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Chris Hayes on the attention economy
Chris Hayes — author, MSNBC host, and previous guest on Volts — is just out with a new book, The Sirens Call, about the corrosive effects of the modern attention economy. In this episode, he and I dive deep into attention: what it is, when it became commodified, why it is so easy to steal, where industry is looking for new supplies, and how the harried and distracted can defend themselves from the onslaught.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
Okay! Hello, everyone. This is Volts for January 29, 2025 — which I'm still getting used to saying — "Chris Hayes on the attention economy." I'm your host, David Roberts. There is little that is more personal to each of us than our attention. Our lives are composed on a moment-to-moment basis by what we choose to pay attention to. What draws our attention creates our world in a very real way.
But, attention has also become a commodity. And not just any commodity, but the central commodity of the modern economy. The attention economy has eaten the real economy, and now all of us, from the biggest brands to the most obscure social media posters, are in a war of all against all: everywhere you look, all the time, everyone wants your attention. That makes it pretty tough to use it wisely.
That, anyway, is the basic thesis of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, a new book by longtime MSNBC host and author Chris Hayes, who needs no introduction here.
I've known Chris a long time, I've been on his podcast and he's been on Volts before. I'm keenly interested in this subject of commodified attention, and this new book of his really got my brain revving, so I am super excited to talk to him all about it. (Seattleites: Side note, if you can't get enough of Chris here, catch him live at Seattle's Town Hall next week, on February 4th.)
With no further ado, Chris Hayes, welcome back to Volts.
Chris Hayes
It's great to be back, Dave.
David Roberts
Great book, man. Cool — good book. Well done.
Thank you. I appreciate that. I appreciate your loss for words. I think that's good. I'll take that as a good review.
I feel like modern life — whatever you call modern life, the puzzle of modern life — you've grabbed a big chunk of it here, I think, so I'm excited to get into this. But I want to start at the most focused, specific level. Let's just talk for a minute about attention itself before we back out into the social and political stuff. You talk about three kinds of attention. Let's just start there. Let's just start with a topology or a typology of what we mean by attention.
Chris Hayes
Yeah. So, I think the most intuitive thing we mean by attention, and William James wrote about this, you know, in the 19th century, is just where we flash the spotlight of thought is, you know, if you want to use a metaphor. Right. So, it's a focusing mechanism. You know, where there's a spotlight on a stage, there could be a chorus on the stage, but if the lead of the musical starts to belt out a big number, and the spotlight goes on that lead, you know, that's where you focus your attention. And we can do that with our own thoughts.
You know, you can be in a room right now as I'm talking to you — and this is actually a useful exercise at any moment — there are so many things I could be paying attention to in this room. There are so many places that I could put my attention, but I'm focusing them on you. And that's an exercise of my will and my conscious thought.
David Roberts
Right. Volitional. On purpose.
Chris Hayes
Volitional and on purpose. It's voluntary in the sense that I'm choosing to do it. So, that's the main thing we tend to think of in attention. Right. Like, "Where do I put my thought? Where do I put my focus?" Then, there's this other component to it that is really important to grasp, which is involuntary attention. And because attention is a faculty that evolved for very clear evolutionary reasons. Right, I mean, if you are, you know, around the campfire and you're listening to a story of the hunt, and then a big predator comes through the bushes, and you hear the twig snapping, right, there's some aspect of attention that has to be essentially compelled or involuntary.
Right. Where some part of your consciousness snaps to that sound of the predator in the bushes. And we experience this all the time when a siren wails down the street, when an infant cries on a flight, if someone's being disorderly in a public space or on a subway car. Like, it's not that you volitionally choose to put the spotlight on them, it's that your attention snaps to them before you get a conscious say.
David Roberts
Right. You can't help it.
Chris Hayes
You can't help it. And it happens before you even get to consider it.
David Roberts
Right. And I don't know if this is the best way to describe the division, but it's sort of. I think of voluntary attention as more of a kind of a frontal cortex, higher thought type of thing. Whereas, the involuntary attention tickles your lizard brain. Right. Which is deeper and more fundamental. And therefore, when activated, trumps the higher thought. Right. That's sort of how the brain works.
Chris Hayes
Absolutely. And most people, I think, have had the experience of, say, coming upon deer in a meadow or in the forest. And, you know, they're doing their thing and then they hear something and their heads snap up. Right. That moment of involuntary attention for them, because it's an animal. You know, animals have it, too. They don't have the other one. I don't think the deer could be like, "What am I doing with my life?" Or, "I really want to listen to you on a first date." So, yeah. So those are sort of two sides of the coin.
And then the third, which I don't think kind of maps onto the psychology literature, but I think is as important, is what I call "social attention." The short way to think of that is when we are paying attention to other people and when other people are paying attention to us. It has, I think, a kind of difference in kind, a specific set of psychological and philosophical implications that are distinct from paying attention to other things.
David Roberts
Right. And you can almost think of this as a kind of subcategory of involuntary attention. It's so deeply rooted that it's very difficult — like you in the book, you talk about being at a cocktail party chattering, and you sort of naturally screen out other conversations, just sort of automatically. But if in one of those other conversations someone says, "Chris Hayes said, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Like, that will reach your lizard brain from across the room, and you'll immediately be like "Huh?!"
Chris Hayes
And this isn't just a thought experiment. This is actually an experimental finding that your own name will penetrate and wrench your attention away. And that's because social attention has this specific force and all these implications for kind of who we are and what we are that are wired deep in us.
David Roberts
Right, I want to come back to social attention in a minute, but what falls out of this typology, I think, is one of the most important insights in the book. One of many things which, once you hear it, you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's obvious." But like, a lot falls out of it, which is simply this: It is easier to grab someone's attention than it is to hold their attention. Involuntary attention has a power and an immediacy that you cannot replicate with voluntary attention. So, it's just easier to get attention than it is to hold it. So, talk about everything that is implied by that, because sort of like almost like all the rest of your book falls out of that.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, and I think to illustrate that point, you could go to any single person and say, "I'm going to have you walk in this room. There's 500 people in there. I just need you to get everyone's attention." And basically, everyone could do that. I mean, if you walked in and you screamed, or you got up in front of the room, you start taking your clothes off, I mean, if you had any means available. But if I said, "Look, there's 500 people in there. I want you to go on the stage and hold them spellbound for an hour."
What the hell would you do? Right? So, what falls out of that is because compelling attention and grabbing it is easier than holding it, the more ferociously competitive a market for attention gets, the more iterative you sort of unleash attention capitalism on people where you're competing second by second. The more you will drive towards the lizard brain, the brain stem, the compelled attention, almost as a kind of unavoidable aspect of the incentives. So, what you're going to drive towards is grab, grab, grab, grab, grab, grab, grab.
David Roberts
Yeah, and this is, to me, this is just an inevitable result if you want attention, if attention is what's valuable to you, if attention is literally money to you. You know, like everyone who creates content on the Internet is very aware of just how difficult it is to hold people's attention. Everyone who's, you know, like, you've seen metrics. You're, I'm sure, intensely familiar with metrics.
Chris Hayes
Yep.
David Roberts
You know, and anybody who's ever written a headline versus a story, right? Like, the headline is meant to grab attention. The story is meant to hold it. And we know from every metric, from the history of the Internet, it's real easy to grab people's attention, but they start falling off almost immediately.
So, what you call this grab, grab, grab, grab, grab model is the slot machine model. So, say a little bit about that and why it's so powerfully effective.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, I mean, this part of the book is taken from a great academic named Natasha Dow Schüll, who wrote this amazing book called "Addiction by Design," which is about how machine gambling works in Vegas and slot machines. It's about the kind of attentional trance that the games produce in people. And part of the point that she makes about these games — which have basically taken over more and more casino floors because they're the most profitable thing on a casino floor.
David Roberts
God, that is so depressing.
Chris Hayes
To illustrate the point, right, is that they create this kind of attentional trance where, you know, she'll talk to people that have really intense compulsions, you know, addictions to these games. And they're like, "I'm not playing to win. I know I'm losing money. It's the experience of the trance that I'm after."
David Roberts
Right.
Chris Hayes
And so, what we have, and I don't think it's an accident, is that the vertical sort of scroll, the flick of the thumb, is essentially the same visual element of the casino slot machines. We're all just playing dopamine slot machines on our phones all day with our thumb.
David Roberts
Yep. And we know from the psychology, science that getting irregular rewards, like sometimes you get a hit, sometimes you don't, is more addictive than it would be if you reliably got a reward.
Chris Hayes
Exactly.
David Roberts
The sort of element of chance just keeps coming back. Yeah. So, like a slot machine, it just grabs your attention and holds your attention just long enough to see the flowers rotate and stop, and it grabs it again and grabs it again and grabs it again. There's a little squirt of dopamine each time that happens. But, when you put these facts together, just what we've laid out so far, there's voluntary attention, involuntary attention, and a particularly powerful kind of involuntary attention called social attention that is now valuable. We're going to return to why it's so valuable in a minute.
But that means, if you're in a marketplace that wants your attention, the best way for someone who wants your attention to get it is to grab it over and over again, to shout over and over again.
Chris Hayes
Particularly, the best way to get it at scale, I think, it's useful to think about the way food and hunger work for this. Because, you know, we have biological inheritances in our appetites, right? Like, we're drawn to sugar because it's very calorically packed. We're drawn to fat. Like when the Bible conjures a land of plenty, it's milk (fat) and honey (sugar), right? So, if you want to sell food at scale, right, not like a 30 seat restaurant, but like to billions of people, you drive towards what, burgers, fries, Coca Cola, right? All that processed stuff that is lighting up our biological inheritance and you can sell it anywhere in the world.
Now, that doesn't mean that's all people want to eat, and it doesn't mean you can't make a profit selling other stuff. In fact, the amazing thing about humans is they'll eat anything. It's just incredible, you know, like from bugs to caviar to all sorts of plants that you wouldn't think to flowers and salads. I mean, there's a million things people eat, right? But you've got these side by side. You've got the kind of food as culture and identity and bonding and cuisine, and you've got food as, you know, industrial scale, like demand. And we've got a very similar thing happening with our attention.
And that industrial-scale demand is going to drive towards that kind of compelled, lowest common denominator.
David Roberts
I want to set up this framework because I want to return to it later because — and I think the food analogy is good and it works — in that you say, just take me as an example, in this minute, I want a sugary snack, right? Because a sugary snack squirts this dopamine. It feels good, tastes good. So that's one sense in which I want something. But I also, in another sense, want to be healthy and to lose some weight. So which of those do I want? Which is my real want? And what I think we're seeing is a massive capitalist competition for my food dollar, right?
You're going to appeal again and again to my lizard brain's immediate-instinct want. And what happens in capitalism, and I want to come back to this later too, is we start seeing anything that might serve that second kind of want, that longer-term want. Like, if you want that longer-term thing, by definition, you have to gatekeep the short-term thing, right? Some force, someone, some mechanism, some institution, some practice has to gatekeep what comes in front of you if you want that longer-term health. So what does that, what do we trust to gatekeep our food?
And capitalism sort of inherently distrusts and is kind of corrosive to any kind of gatekeeping that serves that second, longer-term desire. And that's what you see in attention too, is just like the cheapest, easiest, most short-term version of it just getting shoveled at us. And we mistrust gatekeepers. Anyone who gatekeeps, you know, that information, decides what we should see and what we shouldn't, is just getting eaten away by, I guess, capitalism. I don't even know if that's the right word for it.
Chris Hayes
And this tension between the different parts of ourselves, the self that wants the snack, and the self that wants to eat healthily. I mean, the title of the book, like the animating first image, is Odysseus bound to the mast, resisting the sirens' call. Where there are two selves, there's the prior self of Odysseus, who wants to make it home to his family, and under the advice of Circe, binds himself to the mast so that he won't fall prey to the allure of the sirens. And then there's the self in the moment of Odysseus, who wants to go towards the sirens, is desperately begging his men to steer towards them.
And the commitment device there, the gatekeeping that works there, is that he binds himself to the mast. But it's because he's at war with different versions of himself in time and different aspects of his self. And that war that we're just constantly — we've been living that war in our bodies for a long time, if you know, the amount of food advice and obesity and exercise. But we're now living that war in our minds second to second.
David Roberts
Yes, it's intentional now. And one thing that's worth pointing out is, even though binding yourself to the mast looks like I'm disciplining myself, right, this is a solo thing. Even that depends, in some sense, on other people.
Chris Hayes
Yes.
David Roberts
Not untying you when you tell them to. Right. So, it's social. Any gatekeeping, any form of lashing yourself to the mast to resist these short-term pressures, is social and requires some social trust of someone. And I just want to, I want to make the point that I didn't, I didn't feel like you hit it hard enough in your book. It just could be because I'm angsty about it. But I just want to say that one of the reasons we're talking about all this is that developing any skill or expertise requires sustained voluntary attention. That is sort of the nature of it.
That's what practice is. So, you know, people talk about losing the ability for sustained voluntary attention like, "Oh, I can't even read a book anymore." But like, it's a bigger deal than that. Like everything humans are good at or can do or that is worthwhile in human society requires sustained voluntary attention.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, that's a great point in terms of the implications. And I think, you know, you're seeing that manifest in the world. You're particularly seeing this — I don't want to take us off on a tangent — but I think you're seeing it in, there's some evidence that there's some gender differences, you know, whether the source of that is something biological — I'm skeptical of — and more likely the sort of way that, you know, boys and girls are acculturated and you know, you're seeing this in higher education pursuits, like all kinds of things that, you know, require this sort of sustained voluntary attention, you know, that boys are doing worse at.
And I think there's a connection between those.
David Roberts
So you think at least in current society, for whatever reason, women are acculturated, are better able to offer their sustained voluntary attention?
Chris Hayes
Yes, 100%. Yeah, I think that's pretty clear. I mean, I think it's actually a huge source of a lot of what's going on in the sort of increasing gender divide.
David Roberts
That's interesting. I wanted to talk briefly a little bit, just focus on social attention, because I think social attention, much like attention generally, much like food, much like the rest of the analogy. There are kind of junk food forms of it and sustaining forms of it. And one of the things you talk about is that, you know, the quest by these platforms, by these tech companies to get our attention. You know, obviously, anyone who wants to sell us anything wants our attention. Anyone who wants to teach us anything. Anyway, people have always wanted our attention.
But what you have now is the ability to personalize that outreach to attention. This is what the algorithms are. This is the sort of effect of you giving all your information to the Gods of Online; they know you now and can customize their bids for your attention in a way that triggers this social attention. But you talk a good bit about how to be online is just to be subject to social attention and to give social attention. It's kind of what online is now.
Chris Hayes
That's what online is.
David Roberts
But what you're getting is not the sustaining kind. So, you have this phrase, "We're stuffed but starved." Like, stuffed with attention, but starved for what we really want, which is recognition. So, explain that difference just a little bit.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, and first, I should give a shout out to Raj Patel, who's the author, who wrote a book called "Stuffed and Starved." Again, about the weird perversity of the global food system. That stuffed and starved is: yes, we're getting more attention than we've ever gotten. I mean, up until very recently, the experience of social attention from strangers was something that a tiny fraction of anyone at a given time could ever get. I mean, movie stars, politicians, you know, people that achieve some kind of fame. Most people were not being subject to social attention of strangers.
I mean, let me also say, women, particularly walking through public space, you know, female bodies of all ages, unfortunately, are being subjected to social attention. The gaze from strangers has been happening forever. So that's, and that is distinct. And obviously, half the population experiences that. But I mean, the specific thing of, like, strangers saying, like, "Your idea is stupid."
David Roberts
Yeah, and you'll be old enough to remember that, like, back in the day, there were local newspapers, and occasionally the local newspaper would be like, "Rando at this random church, like, won a TV in a giveaway." You know what I mean? And it would be such a thrill.
Chris Hayes
Yes.
David Roberts
For that person to be like, "My God, I'm in the paper. I'm in the newspaper." You know, it's just like the divide was so fundamental, was so distant.
Chris Hayes
I'm thinking of this scene in The Jerk when Steve Martin's like, "The new phone book is here. The new phone book is here. Everyone's going to know my name." You know, until recently, this was a very, very, very tiny fraction of people who were experiencing this, particularly in the way we're experiencing now. Now it's totally democratized. I mean, social attention from strangers is basically the traffic of the Internet. And the point I'm making is that the thing that's so fascinating about attention as a force is that it's both very powerful and also mere. It's sort of always necessary and never sufficient.
You need social attention for all the things you actually want out of human relationships, like love, caring, support, and friendship.
David Roberts
And as you point out, like, as a human, the human species uniquely needs it to survive. When we're born, we are born helpless.
Chris Hayes
Yes, and so you need it literally from the moment you come screaming into the world, but it's also not enough. And so what you get in this stuffed and starved dynamic is you're getting a lot of attention, but what you really want is something deeper, which, you know, I say is basically recognition. You know, the philosopher Alexandre Kojève says that what human desire fundamentally is, at its core, is the desire for recognition, to be seen as human by another human. The Internet doesn't really give you that, but it gives you this kind of close approximation, this facsimile, that makes you feel like you're close to getting recognized and keeps you kind of going for more and more of it, but always coming away, not sated.
David Roberts
You talk about this, I think it was Hegel, the sort of master-slave relationship. Like, the master can get attention from the slave, but it's not sustaining for him. Because what you really want is recognition from someone you acknowledge as a human being yourself, from a full other human being who you recognize as a human being. And sort of almost definitionally, the people you encounter online are not that. They're simulacra. They're performances. Right. They're literally images. They're avatars.
Chris Hayes
Yes.
David Roberts
So, almost by definition, you cannot get what you want and need from those people. And yet, like you say, you can't stop trying.
Chris Hayes
Right. That's exactly right. Because you can't fully actually recognize them as human.
David Roberts
Right. It's funny, you talk about the sort of disorienting effects of fame, of getting this social attention, which, as you say, used to be so rare that the people subject to it weren't even really allowed to talk about it because no one cared. You know, because it was — it would be like a God on Olympus complaining about... You know, like no one cared.
But it became more and more common. It became more and more of a kind of a standard subject of like the disorienting effects of having all these people pay attention to you. And now you say this is available to more and more and more. Like it's going lower and lower. Like you are at a certain level, you know, you're like on TV, so you're recognized to some extent. But, you know, I've even tasted a tiny little shade of it. And it is wild how thoroughly and rapidly it fucks with your brain. I don't think people appreciate...
And you and I have seen in the social media age, sort of like randos, just normal, random people thrust into the spotlight for one reason or another. And God, people just have the most weird, bizarre flailing. They lose their minds. People are not prepared for it.
Chris Hayes
I mean, it's like an evil science experiment to produce psychosis.
David Roberts
And as you say, now we're getting attention when we want recognition, but it kind of seems like the constant pursuit of attention now is starting to occlude those activities by which we would get recognition. Do you know what I mean? Because recognition, seeing people as human beings, that takes some time and a little bit of devotion and a little bit of willingness to work through some awkwardness.
Chris Hayes
And mutual relationships, mutuality. I mean, that's the other key part, right? Like, there are a few reasons that attention is weird, right? Social attention. One is that it's kind of mere, it's necessary but not sufficient. Two is that it doesn't have to be mutual. Like, you can pay a lot of attention to Brad Pitt and not know him, right? It could go in one direction, right? You can't be in a friendship with Brad Pitt and not know him. You can't be in a romance with Brad Pitt, not know him. You can't be in a mentor-mentee — you know, there's no relationship you can be with him, but you can pay him social attention.
And then, the third aspect that's weird is it can run the gamut from deep love to like, hatred to like — you know, someone's screaming in your face on the subway, is paying you social attention. So, like, that's the other thing is there's no valence to it. And in fact, negative attention, I think, is in some ways, I think negative attention kind of out competes positive attention, if that makes sense.
David Roberts
One of the very common phenomena of our time is dudes — not always dudes, but usually dudes — who are so palpably desperate for recognition that they will accept negative attention as a substitute. Right. I mean, that is the life of Elon Musk in a nutshell.
Chris Hayes
I mean, the two most powerful people in the country are —
David Roberts
Yes, and Trump.
Chris Hayes
Trump and Musk, I mean, are just... And I think it's born of their personalities. But I also think they have backed into a kind of feral insight. Like, I think trolling, which is the pursuit of negative attention, essentially, is an efficient means of getting attention, if you don't care about whether it's positive or not. Right. So it's like, if all you want is attention, it's probably easier to get negative attention than positive attention.
David Roberts
Yeah. I mean, I think that's pretty well established. It's the negative emotions —
Chris Hayes
Yeah.
David Roberts
that grab you. Right. Outrage, anger, resentment.
Chris Hayes
And so, you've got this kind of trolling model that I think is, like, before our eyes, kind of colonizing all of public discourse. And it really is. And I think Musk is important in this because I think Trump is so sui generis, even I thought I was a little unclear to me how much he was sui generis. And now you've got this iterative 2.0 version in Musk that makes you recognize, like, "Oh, and I write about Musk in the book a lot more than I thought I would." And at a certain point, I was like, "Is there too much Musk in this book?"
It's like, "No, dude, this is — the reason he keeps showing up is because he is at the vanguard of this." And so now that you've got Musk, it's like, "Oh, this is something more than just the weirdness of Trump. We've got another one now." And it's because of what the attentional incentives are.
David Roberts
Yes, and, you know, we don't want to get off on psychological diagnoses, but I think a lot of these people are incapable of doing the kind of things that would bring recognition or affirmation. That requires a little bit of mutuality, requires a little bit of seeing out into the world rather than only seeing your own ego. You know what I mean? So, like, these guys are never going to get what they want. That's the thing. It's so clear from the outside. They're trying so hard, and they're so never going to get what they want. But that is true on some smaller scale for all of us.
We're all kind of doing a little bit of what Musk is doing. Right? That's the horrible thing.
Chris Hayes
Yes, I mean, the comparison I make in the book is Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, who says, you know, basically, opening scene, he comes back from a sales trip, and it's like, "I'm not there. No one listens to me." And his wife, to her sons, when lecturing them, is like, "He's a human being and attention must be paid." That's the line she says. She's not even asking her sons to pay Willy Loman love or the fidelity of sons. And we think of him as like, this unbelievably pathetic figure and this tragic figure, but it makes Willy Lomans of us all.
You know, here I am, I'm going around, I'm doing a publicity tour for my book.
David Roberts
Yeah, and I have a podcast. Like, that's a lot of attention. And yet, here I am, out every day on the Internet, shouting and yelling in pursuit of I know not what, unable to stop. So, one of the other big planks of the book's argument, so you have this stuff about attention and how it works and the different kinds. And the reason that this slot machine model has developed just in that grab, grab, grab, grab, grab, over and over again is easier than grab and hold. And that's true especially for social attention as well. But then you also have this other argument, which is that — as I said, everyone's always wanted attention, right, like the competition for attention is not new — but you think there's something new in the modern economy, where basically every other sphere of life is now starting to orient around attention, that the attention economy is eating the real economy. Just sort of make that case briefly.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, I'll try to make this as quickly as possible. I mean, the first step in the argument is to recognize that this sort of move from the industrial economy to the information economy, which I think is a fairly common thing. Right? Like, a lot of the economic activity now is generated by moving bits and not atoms. Right? So, if you're comparing a claims adjuster to a steelworker, right, the claims adjuster is just at a laptop all day. You know, she might be making more than the steelworker, but she's not physically moving the world. Right?
So, we all kind of understand there's this thing called the Information Age, the digital economy. The key insight here is that the most important resource of the Information Age isn't information, it's attention.
David Roberts
Right. Information consumes attention. I think that's another one that seems obvious once you read it, but, like, a lot falls out of that.
Chris Hayes
Exactly right. And that's from Herb Simon, a brilliant economist and political scientist, who wrote this paper, gave this talk about decision making in organizations under attentional constraints. And the finite thing is attention, not information. Your information's everywhere. David Roberts' information is in 10 places or a thousand places, does it matter that much? You don't even know. You know, it doesn't matter. It doesn't change your life if your attention is somewhere and not another place, you know, because that's yours and it's finite.
David Roberts
Yes, and information has become trivially cheap.
Chris Hayes
Yes.
David Roberts
Wildly oversupplied. And it's happened so quickly. Like, I really think, and I think you probably agree with this, I really think a lot of weird generational stuff has to do with the fact that old people today, our sort of oldest generation today, grew up in a world where information was still a relatively scarce resource. Yes. And that if you had it, you should hoard it. And that, like, and going out and seeking it and finding it was important. And those just mental and physical and political habits formed in that environment are now wildly out of place.
Chris Hayes
I mean, look at the notifications of any boomer, you know, on their phone. I mean, every single one. And the reason is for exactly that reason. Like, it used to be that someone would try to call you at your house and you weren't there, and you just missed the call. And, you know, there's entire Seinfeld plots around this. You know, people can tell you stories about missing some key call in their life that had some huge effect. "I asked this girl out, and then she called me back, but I wasn't there. And then she ended up going out with my friend." You know, something like that.
So, what does a boomer's phone look like? It's constant. It's like nothing's muted. It's all notified. I mean, God bless and love the boomers in my life, including my parents, who I love.
David Roberts
It's the same reason they keep their good china, you know, and like, every book they've ever had in their life.
Chris Hayes
Just, like, because it's valuable.
David Roberts
Yeah, they were raised in a time of information poverty.
Chris Hayes
Yeah.
David Roberts
Right. So, now information is everywhere. But, and this is the key insight of this chapter of the book, is just that, like, the flip side of information is attention. And for every bit more information you have, that makes attention more and more valuable because information is infinite and attention isn't.
Chris Hayes
And that's where you get this kind of supremacy of the brand over the product in the global economy.
David Roberts
That was a really interesting point.
Chris Hayes
I mean, this is Naomi Klein's thesis of No Logo, which is basically like, you know, at a certain point in globalized production, like, there's just a bunch of early in the, you know, 90s and 2000s, there's just a bunch of factories in Shenzhen.
David Roberts
Yeah, like, I don't know which factory in China is good at making shoes versus the one that isn't good at making shoes.
Chris Hayes
But you know, the swoosh, that's Nike. You know, the three stripes is Adidas. Like, what is a brand? A brand is an attentional focal point.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Chris Hayes
And so, what you get is a supremacy of the brand over the product in this kind of information economy. Right? Where the industrial production has become so commodified. Right? Like, it's indistinguishable from one place to the next. And obviously, there are difficult problems to solve. I don't want to minimize how hard it is to make a high-quality shoe at scale. That's a serious thing. But it's basically a solved problem. Right? And Amazon's a perfect example. This is the funniest thing. Amazon's the next iteration of this because it's even surpassed the brand. And here's what I mean.
So, the No Logo version of this is, you don't know where the shoe comes from. You just know the three stripes or the swoosh. The Amazon version of this is almost an inversion of this. How many products have you ordered whose name is like RJ4532i? And the reason you ordered it is because when you search in Amazon, the attentional focus on the top of the search results, which is the thing they are monetizing, is the thing that pops up that says, like, "Here's the best coffee percolator." You have no goddamn idea who the brand is or anything.
David Roberts
It's like a meta-brand. Amazon has become, has transcended mere brands.
Chris Hayes
Exactly. And it's so wild. That experience of ordering a thing from some company you've never heard of.
David Roberts
Yes, and just the assumption, my background assumption is just like, "Whatever this is, it's probably made in the same Chinese factory as the one with the other brand name." Like, what do I care?
Chris Hayes
Oh, totally.
David Roberts
Like, I have no connection at all to the roots or the physical source of those things. But make the case that, I mean, the core of the book is that attention has become the central resource of the modern economy. Make that case, why? And this has happened as we've watched. I mean, again, wild how fast.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, so I think if you put those things together, right, we've moved to the information economy. The information economy, the most valuable resource almost as a logical matter, is attention, because information consumes attention and there's more information than ever. And because we're in an era of post-material production and as more and more of the world moves into that kind of economy, then the finite thing left, the thing that's the most important thing to get is attention. Because it's finite and because there's competition for it. Right. Because you can't just generate more of it. It's like there's only so many people who are spending so many hours awake.
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes
The competition for it is fierce, and the supply is not that plastic. So, you gotta keep finding new places to take it. Like, if you push people's bedtime down, if you could start getting six-month-olds, if you can get people to watch three things at once, you gotta keep kind of trying to find new places to mine it.
David Roberts
Yes, this is to me one of the more interesting and dystopian facets of all this. When you start thinking, "Well, okay, attention is the primary commodity. It's what everybody wants." Intuitively, it's finite. Like you say, we're only awake for so long. But then you start thinking about the details. You make a point of saying, "People have been predicting shortages of resources for capitalism for decades." And the sort of signal feature of capitalism is that it is extremely creative at finding more of those resources. So, you start thinking in concrete terms, "Well, how could capitalism find more attention?"
And you just follow that string a while, and it gets dystopian real quick. The first place my mind goes, and I'm curious whether you have thought of this too, is self-driving cars. What is that going to do?
Chris Hayes
Such a good point.
David Roberts
What that's going to do is free up a giant swath of attention, right?
Chris Hayes
That's such a good point. I hadn't even thought.
David Roberts
We are going to swarm on those things. Like, pretty soon, you're going to get in a car and you are going to be wrapped by advertising. This is my favorite dystopian scenario because it just feels inevitable to me.
Chris Hayes
That's great. I don't even make that point in the book. That is a very smart insight, and I totally agree. That's a place that they will unlock a whole bunch of attention that was locked up. Right. Because you had to keep your eyes on the road at some level. I mean, I say in the book when I talk about that, it's more plastic than you would think. Is that like when cars were first introduced, the idea that you'd be listening to the radio while doing it? It's like now, it's like you gotta be listening to something.
David Roberts
I know people get their phones out at stop signs, at stoplights.
Chris Hayes
Every stop sign.
David Roberts
Yeah, it's wild. So, there's that attention. There's less sleep. There are things that you used to do, you know, like leaving the house. The more you think about it, the more you realize, "Oh, there is a lot of attention left to mine."
And boy, is it ugly to think about what that's going to look like.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, it is. And I do think that you also see an increasing rebellion against it.
David Roberts
Well, we're going to get to that later, but I want to do a couple of other points before we talk about what the rebellion might look like. So, one of the, I thought, really interesting discussions in the book is this parallel you draw. So, Marx has this whole theory of the commodification of labor. Right. So, you have this thing, labor, that used to be part of my life. Right. It was just mine. I did it for my own purposes, and I got the immediate rewards of it. It was integrated into my life. It would never have occurred to sort of a pre-, you know, pre-agrarian, whatever, human to think of that as a commodity.
Chris Hayes
Yeah.
David Roberts
And what capitalism did is sort of take that from you and make it into a timed, quantifiable commodity, and thus you become alienated from it. And of course, anyone who's read their Marx knows that this is like, this goes all kinds of places. A very deep part of his theory is the alienation of modern life, of humans from their own labor. And the parallel you draw is that what's happening now is that capitalism is in the process of commodifying attention, thus producing a similar form of alienation. So, just spin that out a little bit.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, I think that the signature feature of alienation, and that word can mean a lot of things and can sometimes be amorphous, is a feeling that something that should be internal to us is outside of us, and that we're a stranger to some part of ourselves because of it. And, you know, with labor, it was very material. Like, again, you know, it's not like it was awesome before capitalism, like in feudal systems, just the local lord owned your labor. Right. It's like there's no wage because they just owned you. Everything you did was for them.
But, you know, if you were a shoemaker, you made a shoe, and at the end of that process where you're doing a whole bunch of different things, you have a shoe. Then you sell that shoe and you're transferring the ownership of the shoe from yourself to someone else in a market exchange, and they give you money. If you spend 12 hours a day stamping soles on shoes, which is a thing that right now, as I speak to you, people are doing in this world, to be clear. That's a pretty alienating experience.
David Roberts
Yeah. No pride of ownership.
Chris Hayes
No progression, no telos.
David Roberts
No narrative, no continuity.
Chris Hayes
You don't start at the beginning and then have a middle and an end and then you're finishing the shoe. And Marx recognized something profound about this. You know, he had a whole sort of material theory of it as well as a sort of psychological experience of it. And I think with attention it's the same thing. You know, Karl Polanyi, who's a sort of Marx-influenced economist, uses this term "fictitious commodity."
David Roberts
Yeah, yeah.
Chris Hayes
Where he identifies that a word is useful. Like, you know, if you take rubber out of a tree and rubber is commoditized, which means standardized, every amount of it is equal to every other. Every barrel of oil is the same as every other barrel of oil. Like, that's very different when you do it to someone's labor. It's the thing they're doing. Or their attention, which is where they're putting their mind. When you extract from within us a market commodity, we feel alienation from it. And the other similarity, I think, is this one of the paradoxes of the industrial wage revolution that Marx is putting his finger on is labor is the most important resource in some senses to make the whole thing work.
If you don't have the workers, you can't have industrial capitalism. And yet, each individual's labor is essentially valueless. So, it's like from your perspective, I'm in the factory 12 hours a day, six or seven days a week, and I'm poor. In the aggregate, all of those man hours add up to the industrial revolution. And in the same way, the individual amount that's paid for our attention every day is nothing, but the aggregate of it is incredibly valuable and makes fortunes and drives the entire Internet.
David Roberts
Similarly, I think from the boss's perspective, when it comes to labor, an individual worker's idiosyncrasies or life history, right, or personality, all of those are at best sort of a distraction and kind of an impediment, right? They're complications.
Chris Hayes
They're obstacles.
David Roberts
What you want is a nice, smooth, standard, tradable quantity. So, in a sense, like everything that makes people human is an inconvenience to a boss who's after labor. I think it's similar with attention. Like, this is part of what platforms to me are, is a way of trying to make a standardized unit of attention, right? That becomes tradable, that becomes fungible.
Chris Hayes
It's funny because there's something counterintuitive there. There's an interesting, deep tension here, right? Because you're right, it's trying to do the standardization. And it is on the back end, like whatever second of eyeball looking.
David Roberts
Time spent on site.
Chris Hayes
Right. Time spent on site. But it's also sort of the opposite of the standardization in the degree of individuation of the kind of algorithmic feed, which is bespoke in a certain way. Right. Like, it's the thing they're trying to get from you is very specific to you. Part of the alienation, I think, is we sort of lost more and more aspects of shared attention.
David Roberts
Yeah, the loss of this feeling that you're attending to something that other people are attending to also, right?
Chris Hayes
And I think, honestly, the Super Bowl is one of the last things of this. And I will say this: I have come to like the Super Bowl more over time simply because it is one of the last vestiges of something we all pay attention to.
David Roberts
Yeah. Mass culture. I mean, this is why I think people are so powerfully sentimental about the 90s in a way that I think is a little bit more than just standard nostalgia. Like, there was still a mass culture in the 90s, you know what I mean? Like, there was still something about which you could meaningfully say you were counterculture. Right. Like, there was something to rebel against. There was, you know, a shared something. But now, like, if you wanted to be rebellious, nobody's trying to make you do anything, like, you know what I mean? There's nothing to rebel against anymore.
There's no culture as such anymore, really, it feels like.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, I mean, I think culture finds a way is one thing I will say. Like, it is interesting to me how intensely, rabidly social we are as creatures and how we find ways to create culture under all conditions, you know? But I do think that part of the experience of alienation, which is this thing that should be internal to us, being extracted from us, and also the individuation and the aloneness, all those things sort of go together.
David Roberts
I'll quote your own book: "It's hard not to conclude that there is a relationship between the rise of solitude in modern life and this process of ever more specific individuation of our attention." So, in a sense, like, our attention is constantly being captured. But creating culture — I think this is an interesting point — creating culture right now, I think about this a lot through the eyes of my kids. Like, for me growing up in the 90s, if I wanted to create music, there was a narrative of, like, what music had been popular, what music was currently popular, and a place for me to go.
Like, "I'll go tweak this bit." It just, like, I felt like I was part of some tradition. Some ongoing, you know, some ongoing narrative. Whereas now, everything is everywhere. Everything is on the surface. So, like, music, my kids, they don't... There's no distinction for my kids between Steely Dan and, you know, Kanye. And, like, it's all just music. It's all just there. It's all just there for the taking.
Chris Hayes
Right. Because they could listen to it at any time. And this is the other thing about —
David Roberts
Like, just everything's everywhere. Everything's all the time. So, like, how do you decide? On what basis do you decide, "This rather than this. I will make this kind of music rather than this kind of music."
Chris Hayes
This is the funny thing and a place that I think we are kind of coming to a 360 degrees, which is gatekeeping. And I do think that one of the things, the problem that the algorithm solves, which actually is real, is just being overwhelmed by choice.
David Roberts
Yeah, well, that coupled with the loss of trust in any particular human or institution to do that for us. We're letting the algorithms do it instead of people. And, like, so much follows from that. So, let's talk then. Let's pivot toward, like, solutions. You know, like, you know, I say this from love. Every book like yours is required by some law or other to include the solutions chapter.
Chris Hayes
I think this is one of my best of three. I just want to say, personally, I think this is my best of the three books I've written.
David Roberts
Well, I will say I think it's a completely unreasonable expectation to ask analysts to have solutions to the problems they identify in their back pocket. It's kind of goofy anyway. So, you sort of nod at some solutions. But I got to say, I was not filled with, like, I did not come away happy or uplifted. But let me read a couple of quotes to you, if you'll indulge me quoting your book at you again. Here's a couple that I think really get at this. We're talking about the sort of implications for culture. We're talking about the implications for personal psychology.
But then, there's also, I think, just the implications for public life, society, politics. So, "The reality of the attention age is that everywhere you look, both formal and substantive attentional regimes have collapsed. And where there is no attentional regime, no formal set of institutions to force public attention on a topic, no basic rules for who will speak when and who will listen, the need for attention becomes exclusive. It swallows debate, it swallows persuasion, it swallows discourse whole." And then a little bit later, "We have a country full of megaphones, a crushing wall of sound, the swirling lights of a 24/7 casino blinking at us.
All part of a system minutely engineered to take our attention away from us for profit. Under these conditions, anything resembling democratic deliberation seems not only impossible but increasingly absurd. Like trying to meditate in a strip club." And that, to me, captured something that I haven't really been able to capture yet, which is just not only is there nothing that I can identify as sort of rational debate or exchange of views happening anymore, I don't even really know where to look, where it would happen. Like, as you say, everybody and every institution and everybody who certainly is involved in the content game is under this same compulsion.
They need attention. That's how they make money. And to get attention, you grab it, grab it, grab it, grab it, grab it. Which, by definition, means not sitting on one thing for a while and considering different angles of it and considering other perspectives on it. So, it seems like what we have here is an equation, the nature of attention, the nature of the attention economy that just leaves no remainder for democratic deliberation, for sort of self-intelligent, self-governance. So, what, like —
Chris Hayes
How do we solve it?
David Roberts
Yeah, I feel doomed. It feels, it feels doomed. Like, what is the way out of this?
Chris Hayes
I think you've identified to me that on the sort of what authors will sometimes call the "last chapter problem," like to me, I think you've identified the hardest one to solve. So, I think you're like, that's the one that feels the hardest, which is understanding this as a collective breakdown of the ability to focus in the same way that an individual who can't focus is going to have a hard time sustaining thought or accomplishing tasks. A society that is incapable of focusing in a democracy, incapable of focusing, is also going to have that, you know, writ large at scale.
David Roberts
Add this to your description, which just goes to me, and this is where I bring capitalism back in, is just that capitalism is constantly trying to satisfy those id, those lizard brain level wants, want, want, want, want, want. And by definition, sustained contemplation requires some bits of frustration. You will know this like any attempt to become good at anything, and that includes arguing and deliberating or playing guitar or woodworking or whatever, requires being willing to work through frustration and live with that frustration. It seems like capitalism is devoted to eliminating any type of frustration like that, thereby eliminating any possibility of sustained anything.
So anyway, go ahead.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, so I think that's the hardest problem, and I think it's one of the biggest problems we face. And I'm not going to sugarcoat it. It's really bad. And you know, even as you're describing, like yourself, about how you, you know, I think a great example of this, you know, I see people always sort of talking about the legacy media and like, how much it sucks. And particularly people who are now like, in the content creator game. And one of the ironies is if you have your position as an independent creator, you're actually much more tied to the, like, financial incentives of what you do than people in traditional legacy media.
Like, you know, someone who's a reporter at The Washington Post, their livelihood, their mortgage didn't depend on how many views they were getting. They had assignments, they did stories, they got written. And you were actually fairly insulated from these attention imperatives. Your job was — and there's all sorts of problems with that model and all kinds of issues.
David Roberts
Well, it used to be the point of that institution to protect people from those attentional imperatives. That was, indeed, that is what journalism is.
Chris Hayes
Exactly. Because, as I say in the book, attention is not a moral faculty. And that really is what it all comes down to. When you have this breakdown of attentional regimes, this war of all against all, this sort of hyper-distractibility, this inability to focus where attention swallows everything, what gets attention is not what's most important.
David Roberts
Or what's true.
Chris Hayes
Or what's true. Exactly. It's not what's most important, and it's not what's true.
David Roberts
As a matter of fact, truth, as you and I know to our great chagrin —
Chris Hayes
Is kind of boring sometimes.
David Roberts
Kind of boring, kind of frustrating. Kind of more complicated than you thought it was before you took a look.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, exactly. Like, people going around Los Angeles secretly lighting fires for some sinister motive is actually more interesting than just like, there were winds and they picked up embers.
David Roberts
I mean, Jewish space lasers, whatever else you might say about that, are quite interesting. You're going to pay attention if somebody brings them up.
Chris Hayes
So, I don't have a solution to that. But here's where I do actually feel genuine, not like forced, but genuine optimism. I think the feeling of claustrophobia that we're in a corridor and dissatisfaction around the specific form of attention capitalism right now is getting so ubiquitous and so intense and acute that I do think it's hitting some breaking point.
David Roberts
But, do people, I mean, the question I have about that is, are people accurately identifying the source of the angst they feel? Do you know what I mean? Like, to solve the problem, you've got to identify the real problem.
Chris Hayes
I don't know if they are yet. But I do think I have a kind of thousand flowers will bloom version of this where I think people are going to increasingly drop out of social media. And actually, you're seeing this in the numbers which are going down. I think that people are going to sort of hit some wall. I think that as the Internet gets less pleasant to be part of, and then like they're populating it with AI bots, which is the funniest thing I've ever seen. It's so funny to look at the modern Internet and be like, "The problem is we got too many people."
David Roberts
Yeah, like, what is the most denuded form of social attention that you could possibly imagine? Is it a robot saying your name? And yet, it works. People are falling in love with these things. People are having relationships with these things. It takes so little to activate that.
Chris Hayes
But I do think the rebellion is percolating, and there's a bunch of different ways it'll happen. Like at an individual level, I think in, you know, group levels. Like the sort of way that the Jonathan Haidt book has taken off in schools in terms of school and phone policy.
David Roberts
Yeah.
Chris Hayes
Which I think is just — it's crazy to me that some of this stuff wasn't being done before. Like, take the kids' phones so they don't have them in class, obviously.
David Roberts
But then, just to give some color to our dystopia, you get parents saying, "But what about when school shootings start?"
Chris Hayes
Yeah, I know that's...
David Roberts
"We need to be able to text one another for the school shootings." Oh, God.
Chris Hayes
But, but, but, I will say that there's been success there. To go back to a metaphor I used before, which I actually think is really useful. Well, there's two. Let me give two sources of hope. One is that there are these meme accounts that exist of like recipe books from the 70s and 80s that are like the grossest things you've ever seen.
David Roberts
Jello salads.
Chris Hayes
Jello salads, processed food casseroles. Right. And the reason they work is because they're kind of identifying a kind of low point dead end in the total takeover of all of American cuisine by the most like industrial, corporatized slop. People did start to rebel against it and a bunch of weirdos and freaks — and I say that with love — started farms and back to the land and opened natural food stores and green markets and farm-to-table dining and basically did completely alter the trajectory of American cuisine and American food culture. And that's not to say that we still don't have a million problems with it and sky-high rates of obesity and unbelievable amounts of processed industrial food.
But there was a resistance rebellion that created this entire alternate universe that then kind of moved into the mainstream.
David Roberts
Yeah, the food revolution in our lifetime has been wild. It's incredible. It's everywhere. Every small town now has a little coffee shop, whatever.
Chris Hayes
Totally. And the other example I think that's really useful is that we already in our lifetime have seen a corporate Internet defeated by an open Internet once. And people forget this, but the first version of the mass Internet were the walled gardens of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy. And the reason that AOL was able to buy Time Warner is that it was the most valued media company in the world at a certain point. And what happened was that model, which was completely corporate-controlled and you moved around where they wanted you to go, was destroyed by the open Internet.
You know, hilariously, partly because of Marc Andreessen creating a graphical user interface web browser called Netscape, that then made it possible that anyone could start a blog and you could fill in the little URL box. Anyone could be on the Internet and people could exchange. And that open Internet defeated, it genuinely defeated the corporate Internet. We have now gone through a consolidation when we're back in the period of the corporate.
David Roberts
Yes, we won that battle and then gave it back.
Chris Hayes
Won it and lost it, absolutely. But it doesn't mean it can't be won again. I really think that, like, that's another thing. Is that part of the rebellion you're seeing? Part of — I mean, even just something as silly as Bluesky, which is growing at a totally astronomical rate and is not like a nonprofit. It's, you know, it's also a corporation but it has the values of the open Internet in it. That is because people are actually seeking this out and voting with their feet a bit. And again, how does that accrete to a democratic republic and a public that's not so malformed as the one we have?
That, I genuinely do not know. But I do, to my core, think that we're at a kind of, like, nadir. We're at the, like, jello salad period of the Internet? I really do think that.
David Roberts
It's hard for me — I mean, I didn't come into this intending to sound like a DSA guy, but, you know, I come back to capitalism. Like, just if it were just the dynamics of attention playing out, like, that's how I think of the Old Internet. It's just like the quirkiest little weirdest things you could come across because they didn't need to maximize attention.
Chris Hayes
Yep.
David Roberts
Just needed to get a little bit. Like, you could attend to things that were sort of obscurely popular among groups. Like, that was what was so great about it. There's so much creativity and like —
Chris Hayes
Yes.
David Roberts
Part of what was beautiful about the early Internet is, you could just be like, "Oh, like, people are so clever. There's so many different kinds of people, and they are so clever."
Chris Hayes
And it made me think higher. It made me think, like, I was always blown away by how smart people are.
David Roberts
Yeah, and how funny they are.
Chris Hayes
How funny they are, how creative they are, what their skills and talents are, the things they can make. Like, I love that part of the Internet. I still to this day do.
David Roberts
They commodified it. Like, this is where I come back to capitalism. Once you commodify it, then you have to maximize it. Then you have to direct all your attention toward what gets the most. Not just some, right, a little bit. What gets the most attention. And what gets the most attention is shouting. Right. Like, what gets the most attention is just negativity and bitterness. And so, like, the Internet has become, like, so nasty. I don't know if you've been. I don't know if you've been back to Twitter recently or been back to X.
I mean, if you're out of it for a while and then you go back in, you're just like, "My God, what would it do to you to be in this day after day? Like, I used to live here. I can't believe it."
Chris Hayes
You know, one thought I had was I was thinking about this last election, and I was thinking about three elections. 1964, landslide for the incumbent. That's LBJ beating Goldwater. 1972, landslide for the incumbent. That's Nixon beating McGovern. 84, landslide for the incumbent. That's Reagan beating Mondale. And then you could also add 96, which is not a landslide, but Clinton basically cruises to victory in 96. Like, it's never really in doubt.
You know, and in all four of those, basically, they were. You know, people talk about "change versus more of the same" elections. People were just like, "Yeah, things are going well. Like, let's keep this going. This is going well." I just think it's impossible to produce a public right now that would feel that way. Totally impossible. And that's not even an — I'm not making an ideological point. I'm saying the information environment we live in, the attentional environment we live in is one of negativity.
David Roberts
And it cannot spread good news.
Chris Hayes
It cannot be the case that people are like, "You know what, things are going well."
David Roberts
Can't just say, "Biden set out to do X and he did it. Good job, Biden." Like, no one is allowed to say anything good about anybody. Michael Podhorzer made this point in one of his analyses last week. It's like, no political party in the US is capable of winning elections anymore. The other one loses, right? Like, people get more pissed off at the other one. So, as a final question before I let you go here, it seems to me like the signal malady of our modern life, from which all these others derive, is the loss of trust.
And you and I know we've talked about social trust and how important social trust is for a society to persist, to stay, much less stay healthy. And it seems like what's happened is we've lost trust in all our institutions, right? This is in all the data. We've lost trust in one institution after another. We've lost trust in any gatekeepers. So, what we have in place of gatekeepers now are algorithms run on capitalist logic. And that's what we're trusting in place of gatekeepers. Like, as you say, because information is infinite and attention is finite by definition, all human beings in that context are dependent on filters of some kind.
You have to have some kind. You're trusting some filter, whether you know it or not. And if you decided that "The MSM is full of crap and politicians are all lying and blah, blah, blah," you're going to trust instead some algorithm written by Silicon Valley bros. It's not like you're not trusting someone. You've just put your trust in what seems to me the worst possible place for it. So, I wonder a) like, do you think the attention dilemma is connected to the trust dilemma? And I guess my second question, which is too big to answer on any podcast, it's just like, do you see any, like, I can see people like you say, finding their attentional farmers markets, as you put it right there, little respites I can imagine, especially affluent people, right?
Like, finding shelter from this. But what I have trouble envisioning is the redevelopment of some kind of social trust, redeveloping institutions that we charge with the task of separating what's true from what's not true. You know, like science, journalism. Do you, is it just an individualist, everybody on their own world from now on?
Chris Hayes
No, I think we're going to find each other again, I really do. I know that sounds a little hippie, but I do. And I think partly that's because the non-commercial Internet defeated the commercial Internet once and is going to do it again. Partly because I think that actually I have a view of the possibility of human cooperation that's informed by my upbringing in the left. That is, even if battered and bruised, sort of undeterred. Which is that I think people can collectively do amazing things. And I think that that's going to involve activism.
Like, there's people, you know, it's going to have to be a thing that people mobilize for and really view as an issue, as something they are committed to. There's this thing called the Strother School of Radical Attention, some really interesting people coming out—
David Roberts
Don't you worry, though, that like young people raised in this environment, which makes it so difficult to sustain attention, and which makes this. That feeling of ease is everywhere. That's what I think about my kids. Like, yeah, they've just never run into any kind of friction ever, anywhere. But like, doing anything worthwhile, making any friendship that's worthwhile, creating anything that's worth doing requires tolerating some friction. And it just seems like that's what we've designed out of lives now.
Chris Hayes
Yeah, and I think that people, I don't know where this will end up, but I do think that people are going to find their way back to it or invent some new version of it. And I also think ultimately we are going to regulate this one way or the other. It could be good or bad. I think a lot of these companies need to be broken up. I think they're too big. I think they control too much. But like, you know, we've gone from oligarchy as a kind of metaphor we all use to like the literal version, like the genuine literal version where it's like there's half a dozen billionaires and they're close to the like personalist leader.
David Roberts
Yeah, we went from Soros as a metaphor to like a literal dude literally doing all the things that they ever said George Soros was doing.
Chris Hayes
So, I think there's going to be mobilization and activism, and political pressure on this. And I think people are going to do it in a million different ways. Voting with their feet, as consumers, as political actors, in groups of other people, as civic actors creating civic non-commercial spaces, and also as citizens working on their government. But I do think, like, it feels like a breaking point to me and that's the only good news I have because everyone feels it. Everyone feels it. They really do. Like, in the same way that, when you read accounts of people walking around London in 1890, and they're like, "Oh, my God, this is unbearable."
Literally, it's like, soot, black skies, and cholera in the water, and sewage everywhere. This is the most disgusting place on Earth. Something must be done.
David Roberts
I thought your comparison of pollution to spam, or your sort of analogy, is very good. Like, spam is basically the newest form of pollution, and we've not yet really developed a regime to control it.
Chris Hayes
And so I think when you, yeah, when you go back and you. You think about the conditions that brought about so much that altered the trajectory of industrial capitalism, its worst excesses, I feel like the attentional capitalism we're living right now, like, it feels to me a little like that person writing there about visiting London in the 1890s. You know, we're just like, this is a disgusting place to be. Like, how long can this go on? And I think we're there, and I think that's the first step to, like, creating something new.
David Roberts
Yeah, I mean, I guess at some point people are gonna start thinking, "You know, it's cool that I'm allowed to think whatever's happening is whatever I want to happen, but it would also be cool to know what's really happening."
You know, I'm just waiting for, like, a new generation to be like, "You know what? Like, what's really going on, though?" Like, I'm tired of feeling like I'm getting a — like, being on the Internet is like getting a handjob in a back alley, you know, like someone who's just, like, "Giving you whatever you want," like, at the immediate. Like, you get nothing, you know, you come away feeling kind of dirty. I keep waiting for people to be like, I want, I miss developing knowledge over time and developing skills over time and valuing skills and knowledge that were developed over time.
And just the — I keep coming back to Buddhism, as you did in the book, as a sort of corrective to all this. But we could talk about this forever. Fascinating book. I appreciate you. I appreciate your work. I appreciate you somehow keeping open eyes and strong values despite the insane contexts in which you work. So thanks for coming on and thanks for the book.
Chris Hayes
Thanks, man. I really had a great time.
David Roberts
Thank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially, to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes me and my guests sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review, or telling a friend about Volts. Or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time.
