Thinking, and continuing to think for any length of time, is a peculiarly elusive activity. A vast self-help literature on how to focus and a suite of antidistraction devices, from Pomodoro timers to Freedom software that blocks the Internet, suggest that people would like to think deeply. Yet we largely don’t or won’t: in 2023, 79 percent of respondents to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey reported that they spent no time just “relaxing or thinking” on the average day—while nearly all, or 93 percent, engaged in some form of diversion, such as watching TV.
In 2014 researchers from the University of Virginia published a set of studies of people’s willingness to sit and think. They asked participants to spend six to fifteen minutes alone in a room without cell phones, laptops, or books. All they had to do was think. Sixty percent reported difficulty, and nearly half found the experience unenjoyable. In a follow-up study, the researchers added a twist: participants were given the chance to experience a negative sensation—a mild electric shock—during the quiet time. Sixty-seven percent of the men and 25 percent of the women in the study decided to take it. “Simply being alone with their own thoughts” was a deeply unappealing prospect for many people, the researchers found; they would “rather do an unpleasant activity than no activity at all.”
For Chris Hayes, who cites the Virginia study in his new book The Sirens’ Call, this apparent need for distraction, even unpleasant distraction, explains a lot about our relationship with our phones. The smartphone offers distraction so readily and abundantly that it’s possible to spend hours every day skipping from tab to tab, or from video to video, without enjoying a moment of it—often, in fact, feeling somewhat drained and diminished. For social media addicts, “the idea of facing the normal flow of time is unbearably depressing,” the journalist Richard Seymour wrote in The Twittering Machine (2019). Or as the tech critic Max Read has put it, “The actual point of ‘screen time’ is the time part—the hours it allows you to numbly burn up.” Hayes is taken aback when his phone notifies him that he devotes an average of five hours and sixteen minutes to “screen time” every day. The number doesn’t seem plausible, until he realizes “it all passed in little ten-second increments.” Days slip by in meaningless and forgettable microfragments. To be online in this way is to submit to what Hayes calls “the alienating experience of being divided and distracted in spite of ourselves, to be here but not present.”
He is far from the first to lament the “attention crisis.” The very fact that there is a long tradition of such critiques is often used to refute them. In The Shallows (2010) Nicholas Carr worried about “what the Internet is doing to our brains,” and he goes further in his new book Superbloom, contemplating the destabilizing effects brought about by new forms of communication. Tim Wu chronicled the tricks that corporations have used for over a century to extract attention and profit from it in The Attention Merchants (2016). Jonathan Haidt has argued more recently that too much screen time has contributed to a mental health crisis among kids. And before the advent of digital media, Neil Postman issued similar warnings against the coarsening effects of television and movies in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985). People have been complaining of shortening attention spans for millennia: What’s new? As Daniel Immerwahr asked in a recent skeptical review of The Sirens’ Call, what about that “long section in Plato’s Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing will wreck people’s memories?” Doesn’t every era simply fret about the latest technology, whether it’s the printing press or the TikTok feed?
That may be true. Still, the fracturing of attention in our moment has some distinctive features, and Hayes, a cable news anchor with a professional interest in getting attention, is exceptionally attuned to several of them. Whereas the game used to be grabbing and holding someone’s attention for some duration, he argues, it’s now enough just to keep grabbing attention for shorter and shorter periods, sucking audiences into a chaotic loop of stimulation. (Think of watching sixty Instagram Reels back-to-back instead of a half-hour sitcom.)
These assaults are more disorienting than earlier claims on our attention, and more pervasive: they can grab us in the moments between tasks, or while we’re already distracted by another screen. Perhaps most importantly, they tend to amplify “intensely polarizing figures who seem addicted to controversy”—figures like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump who “seem to compulsively feed off negative attention.” And so while Hayes records the familiar self-loathing that comes from staring at a screen too much, the most troubling and most valuable parts of his book examine the warping effect of scattered, easily redirected attention on public discourse and politics.
Cable news networks might once have seemed to embody the dark arts of attention seeking, with their barrage of flashy graphics and fast-talking hosts. But Hayes’s experience hosting a show on MSNBC underlines how restrained television appears compared with social media and apps. Even a news show that frantically skips through multiple stories in an hour is a single continuous broadcast, offering the same product to millions of people. By contrast, the algorithms of social networks can show each user content tailored specifically to them, based on all the things they’ve clicked on before. (This is how Hayes loses an entire hour, one stoned evening, watching videos of people assembling sandwiches and slicing them in half.)
Social media can also capitalize on direct appeals to the audience by name. One of the more intriguing facts that Hayes cites comes from a 1959 study of people’s ability to tune out background noise and conversation when they wanted to focus: “The only stimulus so far found that will break through,” the researchers wrote, “is the subject’s own name.” Platforms that notify users each time they are “mentioned” work on this principle; the most reliable way to draw someone in, even if the content on offer doesn’t particularly appeal to them, is by creating the impression that other people are talking about them.
Some major differences between a TV show and a social media feed are that the former is highly produced by a team of professionals, is calibrated to be entertaining or engaging, and has a strong incentive to retain the trust of its audience; a network show is a big investment that needs a reliable audience to sustain it. The content on social media doesn’t have to conform to these rules. Some of it may be produced to professional standards, and some of it is genuinely informative (how-to videos, detailed product reviews) or at least novel (Hayes finds himself entranced by videos of professional rug cleaners who show the viewer every stage of shampooing and rinsing heavily soiled carpets). But much of it is cheaply produced, repetitive, and sometimes blatantly deceptive (see: YouTube Shorts that promise life hacks but turn out to be twenty seconds of someone flushing tennis balls down the toilet). Increasingly, much of it is AI-generated “slop”—a scroll through Facebook might yield a dozen fabricated images of Kate Middleton looking angelic but slightly off, or of uncannily faked home renovation before-and-afters.
The old model, the TV model, is to grab your attention and hold it; the new model is just to grab your attention, and if you feel disappointed or tricked it doesn’t matter, because in five seconds another video or post will grab your attention again, and again, and again. Hayes calls this the “slot machine model.” Slot machines work by transfixing the player “for just a little bit while we wait for the spinning to stop, and then repeating that same brief but intense process over and over.” What makes slots so addictive, Hayes writes, drawing on Natasha Dow Schüll’s research in Addiction by Design (2012), is “the unique attentional trance the machine’s gameplay induces,” where the experience of a new stimulus every few seconds feels more important than the actual outcome of the bet.
The result is a world of distraction, with no need for the amusement that Postman thought so corrosive of the American attention span in the 1980s. “The slot machine model,” Hayes explains,
allows the most powerful and profitable companies in the entire world to entirely dissolve the problem that, for a century, Hollywood executives and big publishing houses and Broadway producers have all attempted to solve: What will hold people’s attention? They don’t have to have an answer. They can simply throw a million little interruptions at us, track which ones grab our attention, and then repeat those.
This has another significant advantage over the traditional model. The broadcasters of the past had to compete for a finite amount of attention: there were only so many people available (that is, not at work, not in transit, not out to dinner with friends, not taking a shower) at any given time to tune in. Getting more eyeballs meant working to draw in a larger share of those people, whether by luring viewers away from rival shows, or by targeting wider demographics, or by syndicating a show in more regions or countries. Social media breaks through that limit by working itself into the nooks and crannies of our lives—it can be consumed in the briefest moment of downtime; it can in fact be consumed at work and in transit, during dinner with friends, and even (often, in fact) on the toilet. The smartphone can also command attention while the user is nominally already watching something else; there’s no need for Instagram to feed you content so good that you’ll switch off your TV and focus solely on your phone, when you can stream the latest episode of Severance while scrolling “get ready with me” videos and faving a friend’s Stories.
In The Attention Merchants, Wu likened these developments to another kind of resource extraction. The smartphone “appeared capable of harvesting the attention that had been, as it were, left on the table, rather in the way that fracking would later recover vast reserves of oil once considered wholly inaccessible.” Wu, a legal scholar who has written extensively on antitrust, tells this story through sketches of the corporations that unlocked new segments of our attention. Hayes writes more often from the perspective of the user; the person whose mind is being fracked feels, he remarks, “that our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.” Distraction has always been big business, but the immersive quality of digital media, in his account, makes it much more powerful and toxic.
We may understand intuitively how unpleasant this siphoning of our attention is, but we’ve failed to grasp why it’s so consequential. Part of the reason, Hayes argues, is that we overestimate the value of information and underestimate the value of attention. The world’s largest tech firms, from Microsoft to Google, process vast quantities of information and data; Hayes quotes a mathematician who in 2006 proposed that “data is the new oil.” Hayes acknowledges that information “is vitally important,” but it’s also not scarce. In fact, the sheer amount of information available digitally is proliferating so fast that it has become a burden to most people, beset by hundreds of unread e-mails, invites, and notifications—a problem that generative AI is only exacerbating by flooding the Web with even more thoughtless stuff. “Everyone labors under the strain of information being cheap and plentiful and overwhelming,” Hayes observes. The major problem is how to sift that information—how to direct people to the information that they want or that you want to show them. In other words, the thing that is now most scarce is attention.
The principle can be difficult to grasp because it’s an entirely novel state of affairs. For most of human history, information has been hard to come by, and anyone who grew up before the rise of the Internet remembers the effort of tracking down a fact, or of getting a vital message to a friend if they didn’t happen to be near their home phone. In this setting it made sense to hang on to every shred of information available, just in case: reference books, yes, but also old newspaper clippings, restaurant menus, business cards—the kind of information one might now trust can be called up again later online. And with little information at hand, attention was the thing that was often surplus; Hayes recalls, for example, reading every word on the cereal box as a bored child over breakfast.
The economist Herb Simon recognized as early as 1971 how hard it would be for most people to adapt to a new abundance of information: “Most of us are constitutionally unable to throw a bound volume into the wastebasket,” he noted in his lecture “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” Hayes sees this difficulty affecting older generations with particular severity, leaving them more vulnerable to interruptions from their smartphones: “Older folks’ phones all ring for every call—they are never on silent—and every app they have, as a rule, can send them notifications so that their phone is constantly going off like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.” One might argue, conversely, that the way many younger people, born like Hayes into the “teeth of the attention age,” cope is just as dysfunctional: turning off notifications and ignoring most calls, at the risk of missing a message they might actually care about. In both cases, attention isn’t carefully directed: it’s either open to all interruptions or locked against most of them.
The crucial divide in the attention economy isn’t between old and young, in any case. It’s between those who understand that attention “is now the most important resource,” as Hayes puts it, and those who don’t. The first group is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the new rules of the attention game, and the way they have reshaped everything from entertainment to political debate, while the second is most susceptible to manipulation.
For Hayes the primacy of attention over all else explains the success of Trump and his ability to withstand almost any form of scandal or outrage—indeed often to turn it to his advantage. Traditional politicians seek attention, but they do so as a first step in the process of gaining approval: make sure people know who you are, and then try to make them like you and want to vote for you. Trump defied this simple rule of campaigning by skipping the later steps, Hayes argues. He has often drawn attention in ways that make him look reckless or cruel or untrustworthy, and yet he has been elected president twice—and with a greater share of the popular vote in 2024 than in 2016. Hayes suggests two reasons this has worked so consistently. One is that in the slot machine model, all that matters is grabbing attention repeatedly; negative attention is less damaging when the next day (or the next hour) brings a new story, another wave of attention, and another, and another. The news cycle becomes a blur in which individual incidents are hazy and only the unifying theme—wall-to-wall coverage of Trump—sticks out.
Hayes’s other theory is that Trump has worked out a risky but highly rewarding way to turn negative attention to his benefit. Trump sensed, Hayes believes, that “if he drew attention to certain topics, even if he did it in an alienating way, the benefits of raising the salience of issues where he and the Republican Party held a polling advantage would outweigh the costs.” One example is Trump’s rhetoric on immigration in the 2016 campaign, when he “accused the Mexican government of ‘sending’ rapists” across the border and vowed to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Sixty-six percent of Americans disapproved of the border wall idea, but these antics consistently directed public attention toward the issue of immigration, on which, “as a general matter, Republicans had an advantage over Democrats.”
If Hayes had drafted his book after the 2024 election, he might have noted the same dynamic playing out when Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, boosted the sensational claim that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating people’s pets. The story had no basis in fact, and it put the city’s Haitian community in a terrifying position, as they became a target of hate, with more than thirty bomb threats against local schools, hospitals, and homes. (Even Ohio’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, pointed out that the claim was “a piece of garbage that was simply not true.”) Yet only one month later, voters reported that they trusted Trump on immigration over Kamala Harris by a significant margin—49 percent compared with her 35 percent.
Trump may be “the political figure who most fully exploited the new rules of the attention age,” but Hayes argues that he is part of a larger shift among the rich and powerful. Musk “had riches past all imagination,” Hayes notes, but when he purchased Twitter for over $40 billion, “what Musk did want…was attention.” He became more influential as the owner of the platform even as he “boosted vile and false conspiracy theories about a savage attack on the husband of the Speaker of the House” and “mocked the notion that a mass shooter with literal swastika tattoos could possibly be a white supremacist.” His recent efforts to dismantle the federal government double as an extraordinary case of attention seeking: the point may be to slash agencies like USAID, but it’s also to send grandiose tweets like “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die.”
Hayes sees the “same thirsty, grasping desire for attention” among Musk’s peers, from “Silicon Valley billionaires starting their own podcasts” to hedge fund managers like Bill Ackman “posting compulsively.” It’s harder to say what these figures have gained by taking up a megaphone, and Hayes doesn’t go into detail. Through podcasts and posting, yes, billionaires have personally fueled controversies—as in the investor David O. Sacks’s campaign to recall the San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, or Ackman’s calls for the then Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign—though it’s not clear that Hayes’s new rules for the attention age significantly shaped their actions. Sacks has been a polemicist since the 1990s, when he coauthored a broadside against diversity with Peter Thiel shortly after Sacks graduated from Stanford, a hotbed of old-fashioned culture war ferment. Ackman, too, has long engaged in provocative campaigns—notably with his attempt to expose Herbalife as a pyramid scheme by shorting its stock (the subject of the flattering 2016 documentary Betting on Zero).
It’s tempting to wonder just how convincing Hayes’s arguments about political debate in the attention age would be if Trump had not won the 2024 election—if any number of contingencies, in other words, had tipped the balance in Democrats’ favor: if, say, inflation had not proved so intractable (egg prices!); if Joe Biden had pulled out of the race earlier in the year, giving the party time to run a competitive primary; if Harris had distanced herself from the most unpopular parts of Biden’s record. In that case, it might have appeared that Trump’s bids for attention at all costs ultimately proved self-defeating—as has been the case with a spate of candidates running Trump-style campaigns in recent years. Hayes notes that “attention hounds, from Blake Masters to Kari Lake to Doug Mastriano to Herschel Walker…ended up on the wrong side of the Trump attention/persuasion trade.” They made outrageous claims, ran alienating ads, and lost winnable races to more low-key Democratic opponents.
Hayes may also be taking too simple a view of Trump’s appeal when he argues that the fact that Trump got talked about was more important than what he talked about, however preposterous or offensive. Ubiquity has its advantages, but Trump did not need smartphones or social media to achieve it: he has had enormous name recognition for decades as a fixture of the tabloid press and a television personality. And while it’s been hard for many voters to keep up with the sheer number of Trump scandals and their accompanying fact checks over the last ten years, it would be too easy to conclude, as Hayes does, that people did not take in the substance of his speeches. In the eyes of many Americans, Trump’s outlandish claims about criminal migrants did not reflect poorly on him; they liked the harshness of his style of politics, or as Adam Serwer so memorably put it in The Atlantic in 2018, for this constituency “the cruelty is the point.”
Add to those voters another, perhaps more decisive bloc: those who chose not to believe that Trump really meant what he said, especially when they didn’t like (or claimed they didn’t like) what they heard. As Trump rolled out the measures that he had promised during his campaign, from tariffs to an executive order attempting to abolish birthright citizenship, the press quoted shocked voters who thought he had been bluffing. They hadn’t missed these promises because their attention spans were fried; they heard what he said and decided not to take it at face value, partly because of Trump’s unusual ability, honed by years of playing a boss on TV, to make people think he’s only acting tough when it suits them to believe that, and partly because a credulous political press often downplayed the more extreme elements of his political project. Shortly after The New York Times reported on the details of Project 2025 this fall, Politico assured readers that conservatives linked to the project were on a list of people “banned” from staffing the new administration. By the third week of January, Russell Vought, a prominent contributor to Project 2025, was confirmed as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget.
Distraction and misdirection are only part of the dysfunction, though they are particularly hard to address. Suggestions for reclaiming our attention range from the artisanal to the wan. Hayes rehearses a familiar set of solutions: you could leave your phone at home the next time you go for a walk, or subscribe to the print edition of a newspaper. Sales of vinyl records have picked up in recent years, he reasons, and “the vinyl of the news is the physical newspaper”; reading accurate reporting on nonclicky subjects could be the new shopping at farmers’ markets. Failing these, maybe the government should step in, he muses, legislating a cap on screen time. He wonders whether this last proposal wouldn’t be considered “an intolerable assault on our cherished freedoms,” not to mention an inconvenience to anyone who needed to answer an urgent e-mail after they’d used up all their hours. But then he justifies it somewhat confusingly by pointing out that these same arguments about protecting freedom were used to strike down “a whole host of progressive regulations” until the New Deal era.
Like any self-help guidelines, some of these actions might alleviate the worst feelings of screen-induced alienation, for some of us. But if our phones are also where many of today’s most intense and intensely disordered political contests are playing out, then to disconnect is to cede the field. The project of repairing our frazzled habits of mind shouldn’t be only soothing or restorative or wholesome—at least not if we want a chance to wrest the direction of debate toward honest and substantive argument. What’s clear from Hayes’s own complaints is that the most important power over one’s attention is the ability to wield it. To combat the haze of interruption and misdirection requires a public that is more engaged, in control, and confrontational. It may be as well, then, not to log off just yet.
English (US) · 