On ‘Attention Capitalism’

Chris Hayes’s ‘The Sirens’ Call’ and the limits of tech criticism

John William Waterhouse / Public Domain

I haven’t followed Chris Hayes’s career all that closely, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen his show, but my general prejudices about MSNBC hosts didn’t lead me to expect all that much when I got a review copy of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. But somewhat to my surprise, it’s one of the more insightful recent works of media and tech criticism I’ve encountered, and a good companion to Nicholas Carr’s Superbloom, which I wrote about previously on this site.

Hayes’s book, as I read it, makes a novel contribution to the political economy of media. As he states his thesis, “Attention is a strange kind of commodity, a ‘fictitious commodity,’ in Polanyi’s words. And the process of its commodification, similar, to, say, wage labor, transforms an ineffable subjective experience of the world into a ‘mere’ commodity with a price.” There are two key points here. The first is that attention, and not information, is the core commodity of the information age. This is because the effect of our technologies has been to create a superabundance of information (a superbloom, to use Carr’s term), which in turn renders the intrinsic scarcity of attention even more acute. (The supply of attention doesn’t increase along with the exponential growth of demand for it from multiplying media channels and their ever-expanding glut of content.)

The second point is that attention—in a manner, per Hayes, analogous to labor—resists this commodification because its fundamental nature is qualitative, not quantitative. For attention to become the basis of an economic system—what Hayes calls “attention capitalism”—is for its value to be expressed as what Marxists call exchange value, i.e. a price can be put on particular units of it, it can be bought, sold, bundled, traded, and so on. This means the functioning of our society and economy depends on suppressing the essential nature of attention as, as Hayes puts it, “an ineffable subjective experience of the world.” The result is alienation: the radical estrangement of a core part of our human essence. This closely resembles, in Hayes’s account, what Marx argued happened when labor—for him, the core attribute of human species-being—became wage labor.

As his title indicates, Hayes’s central metaphor for the media technologies that capture and commodify our attention is the siren. (In this, he follows Jaron Lanier, who in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future? memorably referred to digital platforms that seize and monetize our attention and data as “siren servers.”) He begins the book by recalling the connection between the two main uses of the term: the mythic temptresses of the Odyssey, and the noise-generating devices placed atop police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks. “The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape,” as Hayes writes, “both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens’ call.” What is at stake, in other words, is a loss of our fundamental subjective autonomy.

Hayes’s analogy between labor and attention leads directly to his proposed solutions, or at least responses. “In both cases,” he writes with reference to labor and attention, “something within us, intimate to us and possessed by us was transformed, through a series of technological, legal, and market innovations, into a commodity that was extracted from us at a price.” In the case of labor, unions and reformist parties and movements beginning in the 19th century organized around demands like limiting the number of hours that employers could require workers to be on the job, banning child labor, and introducing various workplace rights and protections. Hayes sees an analogy to the latter in legislative attempts already underway to limit social media access for children, and wonders about the viability of something far more ambitious: a “legislated hard cap on, for instance, the number of hours of screen time on our phones.”

As he acknowledges, any such proposal will be objected to by many across the political spectrum—even those who share the book’s concerns—as a limitation on freedom. As I argued previously in relation to Carr’s book, regulations on social media often seem more internally coherent when proposed by social conservatives, as has often been the case with recent laws limiting children’s app use (which Hayes doesn’t acknowledge). For the traditionalist right, freedoms are always seen as coming at the cost of other positive social goods. Conversely, modern progressives have usually emphasized free choice, and declined to offer a universally applicable substantive account of the good. In other words, if you find it lamentable that people spend nine hours a day glued to their phone screens, who possesses the moral authority to tell them what might be a better use of their time? It’s a considerably easier question for conservatives to answer.

To this extent, my critique of the limits of Carr’s tech criticism also applies to Hayes:

the outlook he evinces in all of his writing is that of a secular liberal disillusioned with where technological and material progress has taken us; roughly the same is also true of most of the other prominent tech critics mentioned thus far. The basic problem all of them face is that their operative ethics, metaphysics, and ontology all tell them that it is ultimately up to individuals to make their own determinations about what they will define as “good.” If the majority of the public, as Carr concludes, have simply opted for the infinite feed of digitized information as their version of the Good, who is he to begrudge them their choice?

In indirect support of this conclusion, when Hayes wants to give an example of the substantive goods the sirens are pulling us away from, he falls back on a conservative one—the same one highlighted in the “technology agenda for the right” document I looked at alongside Carr: the family. Hayes begins the book with an image of him sitting on the couch with his young daughter, struggling to avoid being pulled away by phone notifications; he ends it with an optimistic image of collective humanity “making our way back home to the people we love, the sound of the sirens safely in the distance.”

However, I’d also offer a critique of Hayes from the left—albeit one that ends up being consonant with the conservative approach. His central metaphor of the siren is also famously a leitmotif of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which among other things is an early work of media criticism in the same lineage that Hayes has joined (especially the final section, “The Culture Industry”). For them, the self-bound Odysseus, who figures out how to hear the call of the Sirens without succumbing to his own destruction, is the prototype of the rational, self-possessed bourgeois subject, who subjugates passion to reason and subdues the Siren song by turning it into something like art: “In primitive bourgeois history,” they write, “it is neutralized to become merely the wistful longing of the passer-by.”

The problem, according to Dialectic of Enlightenment, is that the immense success of bourgeois rationality at subjugating passion, fate, and necessity—all allegorized in the triumph of Odysseus over the Sirens—has become the basis of a logic of total domination. As more of the forces of nature once seen as uncontrollable—whether external threats or internal passions—come under the control of the rational bourgeois subject, he continues to expand the scope of application of his burgeoning techniques of calculation, prediction, and control, which expand his knowledge and his freedom. But eventually, these techniques are turned on the human subject itself, not least in the form of technologically enabled mass propaganda, which targets the vulnerabilities that lead men less cunning than Odysseus to ruin. This is what Horkheimer and Adorno refer to, in their “Culture Industry” chapter, as “enlightenment as mass deception.”

The implication of this connection is that the crisis Hayes is describing is a far more profound one than he acknowledges: It is, simply put, the crisis of the bourgeois subject, which was already of central concern to thinkers on the left a century ago. It isn’t clear, in this sense, that “attention capitalism” is particularly distinct in the problems it poses to human freedom than the eras of capitalist development that preceded it. In the closing of the book, Hayes returns to the motifs he has drawn from the Odyssey, imagining us “as liberated souls, unlashed from the mast, our ears unplugged and open, listening to the lapping of the waves.” It is hard to imagine that age-verification for social media mandatory limits on screentime will bring about this utopian scenario, because it speaks to far deeper questions about the self-undoing of human freedom, a central concern of the Frankfurt School long before the internet, and not one to which they believed the expansion of the regulatory state could provide a remotely satisfactory answer.

This brings us back to Carr’s argument that, in effect, “the fault is in ourselves”—that no regulation or design hack will change the fact that people deeply want what the sirens of technological media offer, and it is hard to imagine that changing. The question therefore becomes whether it is still possible to form human subjects who want other things and have the fortitude of mind and self-possession to pursue them. The answer here may turn out to be a conservative one. Perhaps, as Christopher Lasch came to conclude partly under the influence of Horkheimer, the institution of the family is—or at least could be—“the last defense of a rich and autonomous inner life against the encroachments of the mass society.” It isn’t hard to find this idea implied in passages in Hayes’s book, in which family life appears as a counterweight to “attention capitalism.” I hope he and other liberal tech critics might address it more directly at some point.

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