What The Sirens Call Teaches Us About the Economy of Our Attention

Here are some quotes from the book"Siren's Call" - Chris Hays, that made me think.

I. Attention, Distraction & the Restless Mind

Is the development of a global, ubiquitous, chronically connected social media world more like comic books or cigarettes?
Humankind Has Now spent more time playing Call of Duty than has existed on earth.
We've got three main aspects of attention in our working model: involuntary attention, voluntary attention, and social attention.
The root of it, he proposes, is an aspect of the human condition upon which so much today depends: the restlessness of our minds, the craving for diversion.
The more diversion we have access to, the more diversion we crave. The more diversion we need, the more quickly we become bored.
In a distracted age, focus is power, and to focus relentlessly on a topic is to convey its importance.

Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; quite the contrary, it is a truly divine way of life, so long as one is not bored.
Winning as an internal battle with boredom is one of the most difficult and necessary parts of the practice of Buddhist meditation.
Principle of limitation, which is the only saving one in the world. The more you limit yourself, the more resourceful you become.

Nothing is more dehumanizing than the absence of human companionship.
Having a teenage daughter is like having an office crush. "You're thinking about them a lot more than they're thinking about you.
Without gossip, there would be no society. Gossip is what makes human society as we know it possible.
A thousand kind words from strangers will bounce off you, while a single harsh criticism will linger.
We crave attention as a means to an end, but when starved, we take it as an end in and of itself.
Man will risk his biological life to satisfy his non-biological desire.

Human work has always existed, but wage labor is a creation of industrial capitalism. Human attention has always existed, but "clicks", "content", "engagement", and "eyeballs" are creations of attention capitalism. And to be reduced to a wage or an eyeball is to find oneself alienated from some part of oneself.
One way of defining culture is simply what everyone pays attention to, and what they pay attention to together.
There are enormous consequences to where public attention flows.

Americans no longer talk to each other; they entertain each other. They don't exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials.
Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.
conflict entrepreneurs to describe people who thrive on drama and discord.

There are many sociological and psychological reasons why people adhere to conspiracy theories. For one, it feels much better to believe things that confirm your priors than to have to wrestle with new facts that force you to revise. Conspiracy theories also offer their adherents the thrill of secret knowledge.
People attempting to go viral don't have to worry about what kind of reputation they will build up iteratively over time. They're just looking to hit the attentional jackpot and then move on to the next pull of the slot machine lever.

While it takes just as long to fly across the Atlantic as it did in 1970, computers have gotten faster.
Depending on various estimates, somewhere between 50 and 90 percent of all daily email traffic in the entire world is spam.
In 2023, the American Dialect Society named "enshittification" as its word of the year. The term was coined by tech theorist and early blogger Cory Doctorow to describe the process by which platforms go from thriving to dying. "First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.

In sum, students who spend more time staring at their phones do worse in school, distract other students around them, and feel worse about their lives.

If we look back to the labor movements of the nineteenth century, there were two particularly rudimentary and fundamental forms of regulation that they came to advocate: a ban on child labor and limitations on total hours worked. Neither of these restrictions seemed obvious and commonsense at the time. What if we viewed attention in similar terms?

Happy Reading !!!