Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

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 MSNBC host and bestselling author Chris Hayes writes in The Siren’s Call, “With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade.” Hayes says “attention capitalism” has assaulted our minds and our hearts, and has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society. He argues that we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the 19th century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. As Hayes writes, “Now o