Review: Chris Hayes on the war for our attention

In his new book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, Chris Hayes argues that our attention is not just the most fundamental human need; it is also our most important resource. The commodification of attention represents the dawn of a new era, defined by the effort to access our interior lives and influence our social lives. As Hayes puts it, “Every single aspect of human life across the broadest categories of human organization is being reoriented around the pursuit of attention.” Everything is now a “war for attention” in a moment when information is abundant and our attention spans are more limited. 

Hayes’s book is clear and easy to read, written in the conversational tone of a journalist reporting on what he’s read from philosophers, cultural anthropologists and psychologists. He draws from his own experiences, including hosting a news show on MSNBC, where grabbing and holding the attention of his audience is a top priority. 

He writes with concern about the latest innovations in attention capture, like how video games and social media platforms provide constant stimuli and continuous interruption, turning our phones into addictive slot machines that are incessantly summoning our attention. Odysseus only had to resist the Sirens’ call once; today, screens compete for our attention every waking second. 

Hayes is careful not to contribute to the moral panic that often arises in response to new technological advances. At various points in the book, he observes how everything from comic books to TVs to the Sony Walkman set off a flurry of hand-wringing. 

On the other hand, while these historical trends provide some perspective today, there is also the risk of a false equivalence given that social media is designed to create psychological cravings, to say nothing of the impact on our interior lives, relationships, social norms and institutions. We have heard plenty about the fallout: the inability to focus; shrinking attention spans; endless distraction; higher rates of loneliness and isolation, anxiety and depression; vicious interactions shielded by anonymous avatars; the normalization of disrespect and callousness; and bots, misinformation and generative artificial intelligence, making it harder to distinguish between truth and deception.

Citing Kierkegaard, who wrote that boredom is the “root of all evil” in 1843, Hayes suggests that screens are the latest tool used to cope with the existential and spiritual “dis-ease” that results from a nonstop exposure to stimulation and need for diversion:

The fundamental condition we’re caught in and in many cases rebelling against is older than we realize… [T]he specific kind of mental restlessness we label boredom is the product of industrial modernity. This basic form of human civilization—jobs we work to earn money to buy what we want and need—generates ever more stimulus, which ratchets up our attentional needs, as it also provides hours of empty leisure time to fill for some and endless monotonous work for others.

St. Augustine insisted that human restlessness is a gift, since it keeps us searching for God (as nothing else will satiate our deepest desires), although others are not as confident. Nearly 50 years ago, Richard Foster lamented that “superficiality is the curse of our age.” Have things only gotten worse thanks to the iPhone?

Hayes makes his strongest argument in Chapter Five, using Karl Marx’s critique that capitalism commodifies labor and causes workers to experience estrangement. As Marx sees it, when labor is standardized (Hayes uses the example of a cobbler making shoes as compared with shoes made on an assembly line), there is both a subjective experience of alienation (something I do is now being de-individualized, or even dehumanized, as is the case in exploitative working conditions) and an objective experience of alienation (the value of my labor shifts from me to the owner, who can pay anyone a wage for the desired labor). Hayes claims that today we’re experiencing “attention capitalism,” such that our attention has been commodified. Where we direct our focus has been abstracted into “clicks,” “engagement” or mere “eyeballs,” and “to be reduced to a wage or an eyeball is to find oneself alienated from some part of oneself.” 

The result, as Hayes contends, is that we feel “our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will. This comes from the sophisticated development of attention markets, which have figured out ways to extract and commodify more and more of our attention, more and more efficiently.” If things are bad now, they are likely to get even worse, since competition for attention will produce even more deceptive forms of attention extraction. 

There are also urgent economic, environmental and political problems arising from the mounting pressures of commercial attention capture. For this reason, it is curious that Hayes largely sidesteps the moral valence to these trends. He claims that “[u]nlike love or recognition, attention is value neutral. It can be positive or negative; it can be the basis for adoration or revulsion.” He then explains how Donald Trump leveraged attention in order to win the White House, without assigning any responsibility to media outlets for how they failed to hold him accountable for his serial dishonesty, inflammatory speech (especially when it fueled support from white supremacists and Christian nationalists), record of sexual harassment and assault, numerous business failures and tax evasion. 

I was surprised to find that Hayes does not distinguish among the intentions, circumstances or desired outcomes behind how people use their attention. It is easy enough to see that attention can be differentiated by whether it is receptive and respectful as opposed to derisive, lustful or even threatening. As a Catholic moral theologian, I have been interested in the moral impact of our digital devices for some time. The church’s role as the moral guardian of society requires more prophetic attention to these trends, described by Hayes as “attentional warlordism” lacking rules or structures. 

What we permit and prioritize are always moral choices. The person who is driving a car while also scrolling through a newsfeed has misdirected his or her attention and endangered other drivers, passengers and any pedestrians in the area. We fail in our moral duties to one another if we see this and shrug or just hope the driver “stays in their lane.” Others are impacted by our choices just as we are constantly impacted by others’ choices; these decisions are rarely “value neutral.”

The moral dimension of the life we share together is largely absent from this book, which is written predominantly through a lens of individualism. Hayes writes as if his own experience of attention and alienation is universal, without considering how this phenomenon affects people differently because of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, age, education, physical or cognitive ability, or religion. He does not focus on how the attention age impacts our most intimate ties, where the most profound formation takes place, as seen in the declining emotional health of children neglected by their parents’ screen time, or how phones can derail our romantic relationships. 

When Americans scroll through their phones and see news of another mass shooting or images from bombings in Ukraine or Gaza, these realities are conflated with an oversaturation of violence in media and entertainment, which can desensitize us to cruelty and injustice, letting us scroll past content that otherwise might prick our conscience, move us with compassion and urge us to act courageously in solidarity with those who are suffering. 

In one promising section, Hayes notes that “[i]f attention is the substance of life, then the question of what we pay attention to is the question of what our lives will be. And here we come to a foundational question that is far harder to answer than we might like it to be. What do we want to pay attention to?” This is the question that St. Augustine wrestled with 1,600 years ago, insisting that we become what we love. What we love, we give our attention to; what we pay attention to shapes our desires. A community is united by shared love held in common; the church’s role is to help people properly order their desires. 

Hayes offers his own answer to this essential question, assuming others would answer in a similar way: “I would focus on family, friends, and loved ones, my hobbies and interests, things that brought me joy, personal projects…that bring me satisfaction.” But this answer leaves no room for discernment, no sense of altruism or the common good; it is just basic self-interest. If conscience means “to know together,” then it would benefit us to engage each other in dialogue about what we want to pay attention to, how that compares to what we actually give our attention to, and what we can and should do about that. 

Hayes contends that boredom is making us lose sight of what really matters. Maybe the problem is not the lack of substance but being overwhelmed by all the endless possibilities we face. I’m reminded of the line by the Dutch writer Corrie ten Boom: “If the devil can’t make you bad, he’ll make you busy.” It’s not enough to become a deep or purposeful person; we must cultivate the discipline of taking a long, loving look at the real. This contemplative practice helps us see as God sees, with eyes of love—and since the effect of love is union, it can restore us to right relationship with God, ourselves and one another. The task of the church today—and an urgent ministry in so many homes, neighborhoods, schools and places of work—is to help people learn how to increase our capacity for loving awareness. 

Sin is nothing new, whether it stems from staring at screens or the coding of the software behind them. The church has a rich tradition of contemplative practices that can help individuals and communities develop a spiritual immunity—or resource—to combat temptation. 

Odysseus resisted the Sirens’ call by stuffing wax in his ears and being tied to the mast of his ship. In the Christian moral life, even better than trying to control or override our impulses, we can recondition our attention to what really matters: loving well and being loved well. There may be countless Sirens trying to coerce our attention from us, but in every moment we get to decide where we look, how we look and to what end or goal.

This article appears in December 2025.

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