dominance for the darkest possible ends right now. CB. Another piece of the attentional ecosystem they exist in isn't just fragmentary attention, it's actually kind of long form, right? Like the way this podcast ecosystem has emerged

in and around a set of ideas that they play in and they clearly fuels them and they fuel, there's a feedback loop there, right? Between how does that play in, like how did that happen? And how do you see three hour podcasts of people building and constructing reality in long form? That's just wrong. There's a few things I think about this. Why do you think the podcasts are in their own category, partly because they retain the open platform of distribution

of the pre-platform dominated internet. They run off RSS and in some ways, their open flourishing is a testament to the point I'm making in the book, which is like, and same thing with email newsletters, right? What are the two remaining open channels of distribution? Email open platform developed pre-platform dominance, RSS developed in the early 21st century by Ernst Schwartz, among others. There's a reason those things exist and the reason that those are places that people can do interesting stuff.

In terms of the long form podcast, one of the points I make in the book is like our appetites, which are both drawn to junk food and also will eat a million different things, our attentional appetites are drawn towards the casino slot machine, and also people read Warrant Peace and they go to Wagner's Ring Cycle and they watch four hour podcasts. And I think the flourishing of that in the abstract is good.

And in some ways, like even the right wing version of that is more just the thing that happens doing politics. Like it's, you know, you can't stop people from having bad ideas. That happens in any age and any platform. I do think the one thing that really has changed, however, I think the idea is something distinct civically called news or journalism going away. And everything being thrown into this kind of slot machine where like whatever grabs attention means that.

People have no sense of an ethos of like saying true things or fact checking and so the information you get is so undifferentiated that if Joe Rogan says. get is so undifferentiated that if Joe Rogan says, you know, the aliens built the pyramids or whatever, it all kind of has this like flattening effect on what we view as true. AC I think that's exactly it. That the factual base on which they're having long form conversations is the thing that's been broken by the attentional economy. CB Yeah, yeah, exactly. AC Like in my day job, we run an observatory that studies the information ecosystem, right? Oh, wow. And we can see this constantly where you see fragments of false information begin on social platforms via the incentive structure you talk about.

Yes. And then they take root on a podcast. in a, and then they get the space to be legitimized for three to five hours, right? And then when they go back out in the ecosystem, they've been laundered by this like process, right? So all of a sudden, it's not just a piece of information. It's like something that Rogan has cleared or Rogan's found the expert that's gonna sound smart for three hours about that false piece of information.

There's something dangerous there. That's such a good point. Well, you can cut this if you want, but there's this conspiracy theory that Emmanuel Macron's wife Brigitte was like born a man, born a boy, that Candice Owens has done like a 10-hour series on and has published a book about, which is like a top seller. And it's just like the wildest thing. Was our golden age of attention?

It's a good question. I don't. Well, I mean, I sort of think the open the first version of the open Internet was kind of a golden age of attention in some ways, where the best parts of curiosity and connection were happening without the attention capitalism model that was trying to extract every second. I do think there was a very vibrant non-commercial universe of attentional exchange of people and people giving each other attention via the early versions of the social web before it got mechanized. via the sort of early versions of the social web before it got mechanized. All media regimes and attentional regimes

are gonna have their sort of pluses and minuses. So I think that one of the things that happens in this is there's this sense that maybe all of us who are worried about this are engaging in moral panic. And then on the flip side, you could say, well, people were pretty freaked out about TV, but it's like, right, but TV was absolutely a transformational technology that completely altered.

They freaked out for a good reason, right? It changed the world. Yeah, like all public and private life. Yes, exactly. Like it definitely changed the world. So one of the things that's interesting is you go back to those FCC network debates, where there was this active question about regulation, civic commitment, the public good, back and forth, you know, in the in the sort of famous Newt Minow speech, and then in the the sort of Sunday show, the creation of the Sunday show is the kind of civic tax that

the networks would pay. Space of reason debate every Sunday. Exactly. Like and again, it's not like that was so amazing, but there was a debate about precisely this that is just totally absent now. Like no one has any sense that that there should be some. Public good regulation of what attention capitalism has wrought. I mean, we have these fights about everyone sort of lobbying for this or that content to be dinged or not, but a broader sort of question is just totally absent from the policy discussion.

But it doesn't need to. I mean, we know there are some things one could do to change the underlying incentives and structures of the platform ecosystem. For example, right? You could ban digital advertising or data collection if you really wanted to, right? Like if you really wanted to change the attentional infrastructure, you could do it pretty easily. You could.

Yeah. But it's not in the realm of political possibility, I guess, is the problem. Right. But I, but I wonder, I mean, there's, there's two things that I think will probably happen. I think one is some regulatory regime. Yeah, you can ban digital advertising in its current form. You can cap the total number of minutes. You can have some sort of accelerating tax, like per user minutes over a certain amount so that you, there's things you could do at a regulatory.

The other thing I think might just happen is that users start to flee. Like I do think, you know, daily active users across these platforms are in decline with some exceptions, WhatsApp is going up still, but a lot of them are having a hard time retaining people. And the same way that there was that period in Facebook where everyone got on Facebook and started posting and then

getting yelled at by strangers and then people stopped doing it because they were like, this sucks. I think that this sucks effect might actually end up doing a fair amount of the work here. CB In your book, I think you flip around the question about what we're striving for and ask what you as an individual. We actually do have a fair amount of choice, right? So what's the ideal we should each want, right? Do you want to be sitting reading a book all day or do you want the internet a bit? What's yours in this? In an ideal world, what would you want your attentional diet and structure to look like? I like reading books and having to write a book forced me to do that.

I like taking long walks where I have to think about my ideas a little bit and push them through. And I like spending time with my wife, my kids, my friends, my family, the people I love. I like being around people and in communion with them. I also like some dumb videos. I love some, you know, I love some funny dances. I love some carpet cleaning. I love all that stuff. It's a question of sort of the right balance of it. The algorithmic feed is kind of like a, it's like a condiment, you know, you know, too much of it. And I think, I think the other,

the big thing too about this is like communion with other people. I mean, that is, you know, I write about this as some length in the book, but there's a deep connection between how much time we're spending by ourselves and how much time we're spending with our attention being extracted. So if you were to have that ideal mix, what are you striving for? And what's what are you trying to get out of that attentional make just a satisfying life? Yeah, I mean, deep, deep relationships with people I love

is the most important thing. And then like, from the from the thing, you know, the thing I said off the top about sort of writing this book as a form of therapy is like the satisfaction of just of just like reading deeply and thinking hard about things, which to me is its own satisfaction. I mean, I weirdly, when I finished the book and I've been doing PR for it, there's a little bit of me that's been mourning the purity of the first part of the process where just the doing of it was so fulfilling and satisfying because I was just forced to think long and hard about things. And that itself is really fulfilling for me.

AC It's funny, you know, I'm a professor and I literally went into this career because that, right? Because I like that process. But I don't have time to do it anymore. So I started doing this podcast to force me to do that. Because literally I can't do it in my own job anymore, which is why I chose that profession. Yeah. I started my podcast for the exact same reason. There's like, well, I'll book authors and then I'll have to read their books. Exactly. I'll just guilt myself into pressure myself into reading books, but it got me to read your book. So I appreciate it and value the chance to talk about it. So thanks a lot. Thank you. Machines Like Us is produced by Paradigms in collaboration with the Globe and Mail.

This episode was produced by Ramatulla Shaikh. Our senior producer is Mitchell Stewart. Our associate producer is Sequoia Kim. Our theme song is by Chris Kelly. The executive producer of Paradigms is James Milward. A special thanks to Matt Frainer and the team at the Globe and Mail. If you like the interview you just heard, please subscribe and leave a rating or a comment. It really does help us get the show to as many people as possible.