The War for Your Attention

Summary

Radio Atlantic: The War for Your Attention
Host: Hanna Rosen
Guest: Chris Hayes
Release Date: January 30, 2025

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of Radio Atlantic, host Hanna Rosen engages in a profound conversation with Chris Hayes, renowned host on MSNBC and author of The Sirens: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Together, they delve into the complexities of the attention economy, exploring how modern technology and capitalism exploit human attention and the profound implications this has on individuals and society.

The Attention Economy and Its Foundations

Chris Hayes introduces the concept of the attention economy, explaining how human attention has become a commodified resource that is relentlessly extracted and sold by powerful economic entities.

Notable Quote:
"Attention is the substance of life. That is what our lives add up to."
— Chris Hayes [20:10]

Voluntary vs. Compelled Attention

Hayes distinguishes between two types of attention:

• Voluntary Attention: The conscious, intentional focus we choose to direct, such as reading a book or engaging in a meaningful conversation.

• Compelled (Involuntary) Attention: The automatic, often subconscious attention triggered by external stimuli, such as a phone notification or an unexpected loud noise.

Notable Quote:
"Compelled attention is part of our deepest biological neurological wiring. It's the involuntary reaction."
— Chris Hayes [04:31]

Hayes emphasizes how modern technology leverages compelled attention to divert us from our voluntary focus, leading to a constant state of distraction.

Social Attention in the Digital Age

The discussion shifts to the evolution of social attention, highlighting how the digital age has transformed our interactions. Fame is now democratized, allowing anyone to garner attention from strangers online, a phenomenon that is alienating and psychologically taxing.

Notable Quote:
"Any viral moment online allows anyone to have enormous social attention from oceans of strangers."
— Chris Hayes [12:16]

Hayes draws parallels between ancient human needs for social attention and contemporary online behaviors, illustrating how platforms exploit our fundamental desires for recognition and connection.

Impact on Individuals and Relationships

Hayes and Rosen explore the personal ramifications of the attention economy, discussing how negative attention online can have lasting emotional effects. Hayes shares his own experiences with public scrutiny and the emotional toll it takes, underscoring the vulnerability that comes with seeking social attention from strangers.

Notable Quote:
"Insults and negativity cut and stick. It feels ancient, like being in the public square."
— Hanna Rosen [18:55]

Case Studies: Donald Trump and Elon Musk

The conversation turns to high-profile figures like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who exemplify the pursuit of attention in the modern era. Hayes explains how these individuals prioritize attention above all else, leveraging it to gain power and influence, often at the expense of genuine human connection.

Notable Quote:
"These are people that understand that attention matters more than anything, even at the cost of negative attention."
— Chris Hayes [26:54]

He further illustrates how their relentless pursuit of attention has reshaped public discourse and underscores the destructive potential of valuing attention over substance.

Optimism and Potential Solutions

Despite the bleak outlook, Hayes offers a glimmer of hope by pointing to emerging trends that resist the exploitative aspects of the attention economy. He cites the resurgence of vinyl records and platforms like Substack as examples of how commitment-based models can reclaim voluntary attention.

Notable Quote:
"Commitment mechanisms are the triumph of the volitional will over the involuntary attention compulsion."
— Chris Hayes [30:28]

Hayes envisions a future where non-commercial digital spaces, such as group chats, provide sanctuaries for genuine human connection free from the manipulative tactics of attention capitalism.

Conclusion

Hanna Rosen wraps up the episode by reflecting on the insights shared by Chris Hayes, emphasizing the importance of cultivating intentional and meaningful interactions in an era dominated by the war for attention. She encourages listeners to engage more authentically in their personal relationships and to seek out non-commercial digital spaces that foster true connection.

Final Thoughts:
"There is something pretty dark and insidious about how the major platforms are engineering this kind of attention compulsion."
— Chris Hayes [33:18]

Hayes reiterates the necessity of recognizing and combating the manipulative strategies of the attention economy to preserve our mental well-being and foster healthier societal interactions.

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Key Takeaways:

• The attention economy exploits both voluntary and compelled attention, leading to widespread distraction and alienation.
• Social media has democratized fame, creating psychological strains as individuals seek validation from strangers.
• High-profile figures like Trump and Musk embody the extreme pursuit of attention, influencing public discourse negatively.
• Emerging trends favoring commitment and non-commercial spaces offer hope for reclaiming voluntary attention.
• Recognizing the manipulative nature of attention capitalism is crucial for personal and societal well-being.

Recommended Actions for Listeners:

• Foster and appreciate genuine, non-commercial digital connections such as group chats.
• Be mindful of the ways technology diverts your voluntary attention through compelled stimuli.
• Support and engage with platforms that prioritize meaningful interactions over attention extraction.

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This summary captures the essence of "The War for Your Attention," providing a comprehensive overview of the critical discussions between Hanna Rosen and Chris Hayes on the pervasive influence of the attention economy.

Transcript

[Chris Hayes]

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[Hanna Rosen]

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[Chris Hayes]

Spend on the phone?

[Hanna Rosen]

Well, I think like when they had landlines and stuff, you wouldn't spend too much more time on the phone and you would spend it on other types of devices. But now since it's all in the phone, so you wouldn't really be seeing like your parents like on a computer. You'd only see them doing that for like work or something. That's our executive producer, Claudina Baid and her daughter. We're hearing from them because when we talk about screen time or how phones are manipulating us, it's often adults talking about kids. But of course, it goes the other way too.

[Chris Hayes]

Every kid is engaged in a kind of battle for their parents attention.

[Hanna Rosen]

This is Chris Hayes, my guest this week.

[Chris Hayes]

I mean, I think every kid notices how distracted parents are by the phone.

[Hanna Rosen]

Who's the meanest to you about it?

[Chris Hayes]

My youngest.

[Hanna Rosen]

Really?

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah.

[Hanna Rosen]

Not the teenager, as we say?

[Chris Hayes]

No, actually I think the youngest, because youngest children have a real antenna for attention, right? They come into a family in which they recognize immediately that there is at some level a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all for parental attention.

[Hanna Rosen]

I'm Hanna Rosen, and this week on Radio Atlantic, the war for your attention. You probably know Chris Hayes best as a host on msnbc. He's also the author of a new book, the Sirens How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. And he doesn't just mean parental attention. He's talking about attention in politics, commerce, social media. Basically how capitalism found a uniquely human weakness to exploit. But since the topic is so often seen through the lens of parents and children, we started out sharing how we can feel like hypocrites when we police our kids devices.

[Chris Hayes]

The one that I caught myself, I've caught myself doing is the. Your child asking for screen time when they're, you know, not allowed to, or it's not normally the time, and giving them like a sharp no. And then like going back to looking at your phone.

[Hanna Rosen]

Oh, oh, oh, Chris. 1,000%. Even the fact that we get to use the term screen time, and guess who doesn't exactly get to use the term screen time. They can't be like, dad, you, you only have an hour of screen time.

[Chris Hayes]

That's right. And you know, one of the things I, you know, write about in the book is that when we think about the state of boredom or being bored, I think we associate it with being a child. I mean, I remember, you know, days in the summer, particularly where I was a little underscheduled. I just sort of sitting around these periods where you feel like I have nothing to do. And the reason I've come to believe that we associate with childhood is as soon as we are old enough to control our lives, we do everything possible to make sure we never feel it. That's why it's associated with childhood, because. Because children don't have full agency. Once we develop full agency, we're like, I'm not going to be in that state. I'm going to do whatever it takes not to be in that state.

[Hanna Rosen]

Chris writes about how there are two kinds of attention, voluntary attention and compelled attention.

[Chris Hayes]

So compelled attention is part of our deepest biological neurological wiring. It's the involuntary reaction. If you are at a cocktail party and a waiter drops a tray of glasses, you can't help it. You cannot control whether you're going to pay attention to that. It's often the case with, you know, an explosion or the siren that is on top of an ambulance or a cop car as it goes down the street. That involuntary attention is the part of our neurological wiring in which our attention is compelled independent of our volition and will as a kind of almost biological fact due to the fact that we needed to be alert to danger, basically. And then there's voluntary attention, which is when we, using the conscious will, flash the beam of thought where we want it to go.

[Hanna Rosen]

So I sit down and read your book. That's Voluntary attention.

[Chris Hayes]

Correct.

[Hanna Rosen]

Is one better than the other?

[Chris Hayes]

Well, I mean, I think that, look, involuntary attention, I think is probably necessary for the survival of the species. So in that sense it's fundamental. And I wouldn't say it's worse. The problem is, so let's say you're reading the book, you've made this volitional decision, and as you're reading the book, the little haptic buzz of a notification, your phone goes off. Now, you notice that because it's designed to use the deep circuitry of compelled attention to force your attention onto the physical sensation of the phone. That is a perfect example of the one way ratchet of what I call attention capitalism is that the more important attention gets, and the more that people, corporations and platforms have sort of optimized for it competitively, the more they will try to use the tactics of compelled attention to get our attention rather than to get the part of us that's volitional attention. Now, of course, you still have human will, and in that moment you're gonna decide, am I gonna take my phone out to see what the notification was or not? But that little moment, that little interruption, that's pretty new at scale. I think it's totally new at scale. And it's also just absolutely endemic to modern life. It's our entire lives. Now is that wail of the siren going down the street, the clatter of the drop tray. There's very powerful forces attempting to compel our attention away from where we might want to put it in any moment. Because that's a kind of hack for them for getting our attention. Right.

[Hanna Rosen]

You're a little less than aware of it. Like you're not thinking, I want to look towards the waiter dropping the tray or I want to look towards the ambulance. You're just kind of reactive.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah, you're reactive and you're in the. You're at your sort of biophysical base. Right. You're the comparison that I use in the book, and I think this might be helpful for people to think this through is how hunger works. So with food we have these deep biological inheritances where there's just universal deep wiring towards sweets, for instance, or fats, because they are extremely calorie dense. You can exploit that at scale, as McDonald's has and other food operations, and find that you could basically sell cheeseburgers and salty fries and Coca Cola all over the world because you're working on that deep biological substrate in people. But it's also the case when you ask, well, what do humans like to eat? It's an impossible thing to answer because the answer is basically everything, right? It's amazing, all the different things and what we see in sort of modern food culture and the food industry is a sort of fascinating kind of battle between these twin forces, right? The kind of industrialized production and fast food that is attempting to sort of find the lowest common denominator, speak to that deepest biological substrate so that they can, you know, sell corn syrup to everyone. And then all of the amazing things that people do with food and what food means as culture, as history, as self expression, as expression of love and bonds. And I think basically there's a very similar dynamic that we now have with attention where our compelled attention and our deep wiring is being extracted and exploited by very sophisticated, large and powerful economic entities. And yet we still do have this thing called voluntary attention. And you know what's sort of amazing too about the Internet age is like, and I say this in the book, like, I've watched hours of people cleaning carpets, which I find totally compelling and almost sort of sublime and soothing. And I wouldn't have guessed that that was a thing I wanted to pay attention to. Like, you know, the Internet has opened this cornucopia of different things you can pay attention to. So we're constantly in this battle between these two forms of attention that are in our heads and the different entities that are trying to compel our attention against our will, and then our own kind of volitional attempt to control it.

[Hanna Rosen]

Chris, were you high when you were watching videos of cleaning carpets or.

[Chris Hayes]

Mostly not. Occasionally, yes, but mostly I have been sober while watching the cleaning carpets, and I've still found them incredibly common.

[Hanna Rosen]

What. That's. That is. So that's your ASMR is carpets. That is.

[Chris Hayes]

That's the Cape car. I don't know if you've seen these, but they like, they take these super, super dirty carpets. It's like a genre of video. There's a million different ones now, and which indicates that it's not just me. Lots of people feel this way.

[Hanna Rosen]

It's okay. It's okay. There's no judgment in this podcast at all. You can find your calm wherever you need it. I'm just curious U.

[Chris Hayes]

So, yeah, that's. So that's basically, that's how I think about compelled, involuntary attention. And I do think that because I think we're more familiar with it in the context of our. Our appetites and hungers. I think it's a really useful and grounding metaphor because I think it functions in a very Similar way.

[Hanna Rosen]

Essentially, what you're saying is the way this works is we've got some biological impulses, let's say, for example, to want social attention, just to be noticed by others. That's. That's in us and that's fine.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah. I mean, I think the reason that it's so foundational social attention, and I think it's slightly counterintuitive because I think people have very different attitudes and personal dispositions towards social attention. Lots of people don't like it, but the foundational truth about being a human is we come into the world utterly helpless and dependent completely on care. And the thing prior to that care is attention. And the best way to see this is the child's whale. The most powerful tool that the newborn has is the cry. And the reason they have the cry is it's their siren. It compels our attention. And the reason that it compels our attention and the reason they have to have the ability to compel our attention is because without attention, they will perish. And that is our human inheritance, that need from the moment we come gasping into the world for others attention that is foundational to every single one of us.

[Hanna Rosen]

So we have this need for social attention. It's a basic need. Whether we're an introvert or an extrovert. That's not what we're talking about. We just have this basic need for social attention. What is different about seeking social attention online?

[Chris Hayes]

Okay, this is really, I think, a key thing to think about. So before civilization, you got social attention from people that you knew that you had relationships with. Right. There weren't really strangers. And you might be able to put your social attention on someone you don't know. Like a kind of godlike figure. Right. Or a mythic hero that tales were told of. Right. So you can put your attention on a person you don't know, but the social attention you received was all from people that you had a relationship, a bilateral relationship with. What happens with the dawn of what we might call fame. And there's an amazing book about this.

[Hanna Rosen]

That I, Leo Bratty, love it.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah, Leo Bratty's great book. He says Alexander basically is the first famous person, and he explains why. But fame is the experience of receiving social attention from people you do not know. And at scale now, this is a very strange experience. And the reason I know this is because I happen to live it. And so in the sort of progression of civilization, you start to have famous people, and more and more people can be famous. With the dawn of industrial media, Movie stars, pop stars, all this stuff. But it's still a very, very, very tiny percentage of people that can be known by strangers, that can have social attention being paid to them by strangers. That just generally doesn't happen for most people. And most people are going to have received social attention from people they have relationships and they might put their social attention on all sorts of public figures, the president or celebrities or other people, but they're not getting it from people they don't know. That just is a very tiny sliver of humans that can have that experience. And now it is utterly democratized for everyone for the first time in human history. I mean, it's genuinely new, genuinely a break has not happened before. Anyone can have enormous social attention from oceans of strangers on them. You can have a viral moment online, you can cultivate a following. This experience of social attention from strangers, precisely because it is so at odds, I think, with our inheritance, is weird and alienating and, and there's a bunch of ways it is. One of the ways it's alienating is that we are conditioned to care what the people we love think about us. We're conditioned to care if we've hurt someone that we're in or we have a relationship with. But it's very different if you've insulted or hurt someone. You just a total stranger who's saying mean things to you or you've disappointed them or they're angry at you that comes into you psychologically indistinguishably from it coming from kin or lover or friend.

[Hanna Rosen]

So we just basically our. I don't know if I want to call them our intimacy compass. Something gets scrambled. We just don't have the category to react or manage that category of social attention. We just don't know what to do with it.

[Chris Hayes]

Truly. There's a kind of clash here between the data set we're trained on, if you will.

[Hanna Rosen]

Right.

[Chris Hayes]

And. And what we're encountering. And the reason, again, this is a place that I really know. Right. I didn't used to have people come up to me on the street. And then I became famous enough that people did. And I've experienced all the ways that that's strange and alienating and I've given a lot of thought partly as a kind of full time psychological undertaking so that I don't go crazy because I do think it's kind of distorting and madness inducing in its own way. And what we've done is basically democratize the madness inducing aspects of celebrity for the entire society, for every teenager with the phone now can be driven nuts in precisely the way that we have watched generations of celebrities and stars go crazy.

[Hanna Rosen]

You mentioned Bo Burnham in your book and the movie he made eighth grade. When he talked about why he made that movie, he said that same thing that, you know, he had a similar experience to. He went viral at a pretty young age and then he realized that every eighth grader was having the kind of experience that he had had which he found so alienating, but that had now become a common experience. Can you read a paragraph for me from your Social Attention chapter, which I think is relevant to this conversation?

[Chris Hayes]

Sure, I'd love to.

[Hanna Rosen]

Just the graph that starts with the.

[Chris Hayes]

Social media combination the social media combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting our friends to laugh at our jokes 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.

[Hanna Rosen]

That really hit me. It's a dark vision. It's like they tap into our thirst perfectly but then just keep the glass of water just out of reach, you know?

[Chris Hayes]

Well. And I think that's because there's something holy or sublime in actual human connection that can't be replicated like that. You know, the thing that we're chasing is something ineffable and non replicable. And it's the reason we chase it because it's the. It's what makes life worth living at a certain level is to be recognized and seen in relationships of mutual support and affection and care with other people. You know, that's it. That's the stuff of it. And we are given a tantalizing facsimile that some deep part of us cannot help but chase. But it can't also be the real thing.

[Hanna Rosen]

When we come back, we who exactly is benefiting from this attention economy, why it feels so bad for the rest of us and what we can do about it. That's after the break.

[Chris Hayes]

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[Hanna Rosen]

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[Chris Hayes]

Who's paying for the mattress topper? You mean the beanbag chair? Aren't we getting a mini fridge?

[Hanna Rosen]

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[Chris Hayes]

What you quickly find is that positive compliments and recognition and they just sort of wash off you. But the insults and the negativity cuts and sticks. I mean, do you not feel that way as someone who has some public profile?

[Hanna Rosen]

Yes. It's happened to me, and I was so surprised at how hurt I was. And when I look back, I think I literally don't really know those people. There's just something so. Oh, it's ancient. The feeling like you're being pilloried or something. Like you're in the public square, and it feels terrible. And I don't understand why. Like, I could just shut my computer, be gone, but it. It does not feel that way internally.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah. And I think, you know, I can think of days I spent in that haze. You know, when you come out of it, you're like, why did I let myself feel that way? Like, why did I spend a whole day? Like, why was I. I could even think of moments of being distracted from my, you know, kids because I was sitting there and feeling wounded and hurt and ruminating on a mean thing. Someone who, I don't know, said online, am I. I'm distracted by tensions on that instead of, like, my wonderful child sitting on my lap, you know?

[Hanna Rosen]

Well, I think the lesson to learn from that is what you're talking about in this book is how vulnerable we are, even when it doesn't make intellectual sense. There is some way that we're, you know, vulnerable in this moment. We can't completely control our reactions and choose voluntarily not to pay attention to this thing. We don't have that kind of agency. Not yet, anyway.

[Chris Hayes]

That's exactly right. You know, attention is the substance of life. That is what our lives add up to. It's in every moment. We are choosing to pay attention to something or we're having it compelled, but we're paying attention to something. And that's what adds up to a day and a week and a month and a year in a life. And it's also finite. You know, this is one of the key points I make, is that part of the value and the reason it's so valuable and the reason there is such competition for the extraction of attention is that unlike information, it's capped. It's a finite resource. It's. People are figuring out how to take one or two extra slices of the pie, not grow it. And that's the other thing that leads to the feeling of alienation and the feeling that something has been taken away from us because of its finitude.

[Hanna Rosen]

Well, let's talk about attention as a resource because we've talked a lot about how it works in us, the individuals, and permeates our lives. But I want to talk about a broader social context. You make this very compelling analogy between our attention problem and Marxist ideas. I did have this image of you at a bookstore one day, like being bored and coming across a copy of Das Kapital and like a lightning bolt goes off. Yes, it's like Marx, but for the information age. It's a really compelling analogy. Can you explain it?

[Chris Hayes]

Yes, I mean, I, you know, I started reading Marx in high school, which is a weird thing to say, but it was true. Here's the basic argument Marx makes about labor. So he's living at this time where there's this new thing called wage capitalism. Wage labor, people, you know, sell their labor per hour basis.

[Hanna Rosen]

And how is that different from people's relationship to labor before? Just so we get the analogy.

[Chris Hayes]

Totally. So, so interesting. Yeah. So let's think about a cobbler, right? You're in the pre industrial age. You got your little shop, you make a shoe. And there's a few things about this process that are distinct. One is there's a telos. There's an arc to it. You start with the raw materials, then you put them together, then you put the sole on, then you put the finish on. In the end, you have a shoe and you own that shoe, and then you sell it in your store in exchange for money. Now compare that experience to the wage laborer in a shoe factory who is at one position stamping soles 10 or 12 hours a day, six days a week. In both cases, you could say that the sort of pre industrial cobbler and the shoe factory worker are both laboring. But now there's this distinct thing called labor as a commodity that has a wage price and a set of institutions to take the labor in Exchange for that wage and a set of technological and economic developments that produce a situation in which you go from being the cobbler who makes the whole shoe to being In a factory 12 hours a day, stamping a soul. And Marx talks about this as the root of alienation. You're just alienated from yourself, from your humanity. You're not doing a recognizably human thing. You're doing something that feels robotic and mechanical, but also that the value that you're creating is literally outside of you. I mean, to go back to the cobbler, when he makes the shoe, he actually owns the shoe. If he wanted to make the shoe and give it to his kids, he could do that. And sometimes cobblers would. Right. But the factory worker doesn't have that. The factory worker is alienated from the value of the shoe. He's stamping the soul. And when it's. It goes down the line and it gets sold off somewhere else, it's literally outside of him. It's alien to him. So this is the basic Marx labor theory of value, right? That you had this transformation in society, economic conditions, institutions that took a thing that was fundamentally human effort, toil, whatever you want to call it, and transformed it into this new thing that was a commodity that could be priced and bought and traded called labor, called labor. And I think basically, there's something happening right now with attention that's similar. People have always paid attention to things, and that attention has always had some value. And, you know, there's people who have utilized that value for all kinds of purposes. P.T. barnum, Mark Anthony, friends, Roman countrymen, Lemon, your ears. You know, there's always been a value there. But we've entered an age that I think is similar to the industrial age for attention, where a set of institutions, technologies, and arrangements have produced a world in which our attention is being extracted from us and commodified and sold at a price, often in millisecond auctions to advertisers. And that extraction leads to a profound sense of alienation, similar in some ways to that sense of alienation and that alienation of the laborer. And yet there's one more way in which it's even more insidious, I would argue, which is that compelled, involuntary aspect. So labor can be coerced forcibly. I mean, you can, you know, use a whip or a gun to make someone do something, right? If you put a gun to someone's head and, say, dig a ditch, you're coercing. You're forcing that laborer. But they know they're doing it. If you fire a gun, your head will snap around before you know you're even doing it. And so, because of this involuntary, compelled aspect of our biological wiring for attention, this new competitive attention, capitalism is working to extract it at such a deep level that it's compelling it at some way before we're even able to make a volitional choice about it. And that feeling is this profound, deep feeling of alienation. I think this alienation is so ubiquitous. I think we all feel versions of it. And I found the concept of alienation, which I always found a little foggy in the past, very clarifying. Something that should be within us is outside of us, and that within us is my control over my own thoughts. That's the thing that should be within me. That's the nature of consciousness itself, what it means to be a free will. And yet that is being extracted and commodified and taken outside me.

[Hanna Rosen]

So we're not exactly compelled. Nobody's holding a gun to our head. So I don't know that you could say it's worse. It's just more confusing because we are participating.

[Chris Hayes]

Yes, that's a good point. Yes. There's not the same sense of violation, Right. Because in some ways, it feels like we're consenting. I think you're right. That muddies it and also gives us a weird feeling of shame and guilt.

[Hanna Rosen]

One consequence we're seeing is the kind of people who thrive in this age. Yes, obviously, Donald Trump. You mention Elon Musk a lot in the book, which I think is a specific point. Like the Trump point is kind of obvious, like why someone like that thrives in an age of attention. I think we intuitively understand that Musk is a little more complicated.

[Chris Hayes]

Well, look, here's what unites them, right? It's. It's fundamentally, these are people that understand that attention matters more than anything, even at the cost of negative attention. And this is really the key. The key thing to understand. I think that has really warped our public discourse. The thing that separates social attention from other more elevated forms of human interaction is that it's necessary but not sufficient. Someone flirting with you across the bar is social attention. Pleasant, kind, someone screaming at your face because you're too close to them on the subway is also attention. And that's the weird thing about attention. It could be of either valence and everything in between. In a world that increasingly values attention over all else, what you get is you unlock the universe of negative attention and its power. Because if all that matters is Attention, then negative attention is just as good as positive attention. Now, most of us are conditioned to not like, negative attention, but there's a certain set of people who either through a sort of intellectual understanding, sometimes this happens. You. You. You'll read interviews with creators who are like, oh, yeah, once I started trolling, I got more views, right? So, like, part of it is the algorithms select for negative attention, but part of it, I think, is just a deep brokenness in their personality. And I think this is true of both Donald Trump and Elon Musk to seek out negative attention because it's tension. And this creates a kind of troll politics writ large. And I think we're sort of watching, in some ways, the Musk era supplant the Trump era, if that makes sense.

[Hanna Rosen]

Like, what do you mean? What do you define as the Musk era?

[Chris Hayes]

So most politicians, they want positive attention, and if they can't get positive attention, they want no attention. And then underneath that, negative attention, right? So it's like you want people to like you and know your name, or you want to stay out of the news. And what Trump realized is that, no, it doesn't matter whether it's positive or negative, as long as you're getting attention. Musk has now taken this insight to actually having captured a platform that he purchased, where he is now operationalizing this at scale. So it's like the higher synthesis of the inside of Trump. He's understood that attention is the most valuable resource. And this is true in monetary terms. I mean, look at what's happened. And this I actually get wrong in the book, because I can't. I was writing it too early. Look what happened. He buys Twitter, okay? He buys it for $44 billion. So he gets it. So he could be the main character on this. He so obsessively pursues this attention that it destroys the actual value of the entity. It's a lighting $25 billion on fire, right? All in this sort of broken pursuit of attention. But then using this attention and using the platform, he helps elect a president who puts him essentially at the seat of power. That produces an enormous boon in his personal wealth, because people are like, oh, now he is close to power. And it has netted him hundreds of billions of dollars in his personal value. And it's the most incredible allegory for the entire attention age. Here are these two guys, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who seem to recognize more than anyone that attention is the most valuable resource and that you should do whatever you can to pursue it, even if that means acting like a maniac and it's kind of worked for.

[Hanna Rosen]

Both of them, that seems so huge and overpowering. I mean, there's a way, there's a way of listening to you and reading this book and fully seeing it. Like we can see the train wreck in our own lives and sort of out there in the world. But you might read the book and think, okay, this is my own ordeal, like something I have to combat. I have to put my phone away, I have to chain myself to the trees or whatever.

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah, I mean, I think so. The first thing I would say is that the cause for optimism, which I, I have some, is that I feel this is pretty untenable and unsustainable because I think the, the sense of exhaustion and alienation so ubiquitous and profound that I don't think it can keep going that way. And actually I think that there's unbelievable latent energy for something different than what this is. There are ways that attention can still be bought and sold that isn't this particular to the second algorithmic infinite scroll that we're all now trapped in. Right. So I think you are going to see flourishing of alternate means. And you see this, I mean again, substack, right? Like the long form newsletter, we're seeing it happen. Like substack is growing because people do want to like read long things from people that they think are interesting and not just algorithmic serving of short form video. That's a different model. It's a for profit model, but it's a different model and I think a better one and one that's less extractive and alienating for our attention. You know, vinyl records were completely supplanted by cassette tapes and then CDs. And then starting about 10 years ago, they started growing and they've been growing every year and they've been growing at huge paces and there's now a thriving vinyl industry. And the reason is that I think when you are streaming music, you have the twitchy short form attention extraction of going to the next song, or maybe I want something else. When you put on a record, you commit, right? The, the commitment mechanism is the triumph of the volitional will over the involuntary attention compulsion, right? It's like Odysseus lashing himself to the mast, right? We make a commitment. I'm going to read this email from this substacker I subscribe to. I'm going to listen to this album which I've put on vinyl. These commitment methods and again, they could be in for profit contacts. I think we are going to see flourishing and more energy behind that. And the other example I use, because I talked about hunger before, is to think about what's happened with how opposition to the sort of corporate industrial food system the US has worked. So you've had the entire thriving ecosystem and set of businesses built up in opposition to precisely the forms of extractive and exploitative food capitalism that I think is parallel to attention capitalism. And I think we are going to see that there are people that market dumb phones now, and I think there's gonna be a lot more of them. I can imagine a world in which in the same way that like, a certain kind of parent doesn't feed their kids, you know, fast food, you start to see that more and more the people kind of just opt out of this entire system to the extent they can.

[Hanna Rosen]

Do you think we're being exploited and we should be mad about it?

[Chris Hayes]

Yeah, I do, I do. I think that there's something pretty dark and insidious about how the major platforms particularly are engineering this kind of attention compulsion. And I think we are going to enter an era in which we start regulating attention. Seriously, you're seeing this call. You know, in Australia they've already ban social media for children under 16. You're gonna see more and more calls for that. But also I can imagine other ways that we try to regulate it, whether it's hard caps, regulated hard caps on screen time. I mean, that sounds so crazy and kind of unamerican, but I don't know, maybe that's a good idea.

[Hanna Rosen]

Well, I. I take hope in the schools, I mean, schools not just in the U.S. but all over the world, are starting to get pretty serious about no phones at all during class time, which, which is radical. You're a teenager. That's a radical change in your life. So. So that's hopeful. I will say one thing your book has really done for me very concretely is make me appreciate my group chats. I like. After I read your book, I went back and I, like, thanked, you know, I thought, oh, you know, I've got a couple of group chats that are so fun. And I just went and thanked everybody on them.

[Chris Hayes]

That makes me so happy to hear that, because this is a book written by a person who genuinely loves the Internet and has loved the Internet most of his adult life. I mean, I'm an early Internet adopter. And what the group chat is doing is it's using technology to connect actual people that know each other. And there's lots of stuff that could happen in Group chat. That could be messy or bad because humans can be, you know, mean or, you know, gossipy to each other. But fundamentally there's not an interposition of some entity trying to monetize it. It's a non commercial space. It's a technology that's a non commercial space. It feels like the early non commercial Internet. You just go on with your friends and you make jokes and you share stuff and that's it. No one comes in with a 5 second ad. No one tries to extract your your attention against your will. It's, it's a set of bilateral relationships voluntarily entered to in a space that is non commercial. And that's the other thing we really need. Like we have physical public spaces that are non commercial and they are so vital, whether that's schools or libraries or parks. Increasingly the Internet is just totally captured by commercial spaces. And it used to be entirely non commercial and now it's entirely commercial. And those commercial spaces will ultimately further the kind of extractive attention capitalism I'm critiquing. But there are ways to create and the group chat right now is the chief among them. Non commercial spaces of digital connection.

[Hanna Rosen]

Okay, everyone listening, go do more group chats. Just go engage in your group chats. And Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for writing this book and explaining this all to us.

[Chris Hayes]

Thank you for reading it. It really means a lot to me. And thank you for having me.

[Hanna Rosen]

This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudina Baid. Rob Smirciak engineered and Anna Alvarado Factor. Claudina Baid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. My thanks again to Chris Hayes for joining me. His new book's called the Sirens How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. I'm Hanna Rosen. Thank you for listening.