I’ve always struggled to pay attention. For the first half of my life, well before I had 24/7 portable high-speed Internet, it was a challenge to stay focused on what a teacher was saying in class, or on the homework I was supposed to be completing, as my mind involuntarily drifted to topics I found more stimulating. Then, once smartphones entered the picture, it became possible for me to divert myself with whatever I found most interesting at any given moment, which quickly became more addictive than any substance I might consume. While not everyone is as distractible as me, most of us contend with the social Internet’s incessant demands on our attention, the difficulty of finding time for activities unmediated by screens, and the mendacious narratives spread by the most toxic attention seekers—above all the ones in the White House.

Chris Hayes’s latest book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, argues that the problem of attention is central to our current political and media environment as well as how we live our quotidian lives, with ubiquitous and predatory high-tech platforms competing over every scrap of our waking hours. Hayes is an anchor for MSNBC and before that was a longtime contributor to The Nation, and he draws on both of these experiences—of trying to maintain the attention of an audience that could be watching or reading anything else instead—to untangle the problem of attention itself. Though he does urge spending less time staring at screens, he goes well beyond that frequently disregarded advice to offer an almost philosophical exploration of what attention really is and how it works. I recently spoke with Hayes about his book and how it can help make sense of this historical moment. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

—David Klion

David Klion: Why did you decide that attention was the thing you would devote a book project to?

Chris Hayes: Back when I was writing for The Nation, we would have some sense of what the traffic on an article was, but there was also a sense of whether something was a good piece or not. We had an independent judgment about whether we thought it was good reporting, whether it was well-written, whether people were talking about it. We didn’t conceive of the work in terms of whether it was charting.

Then as I moved into cable news, it’s just the case that holding people’s attention is really foundational to the whole project. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. Wrestling with that, at a craft level, day in, day out, over the course of more than a decade and over thousands of cable news segments that I’ve done, had me thinking a lot about the internal tensions within trying to hold attention—what attention is, why it moves, the directions it moves, and how valuable it is. That’s what led me to the book.

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DK: You operate at the intersection of three very different attentional regimes: long-form journalism, cable TV, and, well, being extremely online and posting a lot. Some of the most interesting parts of the book were when you got personal about early ratings failures—you thought that you could bring what was interesting to you as a reader and a writer on cable, and it often didn’t work.

CH: That took a real psychological toll. I write about how we would all get ratings, and every day everyone sees everyone else’s ratings, and it creates a feeling that can suffuse the building—it’s like getting a report card every day. At least early in my career, it felt that way; now I detach from it more. But it creates its own intense internal pressure.

DK: I got the sense you have, not exactly regrets, but are self-conscious about some of the coverage decisions incentivized by that. You write about the missing Malaysian plane story and the outsize attention your show gave it. One thing you don’t write about is Russiagate, but I’m curious how these pressures affected MSNBC’s coverage of that?

CH: There was definitely a tension behind that. I really thought—and still think—what happened with Russiagate was totally outrageous.

DK: I do, too, for what it’s worth.

CH: The thing about Russiagate that propelled it attentionally was that there was a genuine set of unanswered questions, and a structure of a mystery and revelation, reminiscent of Watergate. The way the Watergate story was structured in terms of the unraveling of a cover-up gave a kind of attentional force to it over a sustained period of time. With Russiagate, we had a set of facts that were themselves incredibly damning. There was a question about what was hidden, and I think that was why there was such enormous energy around that. But there are a million things that have happened since and are happening now that, in many ways, have been worse.

DK: With Russiagate, we can disaggregate the Steele dossier and the many salacious claims in it, which turned out to be bunk, from the overall conclusion of the Mueller Report that there was a concerted effort by Russia to influence the election, which Donald Trump at the very least openly welcomed. Whether you call that “collusion” or not is almost semantic. But in hindsight, a lot of the outrage and attention directed at it was premised on the idea that Americans had a set of shared assumptions about how the world was supposed to work. That seems almost quaint now.

CH: Yes! Beyond the mystery aspect, there was this faith and belief that, as with Watergate, when they get the smoking-gun tapes that prove the president organized a cover-up, there will be a moment when people agree that a line has been crossed, and there would have been a Nixonian denouement. What we learned in the end was that, first of all, the facts were nowhere near that clear, even though I agree with you that whether the collusion was explicit or just openly implicit doesn’t really matter. But what drove all the attention was the belief that there existed some set of facts, some scandal, some revelation about Trump that would get people to say, “We’re done here.” What we learned is that no such set of facts exists. Subsequently, on January 6, Trump attempted the first-ever violent opposition to the transfer of power since the cannons fired on Fort Sumter, and that was not enough either.

DK: You’ve clearly heard the critique that cable news and other mainstream media suppress important stories. The argument you make in the book, and that I find fairly persuasive, is that all anyone is doing is responding to audience incentives, and audiences just don’t want to hear about the things that matter most. What kinds of stories do you think audiences are missing, and why?

CH: Walter Lippmann has a great line in The Phantom Public (1925) where he says that the American public has a great interest in what happens with the Treaty of Versailles, but they’re not interested in it—the same way a son has a great interest in his father’s business but is not interested in it.

One of the hardest topics to get audiences to care about is international news. Partly that’s because America is a huge and hegemonic country, which gives us the luxury of not having to worry that much about other places in the world, because it doesn’t directly affect us the way it would if we were El Salvador or Belgium. There are lots of small European countries where people genuinely read a ton of international news. I meet foreigners all the time who watch MSNBC and are incredibly invested in American politics. It’s almost impossible to imagine an American who has that investment, and pays that much attention to another country’s politics unless it concerns them directly, in the absence of major violence or conflagration like October 7 or the invasion of Ukraine.

The other big one is climate—that’s the biggest disparity between objective importance and the scale of coverage. It’s really hard. Even if you look at left-leaning publications that cover climate more, they generally don’t focus on it in proportion to its overwhelming importance.

DK: Another one that comes to mind is Covid, which for a while was the dominant story because it was affecting everyone’s life so directly, but it was impossible to sustain that. There’s been a kind of mass forgetting—I personally got sick of talking about it every day. It’s a tedious topic.

CH: I do think there’s something about Covid that relates to some of the deep attentional imperatives I am concerned about. Part of what we do attentionally is acclimate to things. Novel stimuli grab our attention—if a car honks at you in the street while you’re crossing and looking at your phone, it wrenches your attention preconsciously, independent of your will. It’s compulsory, and thank God, because that saves you from getting hit by the car.

But let’s say you’re in a hotel room and a loud HVAC turns on; it will grab your attention at first, and then as you adjust and the stimulus recedes from novelty, you don’t notice it anymore. And this is true about many things, and it’s hard to sustain focus. Grabbing attention is easier than holding it. If you task anyone you know with walking into a room of 500 people and grabbing their attention, they can do it—but if you task them with walking into a room of 500 people and holding it for an hour, they probably can’t.

Covid is a great example of something that has receded from the novelty of the initial stimulus to a kind of background noise. But Ukraine is also a great example—that war is still grinding on, incredibly brutally, with enormously high geopolitical consequences and lots of things happening on the ground day after day, but audiences have stopped paying attention.

It’s always been part of the human condition that we have these competing kinds of attention: the compelled attention—this circuitry that can function independent of our will—competing with our willful desire for a place to put our attention, as a refuge from the terrifying, feral reality of our own minds, from anxiety and boredom. But now we live in a technological landscape that allows us a level of diversion that would have been unthinkable in earlier eras.

DK: Since we are both in our 40s, we have clear adolescent memories of a time when our attention was not as aggressively contested as it is now. A lot of people our age are nostalgic for that era. But I also remember being so miserably bored all the time, and how wonderful it was when the Internet made it possible to access endlessly interesting things.

CH: As a child, there would be summer days where I just was doing nothing. I would go to the park to shoot hoops, but it would be 98 degrees on an outdoor court. I’d last two hours maximum, I’d go home, I’d sit on the couch with nothing to do and stare up into a light shaft coming through the living room window, lighting up the little dust motes as they floated up off the couch, trying to entertain my brain.

The experience of the early Internet was a reprieve from that, particularly if you were a nerdy or curious kid. Before the Internet, I consulted baseball statistics books (like the ones published by the Elias Sports Bureau), I read books like The Way Things Work by David Macaulay, and I had this compendium of Greek mythology—reference tomes that I would comb through that were enjoyable reprieves from boredom. But then we got the Internet, and suddenly any fact you wanted was there. It was the feeling of landing in a new city on the first day, checking into your hotel, and being like, “What should we go see?” I miss that feeling… I truly do.

DK: When I think back, when did my screen addiction really begin? I was in high school from 1998 to 2002, and we had these computer labs full of turquoise-colored iMacs connected to the Internet. I was a nerdy kid, as you might imagine. We had free periods, so I remember having enormous amounts of time during the school day when I could read about Star Wars or whatever. Later, thanks to phones and social media, that behavior took over more and more of my life. But I’m realizing a lot of us were primed for this kind of lifestyle even before it became totally hegemonic.

CH: I do think that kind of thing was qualitatively superior to what’s happening now.

DK: Well, yeah—I wasn’t getting into fights with people, for one thing.

CH: There’s that! Also, if you were to tally up your regretfully wasted minutes then, it would be much lower than those minutes now. It’s true that the screen itself and its attentional draw has a compulsive, addictive quality. But I also think the specific model of the open Internet, which was not designed by enormously sophisticated and wealthy corporations to monetize every last ounce of our attention, led to a qualitatively different experience. I remember my friends and I would go to the computer lab and message each other sitting five feet apart, and we got such a kick out of it. To me, that feels like a pretty pure adolescent activity, like a digital version of note-passing.

So one of the things I’m trying to do in the book is untangle the experience of the Internet or screens from the particular forms of attention capitalism that have become intertwined with the technology, and to make a case that you can actually disaggregate them. There is a version of an open Internet that maybe people are addicted to or use compulsively, but that is not extractive or exploitative in the way that the current Internet is.

DK: You can’t be accused of Luddism—you’re not saying we should destroy the Internet; you appreciate why the Internet is cool, even as you’ve watched it systematically become something worse. Let’s talk about our political situation in this context, which you wait until pretty late in the book to dive into. Why is it so difficult for liberal culture to hold attention right now? The right has Trump and Elon Musk and a million different hateful, conspiratorial grifters. But we have celebrities: We have Taylor Swift, we have Kendrick Lamar, we have athletes like LeBron James, we have charismatic politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Barack Obama. We have some of the most talented attention seekers on Earth, people with incredibly powerful global brands. So what is the right’s edge, and why do all the celebrity endorsements in the world not ultimately move the needle for us?

CH: For one thing, the form of attention capitalism we have, with its relentlessly competitive bidding for eyeballs across monetized platforms, stacks the deck in favor of reactionary gestures—the obnoxious, the insulting, the offensive, the outrageous, the troll, the threat.

There’s been a recognizable version of this in another attention market for years: local evening news, which is quite competitive and high-stakes. There’s a huge audience, divided between three or four networks, so it really matters to those networks how much share they get. These are widely watched programs, and they’re very profitable. And we all know the cliche: If it bleeds, it leads. There’s something about the structure of the evening news attention market that pushes it toward a form of crime coverage that clearly leads in reactionary directions. It’s trying to grab you with a feeling of threat every night. New York is a city of 8 million people, so something bad happens to someone here every day, and that’s what gets covered on the evening news. If you watch it every night, you come away thinking the city’s a terrifying hellhole. There’s something similar in the current attentional landscape that favors the threat-focused, right-wing ethos in a similar manner.

The second part of it is a cultural aspect of liberalism, and particularly in the world of Democratic politics, which is risk-averse, status-quo-oriented, and small-c conservative. Depending on the situation, being risk-seeking or risk-averse can be important or maladaptive. If you work in the nuclear safety bureaucracy in the Department of Energy, you want to be pretty darn risk-averse, whereas if you work at a start-up, you should be more risk-seeking. There’s an almost dispositional cultural phenomenon among Democratic lawmakers and their staff that makes them risk-averse, and means that they don’t want to seek attention if there’s some chance it blows up.

DK: I’ll take a minor risk and bring up the war on wokeness, which relates directly to what you’re saying. There’s an argument that some of these popular anti-woke cultural figures have become transgressive in a way that left-leaning culture used to be, because they relish offending people. Our generation remembers a time when progressive cultural values were distinctly in the minority and espousing them could seem subversive, whereas I think a lot of zoomers take for granted, for instance, that gay people have equal civil rights, or that there’s a certain level of diversity in the cultural establishment. Offending that establishment and its pieties, for some people younger than us, is what’s edgy now.

CH: Yeah, there’s a cyclical rhythm to culture. If you grew up in the wake of 9/11, it’s normal to think of the culture as hegemonically aligned behind a conservative president. Right now it’s actually quite divided by comparison. But who counts as the establishment and who counts as the insurgents, and how they’re coded politically, has gone through shifts. I don’t think it was the worst thing for the left to have this inauguration where Trump is onstage next to the five biggest tech CEOs—it presented an image of an establishment colossus to rebel against, which is useful and clarifying.

DK: I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet for the bulk of the country. Elon Musk may be the richest person who ever lived, but he still presents himself as a kind of bratty insurgent against the true establishment, which apparently consists of USAID bureaucrats who no one has ever heard of. I’m wondering how much damage the Trump administration will have to do before it clicks in people’s heads where power actually lies.

CH: A lot of the work of good governance is boring—it’s saying no and being stodgy about risk, and those things are not that attentionally salient. That’s another way in which the deck is stacked against liberalism: A 19-year-old swashbuckling into a government agency is a better story than the everyday work of governance. That’s not to say there isn’t genuine sclerosis in the federal bureaucracy—anyone who has ever worked in it can give you a three-hour lecture on all the things they find maddening about it. But fundamentally, this comes from a place of knowledge and love. That is not the case with DOGE, but the story of the disruption is a better story and attentionally outcompetes the boring daily work of the civil service.

DK: It’s sad and ironic that this is probably the most sustained attention the work of USAID has ever gotten.

CH: Right, they made USAID a story, which in any other universe is impossible.

DK: In your final section, you speculate that the current attentional regime is unsustainable. But in outlining what it would look like to move past it, you emphasize cultural trends within what we could call “professional-managerial class liberalism.” You draw parallels with the rise of organic food, which I found plausible, and I can see how it might apply to you, me, and our peers in gentrified Brooklyn. But looking at the political landscape right now, I feel like we are already profoundly alienated from the country writ large. The only demographic that got more blue last year was college-educated whites. I can see a cultural shift among educated liberals where we regulate kids’ screen time more aggressively, or where it becomes a point of pride to read a lot of physical books or shop in physical stores. But does that trickle down to the rest of the population, or does it become one more thing marking us off as snobby elites?

CH: A number of people have responded to the organic food metaphor in the book with a reaction along those lines. My response is that you have to start somewhere, right? The base that has been built for a rebellion against industrialized food started among a vanguardist elite, if you want, and then it moved beyond them—there are people doing food justice work in every part of this country, in poor neighborhoods, in urban centers, in rural areas—and it has changed American food culture writ large.

The other thing I would say is that this experience of carsickness produced by the contemporary online attention regime isn’t just limited to educated liberals. It’s a broadly shared feeling of alienation. I think there are ways to reach out to people who feel it and who don’t necessarily have the same politics or worldview.

DK: I buy that, but I also expect there will be a right-orchestrated backlash that says, “They’re trying to take away your AI slop and your crypto.”

CH: We saw it with TikTok—the Republicans did a 180 on this one specific issue within the course of a few months.

DK: TikTok is such an interesting example because it arguably is a Chinese foreign-interference op, but it also hosted a more pro-Palestinian news environment than basically the entire US media.

CH: Yeah, and it didn’t help to hear a bunch of prominent politicians explicitly say that one of the contributing factors for the TikTok ban was the balance of Israel-Palestine coverage on the platform.

DK: Right, which is how you end up with AOC defending TikTok. It’s a partisan-scrambling issue. I have an aversion to TikTok, and a lot of my friends and peers do; for people who work with words, pre-Musk Twitter was the ideal social media platform. There’s a lot of anxiety right now that reading and writing are going to be obsolete. It’s notable that you’ve packaged your argument as a traditional nonfiction book, because it feels like an endangered form.

CH: Yeah, do we end up with an increasingly post-literate mass culture? We had the Internet of words from the mid-1990s to around 2016 or 2017. The lifeblood of the Internet was writing, from the early AOL forums to Instant Messenger to e-mail, and we’ve transitioned to mostly oral forms of communication.

Also, while I think IQ is a dubious measurement and isn’t measuring anything innate, there is such a thing as the Flynn effect: As societies get richer, they score higher on IQ tests. It’s not that people get innately smarter, but social forces affect their scores. We’ve seen a reversal of the Flynn effect over the last few years, and it’s possible national IQ is just going to decline because of these non-text-based platforms.

DK: It’s ironic that the oligarchs who are driving so much of this change tend to be obsessed with IQ, even as they are systematically rotting away the average American’s IQ as well as their own. Elon Musk must be stupider now than he was five or 10 years ago.

I’ve been reading a lot about the development of a mass intellectual culture after World War II, in large part because of the expansion of higher education. It’s not that everyone became an intellectual, but huge numbers of people who grew up blue-collar earned liberal arts degrees and went on to read smart novels and attend local theater or symphonies in their midsize towns, and it feels like we’ve come in at the very end of that era.

CH: Part of that is a story about that growth plateauing. There was an idea that an ever-higher percentage of people were going to be four-year college grads, but it stopped at a certain level. That’s the structural, sociological part of the story, but it’s also technological—we’re seeing a generational shift from typing out your texts to dictating them, which seems deranged to me. The move away from writing and reading is clearly happening, and it is more than a little unnerving.