Chris Hayes knows a thing or two about getting attention, given that he has hosted his Emmy Award-winning MSNBC talk show "All In with Chris Hayes" for more than a decade. That helps explain why his new book, "The Sirens’ Call," which focuses on exactly that topic, debuted at the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
When I spoke to Hayes about his new book for "Salon Talks," he observed that attention is like oxygen: Humans need it to survive. “A newborn infant is totally helpless and it dies unless it is attended to. So from the moment we come into the world, our survival depends on attention from others,” Hayes explained.
Throughout life, in fact, we all strive for attention to varying degrees. (As a needy person myself, this is an acute daily exercise!) But something deeper is at work in what Hayes calls the “attention industry,” which seeks to secure our attention for profit. In every minute of our waking lives, social media platforms compete for our attention with all kinds of entertainment and commentary, even including a “Dog With a Blog,” as Hayes mentioned.
Of course we also see a nonstop contest for attention by politicians. Discussing Donald Trump, Hayes remarked that “his desire for that attention is so deep, it's coming from such a deep place, he needs it so pathologically.” That need seems to drive Trump’s every action, as we have all witnessed over the past decade.
Democrats, by contrast, appear to be losing the war of attention. Some Democrats in Congress are trying to take Trump on directly, Hayes notes, “but fighting back or getting attention might not be the same thing.” One important element is what Hayes calls the operating DNA of the two parties. "Democrats want to get some bills through Congress," Hayes told me, "and what Republicans want to do is go on podcasts."
The challenge for Democrats, he believes, is to focus on new ways to attract attention — and to overcome their “risk aversion to trying new things.” This may be a generational or institutional issue, but it's high time for Democratic leaders need to realize that if they can't win the battle for attention, they may not be able to survive.
Watch my "Salon Talks" episode with Chris Hayes on YouTube to hear more about Hayes' theory of attention, how cable news has changed over the last 10 years and why Trump is so well suited to harness the attention industry.
The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
I'm smarter now from reading your book! I don't say that too often about other people's books.
Honestly, that is the best thing an author can hear. The thing when you write a book is you want: a) people to read it, which is not nothing — as I document in the book, we're all distracted; and b) people to find it useful. My favorite thing is when people read something that you've written, and they feel like it generates their own thoughts. Like, "Oh, I started having these thoughts about things." That's sort of the sweet spot.
You talk about people going into solitary confinement as a form of punishment. Is attention like oxygen? Do we need it to survive?
Yes — social attention, that specific form of attention. One of the things I try to do in the book is map out these dimensions and distinctions. One really important form of social attention is so elemental to human life that it is the necessary precondition to survive. A newborn infant is totally helpless and it dies unless it is attended to, so from the moment we come into the world, our survival depends on attention from others. When you read about people that have been exposed to prolonged periods of isolation, it's a form of torture, it's a form of madness. That's because that social attention from other people is like the lifeblood of human existence.
You write, "I don’t think you can understand the attention age without grappling with the experience of alienation … I’ve returned again and again to alienation as the best available descriptor for something I can’t quite name about what it feels like to be alive right now." Why do you feel that way?
Alienation is one of those concepts that I've always been a little suspicious of because it could be so fuzzy and all-encompassing. The specific thing I'm talking about here is a sense that a thing that should be inside you is outside of you. A thing that you should have control over and be internal to you has been taken from you and it is now alien to you. I think we feel that way about our own attention, about our own minds.
This feeling of constantly being compelled to pay attention to something, maybe against our will, maybe eliciting some part of our will that we feel icky about, and then that attention being outside of us and not something that properly we control. It's that feeling of alienation, this kind of mental carsickness that we all walk around with, that stuck-in-traffic feeling but in your mind that I think has really become the mood of the times.
We can be alienated from our own attention and then alienated from each other through technologies that are defined with increasing sophistication and the use of machine learning running experiments over a billion users to find the particular individual thing we will want to spend time with that might be different than the spouse sitting next to us on the couch.
Every new media invention has caused moral panic: radio, TV, the Walkman. The Museum of Modern Art has an exhibit about the earliest days of Impressionism and you read the articles like, "It's the devil's work, it's going to destroy society."
Exactly. Those are really wild, the reviews of the [1913] Armory Show when it comes to New York and the Impressionism period. My favorite example of that is a quote I have from, I think, the 1890s, where someone's writing about the scourge of magazines and the thing he says is, like, "Nowadays after dinner by the fire, a whole family is sitting, each looking at their own magazine and not paying attention to each other." It's so perfect.
Then a few years later everyone is over the panic, the technology is normal and the next thing becomes demonized. How do you separate yourself from that cycle when talking about social media?
I think there's two answers to that. One is that if you go back, you can look at this resistance to new technologies as moral panic, but also as capturing something true. People weren't wrong to recognize that TV was a revolutionary technology that was going to totally alter how politics was conducted, how commerce was conducted and how people lived their lives in the domestic sphere. All of that was true. So first of all, we're dealing with a technology on the order of, at the very least, TV, which is to say it's going to have seismic implications.
"What Democrats want to do is try to get some bills through Congress, and what Republicans want to do is go on podcasts."
Two, I think there's a bunch of things that differentiate this technology. Its ubiquity, which is totally distinct. You carry it around, you have this portal to it. Its sophistication, in terms of the scale at which it's operating over a billion users — there's never been a medium that operates over a billion users. Then, crucially, this social aspect where it is able to talk to you individually in a way that no technological media forum has ever been able to do. The closest you could get was to look into the camera and try to sell to a generic housewife, or Uncle Sam pointing in the poster. This can actually talk to Dean Obeidallah. This technology can have people tag and mention you. It can weaponize that need for social attention at scale in a way nothing else ever has before.
There are valid concerns about the technology we have today, but what about AI?
I have a bunch of complicated thoughts and I still feel like I am in the beginning of a learning curve. There's a Sam Altman quote where he talks about the machine learning that's employed on algorithmic social media as being the very first alignment problem of AI, meaning it's useful to understand that algorithmic social media is really the first mass consumer product driven by large language models or machine learning at scale. It is learning what people like and don't like and learning in real time and getting more and more sophisticated. The fact that that can produce a set of incentives that are misaligned with what we want from humans or produces a lot of swastika content, that's a big problem that portends something profound about AI in the future.
In terms of the specifics of AI, one of the crazy things is that social media has this thing where they can get Dean's attention on Bluesky, but there's a person connected to that. Now imagine a world in which AI can do that, and imagine a world in which there is no regulatory demand that you know when you're talking to a computer, a bot or a human. That to me is the most obvious point.
You can start to scale this sort of social tent. Imagine people friending you six months before an election and they're talking to you. You have shared interests and then they start to say things about the election and they're kind of trying to drive you toward a certain point of view. And then it turns out, "Oh, that's just an AI bot that was deployed at scale." There are serious ethical questions here.
Donald Trump has harnessed the attention industry that we live in. Is it that he works the system well, or is it the system going, "OK, we can use this person to do what we need to do, which is to monetize"?
I think it's sometimes that a man meets his moment. In this case, it's sort of a dystopian version of this, where a person whose desire for attention is so defining and pathological that it's genuine and authentic in a way that's unthinkable. He is not an authentic person insofar as he lies all the time, but his desire for that attention is so deep, it's coming from such a deep place, he needs it pathologically. He entered politics at the moment when attention is the most valuable resource, and from this sort of feral instinct he backed into this realization: All attention is good attention, even negative attention; the point is to dominate attentional space.
If you look at his first few weeks in office, he comes out every day behind the Resolute Desk. I've never seen it before. Every day, four o'clock, Resolute Desk, Oval Office. It could be the most insane surreal thing you've ever seen, like Elon Musk twitching with his four-year-old in front of him, but you're watching. That's the point, and I think the central insight that has helped him.
Democrats are losing the war of attention. I have members of Congress on my radio show, and they get slightly defensive when I go, "You guys are not fighting back hard." They'll list what they're doing. I'm like, "Well, it didn't make press coverage."
That's the thing: "Are you fighting back?" or "Are you getting attention?" might not be the same thing.
That's what they are not getting, that's the disconnect.
I thought when they went outside USAID, I thought that worked. I don't know if they had a mic set up or maybe just a megaphone, but there were protesters there. That was the first time where I was like, "OK, there's something happening here that's new, that's different, you're trying to break through." But a huge part of it is just this default institutionalism, this hidebound risk aversion that I think has become a real cultural problem in the Democratic Party. This kind of stasis, not wanting to try new things and being scared of new things.
"There's this entire industrial complex around democratic politicians. PR people and comms people, and everything has to be vetted... AOC just goes on Instagram and she talks to people."
I also think there's a real problem, which they've found themselves in for perfectly good reasons: They really are more comfortable governing than being powerless in opposition. Republicans are the other way around. What Democrats want to do is try to get bills through Congress, and what Republicans want to do is go on podcasts. What happens is when the Democrats are in power and Republicans are out of it, they're each suited to their roles. When it flips, what you have is Democrats struggling to get attention and Republicans having a hard time governing, and instead going to war against their own government.
Democratic leadership during the election campaign would say, "Donald Trump's a fascist, he's going to take away our freedoms, our democracy, everything." After he wins, they're like, "Let's find common ground." How does that work?
I think that was a pretty rough message twist. I don't think their worst fears have been disproven by his actions in the first three weeks. Let me defend them this way. Here's their logic, and I don't think it's ludicrous: We believe this is true, that he is a threat to democracy. We made this argument consistently and forthrightly to the American people and they were like, "Eh, I don't care."
Then I think what they said is, "Look, if people don't care about that argument, if that's not breaking through to people, we shouldn't keep trying it. We should try something new. What we're going to try is we'll work with him on areas we agree, but what about the price of eggs?" Now, again, that has a certain logic to it and in the latest polling, even a very good poll for him that came from CBS where he had positive approval, 77% of people said he wasn't doing enough about prices. You had inflation come in hot this week. So it's not crazy, but there's something a little narratively incoherent as he lays waste to the government to be like, "Well, what about the price of eggs?" Like, OK, yes, but ...
Politics is about figuring out effective means of public communication, particularly when you're in the minority. They literally have no power to set an agenda, they have to react to the agenda. One of the things you have to do is try different messages, try to do different things, and one of the things I think you can say is, "Look, he has given the keys to the government over to a billionaire to enrich themselves, to screw over working people, to push through big tax cuts and what is happening to your costs?" There's a way to unify those messages. Some Democrats are doing a good job. I think it's hit-and-miss. It's a little generational, too.
One of the things that I think is really important is that there's this entire industrial complex around Democratic politicians, PR people and comms people. Everything has to be vetted because blah, blah, blah. AOC just goes on Instagram and she talks to people. Maybe she's going to say some things that are going to be taken out of context and she's going to get killed in the New York Post for it, and that does happen. But she is trying her level best to authentically communicate, without these filters. There's a lot to learn from that, which is just go talk to people. On any platform you can find, go talk to people.
Your book is about attention, and you've been on TV now for more than a decade. What have you learned about getting attention over this year? How has it changed for you in terms of trying to get the viewership attention?
One is just the constant change of the universe we live in. When I started doing this show, I remember we had the showrunner for “House of Cards,” Beau Willimon, on [as a guest]. It was 2013 or ‘14, because the big thing was, Netflix has a show now. That was the reason we booked him, it was a political drama, but the big story was, "Whoa, Netflix making content." Radical transformation! TikTok didn’t exist, none of that.
"People talk about advertisers all the time. No one knows my advertisers less than me."
In every moment, everyone who's doing something like what you and I are doing is competing with every other piece of content ever made in human history. I see it with my kids sometimes, they'll be rooting around on Disney and discover a canceled sitcom from 2002 that they watch every episode of. “Dog With a Blog.” That's a real show. There's a show called “Dog With a Blog” about a dog with a blog. Didn't last very long. My daughter loves it. The point of that is the competition is incredibly fierce, more intense than it's ever been.
It's hard to move people off the platforms they're on, that's the other thing. I have a podcast that comes out weekly — we reach a bunch of people that don't watch my TV show. A lot of people watch my TV show and don't listen to the podcast. I hope there's a lot of people that read this book who don't do either. I'm on Bluesky and I'm on X and I'm on Threads, and part of the reason that I'm on all these different places is that different people, different generations, different demographics, get information in different ways. You kind of have to be in all these different places.
If there were things you couldn't talk about on your show, would you choose to talk about them in a book? Is there ever push and pull from the big world of corporate media?
No. I think I had this conception when I was younger: "Corporate media won't let you say X or Y." I've really not had that experience. People talk about advertisers all the time. No one knows my advertisers less than me. I talk to viewers who will mention my advertisers all the time. I'm like, "I've never seen an ad for my own show. I have no idea who my advertisers are. In fact, you know much better than I because you actually watch it from the outside. I sit there in the studio like ... ‘Four minutes.’" That part of it is just not a factor.
What is a factor is format. That's the big factor. What can you do in an eight-minute cable news block, versus what can you do in a 45-minute podcast, versus what can you do in a 300-page book, versus what you can do in an essay, in a tweet or a Bluesky post. That's where I think you hit limitations in format. I did this podcast with this guy, David Roberts, who's a great writer on the green economy, and we talked about the electrical grid for 50 or 55 minutes and it was fascinating. You can't really do that on a cable news show, there's too much detail to fill up.
One thing that's great is with these different formats, at the same time we have this lowest-common-denominator sirens' call of the casino-fication of content and the algorithmic drive to short video, and next to that we have these boundless human appetites for all sorts of different things. People listen to four-hour podcasts, people get really into shows about history or astrophysics. People are interested in different stuff and a more diverse landscape allows you to meet those different needs in different places and create small-scale but sustainable outlets. The question is, which of those two impulses is ascendant?
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