From Tokyo: In a country where late-night television schedules are famously regimented and smartphone notifications are treated with the deference of ceremonial announcements, you would think the battle for attention would be simpler. Instead, Chris Hayes, the host of MSNBC's All In, has come to a troubling conclusion: keeping up with the news is no longer primarily a question of discipline or time management. It is a question of whether algorithms designed to capture your attention can be resisted at all.
Hayes has spent months wrestling with this problem. As a broadcast journalist, he exists within the attention economy and profits from it. Yet as a cable news host in the attention business, Hayes says he often feels like he's chasing rather than directing his audience's focus. His new book, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource, explores not just news consumption but the deeper crisis: attention has become a commodity, and not just any commodity, but the central commodity of the modern economy.
The rise of artificial intelligence has sharpened this crisis. Hayes told Slate's "What Next" podcast that the AI deployed by social media platforms is "learning at scale," and can churn out content that "no executive would have ever greenlit" but that appeals to the public in a way that corporate executives "never have to figure out". This is not incidental to social media design. What is different about the machine learning algorithm over at Bytedance or Instagram is that it does purely do it for the purpose of attention. There is no other purpose. It's driving towards nothing.
Hayes distinguishes between the attention economy as it manifests in journalism and as it manifests in algorithmic feeds. As a broadcast journalist, he acknowledges he participates in attention-grabbing practices, but notes that "the attention is a means towards some end," stating "I am not just on air to keep people's attention. That's not the project I'm engaged in. And if I were, I might make different choices". A news programme may capture your focus, but there is an ostensible purpose beyond the capture itself.
What Hayes describes as the infinite scroll represents a more insidious threat. He notes that the infinite scroll "feels like a slot machine for nonaccidental reasons. The slot machine is probably the single most successful pure attention-monetising technology ever derived". The mechanics are deliberate. The reward cycle is engineered. And every person scrolling is both the product being captured and the unwitting participant in the design of the trap.
The implications for news consumption are profound. Hayes observes that "information is everywhere. Attention is finite". You cannot solve the problem of staying informed by reading more. The problem is not the amount of information available but the weaponisation of human psychology to keep you distracted from what might matter most.
For those trying to make sense of current events, Hayes offers a more useful framework than tips on time management. The real work is recognising that staying informed is no longer just about finding good sources. It is about defending your own attention from systems explicitly designed to hijack it. That distinction, properly understood, changes how you approach the news entirely.