Attention is one of the most valuable and contested resources of our time. Everywhere we turn, something is demanding it. From the relentless pull of social media to billion-dollar industries designed to keep us hooked, our focus is no longer just ours to control. It’s a battleground, and major corporations are spending unfathomable amounts to capture, shape, and profit from it.

The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource discusses the attention economy, exploring how our ability to focus has been reshaped by technology, markets, and social forces. Christopher L. Hayes makes a bold comparison: what is happening to attention today is eerily similar to what happened to labor in the 19th century. Just as industrial capitalism turned labor into a commodity—something that could be bought, sold, and traded—modern capitalism has done the same with attention. What was once an intimate, personal part of our lives has been transformed into a product that is extracted, measured, and monetized, often leading to a deep sense of alienation from ourselves.

The book breaks attention down into three types: voluntary attention, involuntary attention, and social attention. While all three are discussed, the main focus is on social attention, how our need for recognition and validation drives much of modern online behavior. However, I felt that the book didn’t fully explore why humans crave social attention as deeply as we do. Other books like Superbloom or The Chaos Machine provide more compelling insights into this aspect of human psychology.

Still, I love how the book weaves in the Hayes’ own perspective, particularly through the lens of his experience as a news anchor. These personal insights add a layer of depth, making the analysis feel more grounded and reflective rather than purely academic.

The Sirens’ Call is a book for anyone curious about the modern attention economy and how it shapes our daily lives. While it may not have fully answered every question I had, it does an excellent job of framing attention as a resource under siege and why reclaiming it is more important than ever.

Summary

How Our Attention Became the Ultimate Battleground

In ancient myths, sirens lured sailors to their doom with irresistible songs. Today, sirens still command our attention. Only now, they blare from city streets and digital screens alike, pulling us in against our will. The relentless wail isn’t just noise; it’s a symbol of our reality, where distraction is no longer a momentary lapse but a permanent state of being.

To exist in the modern world, both online and off, is to struggle endlessly, like Odysseus lashed to his mast, resisting the pull of forces vying for control of our minds. From social media to advertising, from corporations to bad actors, an invisible tug-of-war is waged over our focus, shaping how we think, feel, and behave.

At the heart of this struggle is a collision between human nature and corporate strategy. Our deepest instincts make us vulnerable to stimulation, novelty, and reward. Meanwhile, some of the most powerful companies on Earth invest billions to refine the perfect hooks, learning what we crave and how to monetize it. To us, our attention is our essence, the fabric of our thoughts and identity. To those seeking to capture it, attention is a resource.

How Our Focus Became the World’s Most Valuable Commodity

Attention is the very essence of life. What we focus on shapes our experiences, our relationships, and even our sense of self. But in the modern world, attention is no longer just a personal resource; it’s a commodity, something to be seized, bought, and sold.

Just as industrial capitalism transformed labor into a marketable asset, our digital age has done the same with attention. Karl Marx once argued that industrial capitalism alienated people from their labor. What was once an intimate expression of effort and creativity became a product for someone else’s profit. The same is now true for attention. The ability to direct our own focus, once deeply personal, is now the target of billion-dollar industries designed to extract and monetize it.

And it’s not just the commercial world that runs on attention. Politics, social life, and public discourse are all driven by what captures the collective focus. The rise of mass media meant that public opinion became more powerful than ever, shaped largely by which topics and candidates made it into the public eye. Even in 1925, critic Walter Lippmann observed that the sheer number of issues demanding a citizen’s attention was overwhelming, even for the most informed. By 1950, Pope Pius XII warned that society’s future depended on balancing the power of mass communication with individuals’ ability to process it.

Decades later, media theorist Neil Postman painted a grim picture of a society where discourse had devolved from meaningful debate into a spectacle. “Americans no longer talk to each other,” he wrote. “They entertain each other.” Arguments were replaced with slogans, critical thought with celebrity endorsements.

The most alarming part is attention can be extracted from us before we even realize it, before our conscious minds have a chance to resist. This is the true power of a siren’s call: it bypasses reason and takes hold before we can say no.

Persuasion, argument, and information, as the traditional tools of influence, are now secondary. What matters most is the ability to capture attention first. Everything has become a battle for it: businesses fight for consumer attention, politicians fight for voter attention, parents fight for their children’s attention. And in this never-ending war, we are all exhausted.

Attention exists to solve a problem: how to navigate an overwhelming flood of information. Information is infinite, but attention is not. And in a world that constantly demands more of it, our most precious resource is slipping through our fingers.

The Three Types of Attention That Shape Our Lives

Not all attention is the same. In fact, it operates in three distinct ways. Some within our control, some beyond it, and some deeply embedded in our social world. Understanding these three aspects of attention helps explain how we focus, why we get distracted, and how our interactions with others shape our sense of self.

1. Voluntary Attention: The Power to Choose Focus

This is the attention we control, the conscious decision to direct our focus toward something. Like a spotlight, voluntary attention illuminates one thing while leaving everything else in the shadows. It’s what allows us to concentrate on a book, solve a problem, or have a meaningful conversation. But in a world filled with distractions, holding onto voluntary attention has become harder than ever.

2. Involuntary Attention: The Mind’s Built-In Alarm System

While we consciously focus on one thing, another form of attention is always running in the background: involuntary attention. This is the part of our brain that scans the environment for danger, unexpected changes, or anything that demands an immediate response. A loud noise, a flashing notification, or someone calling our name. All of these trigger involuntary attention, pulling us away from whatever we were doing. It’s a survival mechanism, but in today’s hyper-stimulating world, it often works against us, hijacking our focus before we even realize it.

3. Social Attention: The Glue of Human Connection

Attention is something we give and take. Being the object of others’ attention is a fundamental part of human experience, shaping our relationships, self-worth, and place in society. At the same time, we also direct our attention toward others, forming connections through the shared act of paying attention. This reciprocity, giving and receiving attention, is the invisible force that holds social bonds together, from friendships to entire communities.

In a world where attention is constantly under siege, recognizing these three types helps us understand not just how we focus, but how our relationships, emotions, and sense of identity are shaped by the way we direct and receive attention.

The Slot Machine Model, How Social Media Hacks Your Attention

In the age of digital distraction, the most powerful attention-harvesting model isn’t built on choice or depth. It’s built on compulsion. The “slot machine model” has become the dominant force behind platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok. Their core design, the infinite scrolling feed, mirrors the mechanics of a slot machine: an endless loop of unpredictable rewards that keeps users hooked. You pull the lever (scroll), anticipate the next result, and repeat, again and again.

This model doesn’t require deep engagement to work. It thrives on constant stimulation, interruption, and ease. All designed to keep us from looking away. Former Google employee Tristan Harris warns that our natural need for social approval is now controlled by tech companies. The likes, comments, and notifications we crave aren’t just incidental; they’re engineered hooks that keep us coming back.

At its core, modern attention extraction follows a simple formula: hail, grab, and hold. Each step aligns with the three fundamental types of attention (voluntary, involuntary, and social) making this method both deeply effective and incredibly difficult to resist. In a world where our focus is constantly under siege, recognizing these tactics is the first step in reclaiming control over our own attention.

How the Attention Economy Fragments Our Sense of Self

Alienation is the feeling that something intrinsic to us—something that should be ours—has become foreign, distant, or even hostile. It’s a sense of fragmentation, a disconnection from the whole. This feeling has long existed, but in today’s attention economy, it has taken on a new and insidious form.

Karl Marx saw alienation as the defining condition of capitalism. Under industrial capitalism, work was broken down into repetitive, mechanical tasks, stripping labor of individuality and reducing workers to interchangeable units of production. Once labor became a commodity, it lost its connection to the worker’s identity, turning human effort into an economic instrument rather than an expression of skill or creativity.

The modern attention economy follows the same pattern. Just as industrial capitalism commodified labor, today’s digital landscape has commodified attention. Our focus is no longer just a personal resource. It becomes a product that can be measured, auctioned, and sold in real-time. Every second of our gaze, every click, every moment of engagement is priced and traded in sophisticated algorithmic marketplaces. What was once simply human attention is now repackaged as “clicks,” “content,” and “eyeballs.” This is a transformation as profound as the shift from labor to wage work.

In a world where our focus is constantly captured, processed, and resold, we risk something even deeper than distraction. We risk losing the very “physical, psychological, and moral entity” of ourselves, piece by piece, click by click.

My Favorite Bits

It is not an exaggeration to say that the future of modern society and the stability of its inner life depend in large part on the maintenance of an equilibrium between the strength of the techniques of communication and the capacity of the individual’s own reaction.

Pope Pius

---

Author: Christopher L. Hayes

Publication date: 28 January 2025

Number of pages: 336 pages

---