The Sirens' Call

How do you reclaim your mind when information is infinite and interruptions are engineered? In this book, Hayes argues that attention—not oil, data, or code—is the scarce, contested resource that shapes modern markets, media, politics, and your private life. When you give attention, you are giving away moments of your one finite life, and the entities that command that attention—Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok—sit atop the economy because they allocate and monetize it. The twist is simple but profound: information is abundant and cheap; attention is limited and priceless (Herbert Simon framed this inversion decades ago, and Hayes updates it for feeds and phones).

Hayes’s claim is not just economic; it’s existential. Attention is the substrate of your conscious experience—the “what you agree to attend to” that William James called the essence of life. So when platforms extract, package, and sell it, they are not moving inert widgets. They are trading access to your inner life. Once you see that, you notice the same logic everywhere: Google search conserves your attention, then auctions it (AdWords); Amazon search ranks command purchases even when products are interchangeable; the iPhone makes attention portable and continuous; and YouTube/Instagram transform seconds into revenue with variable-ratio rewards that keep you pulling to refresh.

Three kinds of attention you live with

To explain your daily tug-of-war, Hayes breaks attention into three modes. Voluntary attention is what you choose—reading a novel, learning a skill, deep conversation. Involuntary attention is your alarm system—sirens, sudden crashes, alerts—that hijacks focus so you survive. Social attention is special: the gaze you give and receive, rooted in your need for recognition (think of the cocktail party effect; hearing your name across the room snaps you to attention, as Neville Moray’s 1959 experiments showed). The attention economy exploits all three: involuntary hooks grab you (pings, banners), voluntary techniques hold you (story arcs, cliffhangers), and social circuits keep you circling (mentions, likes, tags).

The slot machine model

Because holding deep focus is hard and expensive, most platforms adopt a slot machine model: short suspense, variable rewards, repeat. Natasha Dow Schüll’s “machine zone” research on gamblers maps neatly onto infinite scroll (Aza Raskin’s innovation), loot boxes in games (Call of Duty), and TikTok’s For You page. Chartbeat’s data that most web visits last under 15 seconds confirms the incentive: you don’t need to own someone’s attention all the time—just a few seconds, repeatedly. Hayes shows how even “serious” outlets respond: when ratings lag, cable news reintroduces tickers and crawls to grab channel-flippers, choosing repeated grabs over sustained storytelling.

Commodification and alienation

Applying Marx and Polanyi, Hayes calls attention a “fictitious commodity”: something not produced to be sold that markets nonetheless trade. The result is alienation; your interior life becomes an asset on someone else’s balance sheet. Ad-tech promised precision, but Tim Hwang warns of “subprime attention”: bots (Adobe pegged non-human traffic near 30% in some audits), inflated metrics (Facebook’s “pivot to video” fiasco), and programmatic opacity separate what buyers think they buy from real human focus. When supply is capped (only so many waking hours), firms escalate extraction with more notifications, personalization, and social hooks, cheapening the quality of experience along the way.

Public attention and its hijacking

Public life also runs on attention. The Lincoln–Douglas debates once organized it for depth; modern media organize it for speed and spectacle (Neil Postman’s warning lives on). Hayes shows how Trump mastered attention-as-an-end: he seized the agenda through provocation and interruption, making all politics about what he wanted you to think about, not what opponents wanted to argue. In this world, slow-moving crises (climate change) get overshadowed by spectacles (Titan submersible), and newsrooms herd toward what keeps the meters spinning. The penny press did it with hoaxes; feeds do it with outrage.

Recognition markets and platforms as regimes

The deepest driver is social attention’s link to recognition. Kojève’s reading of Hegel says you crave not just pleasure but acknowledgment from another subject. Social media industrializes that hunger, producing fame without reciprocity. Hayes’s “Star vs. Fan” parable explains why a million likes can leave you hollow. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X for $44B, then pressing engineers to boost his reach, is a case study in recognition-chasing. Platforms act like feudal city-states, writing rules to keep your attention inside their walls (contrast Signal’s nonprofit stance or a physical newspaper’s editorial gatekeeping).

Core Claim

Information is infinite and attention is limited. Whoever best conserves, channels, or captures that attention wins markets, shapes politics, and colonizes your inner life.

Paths to reclaim your mind

Hayes blends personal practice, alternative markets, and regulation. He prescribes walks, daydreaming, and mindfulness to rebuild tolerance for boredom (Pascal’s “inability to sit quietly,” Kierkegaard’s “boredom is the root of all evil,” and anthropologists like Sahlins and Michael Cepek remind you boredom is cultural, not fixed). He points to vinyl and print as “commitment devices” that resist skippability. And he endorses policy: age minimums for social media, design constraints for kids, transparency rules—labor-law analogies for attention protection. The upshot is hopeful: by redesigning tools, norms, and rules, you can treat attention as a shared civic resource rather than a mine to be strip‑extracted.

Herbert Simon’s dictum anchors the book: as information grows, attention becomes the binding constraint. You feel it in your inbox, your calendar, your feeds. Systems that help you are those that save attention by processing more than they output; systems that harm you are those that demand attention to justify their existence. Hayes applies this lens from the Oval Office to your phone, showing how leaders, firms, and tools rise or fall based on whether they conserve or consume scarce focus.

Conserving attention beats producing information

Consider the White House. There is one president and a finite day. The institution exists to protect and allocate a single person’s attention through chiefs of staff, briefings, and strict gatekeeping. Steve Jobs modeled the same stance: excellence was saying no often enough to concentrate attention where it mattered (“How many things have you said no to?”). In your team, a tool is valuable only if it “listens and thinks more than it speaks”—filters, condenses, and withholds noise rather than blasting dashboards at everyone (Note: this echoes Cal Newport’s “attention capital” view and the Getting Things Done ethos).

From conserving to monetizing: Google’s tension

Google triumphed by conserving your attention. PageRank encoded human judgment (links) to give you relevant output from oceanic input. But scarcity tempts monetization. AdWords turned conserved attention into auctionable clicks. The conflict appears in small moments: you search “three row EV,” and paid results pitch cars that don’t match. The more attention is worth, the more pressure to degrade conservation with capture (sponsored results, deceptive formats). This dynamic recurs across platforms: initial value comes from saving your time; profit often comes from selling it.

Retail as attention allocation

Amazon looks like logistics, but Hayes argues it’s fundamentally an attention allocator. If two products are functionally identical (recall the Menu Foods pet food recall, which exposed how brands are decoupled from shared supply chains), then search placement—not product differences—decides. That makes the “real product” the top result slot, not the thing in the box. In markets where information about products is abundant, the scarce lever is the user’s glance at the first screen.

Zero-sum reality and organizational hygiene

Attention is rivalrous: if you have it, I don’t. That makes your workplace a battlefield of meetings, pings, and status updates. Hayes’s practical counsel is to treat attention like budget. Use editorial layers (gatekeepers) to keep noise away from makers. Structure communication flows so the system “thinks” before it “talks” (e.g., async memos over meetings, curated summaries over raw Slack floods). Audit tools by one test: do they reduce net attention costs for everyone else?

Simon’s Law, Operationalized

If a system outputs more demands on human attention than the value of the information it filters, it destroys value—even when it “produces” lots of data.

Where scarcity breeds exploitation

Wherever attention pools, exploiters rush in. Email was a marvel, then spam colonized it; Slack promised less email, then multiplied pings. Political email went from galvanizing (Howard Dean raising millions) to manipulative carpet-bombing. The economics make this inevitable: the marginal cost of soliciting your attention is near zero; the cost to you is high. Hayes’s point isn’t to despair but to design with scarcity in mind: create friction for senders, filters for receivers, and norms that prioritize attention conservation over throughput (Note: this rhymes with Eugene Wei’s “Status-as-a-Service” critique and Tim Wu’s history of attention merchants).

Finally, you can use this lens as a consumer. Ask of every product: does it conserve my attention more than it captures it? Favor tools with clear stopping cues, strong defaults against interruptions, and incentives aligned with your focus (e.g., subscriptions and editorial curation over ad-funded feeds). Scarcity isn’t going away; your power is in choosing allocators that side with you.

Hayes organizes your daily mental life into three intertwined modes—voluntary, involuntary, and social—and shows how modern systems target each. Once you can name which mode is firing in a given moment, you can see the design tricks more clearly and decide whether to cooperate or resist. This is the cognitive map you need to navigate a world of sirens, stories, and mentions.

Voluntary: the flashlight you direct

Voluntary attention is the mind’s “taking possession” of one object from many (William James). It feels like turning a beam on a single task—reading, coding, listening deeply. It’s effortful; it suppresses everything else. Paradoxically, as you master a task, it demands less attention and can invite boredom, which tempts you to seek novelty. Designers who respect voluntary attention provide clear goals, pacing, and stopping points (a chapter break in a book), while extractive systems blur endings to keep you from putting the flashlight down.

Involuntary: the alarm that hijacks

Involuntary attention is your survival system. A crash in the kitchen, a red banner, an ambulance siren—they rip your focus back to the periphery so you don’t die. The “invisible gorilla” experiment proves how potent your filtering is; you can miss a person in a gorilla suit when counting passes, yet your brain still monitors for urgent anomalies. Apps simulate sirens with badges, dings, and color—hijacking a circuit evolved for fire and predators. Hayes’s analogy is blunt: the siren that saves you and the siren in your pocket use the same pathway, but only one deserves to interrupt you.

Social: the gaze that makes you real

Social attention is attention directed at people—both giving and receiving. It’s primal. Infants rely on it to survive; adults crave it as recognition. The cocktail party effect captures the circuitry: your name across the room punctures your filter because the brain runs background speech recognition (Neville Moray’s 1959 finding). Social platforms mechanize this with names, tags, and metrics. A notification with your name is not just data; it’s a recognition lure.

How systems “stack” the modes

Winning products use all three. A TikTok video grabs involuntarily (motion, sound), aims to hold you voluntarily (story beats), then pulls social circuits (comments, shares, @mentions). A cable news A‑block deploys urgent graphics (involuntary), a narrative of unfolding crisis (voluntary), and quotes or callouts to public figures (social). Recognizing the stack helps you spot manipulation: when a “breaking” banner won’t go away or a red dot appears on a tab, ask which mode it’s targeting and whether the claim on your mind is legitimate.

Practical Moves

Mute non-urgent notifications (defanging involuntary hooks), batch social checks (re-channel social attention into relationships you choose), and design clear endings for your voluntary focus (pomodoros, chapter targets, “shutdown” rituals).

The emotional hook of social attention

Because social attention feeds identity, it can overpower your plans. Hayes confesses to checking Twitter mentions after his show—knowing better, yet pulled by the desire to be seen. Trolls exploit this by framing provocations that you feel compelled to answer; replying pays them in the currency they seek. Fame intensifies the trap: the more Fans you have, the less mutual recognition you receive (Hayes’s Star vs. Fan parable). Tina Fey’s jokes about trolls and Kevin Durant’s clap-backs show how even the successful feel deprived of true recognition (Note: this complements Michael Goldhaber’s “attention economy” thesis).

Mastering your three modes doesn’t require monk-like withdrawal. It asks for naming what’s happening and choosing on purpose. Voluntary attention is your north star, involuntary is your safety net, and social is your deepest motive; align your tools and norms so those circuits serve your ends, not someone else’s KPIs.

Why do you keep pulling to refresh? Because the environment is tuned to the same logic that keeps gamblers in the “machine zone.” Hayes traces how the slot machine model—short suspense, variable outcomes, immediate next play—migrated from casinos to your phone. The model thrives because grabbing attention repeatedly is easier and more profitable than holding it deeply once.

Variable rewards at scale

From mechanical poker to today’s digital cabinets, slot designers perfected lights, sounds, and reward schedules to maintain flow. Natasha Dow Schüll’s ethnography shows players seek not just money but immersion itself. Social apps replicate the loop: swiping feeds you unpredictable highs (a hilarious clip, a friend’s like), punctuated by quick lows (meh posts), then offer the next pull immediately. Aza Raskin’s infinite scroll eliminated stopping cues; YouTube’s autoplay and TikTok’s For You page shaved friction to zero. Chartbeat’s finding that most visitors bounce in under 15 seconds validates the focus on repeats over depth.

Content built for the loop

Creators adapt. Ryan Kaji’s unboxing empire taps kid-brain variable rewards (surprises, bright colors). Games like Call of Duty add loot boxes; streamers tease cliffhangers; news programs add tickers and “developing now” banners. When a show’s ratings sag, executives reliably reintroduce interruption devices (Hayes has lived this in cable news control rooms). The feedback loop is structural, not just ethical: when sellers compete for seconds, you get packaging that maximizes re-upping the next short burst.

Boredom, diversion, and why the loop works

Pascal argued that our misery stems from the inability to sit quietly; Kierkegaard called boredom the root of evil. Hayes stitches these ideas to modern lab findings: in a University of Virginia experiment, many participants chose self-inflicted electric shocks over fifteen minutes alone with their thoughts. Meanwhile, anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins and Michael Cepek remind us boredom isn’t universal; in some societies (e.g., Warlpiri), there’s no word for it. Modernity’s time-discipline and isolation prime you to seek constant diversion, making you a perfect subject for slot-style designs.

Escaping the machine zone

Hayes offers humane antidotes. He takes daily “constitutionals,” reporting that unstructured walks yield his best thinking. He endorses mindfulness (Buddhist practice) to rebuild your capacity for unfilled attention and celebrates daydreaming as a creative state, not a void to be stuffed (see Jenny Odell’s defense of attention reclamation). Commitment devices help: vinyl records that don’t invite skips, physical newspapers with finite pages, timer-bound work sprints that end. The goal isn’t abstinence; it’s restoring stopping cues and reweighting your life toward voluntary focus.

A Crucial Corollary

Platforms don’t need your undivided attention—just enough repeated micro-slices to aggregate into days. Track the total, not the token.

From feeds to spam floods

Once a loop works, opportunists automate it. That’s the bridge to spam: an industry of scripts and bots that exploit attention aggregations at near-zero cost. Whether it’s SEO-gamed pages, deceptive ads, or auto-DMs, the casino logic scales into an arms race where your vigilance loses to industrialized interruption. Seeing the slot model at the root helps you choose designs that honor endings and resist endless play.

In practice, you can reprogram your environment: disable autoplay, turn off endless scroll where possible, set “finite format” rituals (one album, one article, one evening walk). You’re not weak; the table is tilted. Change the table.

Hayes extends a classic critique—Marx’s alienation and Polanyi’s “fictitious commodities”—to your newsfeed and ad stack. When attention is traded like wheat, you feel estranged from yourself because what’s being priced is your lived, conscious time. The market then equates unlike minutes as if they were fungible—an engrossed hour with War and Peace becomes “60 minutes of watch time” next to an hour of listless scrolling. That mismatch erodes experience and warps media.

From penny press to programmatic

Benjamin Day’s penny press sold ads against mass eyeballs by stoking scandal and spectacle. Newspapers ran moon-hoax stories because attention, not accuracy, paid. Today’s ad-tech promised a cleaner bargain—precision targeting, real-time auctions—but often delivered an abstraction layer that separated buyers from reality. Tim Hwang dubs it “subprime attention”: you think you’re buying humans; you buy blended metrics—some human, some bot, some viewable, some not.

The measurement mirage

Evidence abounds. Audits have pegged significant portions of traffic as non-human (Adobe once estimated ~30% in some contexts). Facebook’s “pivot to video” inflated view counts and helped implode newsrooms that chased a mirage. Nielsen ratings have long spurred disputes. When measurement is noisy or gamed, publishers over-index on content that triggers the most reliable short hits—rage, moral panic, cliffhangers—because those are the only readings that look “solid.”

Race to the bottom, explained

Competition for finite attention propels sensationalism. Hayes narrates how cable news builds A‑blocks to arrest flippers, then sustains the trance with chyrons, crawls, and urgent graphics. When Malaysian Airlines vanished, coverage ballooned for weeks because the story grabbed. Herding and habituation follow: if one outlet spikes, rivals copy. As George Saunders observed in his “megaphone” thought experiment, loudness drowns quality when channels amplify indiscriminately. The civic casualty is depth: complex, slow crises like climate change get crowded out by spectacular one-offs (think Titan submersible vs mass migrant deaths).

Trump and agenda capture

Donald Trump turns attention itself into political leverage. He provokes to control what everyone must discuss—immigration, crime—regardless of persuasion. The lesson isn’t limited to him; imitators like Kari Lake and Vivek Ramaswamy show that high attention can come with electoral costs if it isn’t convertible into majority support. By contrast, Volodymyr Zelensky demonstrates conversion in the other direction: he alchemizes global attention into weapons, aid, and sanctions.

Polanyi’s Warning, Updated

Treating attention like any commodity invites social demolition: public deliberation bends to the metrics of engagement rather than the needs of self-government.

Alienation you can feel

Because attention is your inner life, being farmed for it feels like estrangement. Hayes argues you sense it when metrics override meaning—when editorial judgment yields to dashboards, when your evening dissolves into “engagement.” The way out isn’t finger‑wagging at individuals; it’s structural: change incentives for publishers, require real transparency in ad markets, and rebuild institutions that anchor public attention in curation and depth (think public broadcasters, editorial newsletters, and physical newspapers as attention-conserving formats).

You don’t have to abstain from media. You can reward outlets that conserve attention, diversify your information diet beyond outrage cycles, and remember that not all minutes are equal. Quality of attention is a value to defend.

Why does attention from strangers feel so good yet leave you empty? Hayes leans on Kojève’s Hegel to argue the deepest human desire is recognition—being seen as a subject by another subject. Platforms monetize that hunger at scale, turning social attention into a tradable currency that too often fails to deliver the recognition you actually seek. This is where individual psychology meets platform power and policy choices.

Fame’s asymmetry: Star vs. Fan

Hayes’s parable is simple. The Star accumulates Fans, but the relationship is one-way; there is no reciprocal subjectivity. A million likes quantify attention without conferring recognition. Tina Fey’s riffs on trolls, Kevin Durant’s replies to critics, and even Elon Musk’s quest to be platform main character all reveal the paradox: more attention can mean less felt recognition. Mandela’s solitary confinement—where the smallest human contact mattered—shows the floor of this need; Linda Loman’s plea in Death of a Salesman (“Attention must be paid”) shows its dignity ceiling.

Platforms as attentional regimes

Modern platforms function like feudal city-states governing attention within their walls. Their constitutions—algorithms, policies, “trust and safety”—optimize for dwell time and monetization, not for truth or mutual recognition. Google conserved attention, then auctioned it. Facebook industrialized social attention and drew “surveillance capitalism” critiques (Zuboff). Under Musk, Twitter/X became a live case: the owner’s recognition hunger directly altered ranking priorities (engineers enlisted to boost his tweets). Other spheres show alternatives: Signal’s nonprofit design resists growth hacking; group chats recreate small-scale reciprocity; Reddit’s volunteer moderation strains under monetization pressures.

Spam, trolling, and recognition markets

Michael Goldhaber reframes everyday talk as attention exchange; trolling exploits the reciprocity rule by provoking responses. Politicians turn attention into money (MTG and AOC fundraise off viral moments). Mass shooters sometimes chase notoriety, making coverage a moral quandary. The throughline is market logic applied to recognition: if attention pays, some will chase it by any means. Your best counter is allocation: don’t feed what you don’t want to grow; amplify what turns attention into public goods (organizers, truth-tellers).

Taking back time: markets, norms, regulation

Hayes ends with agency. On the market side, he spotlights opt-outs that enforce commitment and endings: vinyl’s resurgence, print newspapers, devices with strict notification control. On the social side, he urges noncommercial spaces—Signal groups, family DMs—that prioritize mutual recognition over metrics. On policy, he proposes a labor-law analogy for attention: set age minimums for social platforms, regulate exploitative design for kids, demand transparency in ad delivery, and fund noncommercial civic media. Constitutional concerns are real, but viewpoint-neutral rules (age gates, design standards) are feasible.

Actionable Commitments

Pay for attention-conserving services, move more conversation to small private spaces, adopt clear stopping rituals, and back policies that treat attention as a civic commons.

You won’t abolish the attention economy. But you can change its exchange rate in your life and, alongside others, redraw the rules of the attentional regimes you inhabit. Recognition is the aim; design, markets, and law are the levers.