How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
November 11, 2024
In this expansive account, MSNBC host Hayes (A Colony in a Nation) argues that attention is the most valuable and exploited resource in the world today. Opening with Homer’s vivid image of Odysseus strapped to his ship’s mast to avoid the sirens’ alluring song, Hayes portrays the modern economy as a battle of wills between individuals’ private psyches and global powers that usurp attention to “command fortunes, win elections, and topple regimes.” Casting a wide net that encompasses philosophers, media theorists, psychologists, and classic literature—from Plato, Kierkegaard, and Marx to David Foster Wallace and Arthur Miller—Hayes unpacks how attention is both a force integral to survival and a resource so sought after that it has become like “gold in a stream, oil in a rock.” Some of the most relatable and amusing anecdotes come from his own life—like his admission that he has devoured “hours of videos of carpet cleaners patiently, thoroughly, lovingly shampooing old dirty rugs.” Hayes’s final thoughts are shrewd if a bit diffuse: he lauds the group chat as “the only truly noncommercial space we have today,” pinpoints Donald Trump and Elon Musk as some of the world’s biggest attention-grabbers, and suggests the (rather unlikely) possibility of “a mandatory, legislated hard cap on” daily screen time. The result is a savvy, if somewhat free-form, meditation on the modern attention economy.
