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Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource | Chris Hayes
2 posts | 1 read | 1 reading | 1 to read
From the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society We all feel it--the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they're us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, "With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade." Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens' Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance. Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, "Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human." The Sirens' Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.
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RamsFan1963
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I like it when life syncs up with what I'm reading. Yesterday a storm knocked out the power from 7pm until 10am this morning. No TV, no wi-fi, no internet, and once my phone ran down, no ebooks or audiobooks. No distractions at all, just the printed book to read. Is there something wrong with me when I say that I found no distractions very distracting? I tried to concentration on the book, but I found my mind wandering. It's not the book's ⬇️

RamsFan1963 fault, its very entertaining and Keith Laumer is one of my favorite writers, but I found reading without any background noise, of fans and the fridge, harder than normal. 4d
AnnCrystal Yikes! The unnerving part is not knowing how long it will last for 🙏💫. 3d
RamsFan1963 @AnnCrystal I suppose that's what was making it hard to concentrate, I kept expecting the power to come back on. Since I've lived in this apt, we've had occasional power outages, but never for very long, a couple of hours. According to the news, the storm knocked down several trees which took power lines with them, so they were up all night fixing things. 3d
52 likes3 comments
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HettyG
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You probably already feel a certain way about Chris Hayes. You either find him boyishly charming, cute as a button and nerdily sexy or.... wait what was I talking about? Audio read by the author A+, an excellent analysis of an issue we all know deep down is at the heart of what ails us.

AmyG I‘d be curious as to how many people here even know who he is. 🤣 2mo
Suet624 You forgot earnest. He‘s very earnest. 2mo
Christine 🤣 Great review. 2mo
30 likes3 comments