The Sirens' Call
How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
Chris Hayes 2025 Beaverton 306.342 HAY
p001 Ch1 The Sirens' Call
p001 Odysseus, Circe, and the Sirens
p003 William James The Principles of Psychology 1890 My experience is what I agree to attend to.
- p005 The phones are warbling us to death.
p006 Jonathan Haidt 2024 The Anxious Generation smart-phones -> depression, anxiety, and self-harm
p007 Stanley Cohen 1972 Folk Devils and Moral Panics
p010 Johann Hari 2022 Stolen Focus
p016 Naomi Klein 1999 No Logo
p018 Walter Lippman 1925 The Phantom Public
p027 Ch2 The Slot Machine and Uncle Sam
p030 voluntary attention Ball passing and gorilla The Invisible Gorilla book WCCLS, Beaverton
p031 involuntary attention siren, crash of dishes
- p036 social attention - noticing a mention of your name while focusing on something else
- p042 Hijacked airliner passenger so bored that he almost fell asleep
- p042 War is boring . Tim O'Brien . The Things They Carried . YA novel
- p046 koumiss fermented mare's milk, about 2% alcohol
- p049 Cable news is a televised siren
- p050 slot machines, electronic games displacing card tables
p051 Addiction by Design Natasha Dow Schüll
- slot addict attentional trance, "I'm not playing to win"
p053 Hayes's iPhone Screen Time, 5 hours 16 minutes per day
note48 Brian Fung 2013 WaP Humankind has now spent more time playing Call of Duty than it has existed on Earth
- p056 apps designed to engage our social personality
p059 Ch3 The Root of Evil
p071 Infinite Jest Novel 1996 David Foster Wallace
- p073 boredom's alter ego: distraction
- p076 Boredom: ratchet of stimulation and diversion - liberation by simply rejecting boredom
p078 zoning out opposite of attention ZerstreuheitThe Principles of Psychology p404 James
p078 How to Do Nothing Jenny Odell
https://screentimelabs.com/ manage child screen time
p081 Ch4 Social Attention
- p082 Child maltreatment: 74% neglected, 28% physically abused
- p086 bedroom per family member, 17th century invention
- p105 boundary between public and private "torn down in about a decade" by a few tech firms
p108 Death of a Salesman 1949 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Miller | Arthur Miller ]]
p108 Reply guy
p115 Ch5 Alienation
p122 The Attention Merchants 2016 Tim Wu
- p133 always present smartphones increase supply of attention
p142 2020 Fox lost attention to Newsmax and One America News
p144 Bo Burnham colonization of attention
p151 Author ate half a THC gummy and looked at sandwiches on Tiktok, algorithm figured out he was stoned
p155 Ch6 Dawn of the Attention Age
p165 Herbert Simon Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World
- p166 To be an attention conserver ... system must be an information condenser.
p167 Steve Jobs "How many things have you said no to?"
p169 Total Factor Productivity increased 2%/y 1910-1970; 1994-2004 1%/y, 2004-2014 0.4%/y
- p174 "in its chase for profits, Google has ended up spamming its own users"
alternatives Bing/DuckDuckGo Yahoo Brave Perplexity SearX
p181 Finn Brunton: Spammers waste our time for their benefit
p186 Michael Goldhaber 2024 talk: The Attention Economy and the Net
p190 Twin contentions of book:
- attention is a resource, a substance extracted for its market value
- resource value growing, now the most important resource
- p193 Twitter/X daily 11pm meeting about boosting Musk tweet counts
p193 Zoë SchifferExtremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter
- p194 Zelensky uses comedian/performer skills to keep the world's attention
- p194 Musk is a black hole of negative charisma, spent tens of billions of dollars for attention
p195 Ch7 Public Attention
p197 Lincoln-Douglas Debates mass communication defined by the written word as opposed to the image eBook 2008
- p198 A debate is an attentional regime
p199 general Henry Martyn Robert Robert's Rules of Order 1876
- p205 both formal and substantive attentional regimes have collapsed, easier to shout, harder to be heard
- p206 Postman: Americans no longer talk to each other, they enterain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images.
- p207 Postman: Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance
p209 ref24 vast wasteland
p210 Hayes spent >8 years covering Trump full time, must but doesn't want to
- p212 repellant but transfixing, other candidates asked about Trump, not their own plans and policies
p217 Trump constantly interrupted Biden in 2020 debate; "Will you shut up, man?"
p218 Platforms: Google Facebook TikTok Hobbsian "every man against every man"
- p219 Platforms regulate attention to maximize monetization
- p220 5yo's better during reading time than phone-scrolling academics and executives at meetings
p221 news media dual mandate: keep audience attention and tell them important things for self-governance
p225 Hurricane Hilary in Death Valley National Park first in 80 years
p226 U.S. Open women's semifinal match, protester glued feet to floor
p228 A. Lincoln: "public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed"
p232 Kanye. Elon. Trump. rapper praises Hitler
p235 High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out Amanda Ripley conflict entrepreneurs
- p236 Current standard practice for mass shootings, describe the act and aftermath, downplay the perpetrator.
p238 Whataboutism tu quoque
p238 Ideological battles over what to focus on.
p240 WaPo Fatal Force black men 1.8% of shootings, disproportionate coverage
- p240 There is no standard or objective criteria for choice of focus ... it's a judgement call.
p241 Obama speech about Sandy Hook shooting purposely mistranslated into Arabic subtitles about anti-ISIS airstrikes
p243 ref Naomi Klein Doppelganger 2023 Bvtn Lib
- p245 Attention market disaggregation removes reputational cost of outlet unreliability
- p248 Information age promise: access to all human knowledge; reality, collective civic madness
- p249 shared public discourse, the burbling, insistent ruckus of a deeply unquiet mind.
p251 Ch8 Reclaiming Our Minds
- p253 Everyone, including me, complains they can't read long books anymore
p255 video stores effort, intentional choice, commitment
p257 Vinyl LPsFrom Tape to Tidal: 4 Decades of U.S. Music Sales 2022 vinyl tiny but growing very slowly since 2015
p263 Signal messaging service end-to-end encrypted
p265 The Social Dilemma 2020 documentary