Digital giants have capitalized on our need for constant stimulation. And now politics is doing the same. But antidotes are needed, explains best-selling author Chris Hayes
“The most surprising discovery I made while researching my book? A University of Virginia psychology experiment on attention: a person, exposed for fifteen minutes without any stimulus, managed to seek out one hundred small but painful electric shocks.” For Chris Hayes, author of the book Siren’s Call, our attention has become the most endangered resource in the world (“The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource”, published in February 2025). Hayes, a New York Times bestselling author and well-known American television journalist, emphasizes that the problem is no longer simply a personal or psychological issue. It is both economic and political. The greatest confirmation is now in the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and his ally Elon Musk.
Of course, the attention economy is a well-known topic in the literature. Conceived as early as 1969 by Nobel Prize winner in Economics Herbert Simon: in a world flooded with information, human attention becomes a rare and precious resource. Then, in the 90s, scientist Michael H. Goldhaber expanded Simon’s work by applying the concept to the then-emerging context of the digital world.
Goldhaber had already understood that human attention had become a central resource in the internet economy. A few decades before Google (among others) harnessed this resource to become a two-trillion-dollar powerhouse. That’s about the size of Russia’s GDP. But Hayes notes that in the current global economy and politics, especially the US, the phenomenon is reaching its negative peak. “The digital economy is increasingly based on our attention. And not just on social media or online advertising. Take cryptocurrencies like bitcoin: just like social media, they are tools designed to monetize our attention, in a speculative way.”
Hayes, like other authors, compares many digital services to slot machines that are always inventing new ways to manipulate our attention and keep us engaged; to take our time and, sometimes, even money.
“There is a lot of evidence, reports from within the social media companies themselves, that there is a constant search for manipulative techniques built into the very design and construction of these services. Think of the notifications that keep sending us back to the service,” Hayes adds.
The EU calls these techniques dark patterns, banning them in its latest regulations (the Digital Services Act), which are however difficult to enforce; especially now that the tech giants have found support from Trump to not respect EU rules. Digital services have exacerbated our loss of attention, a phenomenon studied by many authors. Among the best known is Gloria Mark, a psychologist and professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. In a large study published in 2023, Mark documented that the average time people spend in front of a screen, from one activity to another, has fallen from about two and a half minutes in the 2000s to just 47 seconds today. That’s why some, after a few minutes without stimuli, come to prefer electric shocks.
Hayes already finds strong connections between this phenomenon and politics. He notes that Musk is constantly looking for techniques to monetize the attention of the masses, which is why he spent $44 billion to buy Twitter (which he later turned into X). His strategy is in line with Trump’s, and it is no coincidence that they are close allies, with the billionaire having received from the US President an institutional task to find ways to reduce public spending, and he documents these actions in X, often exaggerating or distorting their effectiveness.
“A constant creator of fake news. Like Trump, according to whom, for example, the US has spent 300 billion on Ukraine, three times as much as Europe; when in fact it is half and it is less than what Europe has done”, says Hayes. Trump knows that refutations of his fake news will have no effect. He exploits our lack of attention, that is, the total pollution of our information system (in addition to the strong political polarization of society)”. But now, for Hayes, it is even worse, the peaks are being reached: “Trump has even launched his own cryptocurrency, bought by his fans, exploiting the phenomenon for personal economic reasons”. A summary of how attention capitalism brings together, in the same dynamics, the digital economy and politics.
Hayes proposes several solutions. “On a personal level, I try to train my attention every day, avoiding distractions for a period of time. On a systemic level, on the other hand, we need rules that, for example, limit the ability of social networks to divert our attention for too long.” Hayes goes so far as to propose a kind of tax, like the one applied to companies on pollution. “Even the monetization of our attention is a negative externality; a harm to all in favor of a few,” he says. An idea against the tide, in the age of Trump. “It’s true, but things can change quickly. I’m optimistic,” he says. After all, what alternative do we have? My motto is that of Antonio Gramsci: pessimism of intelligence, optimism of will.”
