[Draft 3-24-2025]

Pay attention!

You’re at a cocktail party … or maybe in a social setting with your family … your attention is selective – like moving a spotlight around a stage, or tuning between foreground & background channels. Did you notice the person dressed in a gorilla costume walk by in the distance? [4]

Others want your attention. Sirens are calling you.

You want attention. Thrive on such attention.

(quote)
… the ability to grab the attention of the consumer is more important than the actual product or service offered. … we will forever be invested in [hunger for] other people paying attention to us. – Chris Hayes [1]

There’s the basic question as to the meaning of “attention economy.” And the harms it harbors. And whether the triumph of marketing over manufacturing is sustainable [7].

But the bigger question is how we got here, to a place where information is infinite (abundant, cheap) and attention is limited (scarce, expensive). Our attention is extracted & exploited, making us (the public) “less capable of self-governance.”

(quote)
Attention can be extracted from us at the purely sensory level, before our conscious will even gets to weigh in. – Chris Hayes [1]

Perhaps this incessant tug for our time & attention (which for some is the Fear Of Missing Out) is akin to the feeling of always being watched, as in the “tendency to detect agency in the environment even when none exists.” An addiction – to immediacy & access – which may be “hacked.”

(quote)
The word scopaesthesia comes from the Greek words scopein, meaning “to see”, and aesthesia, meaning “feeling”. It is the scientific term for the phenomenon of being aware that someone is staring at you, or the “sense of being stared at” [an evolutionary psychology perspective of the reason for religion, by the way].

In this post, I sketch how several threads tangled over time & space to create our “attention age.” I cite several books and a newspaper article.

In his book [1], Chris Hayes connects the attention economy with Greek mythology:

(quote)
The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens’ call.

And in her book [2], Svetlana Boym connects attentive misdirection with nostalgic idleness – “a slow and inefficient use of time conducive to daydreaming, … ,” in which loss may not be properly remembered.

Like Chris Hayes, she cites Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus pays attention to the goddess Circe.

(quote)
The seduction of non–return home – the allure of Circe and the sirens – plays a more important role in some ancient versions of Odysseus’s cycle, where the story of homecoming is not at all clearly crystallized. … Circe’s island is an ultimate utopia of regressive pleasure … One has to leave it to become human again.

And in her book [3], Elizabeth Anderson connects commodification of attention with the commodification of labor.

And there’s an article which connects the sirens of modernity with tech titans’ secular catechism.

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Book: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

The title of Chris Hayes’ book The Sirens’ Call comes from Homer’s Odyssey, in which Odysseus pays attention to advice from the goddess Circe about the peril of the Sirens. [5]

He characterizes our contemporary landscape – industrial modernity where “a brand is its own kind of siren” – as one always competing for our attention, that “attention is the substance of life.”

(quotes)
The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens’ call.

My contention is that the defining feature of this age is that the most important resource – our attention – is also the very thing that makes us human. Unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.

The central locus of economic activity has moved from those firms that manipulate atoms to those that manipulate bits.

In the snake oil model, the attention and marketing are the most important part of the enterprise – capturing the imagination of customers – and the product is an afterthought, in fact often outright fraudulent.
(end quotes)

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The spiderweb of history

So, there’s history to this state of affairs (Figure 1). The path to an attention economy. A tale of zealous advocacy. An interplay of the personal (individual) and social (collective) “goods.” A chain of private & public investments.

And how religious virtues in the American psyche were transformed into secular work virtues and then that work ethic hijacked (co-opted) by mass marketing, by compelling “beautiful” mass voices. And how those technological voices (Sirens) wove a business model which has reshaped us.

The collateral effects of that reshaping extend into our collective psyches and political policies. Into attitudes toward governance, toward decision-making.

Some are awash in nostalgia. Striving to restore supremacy.

All seek hope, a promise (assurance) of salvation. In a landscape where the moral force of old fables has failed. In an everyday world where those fables have been forgotten and “spiritual coercion” has lost sway. (Can coercion ever be a creative force?)

What is the way to a worthy life? The “vehicle for higher purposes than bare survival” – Elizabeth Anderson [3].

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Article: A secular catechism – the legacy of Silicon Valley

Some household names: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.

(quote)
…there’s an attitude, a worldview and a fundamental set of principles that guide the tech industry and its progeny, like a secular catechism:

1. Techno optimism – “unshakable faith that technology is inherently good and will improve things” (it’s ordained)
2. A motto – “move quickly and scale rapidly” (ask for forgiveness later, there’s always time to fix things)
3. The power of personal relationships – “transactional bromance” (seasoned with a dash of shamelessness, as if sanctified)
4. Live the “self-made” legend – make the market magical, ignore interdependencies, e.g., how the federal government built Silicon Valley
5. Offer free lunches & magical charms (“high services at low cost“) – freemium forever (hey, don’t fret those T&C)

• LA Times Voices > “Musk’s mayhem has roots in Silicon Valley” by Mark Z. Barabak, Columnist (3-16-2025) – The recklessness and destruction of the tech mogul’s fancifully named DOGE is not a bug but a feature.

(quote)
Washington has never seen anything like the rule-breaking, power-taking, government-torching, protocol-scorching force of delighted havoc and gleeful mayhem that is Elon Musk.

Margaret O’Mara has.

The University of Washington historian charted the spectacular rise and all-swallowing influence of the tech industry and its titans in her excellent, highly readable 2019 work, “The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.”

(end quote)

(quotes)
To declare that Silicon Valley owes its existence to government, however, is as much of a false binary as declaring that it is the purest expression of free markets in action. It is neither a big-government story nor a free-market one: it’s both.

Another twist on a seemingly familiar story: the high-tech revolution is the result of collective effort as well as individual brilliance, and many non-technologists played critical roles. Success came thanks to a vibrant and diverse cast of thousands, not just the marquee players … [6]

(quote) AI Overview
President Truman famously stated, “Wherever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship” in a lecture at Columbia University on April 28, 1959.
Source: Truman Speaks (1960)

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Book: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back

The commodification of attention is connected with the commodification of labor, which Elizabeth Anderson discusses in her book.

She explains how: “From the start, the work ethic has contained contradictory ideas, and been put to opposing purposes …” which has lead to “the adoption of predatory and extractive business models.”

So, when is “the public interest … a good reason to sacrifice private interests?”

(quote)
In this book, I argue that the origins of neoliberalism can be traced back somewhat earlier than classical liberalism, to the Protestant work ethic. This ideology was originally developed by seventeenth-century Puritan ministers. At the level of individual morality, the Puritan work ethic comprises a suite of virtues … At the level of political economy, the work ethic concerns the economic and political institutions that best promote, reward, and express these virtues. This book traces the history of arguments over the latter, focusing on the history of classical political economy. These arguments were fueled by the fact that the Puritan work ethic embodied contradictory attitudes toward work and workers that were ultimately developed into the progressive and conservative work ethics.

What began as an ascetic doctrine of self-denial in the quest for assurance of salvation had ironically generated a capitalist system in which “material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history.”

(end quote)

Anderson notes elsewhere how the productive sense evolved:

(quote)
One gains assurance of one’s faith only in ceaseless, disciplined work. Work that springs from faith gains exalted significance, in being done for the greater glory of God. Hence, “[g]ive diligence to make your calling and election sure.” Although salvation cannot be earned, God will not grant it “without our earnest seeking and labor.” Any relaxation from constant work, along with any indulgence in spontaneous pleasures, is a sign of lagging faith. So time must never be wasted on idle pleasures. It must be spent “wholly in the way of duty” in the service of God. Worldly goods also must never be wasted, since God gave them to us to use in his service. “We must see that nothing of any use, be lost through satiety, negligence or contempt; for the smallest part is of God’s gifts and talents, given us, not to cast away, but to use as he would have us.” Here we see the core virtues of the work ethic: industry, frugality, ascetic self-control.

(end quote)

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Book: The Future of Nostalgia

Svetlana Boym begins her book by exploring the elusive & complex character of nostalgia, how “nostalgia speaks in riddles and puzzles.”

(quotes)

The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia.

Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an enchanted world with clear borders and values …

Nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that longing can make us more empathetic toward fellow humans, yet the moment we try to repair longing with belonging, the apprehension of loss with a rediscovery of identity, we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding. Algia – longing – is what we share, yet nostos – the return home – is what divides us. It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. … Unreflected nostalgia breeds monsters.

Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: alter egos [Janus-faced].

… nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.

Here two kinds of nostalgia are distinguished: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.

(end quotes)

TBS

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Notes

[1] Book > Hayes, Chris (© 2025). The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press 2025). Kindle Edition.

[2] Book > Boym, Svetlana (© 2001). The Future of Nostalgia (Basic Books 2002). Kindle Edition.

[3] Book > Anderson, Elizabeth (© 2023, 2025). Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back (Cambridge University Press 2023). Kindle Edition.

[4] Wiki > Inattentional blindness > Invisible Gorilla Test

[5] Mythology

• Wiki > Siren (mythology)

• Wiki > Circe > Homer’s Odyssey

(quote)
In Homer’s Odyssey, an 8th-century BC sequel to his Trojan War epic Iliad, Circe is initially described as a beautiful goddess living in a palace isolated in the midst of a dense wood on her island of Aeaea. Around her home prowl strangely docile lions and wolves. She lures any who land on the island to her home with her lovely singing while weaving on an enormous loom, but later drugs them so that they change shape.

(end quote)

[6] Book > O’Mara, Margaret (© 2019). The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin Books 2020). Kindle Edition.

[7] Our early 21st century global economy has thrived on the ascendancy of marketing over manufacturing. Spending more on services than goods. Yet, in our national political culture, some define national greatness as manufacturing greatness, equate a strong national economy with a strong, dominant manufacturing economy. Is this is a grand nostalgia – the restoration of our nation’s post WWII manufacturing landscape?

It’s a alluring notion. The retrograde reaction to a dominant services economy “has a paradoxical echo in American popular culture.” The dinosaur.

(quotes)
The dinosaur becomes a figure for American greatness. Thus when the Empire State Building was completed in New York City right after the stock market crash of 1929, it was described as a “lonely dinosaur,” the belated American monument.

The dinosaur is America’s unicorn, … Jurassic Park is not an obvious nostalgia film and may be a puzzling choice as such for Americans. … The film exemplifies a different kind of nostalgia, not psychological but mythical, that has to do with a heroic American national identity.

What is nostalgic in Jurassic Park is not the reconstruction of the past but the vision of the film itself: it is the fairy-tale world ruled by a patriarch-entrepreneur … [2]
(end quotes)

If we see our nation as a Jurassic predator, such political drift is like bringing back the T-Rex, like a return to being the biggest, baddest dinosaur once again. Yet, our mammal world has evolved. There’s a more expansive, collective way to thrive, to do commerce. A savvier “silk road.”

Our “mammal” economy will thrive on innovation & (admittedly tricky) interdependency, not on revived Jurassic dominance.

• Washington Post > Opinion > Fareed Zakaria > “Trump’s manufacturing dream is a mirage” (March 20, 2025) – The most advanced economies in the world are dominated by services [not smokestacks].

At the heart of the Trump administration’s policies is one overarching goal: … it is to stage the “great American manufacturing comeback.” … to revive the factories and foundries across this country.

The most advanced economies in the world today are almost all dominated by services. … In the U.S., services account for more than 80 percent of all nonfarm jobs. Manufacturing is less than 10 percent. America’s distinctive exports to the world are software and software services, entertainment, financial services, and other such intangible things — and in these, the U.S. runs not a trade deficit but a surplus with the rest of the world.

Over the past 40 or 50 years, manufacturing as a share of the total economy and manufacturing jobs as a share of total jobs have steadily declined in almost all advanced industrial countries. U.S. manufacturing jobs made up around 25 percent in 1973. Today, they make up about 8 percent.

Japan is particularly important as a case study because it did pretty much everything that Trump wishes that the U.S. had done over the past 60 years. It protected its domestic market from foreign goods through high tariffs and other barriers. The government pursued an aggressive industrial policy, society venerated manufacturing, and the educational system prized technical skills and shop work. And yet, manufacturing declined steadily in Japan.

Huge levels of corruption within the ruling elites ensured that firms were favored for political reasons. Most important, the tariffs and other barriers kept Japanese companies shielded from competition. [Remember VHS tape and Walkman-style audio players?]

Countries such as Japan and Germany that tried hard to boost their manufacturing sectors, and countries such as France and Italy that protected their workers through tight labor laws, all saw their manufacturing decline.

Related posts

• Freemium 2.0 (ambrosia) – a 21st century fable
• Sour grapes – blame-shifting folklore
• Puritan praise & pride – a legacy of conflated piety – See, in partcular, my 2-26-2025 comment there, which includes quotes from Elizabeth Anderson’s book and more information on the author and her book [3].
• ‘Politics is about sacredness’ – overlapping moral orbits
• Algorithmic demagoguery – Monsters from the Id redux
• Beacons & broken souls – the challenge of modernity