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Chapter 1
The Sirens' Call
Let us begin with a story from Odysseus's journey. In book twelve of the Odyssey, our hero is about to depart the island of the goddess Circe when she gives him some crucial advice about how to navigate the perils of the next leg of his voyage.
"Pay attention," she instructs him sternly:
First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song. There is a great heap of dead men's bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them.
Odysseus listens as Circe provides him with a plan: stuff wax in the ears of your crew, she says, so they cannot hear the Sirens, and have them bind you to the mast of the ship until you have sailed safely past.
Odysseus follows the plan to a tee. Sure enough, when the Sirens' song hits his ears, he motions to his men to loosen him so that he can follow it. But as instructed, his crew ignores him until the ship is out of earshot.
This image is one of the most potent in the Western canon: Odysseus lashed to the mast, struggling against the bonds that he himself submitted to, knowing this was all in store. It has come down to us through the centuries as a metaphor for many things. Sin and virtue. The temptations of the flesh and the willpower to resist them. The addict who throws his pills down the toilet in preparation for the cravings to come, then begs for more drugs. It's an image that illustrates the Freudian struggle between the ego and the id: what we want and what we know we should not, cannot have.
Whenever I've encountered a visual representation of the Sirens, they are always, for lack of a better word, hot. Seductive. From Shakespeare to Ralph Ellison and down through literature, the Sirens are most often a metaphor for female sexual allure. In James Joyce's Ulysses, Bloom describes the man who has taken up with Bloom's wife as "falling a victim to her siren charms and forgetting home ties."
Given this, it is a bit odd to reconcile the original meaning of the word with how we use it today, to describe the intrusive wail of the device atop ambulances and cop cars. But there's a connection there, a profound one, and it's the guiding insight for this book and central to understanding life in the twenty-first century.
Stand on a street corner in any city on earth long enough, and you will hear an emergency vehicle whiz past. When you travel to a foreign land, that sound stands out as part of the sensory texture of the foreignness you're experiencing. Because no matter where you are, its call is at once familiar and foreign. The foreignness comes from the fact that in different countries the siren sounds slightly different-elongated, or two-toned, or distinctly pitched. But even if you've never encountered it before, you instantly understand its purpose. Amidst a language you may not speak and food you've never tried, the siren is universal. It exists to grab our attention, and it succeeds.
The siren as we know it now was invented in 1799 by Scottish polymath John Robison. He was one of those Enlightenment figures who dabbled in everything from philosophy to engineering, and he originally intended the device as a form of musical instrument, though that didn't take. What we think of as the siren didn't reach its current form and function until the late nineteenth century. In the 1880s, a French engineer and inventor who had created electric (and therefore mostly silent) boats, utilized electric-powered sirens that worked to prevent boating accidents. (He even had a boat called La Sirène.) In relatively short order, the technology made its way to land vehicles like fire trucks, replacing the loud bells they'd formerly used to clear the way.
The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the urban streetscape both compel our attention against our will. And that experience, having our mind captured by that intrusive wail, is now our permanent state, our lot in life. We are never free of the sirens' call.
Attention is the substance of life. Every moment we are awake we are paying attention to something, whether through our affirmative choice or because something or someone has compelled it. Ultimately, these instants of attention accrue into a life. "My experience," as William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology in 1890, "is what I agree to attend to." Increasingly it feels as if our experience is something we don't fully agree to, and the ubiquity of that sensation represents a kind of rupture. Our dominion over our own minds has been punctured. Our inner lives have been transformed in utterly unprecedented fashion. That's true in just about every country and culture on earth.
In the morning I sit on the couch with my precious younger daughter. She is six years old, and her sweet soft breath is on my cheek as she cuddles up with a book, asking me to read to her before we walk to school. Her attention is uncorrupted and pure. There is nothing in this life that is better. And yet I feel the instinct, almost physical, to look at the little attention box sitting in my pocket. I let it pass with a small amount of effort. But it pulses there like Gollum's ring.
My ability to reject its little tug means I'm still alive, a whole human self. In the shame-ridden moments where I succumb, though, I wonder what exactly I am or have become. I keep coming back to James's phrase "what I agree to attend to" because that word "agree" in his formulation carries enormous weight. Even if the demand for our attention comes from outside us, James believed that we ultimately controlled where we put it, that in "agreeing" to attend to something we offered our consent. James was rather obsessed with the question of free will, whether we in fact had it and how it worked. To him, "effort of attention"-deciding where to direct our thoughts-was "the essential phenomenon of will." It was one and the same. No wonder I feel alienated from myself when the attention box in my pocket compels me seemingly against my own volition.
The ambulance siren can be a nuisance in a loud, crowded city streetscape, but at least it compels our attention for a socially useful purpose. The Sirens of Greek myth compel our attention to speed our own death. What Odysseus was doing with the wax and the mast was actively trying to manage his own attention. As dramatic as that Homeric passage is, it's also, for us in the attention age, almost mundane. Because to live at this moment in the world, both online and off, is to find oneself endlessly wriggling on the mast, fighting for control of our very being against the ceaseless siren calls of the people and devices and corporations and malevolent actors trying to trap it.
That's basically the world we've built for our minds. Well, maybe not "we," per se. Our agency in the construction of the business and institutions of the attention age is a matter of considerable debate. The combination of our deepest biological instincts and the iterative genius of global capitalism means we are subject to an endless process of experimentation, whereby some of the largest corporations in the history of humanity spend billions to find out what we crave and how much of that they can sell us. From inside our own being, attention is what constitutes our very self, but from the perspective of entities outside of us, attention is like gold in a stream, oil in a rock.
My professional life requires me to be particularly consumed by these questions, but I think we all feel this to some degree, don't we? The alienating experience of being divided and distracted in spite of ourselves, to be here but not present. I bet you could spend day and night in any city or town canvassing strangers and not find a single one who told you they felt like their attention span was too long, that they were too focused, who wished they had more distractions, or spent more time looking at screens. Like traffic, our phones are now the source of universal complaint, a way to strike up a conversation in a barber shop or grocery line. What began as small voices at the margins warning us that the tech titans were offering us a Faustian bargain has coalesced into something approaching an emerging consensus: things are bad, and the technologies we all use every day are the cause. The phones are warbling us to death.
But before we simply accept this at face value and move on with our inquiry, it's worth poking a bit at this quickly forming conventional wisdom. I mean, don't we always go through this cycle? Don't people always feel that things are wrong and that it's because of kids these days? Or the new technology (printing press, steam engine, et cetera) has been our ruin?
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates goes on a long rant-half persuasive and half ludicrous-about the peril posed by the new technology of . . . writing: "If men learn [the art of writing]," Socrates warns, "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls: They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder."
It seems safe to say in hindsight that writing was a pretty big net positive for human development, even if one of the greatest thinkers of all-time worried about it the same way contemporaries fret over video games. Indeed, it often feels that for all the legitimate criticism of social media and the experience of ubiquitous screens and connectivity, a kind of familiar neurotic hysteria undergirds the dire warnings. An entire subgenre of parenting advice books and blocking software now exists to manage "screen time" and the mortal peril introduced by our devices into the brain development of children; the broader cultural conversation has taken on all the overdetermined ferocity of a moral panic. In 2009, the Daily Mail alerted its readers to "How using Facebook could raise your risk of cancer." The New York Post warned that screens are "digital heroin" that turn kids into "psychotic junkies." "Teens on social media go from dumb to dangerous," CBS cautioned. And The Atlantic was just one of many to ask the question: "Have smartphones destroyed a generation?" In 2024, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt published The Anxious Generation, which argues that ubiquitous access to smartphones has consigned an entire generation of teens and children to unprecedented levels of depression, anxiety, and self-harm. While some scholars who studied the issue criticized Haidt's polemic for being overcooked, it was a runaway bestseller, and parents and schools across the country organized efforts to keep phones out of schools, as the book urged.
Some of the most grave and chilling descriptions of the effects of the attention age come from the workers who have engineered it. The hit Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma relies heavily on former Silicon Valley figures like whistleblower and former Google employee Tristan Harris to warn of the insidious nature of the apps mining our attention. Sean Parker, the creator of Napster and one of Facebook's earliest investors, describes himself as a "conscientious objector" when it comes to social media: "God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," he has said. He is very much not alone. A New York Times Magazine article from 2018 tracks what the author calls the "dark consensus about screens and kids" among the Silicon Valley workers who themselves helped engineer the very products they now bar their own children from using. "I am convinced," one former Facebook employee told The New York Times in 2018, that "the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children."
I'm inclined to agree, but also find myself shrinking more than a little at how much the conversation around the evils of our phones sounds like a classic moral panic. Sociologist Stanley Cohen first coined the term "moral panic" in his 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics, a study of the hysteria that surrounded different kinds of youth culture, particularly the Mods and Rockers in the UK in the 1960s. "Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of moral panic," Cohen writes. Some group or cultural trend "emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions."
We can also see this familiar pattern when the target is a new technology rather than a cultural trend or group: excitement and wonder that quickly turn to dread and panic. The cheap printing technology of the late nineteenth century that gave rise to paperbacks and dime-store novels occasioned one critic to decry the genre publisher for "poisoning society . . . with his smutty stories and impure example . . . a moral ulcer, a plague spot, a leper, who ought to be treated as were the lepers of old, who were banished from society and commanded to cry 'Unclean,' as a warning to save others from the pestilence." In 1929, as radio rose to become a dominant form of media in the country, The New York Times asked, "Do Radio Noises Cause Illness?" and informed its readers that there was "general agreement among doctors and scientific men that the coming of the radio has produced a great many illnesses, particularly caused by nervous troubles. The human system requires repose and cannot be kept up at the jazz rate forever."
The brilliant illustrator Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd, captures much of this in a timeline called "The Pace of Modern Life" chronicling the anxiety of contemporary critics about the development of industrial modernity, particularly the speed of communication and proliferation of easily accessible information and its impact on our minds. He starts with the Sunday Magazine in 1871 mourning the fact that the "art of letter-writing is fast dying out. . . . We fire off a multitude of rapid and short notes, instead of sitting down to have a good talk over a real sheet of paper." He then quotes an 1894 politician decrying the shrinking attention spans: instead of reading, people were content with a "summary of the summary" and were "dipping into . . . many subjects and gathering information in a . . . superficial form" and thus losing "the habit of settling down to great works." And my personal favorite, a 1907 note in the Journal of Education that laments the new "modern family gathering, silent around the fire, each individual with his head buried in his favorite magazine."
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