Attention, Distraction, Social Media, and Trump (Interview with Chris Hayes)

Chronogram, Jan. 30, 2025

Hey, over here! Yes, you! Listen up. MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes has a new book out, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, which is very much worth your time and—well, your attention. The book examines how the fracking of our minds and the commodification of attention has led to widespread distraction and alienation, undermined our mental health, discombobulated our souls, and shredded the fabric of society. Every page of the book has some insight, anecdote, disclosure, or thought experiment that provokes reflection about how we got to this point and how we can start to reverse track. Hayes will speak about The Sirens’ Call at the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie at 7pm.

Richard Kreitner: This topic is something of a departure from your previous books, Twilight of the Elites and A Colony in a Nation, both of which were more overtly political. This one seems a bit more steeped in philosophy, which you studied as an undergraduate.

Chris Hayes: You’re right that this is a more philosophical book than a political one, and writing it in that framework was a great joy. It’s such a different approach compared to the day-to-day churn of the news cycle. I really enjoyed all the reading I did for the book, going back to thinkers like Kierkegaard, Pascal, and Sartre—writers I hadn’t read in forever. That exploration was one of the joys of writing the book.

While it started as a book about attention, it ended up being about what it means to be human under certain conditions of modernity. What’s interesting to me is how it captures things that are specific to this age while also touching on aspects of the human condition that are timeless.

How has your own experience hosting a TV show for over a decade shaped how you think about the problem of attention in the modern age?

I compare it to the dual mandate that the Federal Reserve has: They need to keep inflation low and unemployment low, yet these goals are often in tension with each other. For me, navigating this dual mandate is about balancing the need to keep the audience’s attention with pursuing stories that I believe are essential for democratic citizens to know about. The fact that these two imperatives often conflict has been the defining dilemma and professional struggle of my life. In some ways, that’s the part of the book that feels closest to the bone.

Has it gone the other way as well—has working on the book, thinking and writing about attention, shaped your approach to your job as a TV host?

We’re in a kind of “caterpillar in the chrysalis” phase right now. I’m definitely asking myself a lot of questions about what this next chapter looks like for the show. I don’t have the answers yet, but the combination of now covering Trump for the second time, but in what feels like a very different context, and writing the book, has me wishing I had more settled answers. I’m trying to work through how it’s going to be different.

One thing I think we have to maintain—which was a real challenge the first time around—is modulation. You can’t turn the volume up to 10 and leave it there, because it eventually just sounds like 5. You have to be able to distinguish between a story that’s corrupt but maybe humorously so, a story that’s truly messed up, and one that’s extremely, extremely messed up and dangerous. We did a decent job the first time around, where we left room on the volume dial, and that’s something to carry through.

How does thinking about attention as the defining resource of our time help explain the rise of Donald Trump?

Trump has, for deeply personal reasons, a genuine sense of brokenness in him. And his formation in the New York tabloid world gives him a visceral sense that attention is the most important thing in the world. It’s not necessarily born of analysis but instinct—he has a sort of feral genius for it.

I think his big innovation is that, in a world where attention is more important than ever and competition is fiercer than ever, getting attention by any means necessary is incredibly valuable. That was his breakthrough. Politicians before him didn’t want negative attention; they courted positive attention and avoided actions that would generate negative press. They did so because they believed that people needed to like them in order to vote for them. Trump’s insight was that, because attention is so important and so fiercely fought over, it’s actually extremely useful to grab people’s attention—even if it’s negative.

We’re now seeing the 2.0 version of him in Elon Musk, who has a similar psychological void and a similar set of insights to Trump’s.

It seems like your experiences as a parent—observations of both yourself and your kids—also played a significant role in shaping this book.

Parenting is hugely about attention. All of a sudden there is this gravitational pull to your attention. Parenting is such a rich, sometimes exhausting experience, particularly with very new children—the age where they’re walking but not yet safe and you just have to be locked in on them all the time. Watching how kids react to you, the attention they put on you, how distracted or focused you are on them as that relationship evolves. There are all kinds of interesting disequilibriums that can arise in a household, especially between siblings, between parents and children.

That’s what’s fascinating and potent about this topic, particularly as it relates to social attention—how we pay attention to others and they pay attention to us. That reciprocity of attention, or lack thereof, between two parties, is a big area of conflict and contestation in relationships.

So much of this finds its focal point in the phone—how parents relate to their phones, how kids relate to their phones. It’s something that every parent experiences. The phone is just a concentrating mechanism that makes manifest these preexisting aspects of attention in relationships. It introduces the kind of industrial-scale machinations of attention capitalism into the household.

How does what the former US Surgeon General has called an “epidemic of loneliness” set us up as perfect cogs in the attention machine?

The lonelier we are, or the more time we spend alone, the more we are looking for two things: one, a place to put our minds, to escape the unsettled self that is in some sense the human condition under modernity, something people have written about for centuries; and two, the lonelier people are, the more they seek attention or social relations through virtual experiences.

Those two factors also contribute to each other. The more people are doing that virtually, the less they are cultivating relationships with people they’re physically present with.

It’s not always a conflict. For me, I have a set of good friends I group-text with all day. I love being in touch that way. When we get together, I already know what’s going on in their lives, so we’re not doing up-to-the-minute long catchups. But I think as a somewhat reductive maxim we can say that the more time people are spending alone, the more susceptible they are to the extractive force of the attention economy.

One form of managing attention is a withdrawal from the sphere of politics overall, as a sort of protest. But of course that makes one feel guilty, trained as we are to believe that paying close attention to politics is a vital part of exercising citizenship. Do you see this as a dilemma? How should we balance the desire to reclaim our attention with the obligation to stay informed as citizens?

I don’t think dropping out of politics is a good solution because you can just do all the same stuff, just not about politics. Huge portions of what is grabbing people for the attention economy have nothing to do with politics or news.

For the news junkie, there is something to think about regarding how much news you have to consume. Obviously, that’s an admission against interest—I would like people to watch my television show—but I don’t necessarily think it’s healthy to consume news content all day long. There’s some sort of equilibrium that people should find. I do think that the newspaper, or even a nightly show like mine, where people have some habits and rituals around a set period of time—a designated time where you are consuming the news—actually does make some sense. That’s something I like about people who are nightly viewers of my show; they’re specifically focused on the news at that moment as opposed to this ambient, constant relationship to it.

The fact is, there are two things going on with news junkies: You’re informing yourself about the world, but it’s also a habit, a form of entertainment, like my relationship to the NBA. If people cut down on that, I don’t think there’s a lot of room for guilt there, honestly.

Maybe a little more time for reading Kierkegaard.

Exactly. It’s not the worst thing.