An Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller From the New York Times 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 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.
