(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Chris Hayes, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Penguin Random House, 2025 and
Nicholas Carr, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.
Reviewed by Gary Furr
Few would or could argue that human existence is not being seriously undermined and disrupted by the digital age, despite the many advances that have come with it. Two recent books have sought to understand the distress to human community that has come with the breathtaking advances that technology brings. They do so, ironically, by beginning in a pair of un-computerlike ways—with stories that give metaphors for understanding the moment we are in.
Christopher Hayes’ book is The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. Hayes is best known as a news commentator and anchor on MSNBC. He is also a podcaster, author and editor-at-large for The Nation Magazine. His undergraduate degree, though, was philosophy at Brown University, and it shines through his latest work.
Hayes begins with the mythological story of Ulysses and his sailors as they pass near the island of the sirens. Circe has warned Ulysses of the danger of their seductive song and advises him to have his sailors plug their ears to be able to resist the desire to go toward their beautiful sounds and wreck the ship on the rocks near the shore. Ulysses chooses to be tied to the mast so he may hear their song but nearly goes mad in the process.
Hayes does a deep dive into the disruptive impact of social media and the digital age by examining the role of attention in human life. The book’s subtitle captures his overarching concern: the ever shrinking and distracted attention span. The power of this revolution, which first came from Marchall McLuhan and futurists like Alvin Toffler, has caused the initial euphoria over the connectional power of the internet to give way to profound alarm in recent years.
Defining attention in philosophical and economic terms, the book describes the modern attempts to capture and commodify our attention. Attention, of course, is essential for human connection, survival and the love necessary for our collective and individual lives. Since the advent of modern psychology, William James and others have rightly identified the centrality of attention as a core reality of our humanity. Attention is love—the most basic and elemental form of love and thriving. “My contention,” he writes, “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,” (p. 12).
The metaphor of the siren is enlarged by consideration of what a “siren” means in modern industrialized and bureaucratic life—the sound of a siren breaks in upon our attention and forces us to pay attention. Witness the ambulance, the police car, or the tornado warning system. But there is also the seduction of hearing our name mentioned at a party or in class. Our mind immediately fastens attention to search out the origin.
While it is normal and human to respond in this way, the evolution of modern society, particularly as it has linked with capitalism, is to seek to capture and hold our attention. Attention is money—by distracting us, holding our attention, and luring us to the temptations of material possessions, pleasures and relief from boredom.
It is boredom, the perennial challenge of human life, that we face as a spiritual and philosophical test. Platforms in the computer age employ the effect long ago discovered in the slot machine to capture our attention and hold it. By giving us intermittent rewards we are kept captive. The problem is that as the distractions and lures have proliferated through our technological devices, our attention has not. It is a fixed amount, not increased in any way. We pay attention to only one focus at a time. Therefore, as more and more choices are available in ways never before possible, there is almost infinite competition for the same fixed resource.
For much of human history, we paid attention together—in person, or in groups. Even in our practices of faith, we paid attention collectively through rituals, actions and practices. “For the first 99 percent of our time on this planet, the only way we could experience ritual or spectacle or athletic competition was in person, with others.” Now that is no longer so (p. 145).
If we see what has happened even since the mid-19th century, the effect on our democracy is understandable. Hayes points in chapter seven to the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 to illustrate what has happened to us. A democracy requires sufficient time and attention to hear and absorb debate and different ideas. These robust debates are necessary as an alternative to fascism and authoritarianism, in which a powerful individual or group decides for the society.
Lincoln and Douglas traveled the country, debating the single issue of slavery from town to town, drawing massive crowds who would listen for hours as they argued, answered and explored this critical issue. The shrinking of the attention span has been well-documented, but this requirement of a democratic society is often missed in our current moment. If we consider the phenomenon of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, we see success of a certain kind, but at the expense of any intelligible conversation about substance. Speeches are entertainment and emotional response and, most importantly, gaining attention, whether good or bad is irrelevant.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates could not be had today. That the religious culture, particularly among white evangelicals, has been absorbed and shrunk by this reality is of great dismay. Because the loss of attention means loss of moral depth, the loss of genuine discernment, the loss of critical debate and discussion, and the loss of spiritual change.
Our attention is extracted without our will even being able to weigh in, he argues. As economists once talked about the alienation created by the mundane nature of work in the Industrial Age, now this loss of focus and attention creates a crisis of alienation within our very selves. Jonathan Haidt, Sherry Turkel, and others have documented the damage this is doing to children. Hayes has done us the favor of seeing that we must fight for our very selves. It is our inner freedom that is at stake.
It is easy to see the dilemma of our current politics and culture. Hayes notes on page 205 that we tend to compare the authoritarian tendencies to George Orwell’s 1984, but in fact it is Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that is more apt. He quotes Neil Postman who said that that what Orwell feared was there were those who would ban books, but what Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read.
Attention is our most precious faculty. By it we love and are loved. By it we decide, connect to one another, and promote value and truth. The irony is not lost on Hayes that he earns his living in this attention commodity. But he notes that most news media people do not control attention. They spend their days chasing it.
When we come to Nicholas Carr, we meet another profound metaphor, that of a story of reality colliding with virtuality. Nicholas Carr is a journalist and author who has written substantively about the consequences of technology for humanity. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010. It’s an intellectual history of how various technological revolutions have affected the human brain and how the one in which we currently find ourselves is transforming every part of our lives. An updated edition was released in 2020.
The Shallows examines the impact of technology on the long history of human beings and how this current epoch is particularly damaging to our brains. His latest work, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, starts in a different place, the beginning of modern attention industries.
The opening chapter begins with a current story, in which a young social media influencer documented a spectacular area in Walker Canyon, California, in which a spring “superbloom” of poppies had occurred in 2019. Carr says:
It would appear on Instagram a hundred thousand times over the next two weeks—selfie-seekers followed, pulled the blossoms up by the fistful. “Flowergeddon,” the press called it. In an internet minute, a semblance of joy had turned to a semblance of remorse. with everyone churning out content and competing for the symbolic applause of the like button. As well as a portrait, it offered a metaphor. We live today in a perpetual superbloom—not of flowers but of messages (p.3).
Carr examines our present moment from a different vantage point than Hayes but overlapping it. He begins with Charles Horton Cooley, a communications theorist born in the 19th century, and in fact who first coined the phrase “social media.” He and others were in the early heyday of new technology that was changing the social landscape—the telegraph, then radio and mass newspapers, and later television.
Cooley did not think individuals existed apart from society. While human nature may be fixed, it also could be altered by social influence. Therefore, as ideas spread and technologies enabled letters, telegraphs and other technologies to carry words beyond face-to-face conversation, collective changes and affinity groups could form.
The early pioneers of mass communication were heady with optimism about the impact of this new possibility on human life. The faster and more effective our communication with one another and between groups, the more our differences might be overcome. Ministers were also seized with euphoric hopes for an age of spiritual change, documented in sermons of the time.
They were blinded to the possibility that, by giving people more information and ability to form groups on the basis of their personal ideas that this might also have detrimental effects, what Philip Rieff said in 1962, says Carr, was “a disinclination to take into account the demonic in man” (p. 11). This same naivete was rampant among the early developers of the internet and social media. Mark Zuckerberg had ascended into dominance with Facebook in 2012 and was on a stated mission to create a more perfect world by getting people to communicate more. By 2016, when a heavily armed father of two stormed a pizza parlor in Washington based on a conspiracy theory, his vision was unraveling. The moral qualities to manage and harness this power were outstripped by the technology itself. Marconi and Tesla had earlier hoped that their inventions would bring an end to war by speeding communication and eliminating misunderstandings. The opposite seems to have been the case.
Carr then traces the long and complicated history of the tension between the private and the public interest and the many issues of privacy, freedom and self-expression. As the new technologies evolved, there was a general understanding that a distinction could exist. What may be permitted privately did not apply when a broadcast was universally available. The public then had an interest in regulating and monitoring it.
What changed with the internet, however, was that the ability to maintain this distinction disappeared, says Carr. For most of the 20th century, there were producers of content and consumers of content. Feedback could go the other way, of course, as in campaigns of complaints or letters to the stations. The technological innovations of Bell Labs, however, changed this fatefully through the work of engineer Claude Shannon. Shannon and his team developed the beginnings of coding that could reduce, theoretically, anything humans have by means of ones and zeroes. They could compress all information to be easily transmitted across a network this way, opening the door to the current reality. “By 2007, half of Americans had home broadband. By 2010, two-thirds did” (p. 58).
Carr’s survey of this story is fascinating and illuminating. What ensued was “content collapse,” a reductionism of all things into their simplest form. Next, he says, came the “feed,” a reality Hayes also notes as fateful for humanity. For now, through algorithmic response, users themselves edit and select the information they see and interact with. Suddenly the wall between producers of content and consumers collapsed and the information moved everywhere at once.
While much obvious focus and blame falls upon the greedy merchants of Silicon Valley, Carr underlines the collective fault is what is inside each of us being manifested in the selections we make and comments we share. Moreover, we have run up against a disturbing truth—we do not like and cooperate more as we know more about one another. After a certain polite distance, the more we know, the more our antipathies to one another deepen.
Social media brought us oversharing as the new norm. In agreement with Chris Hayes, he notes what “to shut up, even briefly, is to disappear. To confirm our existence, we must keep posting. We must keep repeating Here I am!” (p. 108). But with this sharing comes the spurring of cascades of dissimilarity. Familiarity breeds contempt, envy, rivalry and covetousness.
The democracy fallacy of the early utopians crashed in the realities of the social media age. Rather than spreading democracy, we now well know that the opposite has happened. Proliferation of information has overwhelmed any capacity to adequately evaluate and debate truths. This was not new, of course. “In 1919, Walter Lippmann wrote a despairing essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled ‘The Basic Problem of Democracy.’ ‘The world about which each man is supposed to have opinions has become so complicated as to defy his powers of understanding,’” (p. 131). We live and move about in the same way but think and feel about it in completely different ways.
When provocateur Steve Bannon suggested the strategy to “flood the zone” with excrement, to put it nicely, he was only channeling the entire effect of social media—to overwhelm with too much unfiltered and unreflective information. Human society is simply overwhelmed and paralyzed with information, much of it created by our own forwarding, responding and reacting. It is the perfect step-up transformer. What results is our own inner, contradictory (and theologians might say both “image of God” and “fallen sinner”) natures projected upon the universe in a chaotic and disastrous tsunami of useless and trivial bytes.
In chapter seven, Carr focuses on the impact of the Coronavirus epidemic, as people were confined and cut off from physical proximity. Isolated, people spend more and more time online. And misinformation also grew. The political and cultural conflicts of that time compounded the deep cracks in our institutional and political life. Now the stage was set to deepen the crisis.
Up to this point in his book, Nicholas Carr traces how global humanity came to the present moment. In his final section 3, titled “Everything is Mediated,” he turns to the revolution of AI and the development of LLMs (large language models). It is a disturbing survey of the AI arms race currently underway. While it is obvious that a handful of opportunistic elites have seized on this revolution for their own benefit, including the current president and his circle, both to enrich themselves and to increase their power and control of society and its direction, the danger is even larger to the future of humankind than our daily crises enable us to understand.
Social media has created a perfect mirror of the neurotic selves we have become. It is fashionable in a therapeutic age to use the language of narcissism to diagnose one another. But a generation ago, pastoral theologian Donald Capps identified narcissism as the emerging disorder of our time in his book The Depleted Self: Sin in a Narcissistic Age. I heard Capps lecture when his book first appeared, and his argument was compelling to me. Narcissism operates profoundly out of a fear of shame, not guilt. At the core of the narcissist is emptiness of soul. Failing to develop a healthy and well-ordered self at early stages of life, this person is bereft of inner resources. Life consists of grasping constantly to fill the emptiness with the external world through manipulation and seeking accolades and praise.
Now we carry the instruments of disordered self-image in our purses and pockets, complete with a camera to edit our words and images to gain the faint praise of unknown people on the web whose actual presence in our lives is nearly non-existent. And we are universally all trapped in this “web.” The stage is now set for the machines to take over the content production phase.
AI is moving at breakneck speed to develop alternatives to actual human connection. Carr documents this in terrifying detail.
In 2012, half of American teenagers said they’d rather socialize with friends through screens than in person, [and a study] found that from 2010 to 2019 social engagement “plummeted for young Americans.” Socializing in person with friends fell by half, from 133 to 67 minutes a day. As people spend more time with technologies of connection, they feel more disconnected. Interacting through screens is not the same as hanging out. The virtual world is a cold place. For many teens and tweens, particularly girls, the twenty-first century has been a time of growing despair. (171-172).
It is not hard to see the consequences for humanity in this development. Carr calls it a “World without World” as the title of chapter 9. He now begins to explore the key characters of the AI overlords, most prominently Marc Andreessen (notably a mentor for Vice-President Vance).
Carr says that he thinks that “AI will neither save nor destroy the world. But its power brokers will be more likely to be guilty of the latter.” Andreessen believed that anything humans can produce, AI can do better. It is infinitely patient and sympathetic and “AI will make the world warmer and nicer.” The manifesto where Andreessen set forth these ideas ends with a warning for “the public and the government to stay out of the tech industry’s way.”
In an obscure interview in 2021, Carr tells of Andreessen’s belief that human beings left to themselves are destructive and wasteful. His vision is a technocracy, in which a small, powerful group of elites control the wealth, power and information systems for the sake of humanity itself. “Behind today’s dystopian AI dreams lurk character traits all too common to the tech elite: grandiosity, hubris, and self-aggrandizement” (p.183).
Both Hayes and Carr underline that once technological change comes, there is no way to go back. The consequences are already underway. Both argue persuasively that our technology both amplifies and diminishes our inner lives simultaneously. It is odd to think that in the creation of a means of sharing connection and possibilities by flattening every made part of ourselves into cyphers that we have somehow attained something worth giving complete devotion and trust into.
The problem is, what do we do now that we see the price, but cannot turn back? As a former executive from that world told me, “You either fight it or try to get ahead of it and manage it.” Both options are profoundly difficult. Superbloom and Sirens’ Call are extraordinarily engaging reads. When you finish them, you will be tempted to live in a mountain cave without electricity, but that is not an option for the followers of Jesus. As the fourth century monastics went to the deserts to create alternative communities of faithfulness as a protest against the secularization of the Constantinian church, so there is an opportunity for Christians to renounce the nationalist idolatry of the present moment, which is buttressed by the virtual sirens in its spread.
We are in the world they describe. For Hayes, this calls for the nurture of the inner life, which AI and the web stand as a temptation more than a help. What is needed are spaces for human connection, reflection, strategic withdrawal and “retreat.” This has long been a part of religious life. Human beings’ souls are under fire today by a collective self-destruction created by our brightest minds and enhanced by our own unreflective and addictive cooperation. It is a dangerous moment. And an opportunity for the best our long heritage of collective wisdom has to offer.
While neither author sets forth explicitly religious visions (Hayes grew up Catholic), invitations to robust theology are everywhere. Hopefully, we will not fail the moment. And, if our convictions are connected to the living God, we won’t.
The problem is, what do we do now that we see the price, but cannot turn back? As a former executive from that world told me, “You either fight it or try to get ahead of it and manage it.” Both options are profoundly difficult. Superbloom and Sirens’ Call are extraordinarily engaging reads. When you finish them, you will be tempted to live in a mountain cave without electricity, but that is not an option for most followers of Jesus. As the fourth century monastics went to the deserts to create alternative communities of faithfulness as a protest against the secularization of the Constantinian church, so there is an opportunity for Christians to renounce the nationalist idolatry of the present moment, which is buttressed by the virtual sirens in its spread.
We are in the world they describe. For Hayes, this calls for the nurture of the inner life, which AI and the web stand as a temptation more than a help. What is needed are spaces for human connection, reflection, strategic withdrawal and “retreat.” This has long been a part of religious life. Human beings’ souls are under fire today by a collective self-destruction created by our brightest minds and enhanced by our own unreflective and addictive cooperation. It is a dangerous moment. And an opportunity for the best our long heritage of collective wisdom has to offer.
Reconnection with nature, with human community instead of virtuality, and the nurturing of contemplation are not merely hobbies in this moment. They mean survival. Facing the potential social disruptions AI and automation bring, like the loss of work and growing financial inequities will result in a time more disruptive than the Industrial Revolution in which Wesley and others went forth to address profound social consequences. The arts, robust taxation of the wealthy, and human life not dependent on our machines are, to me after reading these books, no brainers. No one is entitled to control of the world and its wealth, since it is made by all of us, even if the means of its production is owned by the few. That our political leaders do not seem to see the impending danger is obvious. And the technocrats are now inside the sheepfold. Time is running out to act collectively.
While neither author sets forth explicitly religious visions (Hayes grew up Catholic), invitations to robust theology are everywhere. Hopefully, we will not fail the moment. And, if our convictions are connected to the living God, we won’t. But the way will be strewn with consequences already underway.
— Gary Furr is a speaker, writer, and performing musi- cian living in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, Vickie, and their three children and grandchildren. He retired in 2021 after forty one years as a pastor and is a frequent contributor to Christian Ethics Today. He can be reached at bhmpicker@gmail.com.
