A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick 2025 From the New York Times bestselling author and
television 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. 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:
attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us and from which we are
increasingly alienated. 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. The Sirens' Call is the big book we all need to wrest back control of our
lives our politics and our future.
