Book Post: The Sirens Call and an Attention Deficit

A friend of mine called Chris Hayes’s The Sirens’ Call exceptionally thoughtful, so I gave it a read. It did not disappoint. The thesis of the book is about the commodification of attention, but I interpret this as a use case for a model the book lays out to understand human attention in general. Disclaimer: I no longer have access to the book, so I’m writing this from memory. I’ll explain some of the things I took away from the book, and then I want to use the framework the book introduces to talk about myself a bit.

The book conceptualizes attention as a data filter. The world is an exceptionally dense data source. Suppose your hat is blown off of your head on a windy day, and you begin chasing the hat across a field past a tree. You could fill an entire hard drive mapping the relative orientations and positions of the individual leaves on the tree based off of your view of it, but you probably won’t notice anything about the tree as you run past it other than maybe the fact that the leaves are moving a lot in the wind and the fact that the tree roots and trunk are not in your path. The thing that allows humans to receive stimuli that contain immense amounts of information about the state of the world while actively noticing almost none of it is attention. But attention is also what your life actually is in many ways. You focus on the hat because you care about the hat. You need to focus on it to run after it and not lose it. You need to pay attention to the tree trunk in your way because if you run into one and injure yourself, you will have a worse day than if you do not, but the relative orientations of the leaves on the tree might as well not exist to you in that you weren’t paying attention to them, and they did not affect your chase after the hat. Navigating the maze of fields, hats, and trees is you living your life.

I made up that example. Hayes uses the example of a cocktail party to demonstrate three ways that we pay attention to things. I’m going to use my own nomenclature here, but the examples are his.

1. Directed attention. If you are a guest who is standing in one circle of people listening to a single person talk, you can follow every word that person says. There are many other conversations happening in the party. If you were to try to listen to one of them, you could make out the words they were saying, but you have chosen to listen to this person instead, and so all of the other things you could notice fade into the background.
2. Emergency distraction. If someone drops a stack of plates at the party creating a loud crashing noise, you notice it even if you would have otherwise been focused on your specific conversation. This works on everyone. Conversation pauses because everyone notices it.
3. Social distraction. If someone says your name in a different conversation, you might be pulled away from your current conversation even if you would have otherwise been focused on your specific conversation. You name only works on you. This is remarkable. The sounds which form your name are otherwise indistinguishable from whatever other syllables surround you while being ignored. It shows that your brain must be subconsiously processing every noise you hear just in case your name happens to show up, even as those noises are filtered from your conscious attention.

Hayes uses the emergency siren as an example of an intentional hijacking of the automatic response to an emergency distraction. It is theoretically possible to put yourself in an environment which has so many sirens that you learn to ignore them, but for the most part they succeed at their purpose, which is to make you pay attention to something you would otherwise ignore if you were directing your attention at something else. Driving is an activity which requires a person to filter out almost everything they can see or hear that isn’t nearby vehicles and the shape of the road ahead of them. An ambulance siren forces your attention out of that flow state so that you can adjust your driving to make way for an emergency vehicle which needs to break the normal driving patterns you have trained yourself to focus on.

The thesis of the book is essentially that distractions are the easiest way to get your attention, so the people who want your directed attention are hijacking your ability to be distracted by emergencies to initially get your attention. The hope may once have been that they can get your directed attention once they have your attention at all, but a crop of companies have risen that care about nothing but getting your attention at all. Additionally, if you are in a modern location where one person (or company or something else which represents the interests of many people) can get your attention, there are probably also other people trying to get your attention there, and so the natural incentives of modernity create information spaces which are full of sirens and flashing lights and garish colors and sheer exhaustion from constantly being distracted. When society put an internet-connected computer in everyone’s pocket, it gave us easy access to a literal marketplace for our attention. We very much value the easy access to conversations with our loved ones, to updates about the state of the world, and to entertainment, but by subjecting ourselves to information sources under the control of external entities, we form pools of attention fought over and attacked by entities wishing to influence people. Humans can only pay attention to so many things, and there are only so many humans, so that pool, however vast, is finite, and competition is fierce. Thus our phones have fallen down the incentive gradient which is to constantly subject us to infinite-dimensional distraction tug-of-war. Importantly, we enjoy it! At least in the moment, sort of. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t subject ourselves to it. Yes we can argue that we need these devices for our jobs or to participate in a modern society which makes you scan a QR code to do basic tasks, but come on. Those aren’t the things we complain about when we say we spend too much time on our phones.

Here are a few specifics I remember from the book. The early chapters of the book argue that attention is literally your life. What you pay attention to is what you care about. Your sense of being is wrapped up in whatever the thing you call “I” is that looks out of your eyes and decides what to do based on what it sees. The things which you consciously notice are your life, so if someone is playing with what you pay attention to, they are literally controlling your life. I recall that Hayes has lovely sentimental things to say about fatherhood here which may or may not resonate with you. I suppose I should also mention social distraction here. Hayes makes a case that social attention should be considered separately from other forms of attention. He goes on at length about how humans need people to notice them. We are social animals. We spend childhood in a state of impotence where we will literally die if the adults around us do not care for us, and that need for attention never really goes away. The ancestral human generally lived in a group of people. Your relationships with a group of people you hunted with was a matter of life and death in many hunting societies, especially if you were not one of the hunters. Humans were more resilient to individual catastrophe than other animals because they lived with a group of people who would keep them alive while they recovered. Hayes also talks about how much of the ancestral hunter-gatherer’s time was spent sitting around doing not much of anything. He argues that people did not really have a sense of boredom in the ancestral environment, and he connects the manufactured boredom (and social isolation) of modernity to how we are pulled back to the constant stimulation and weak socialization of our small screens. The boredom we feel is arguably the absense of someone else directing your attention, which only feels like a negative thing because society has put a lot of effort into figuring out how to exploit our basest instinctive desires in order to keep us engaged.

My favorite chapter in the book is the fifth one (called Alienation). From memory, much of the chapter is an extended comparison of the commoditization of labor when industrialization made man-hours more fungible than ever before and of the commoditization of attention as the internet made the opportunity to present advertisement more fungible than ever before. One of the things that makes this chapter and others hit hard is that Chris Hayes talks a lot about his experience as a host for a cable news show. He has experiences in the trenches of the attention economy, and it shows. I won’t go into the chapter more than that, but if you find yourself in a bookstore with time to kill, I highly recommend flipping directly to that chapter and reading for a bit to see if you like it. The chapter is a gut punch. It is a microcosm of the whole book, but admittedly without some of the sense of wonder at the human condition which brings delight to some of the earlier chapters. It is beautifully constructed. I make no promises that it is dense with new insight, but I enjoyed it immensely and found its ideas compelling.

A later chapter talks about how attention can be exchanged for money and power. It’s one of my least favorite chapters, but it still contains useful insights. I think he overshoots by trying to say that attention is now the only thing which companies and people are trying to gather for themselves. He makes fun of himself for doing this, but doesn’t do the obvious-to-me thing of saying that just because attention is arguably the most important modern lever of power doesn’t mean that there aren’t other ones. The statement was right there waiting for him! He literally gives an example of a person who is largely unknown but obviously weilds a lot of influence over many people’s lives and complains about his own thesis not holding here.

The last things Hayes writes about are things he thinks people can do to escape the trap which strips us of the ability to direct our own attention. Hayes spends a lot of pages in one of the later chapters in the book talking about the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and how these many hours-long debates were transcribed into newspapers and people read all of them. They were about a single topic, utilized advanced sentence structure, and they were one of the earliest nationwide media events. He has first-hand experience with getting people to pay attention to political content, and this breaks every intuition he has about it. He claims that people in general just can’t pay that kind of attention anymore. He can feel himself losing the ability to pay that kind of attention himself! So the end of the book talks about things you can do to fight this tendency. I don’t remember all of the things he said, but I’ll talk about some things I already do that aligned with his suggestions in a moment. I will say that the one I found most interesting was that he suggested subscribing to a physical newspaper. He points out that a physical newspaper is a device designed to guide your attention. The images are placed to break up the text into manageable pieces, draw the eye to where the editor wants you to look most, and be a visual aid to help with comprehension of the text. I think it’s important to note that Hayes is not an attention Marxist. He doesn’t mind his attention being bought, sold, and externally directed. He wants to avoid the feeling of never truly focussing on anything. He wants to choose who directs his attention with some faith that they will direct it to something meaningful. He doesn’t want to lose the ability to think about complicated ideas because there’s no place in the world to publicize them in the dog-eat-dog world of algorithmic infinite feeds full of people competing to be the flashiest thing. (I want to point out that I think that the physicality of the newspaper is actually very important here. I tried to subscribe to a digital newspaper several years ago when I was concerned about the death of news, and the lack of structure meant that I never actually read anything.)

One of the things I’ve realized about myself from reading things like this book and listening to other people talk and having eyes is that I feel like I have more resilience to the distraction traps than most people do. Sort of. Maybe. I read books. I don’t use Instagram or TikTok at all. I make it a point to stop looking at my phone at 9pm and leave somewhere else in the house when I go to bed. I often ride the bus or take walks without listening to anything or looking at my phone at all. I don’t have much issue waiting in lines without looking at my phone. Don’t get me wrong, I still look at my phone a lot. I spend a lot of time scrolling through things (which eventually end; more on that soon). I find myself doing that thing where you exit out of an app, go to another app, exit that app, and open the first app again (but there’s nothing new there so I leave; more on that soon). That said, I don’t think I’ve lost my ability to focus on other things if I force myself to do so (although that ability was naturally weak; more on that soon). I don’t feel tied to my phone. I don’t feel unrelenting boredom or a gaping void in my life during the many periods in my day to day life when I stare into space and think about stuff. How did this happen?

The first thing I have to say about this is that I used to have no control over my internet usage when I had unfettered access. I would spend hours on the weekends as a teenager scrolling through effectively-infinite wells of webcomics, joke forums, and demotivational posters (if you know, you know). Immediately after college, I realized that I was spending hours scrolling through Facebook meme groups and wasting thought on coming up with my own posts (which weren’t very good, and I obsessed over the numbers when one caught traction by some miracle). And so I quit Facebook. I kept the account for messaging, but I didn’t have the app on my phone. I got rid of every app with an algorithmic feed on my phone. I wanted to be absolutely sure that if I spent long enough on my phone, I would run out of internet. I’ve shown over and over again that I can’t be trusted with an algorithmic feed. I allow chat apps like discord on my phone because I run out of messages eventually. I allow Bluesky on my phone but I only read all of the posts from the small number of people I follow. I refuse to touch the feeds, and if I ever noticed that I was going in there, I would delete the app on principle. Same with X. I go on Reddit, but I don’t have the app. I have a shortcut on my phone which goes directly to the mobile web site that is a single subreddit that gets a handful of posts per day. Recently they started putting content from other subreddits after the comments which I can feel pulling me, so I’m considering deleting the link.

I think I benefitted from needing to adjust to my severe ADHD. Hayes argues that the world has become an infinite distraction well, but the world has always been that way for me. My threshold for emergency distraction is miniscule, and so I’m used to fighting the temptation. This has combined with my unbelievable stubbornness to lead me to do ridiculous things to preserve my attention. I realized that attention was a thing to preserve once I got out of college, didn’t have scheduled events and deadlines to keep me moving, and realized that I was losing hours and hours of my life to things that didn’t matter at all a week later. I wanted to be studying mathematics and physics.¹ I theoretically had time to do that after work, but I realized that I would never do those things if I had easy access to a firehose of memes, so I removed the firehoses of memes. My lack of memes means that I am hopelessly out of the internet loop relative to the nerds I like to spend time with, and I occasionally annoy my friends by sending them ten-year-old memes in reaction to things in our group chats, but at least I don’t feel the crushing loss of having wasted an entire afternoon adding nothing to the world very often. Even in college I knew that I couldn’t let myself play any video games because I would get obsessed with them and miss things I would regret missing. It was an easy leap to pull everything else off. It helped that I stubbornly refused to join Instagram even as it overtook Facebook as the default social network because I never post photos online anyway, and, eventually, I became proud of the fact. I stubbornly refuse to drink coffee too because I never have and I can’t take that back if I start. Does that make any sense? Not really, but apparently I’ve found some use for that impulse. Then there’s my whole frankly irrational obsession with avoiding online tracking. The degree to which I will tolerate fiddly complications to my life on principle is absurd. My phone screen is grayscale. Does that actually help? I haven’t looked for external experimental evidence, but it seems obvious to me that I’ve removed a significant set of assumed parameters the attention engineers would otherwise possess to guide me toward additional content. I can definitely feel the pull to hit those icons with little red circles on them more if I turn off the grayscale feature, and also I physically wince at my colored screen until I turn the grayscale feature back on. It feels like a candy store in the worst way.

That brings me back to Hayes. The point isn’t to not pay attention to anyone else or only do things of supreme significance. The point is to choose who gets your attention and retain your ability to choose what to focus on. I just spent many hours writing this post (I hope to get faster at this some day). I don’t think it was horribly insightful or that many people will read it. I could have been working on my physics research instead. Arguably it was just as much of a waste of time as scrolling TikTok all day, but at least I made something. In three years, I can come back and read this and remind myself what I was thinking at this point in my life, even if nobody else finds it interesting today. For whatever it’s worth to Chris Hayes, I thought deeply about a narrow topic for several hours.

1. In fairness, I wasn’t really able to study physics until I quit my job and went to grad school, but that’s another story. The point is that I didn’t like what I was doing, so I made changes to my life until I stopped doing it. ↩