Overview

An Instant #1 New York Times BestsellerFrom the New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society""An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics."" --New York Times""Brilliant book... Reading it has made me change the way I work and think.""--Rachel MaddowWe all feel it--the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they're us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. Something has changed utterly: for most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, ""With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade."" Hayes argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens' Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, ""Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human."" The Sirens' Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.

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""A timely guide that's not just about the attention industry that social media is consuming. He also explains the impact that the fight for attention is having on the consumers themselves."" -- ""Associated Press"" ""An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics."" -- ""New York Times"" ""An intelligent, forward-looking analysis of our increasing inability to stay focused."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews"" ""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.'"" -- ""Publishers Weekly"" ""Reminds readers that the reclamation of attention is both a paramount personal challenge--one that calls us to inhabit moments more fully and resist the pull of fragmentation--and an essential societal endeavor. This book deserves yours."" -- ""American Prospect"" ""This book is Hayes's attempt at sounding the alarm, one befitting a great fire, to remind us what's at stake."" -- ""Washington Post""

Author Information

Chris Hayes is the Emmy Award-winning host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the New York Times bestselling author of A Colony in a Nation and Twilight of the Elites. Chris Hayes is the Emmy Award-winning host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the New York Times bestselling author of A Colony in a Nation and Twilight of the Elites.

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