The Sirens Call

From the New York Times bestselling author and television 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- attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated.

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. The Sirens' Call is the big book we all need to wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.



'Chris Hayes's spirited new book, The Sirens' Call, takes a strong stand against the temptations of social media and information overload, on the grounds that the human attention span is ill equipped to absorb and act on such a constant stream of data. Among other things, the book ... reveals that Hayes has abandoned scrolling for the old-fashioned pleasure of reading the newspaper in print each day, which sounds like a pretty good prescription to this fan of old media.'
-Gregory Cowles, The New York Times

'We are mere cogs in the machine of "attention capitalism" ... Chris Hayes is onto something here, arguing that we are in an epoch-defining transition. Have we destroyed a generation? And how do we reclaim our minds?'
-The Canberra Times

'An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics ... Pragmatic.'
-Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times