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
p195 Ch7 Public Attention
p209 ref24 vast wasteland
p243 ref Naomi Klein Doppelganger 2023 Bvtn Lib