The #1 New York Times Bestseller • One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading List Picks From the
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 Maddow "A
useful primer on how social media and the attention economy have warped our democracy and
reshaped our lives." —Barack Obama We 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.
