The Sirens' Call

The “Attention Age” is Hayes’s term for the current epoch, defined by the relentless pursuit of human focus as the most valuable commodity. Unlike the Industrial Age—where raw materials like coal or oil fueled economic power—today’s prime resource lies in capturing, selling, and manipulating our attention. Hayes contends that this shift has radically reshaped global capitalism, as tech giants strive to lock users into prolonged, monetized engagement via smartphones, social media, and ubiquitous digital platforms. The book explores how the Attention Age fosters widespread distraction and superficial interaction, undermining democratic processes and personal well-being. In highlighting this era’s unique pressures, Hayes argues for both individual and collective strategies—ranging from mindful consumption to regulatory frameworks—to counter the manipulative practices that exploit our finite capacity to focus.

An “attentional regime” in Hayes’s analysis is any formal or informal set of rules dictating how group attention is allocated and managed. He points to the structured debates of the Lincoln—Douglas era or the classroom rule of raising one’s hand before speaking as examples of well-functioning attentional regimes. Today, however, Hayes suggests that many of these norms have collapsed under the strain of social media platforms and 24/7 digital content, leaving individuals vulnerable to chaotic “warlordism” where the loudest or most outrageous voices commandeer public discourse. By foregrounding the concept of attentional regimes, The Sirens’ Call reveals how critical it is to reestablish agreed-upon norms—whether through legislative means or cultural habits—that channel collective focus toward substantive issues rather than sensational clickbait or trolling.

Commodification in The Sirens’ Call describes the transformation of human focus into a market good to be bought and sold. Hayes draws an analogy between nineteenth-century labor, which saw people’s work reduced to a standardized wage, and our modern environment where attention becomes a monetized “eyeball” tracked by algorithms. This shift is evident in the endless scroll of social media feeds, where every second of user engagement is packaged and sold to advertisers. While such commodification may seem normal to users seeking “free” services, Hayes critiques the deeper loss of agency and well-being, as personal cognition becomes a battlefield for corporate interests. He argues that commodification is not a natural end state but a deliberate outcome of for-profit business models, which can and should be contested.

Spam, as presented by Hayes, is the barrage of unwanted or low-value content that exploits existing reservoirs of human attention. Early internet culture saw spamming as a mischievous but mostly harmless practice, whereas modern spam—ranging from irrelevant ads to conspiracy-laden “fake news”—is a sophisticated attempt to hijack focus. He likens spam to an ecological pollutant in the Attention Age: just as the Industrial Revolution generated smog, so too does spam obscure and degrade the quality of our digital environment. Throughout The Sirens’ Call, spam exemplifies the race-to-the-bottom tendencies of unregulated attention markets, showing how quickly any platform can become overrun by manipulative content unless robust countermeasures or regulatory frameworks are in place.