MSNBC host Chris Hayes has a new book out, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. The blurb: “From the New York Times-bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society.”
Sounds like a natural fit for a fawning interview on public television, and Amanpour & Co. followed NPR in conducting one, with Amanpour correspondent Hari Sreenivasan after an enthusiastic set-up by host Christiane Amanpour. Together, they advanced a shocking, neo-puritanical proposal -- to limit online screen time in the name of preserving our attention.
Hari Sreenivasan: What you point out with the book is really, I see so many parallels to the ultra-processed food industry and how we seem to be so much more addicted to sugar. But how do you try to get something like attention back?
Chris Hayes: I'm glad that you point to the food analogy or precedent because I actually think it is the closest one here. In the same way, we have certain biological inheritances, we like salt, fat, and sugar, if you release large global capitalism on that problem, it will give you Coca-Cola and fries. And you can sell it anywhere in the world, right?….
Hayes pined for the good old days of the Internet with “open internet architecture….not commercially bound by a platform attempting to monetize your attention.”
He warmed up to his big idea.
Hayes: I think there's real questions about the law and regulation and getting serious about regulating how attention is extracted from us and who it is extracted from.
The solution to “attention capitalism,” as his book has it, was a stunningly authoritarian left-wing proposal from someone whose livelihood depends on support for free expression -- for himself, at least.
Sreenivasan: Should we, collectively as a society, trying to moderate this in some way?...
Hayes: They will say, please regulate us, but then if you try to do things like put on age caps, they fight it—
Sreenivasan: --yeah, they lobby against it.
Hayes: --so yes, they want to choose their own regulators and regulation. But I think that you need both regulation and alternatives. I like the idea of regulating attention in some way, whether that’s essentially a hard limit on screen time, like a statutory limit, that sounds in people's heads, utterly insane and the most paternalistic thing. People thought about that about maximum hours at a certain point. That’s what the Lochner decision, the famous Supreme Court decision is all about is like, if New York says, you can only work 55 hours a week, is that paternalism or are they protecting something essential about you? And does the Constitution knock that law down? It is worth thinking about that for attention.
But I also think that you can't do that unless you also are also nurturing alternatives that are like open platform civic alternatives. Because there are ways that we could communicate with each other, there are, video does not have to exist inside YouTube. There are ways to have open platforms in which people can do things...
Considering the scary quality of this idea, perhaps there should be a hard limit on watching Chris Hayes on MSNBC as well?
