From Trump to TikTok: Chris Hayes on the Rise of Attention Capitalism

Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.
Today, my guest is Chris Hayes, the host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC, host of Why Is This Happening? the Chris Hayes podcast, and author of a new book called The Siren's Call, How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource. As Hayes puts it, we live in an age where we're constantly overwhelmed by the compulsion to pay attention to things we don't actually care about, mostly around our smartphones.
We've been bombarded by so much information that it's hard to know what is actually important to pay attention to. According to Hayes, that's because life is now filled with sirens, as in the sirens from the Odyssey, except now our phones are the beautiful alluring voices telling us to just check them all the time.
But this book isn't just about how we're all addicted to our phones and social media. It's about our crowded attention age.
And as a cable news host whose job it is to capture our attention, that's something Hayes understands all too well. Obviously, this is a problem I've covered for years and talked about incessantly.
And I'm interested in talking to Chris about how these tech companies have stolen our souls over and over again. And they do it every day.
And then we pay them for doing so. And I think it has to change, and it will change going forward.
At the same time, they've never been more powerful and richer than ever. And so it's a very dangerous time for the average citizen when they come up against these modern-day supervillains, essentially.
Our expert question today comes from one of Hayes' colleagues in Holding People's Attention, Rachel Maddow. She has a tough question for him and a good one, so stick around.
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Chris, welcome and thanks for being on on. It's great to be here.
So you're in my territory right now. You've moved over to the attention economy, I see, which I'm very welcome.
I know you're, you know, of all the people I deal with on television, you're quite a, you're not a Luddite, I would say. You are a forward-thinking old media person, although you have a lot of interest in online media.
Yeah. I mean, I, you know, when I was 13 years old, I convinced my parents, 13 or 14, convinced my parents I didn't want to muck around with AOL or CompuServe.
I wanted my own ISP. Wow.
And I got on the internet and I started browsing the web on Lynx, the text browser, before Mark Andreessen created graphical user interfaces for the web. I mean, I really got on the internet early and was pretty hardcore, and it has been pretty formative for my life.
So tell me why you wrote the book now, because as you noted, the phrase attention economy was coined in the 1970s. In the past couple of decades, there's a lot written about the internet, our phones, the commodification of our attention.
And I want to know what was urgent to you. And I was just remembering a Microsoft executive who called it – this was 15, 20 years ago.
He said, we are all going to be in a state of – and this is a great phrase. Her name was Linda Stone –uous partial attention.
That we're sort of paying attention but not.

That has stuck with me for many, many years. This idea of continuous partial attention.
So why did you decide to do a – you could have done a political book. Like why attention from your perspective? A few reasons.
One is that my experience doing the television show means that the craft and technique that I have been working on for over a decade now, 13 years hosting a cable news show, is about attention. It's about grabbing people's attention and holding it.
Or not as much as it used to, right? That's the problem. Well, yes, although that's a great example because that speaks to the kind of vagaries of it, right? Like I can't control what I can't control.
What I try to do is do the best version I can of holding attention, but in some ways it's often outside your control. Right.
And the difficulty of that, it's a really hard thing to do, has made me think deeply for over a decade on this question. And then when I'm not doing that, I'm online.

Yeah, you were very online.

I'm very online.

And we all live in this world.

And it just became clearer and clearer to me

that this thing, attention,

is the most valuable resource of our age.

It's the defining resource of our age.

And it is also the substance of life.

It is, our life will be in the end, moment to moment, what we have paid attention to, what we have ignored. And there is something profound at a philosophical level about the thing that is most essential to us, the substance of our lives being extracted from us, often in a way that feels against our will.
And we like, which is very similar to addiction in that regard. Yes, we like.
I mean, I think it's a complicated version of like, right? Like in the same way that we seek it out. But I do think there's a generalized, and I think this is also crescendoed in the last two years, even in the course of writing the book, a generalized sense of disgust.
I mean, really, people feel disgusted by it at this point. Is this book sort of an adult version of Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation? That's actually a pretty good summary of it, right? Like, I think one of the things I think it's interesting about, and I think the Haidt book is really provocative and very persuasive, you know, that I think we tend to focus and you see this in the social dilemma on Netflix.
We tend to focus the fear on teenagers, but like it's all of us. And it's also I also think it's actually really important to make this distinction.
there's an empirical question about what the literature says to the degree we can measure it

about what this is doing to diagnosable pathologies like addiction, depression, anxiety, things like that, right? But then there's a deeper philosophical question, which is, is this the way we want to live? And is this the way we want to live is kind of the question that the book is asking, which is a little independent of like, well, no, it's not making me clinically depressed. Like, I mean, for some people, I think it is.
But for me, it's not making me clinically depressed. But I can decide that this is a weird and alienating way to go through life independent of that as the empirical outcome.
And I think one of the things you've seen in some of the reaction to the hate book is like this question about like, well, what does the literature say definitively about the causal mechanism and the levels of, you know, of anxiety or depression? There's a deeper philosophical question. What do we want to do with our lives and our minds? We get one shot at this life.
And right now it feels to me and feels to many people like the way the market is set up and the institutions are set up is to maximize the extraction of something that is essential to me to make fortunes for other people for basically pennies on the dollar in terms of what I get out of it. You know, a lot of the companies, like the ones you have been at war with, tech companies, which I find would be just shoplifters, a constant series of information thieves.

I think Walt Mossberg called constant series of information thieves.

I think Walt Mossberg called them rapacious information thieves. Well, I just want to say something about that, about data and information.
Because I think there's two things they're taking from us. They're taking data and information.
They're also taking our attention. And to me, the attention is the more valuable resource.
not in market terms necessarily, but in the sense that like, it doesn't really matter to me. It doesn't affect my life if 10 firms have my data or a hundred or a thousand do.
Like, I don't really know. It's out there somewhere.
Everyone's using it. They're training it.
What does matter to me is whether they have my attention because either I have it on the things I want or they have it on the things they want. And so it's the finitude of attention that is so key here.
It's the zero sumness that is the source of its value and the reason it's so contested. Except they're using that data to get your attention.
To get my attention. Precisely.
Yes. To engineer.
That's right. They take from you, chew it up, vomit it back into your mouth and you pay and say thank you for it.
That's,. You know what I mean if you think about it.
Right. But it's important, I think, to actually map that out because the information is the means to the ultimate end.
Like the reason the information is useful to them is to get my attention, which is to try to get an ad in front of me that is more targeted towards me, that's more socially indexed on me. But the ultimate end, the ultimate thing that matters is that attention.
So just the other day, yesterday I was talking to Scott and he has sort of a theme where he talks about TikTok. This idea of a lot of other stuff, Reddit, YouTube are more like, you know, OxyContin, but this is heroin.
Like I was like, oh, you're stack ranking drugs at this point because I think they're all bad. But do you equate it to drugs? Is that something you think about a lot? Yeah, I think it's similar.
I think the relationship to it is similar and there's a few ways that it's similar. But I think the reason the drug metaphor – the reason the drug metaphor is insufficient.
So I think our personal experience of it is similar to our experience of drugs or people that are in any substance abuse disorder, sorry, substance use disorder situation, which is you kind of hate yourself for it, but there's a compulsion to keep using it. You need bigger and bigger payloads, right, to get the same effect.
And that feeling of like hangover and guilt and shame after a long, you know, a long jag on the Internet is very similar. Why did I stay up so late scrolling? I didn't want to do that, but I did it.
Why did I go out drinking and now here I am. I have a hangover the next morning.
Like those are all similar. The real key difference, though, is drugs and alcohol are not the dominant markets in America.
They're not like they're not. It's to me, the better metaphor is food.
The reason that food is a better metaphor is that some that that pervasiveness, the pervasiveness and the fact that everyone has to put their attention somewhere and everyone's got to eat. And this is actually the thing that makes food and food addiction and disordered eating so difficult.
People that have substance problems, whether it's tobacco or it's alcohol or it's drugs, one possibility is abstinence, right? People that have disordered relationships with food don't have that option. You are going to have to eat and you're going to have to live with it.
And it's going to be everywhere and it's ubiquitous and it's unavoidable and it's woven into your biology every moment. So that's attention to me is much more like interesting appetite and hunger than it is drugs because drugs, drugs or other substances can be abstained from and they can be cordoned off and they don't sort of dominate our lives in a sort of ubiquitous fashion for all of us the way that food does.

Right. So the key argument early in the book is that attention we give our phones and screens makes us less human.
So it's not just the phones that are bad for us. They're existentially disruptive.
And talk a little bit briefly about what human qualities we're losing. And talk about yourself.
Like, I'm not an addictive personality, and I have to try really hard to put it down as not an extension of myself in some fashion. I mean, I think the big thing is being alone with our thoughts.
He talked about that. Boredom.
Just basic boredom. Boredom.
And I think one of the things I've enjoyed about the book is it's about this very contemporary phenomenon, but when you push through it, you get to something essential and enduring about being a human on the earth, you know? And so it's like at some level, some of these problems are literally what the Buddha was wrestling with sitting under the banyan tree. Before there was anything recognizably modern in his world or media, right? The Stoics, some of the stuff we're dealing with, the Stoics thought about.
So part of this is just being a human in the world. And part of being a human in the world is the unquiet mind, the unsettled self, the difficulty of sitting with your own thoughts, and the desire to put your attention on something else.
And that desire, which is endemic to being a human, Blaise Pascal in the 17th century says, I've come to the conclusion that, you know, all the foibles of man stem from his inability to sit alone in his own chamber. Restlessness.
Restlessness. And I think I have that in spades.
In fact, to be totally honest, an antidote for me is to write a book. Oh, okay.
I had a lot of trouble writing a book myself because of that. I find that it orders, it's like, it gives me a deadline.
It gives me a project. It orders my thinking.
If I go for a walk, I'm thinking about the book and then I come back and I work on it. And that is therapeutic to me, weirdly, because I'm doing thinking.
I am alone with my own thoughts, but it's structuring the way that I'm alone with my own thoughts in a way that for me is psychologically beneficial. And I think that's part of the work of being a human is working to be alone with our own thoughts.
But these are amplified versions of what you're talking about. You can look at trees and birds and maybe art, you know, before.
And now it's constant, like it never ends. And it's always interesting.
And we'll get to the interesting parts, but there also is a whole nother world of humans accessible to our funds. And this is something I noticed early on, people connecting, which was, you know, at the time I saw a bunch of quilters connecting on AOL and I met them, then they met in person and it was so powerful.
Very powerful. Very community-based.
You were seeing it in Los Angeles this month, people connecting through mutual aid groups. You could argue that phones give us tools to be better humans.
Is there something you find good about these technologies? Yeah, dude, I'm a partisan of the internet. I love that there are parts of digital culture and the internet that genuinely connect us to other people.
Like, I write about in the book, the group chat. I love the group chat.
The group chat, and why do I love the group chat? I'm keeping in touch with people that are geographically disparate, but very close to me personally. I know what's going on in their lives in a way that if I didn't have it, I probably wouldn't.
And it's not a commercial space. No one is trying to monetize my attention in the group chat.
No one is trying to sell me an ad. We're just talking to each other.
This is a digital facilitation of genuine connection, which was the promise. Like, that's what Facebook says they're selling you, right? So when you can get the non-commercial internet or even versions of the commercial internet, your AOL quilter example, that facilitates genuine human connection, I think that's great.
Like, I love that. I don't want to, like, burn everyone's phones or, you know, cut the cable that brings the internet across the Atlantic, right? Like, I think that one of the things I think, and I think I'd be curious to hear what you think of this because you know this better than I.

I keep reminding people that in our lifetimes, we have already seen the non-commercial internet defeat the commercial internet once. That the first version of the mass internet was AOL, CompuServant, Prodigy.
And it fell to the open web. And that open web was a much more, which was a non-commercial space.
It was a much more wide open place. People could pop, you weren't like knocking around in AOL groups.
And the fact that we've recreated a commercial internet that sort of mirrors that walled garden. Is not the final story.
Like we could have another open internet, you know? Yeah, I just, I do, I think it's who's controlling it and how they're controlling it, because the link between addiction and necessity is really critical. That's, you can't live without it.
And I think the pandemic accelerated that, right? The pandemic, and one particular person, President Trump, who is, you know, I think I wrote a column in the New York Times where I called, you know, if Roosevelt was the radio president and JFK was the TV president, he's the internet troll president, right?

And he used Twitter to occupy attention.

Is he one of the reasons you felt compelled to write the book? Because he is the perfect political figure of this attention age, as you call it. Yes, I think Donald Trump at a very base level born of his own personal pathologies rather than like sitting around theorizing instinctively intuited that attention is the most valuable resource and exploited that for tremendous gain explain how explain from your perspective how i have thoughts on it but i would like you to explain how the one there's one neat trick to to quote an old internet meme, right? Like a way of getting your attention.
The one neat trick I think he's used to reduce it is he will always choose negative attention over no attention. And most politicians traditionally have made the other choice.
Most politicians, if you give them a choice between negative attention or no attention, they're like, I would rather have no attention. I don't want to make news because I don't want to polarize people against me because fundamentally I have to get people to like me.
And when you think about someone being political or like, if you describe someone in your high school as like, like a politician, you're describing someone who wants to be liked by as many people as possible and is kind of a glad hander. Right.
You're not describing a polarizing troll. And what Trump realized is that the methodology of polarizing troll is a more effective means of wielding power in our age than before.
And that to me is the that's the short version. It is kind of an old meme though he's the villain people love a villain right yes that's true villain and they usually don't vote for villains yeah like part of what makes this work is how important attention is detached from persuasion right you know there's there's kind of a trade-off and i write about this in the book, like, let's say you're running for local office, right? You need to get name recognition.
Like, and we're not talking about like one of these big races where there's millions of dollars. Like you're running for state, you know, state rep, right? And you knock on doors.
People need to know your name. First of all, maybe you raise some money and send a mailers.
Now, presumably there are ways you could get everyone to know your name. that would be negative.
Like if you went canvassing naked or, you know, created some huge incident in a public space where you were like screaming slurs at someone, you would probably be on the nightly news and people would know your name. But that would the problem with that is that there's a tradeoff between that and being able to persuade people to vote for you.
But what has happened is because attention has become so important, it's crowded out the other concerns such that just getting people's attention is kind of enough to wield power. Although not everybody can do it, right? No, that's the other thing.
And that's fascinating. I mean.
Rudy Giuliani certain hasn't perfected it. No, I think about.
He never shuts up. Think about all the Trump-like characters who've gotten their butts kicked in elections.
I mean, Rudy Giuliani certain hasn't hasn't perfected it. No, I never shuts up.
Think about all the Trump like characters who've gotten their butts kicked in elections. I mean, Mark Robinson, who's kind of a troll.
This is a North Carolina lieutenant governor, lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson ran for governor in a state that Trump won. That's basically a 50 50 state.
And, you know, he lost 52 to 40. He lost like he got his butt kicked.
And there's a bunch of candidates, Carrie Lake in Arizona, who's lost two statewide races that were probably winnable. Blake Masters, who ran statewide, Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker.

there are a bunch of people who have tried the same playbook that it's backfired for precisely

the reasons I'm describing here. That like there is actually a trade-off and for some reason the

two people who have pulled the trade-off off are Trump and now Musk. Those are really the two that I think have made it work.

We'll be back in a minute.

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Rules and restrictions may apply. Let's talk about the role of tech companies.
We'll get to Musk in a second, but you have a quote from digital theorist Shoshana Zuboff, who I know well. You said Google invented and perfected surveillance capitalism in much the same way a century ago.
General Motors invented and perfected managerial capitalism. Talk about surveillance capitalism.
This is the ability to use surveillance to monetize us, which we were just talking about. Yes.
I mean, I think, you know, her Zuboff's argument is that Google is really the company that kind of foundationally creates the modern commercial internet. And there's two things going on.
The way that i write about them is particular to attention in the sense that they are able to successfully preserve your attention by screening out things that you don't want to focus on and giving you the results you want right so what the the the value proposition google and for people that were were not around i mean Google really was like the ultimate better mousetrap in a way that very few products in my life ever have been. I mean, do you remember using Metacrawler? I used all of them, Chris.
I used all of them. I know.
That's what I'm saying. And it was like it was hard to find stuff on the Internet.
And then Google just truly built a better mousetrap where it was like you would want something. You'd search for and be like oh it's right there all of a sudden the internet is legible and traversable and there were two innovations there one was they built a better mousetrap better search but the monetary innovation was twofold one is they could once they captured your attention sell it to advertisers because they were preserving your attention by actually giving you the search information you wanted.
And number two, crucially, by capturing your data and understanding who and capturing enormous amounts of data, they could, at scale, tailor bespoke advertising. Which came later for people who don't know.
It came a lot later when they bought a particular company. But go ahead.
Yes, exactly. So first they come up with AdWords, then they buy a particular company, and they basically create the back end for all ad tech that powers the modern commercial internet, which is basically capturing people's data, understanding how that data might model out to what advertisements might work for them, and then informing advertisers

and essentially acting as a kind of auctioneer market maker to sell them ads.

Absolutely.

And they, though Google had a very different business model because they didn't want to

keep you on the site.

They wanted you to leave, find what you needed, and then go. Which they've now changed entirely, 180 degrees.
Absolutely, 100%. Which I find maddening.
Well, that was where it naturally—they tried to do a social network. They tried to do a lot of things that didn't work.
But they certainly were a utility to start with and then moved into a necessity, I think, is what they did. Talk a little bit about the other companies.
Obviously, then there's Apple, which is not really trying to capture your attention. So they're trying to get you to use the phone mostly.
They're putting stuff on it. They're selling the portal.
So talk about what each and talk about Apple, Facebook, and say TikTok have wanted to do it. Yeah, I mean, Apple is the founder of the attention age because I think the point at which we enter the attention age is 2007 when Jobs introduces the iPhone, the first smartphone.
I mean, when people say, well, what's different? It's like, well, the smartphone creates a level of ubiquity that never existed before. It's totalizing in a way that no device was before.
And that's really when we enter this age. So, you know, they're in some ways the most responsible and because they they can sell physical hardware and, you know, you and I actually interviewed Tim Cook together.
He's very proud of the fact that, like, you know, we sell products. We don't sell attention, you know, which is sort of true and not true.
I mean, there's other stuff they do now. But they are fundamentally they're selling the portal.
Yes, they are the OG. Yeah, they're selling the slot machine.
Other people might be programming it, but they're selling the portal yes they are the og yeah they're selling the slot machine um other people might be programming but they're selling the slot machine so facebook um is purely an attention company they they have you know their business model is not that different in its essentials as benjamin day's business model for the new york sun when he invented the penny press which was you basically give away the product for free and then you sell the audience's advertising. Right.
And that's what Facebook does. They do it at a scale that would have been unfathomable to Benjamin Day.
TikTok is doing the same thing, but I actually think there's an innovation in TikTok that we're now seeing spread across. You know, X is using it, Reels.
The move from, and I'm really curious what you think, the move from using the social graph, which is a map of people's relationships, primarily in real life, to determine content and attention for people, what kind of ways you're trying to get their attention, to the algorithmic model of TikTok is an enormous change. And I think really bad.
I would agree. And also what's wild to me is that Facebook's, the sort of model of Facebook, right, which is like, we have all this data about you and you're the kind of person who likes X and we'll give you that.
What's amazing about the TikTok algorithm is that it can change with you.

So I write about in the book the experience of getting a little stoned on a gummy and scrolling TikTok and realizing 40 minutes in it had literally just been showing me sandwiches.

And it's like it knew I was high in that moment.

I don't always want to look at sandwiches, but the algorithm was sensitive enough to know that in that moment I wanted to look at sandwiches. Yeah.
Good to know, Chris. I'll know what to send you when you're high.
You call yourself, I think in the New York Times, an attention merchant. Talk about that because cable did that with a lot of local news did it.
The trick, a friend of mine did marketing for local news. And I said, what's your trick for getting people to watch? He goes, it could happen to you.
I was like, what? And he goes, killer bees, it could happen to you. Trans fat, it could happen to you.
Which I was like, oh, my God, that's fucking brilliant. And it is.
You have to lean in and watch. So talk a little bit about the role of cable because tech people always point to cable, especially Rupert Murdoch, about damaging our economy and getting people on a propaganda machine.
They're always pointing to that. And I'm always pointing to the declining rating.
So I'm like, it doesn't really matter if they're doing it, they're not doing it effectively. So talk about your role and how you look at what's changing there.
Yeah. I mean, look, I guess I would say that there's two ways to think about all these situations.
Like there's the broad structure of a particular form of attention market or attention capture. And then there's individuals operating within it.
So like there's people doing literally like fantastic stuff on TikTok. I've learned tons of stuff.
I've watched amazing explanations of a point in constitutional law. I've seen someone who works in fire management talk about the California fires and why they're like, so you got to distinguish between like, what's the structure of the market and what are individual people doing? There are all sorts of critiques of the cable news structure that I think are similar to the critiques you could offer of these of the digital platforms.
Like it is fundamentally a model that is trying to capture people's attention and sell it. That is going to drive towards certain things.
The evening news is another example, right? The cliche that people use about if it bleeds, it leads. Negativity bias.
The saying that we have in news, which is we don't cover the planes that land, right? Mm-hmm. Which is true.
Also, the breaking news noise. Breaking news.
I'm like, that's not breaking news. I always text whoever hosts it as.
I'm like, that's not breaking news. Right.
And all of those are attempts. And I actually write about the breaking news banner in the book.
Yeah. You talk about the banner themselves.
I mean, the constant stream of breaking news alerts were reintroduced after a ratings dip, by the way.

Yes.

And so personally, I'm trying to do the most ethical, valuable work within this structure.

And I think it's possible to do that.

I wouldn't keep doing it if I didn't.

I'm proud of the work I do.

One way to think about it is the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve has what's called famously the dual mandate. There are two things the Federal Reserve is attempting to do, and those two things are often in tension with each other.
They're trying to keep inflation low and maximize employment. Now, it's kind of a sliding scale.
Sometimes steps you would take to keep inflation low, like raising interest rates, will reduce employment. And likewise, steps you would take to reduce employment might risk running inflation.
In cable news, and in, I would argue, any journalistic undertaking these days, there's a dual mandate, which is to get people's attention, because if you don't have that, you can't do anything, and to give them the information and tools necessary to engage in democratic self-governance. And sometimes there's really tough choices.
In the same way, being a central banker is hard. You just face a lot of tough choices about how to make those calls.
And you basically, you try to be guided by ethical commitments you have, but also understand that there are certain trade-offs that are just trade-offs so have you ever gone against your judgment and cover stories out of that interest in keeping people watching um or did this research ever change how you think about your show at all and what you should cover how you should cover what to do with all the data you get about your viewers we don't i don't get that much data i really don't in fact i haven't looked at ratings in five years um you shouldn't i gave it up during covid because i was just like this is like there's bigger fish to fry here in the world and in terms of when i go and meet my maker and tell tell st peter what i did what's that don't look at them i'll look at them for you yeah but go ahead so i also think it's just, it's not good because I think you, first of all, there's a little bit of garbage in, garbage out, but it also starts to make you, it starts to insidiously affect, I think, your decisions.

And part of the problem.

I think we had a similar thing when I wouldn't share page views with my staffers.

See, that's smart.

To do so.

I said, no, you don't need to know.

I need to know. See, you need, like, that that's a great i think that's exactly the right position someone needs to be looking at like you need to look at them right but the individual writers don't i think it's i think this world we have now where look i love there are tons of sub stacks i read and enjoy and i think people are doing great work it's it's similar to what i just said about tiktok like i've i've learned a lot there are people with like genuine expertise who are doing genuine reporting on these independent platforms and i genuinely like them and i'm actually really super encouraged that people have carved out niches but one thing about that market model is that like you as the sole proprietor like your mortgage rises or falls on how many eyeballs're getting.
And, you know, that's its own kind of distorting influence. Right.
So one of the things that's happened, obviously, is people don't get their news from TV. They get it from social media, according to Pew Research.
You know this, about a third of U.S. adults say they regularly get their news on two sites in particular, Facebook and YouTube.
Half of TikTok usually say they regularly get their news from TikTok. It's probably higher than that.
At the same time, companies like this are incredibly irresponsible about how they create their information environment, and especially social media as they become the primary source of news. So Mark Zuckerberg recently announced Meta would get rid of fact checkers and make drastic changes to his content moderation policies.
Obviously, it's an attempt to appease President Trump and seem cool, which is something he will never achieve. But they're also getting rid of a system to spread the disinformation that has been effective.
You know, for years, he's been telling me different things will work. AI will work.
Community will work. Community notes will work.
It doesn't work. And he's bad at it, right? And he doesn't really want to do it, actually.
He doesn't believe in content moderation, nor does he want to pay the cost that it really would cost, given, you know, the mousetrap he has built. But how dangerous is that? I mean, everyone talks about this, but from your perspective, how can they succeed without creating products that addict us and suck all our attention, and then is quite dangerous to people because of disinformation conspiracy theories and is basically propaganda.
I think it's wildly dangerous. I mean, there's a few things going on.
One is that I think the death of the news as a separate and distinct like form of separate and distinct form of quote-unquote content is really bad.

And I think increasingly that's how people get, they just get content and it's like, here's a here, get ready with me while I'll tell you about the time that my husband cheated on me with my sister and I make up, I have makeup. Here's a weightlifting video.
Here's a video about how the aliens built the pyramids here's a video about how uh you know joe biden screwed you on student debt i mean whatever it's like yeah and that undifferentiated thing i think is is is toxic to the public sphere because because i think it i mean the aliens did build the pyramids, but go ahead. Well, of course.

It makes it impossible to do the work of self-governance.

I mean, because you're not.

The idea of the news is a separate thing means that you're bringing.

Like, I encounter a news story differently than I encounter two people just like talking smack. Shooting shit.

You know what I mean?

Or talking Loch Ness monster or whatever. Right.
If my friends are talking about something, that's different than if I read a New York Times article. And it's crazy to put those on the same level.
And sometimes people talk nonsense or they pass along rumors. That's fine.
That's part of being human. Like we gossip.
We talk about rumor. We speculate about stuff we don't know.
We talk about things we don't know anything about. We do that all the time.
That's fine. That's a human activity.
But it's actually important that there's another thing that's called, you know, the news. Well, you're talking about the polluting of the information economy, the pollution of it, the noise.
And I think this is something Steve Bannon talked about. I spent a lot of time paying attention to him because he talked about flooding the zone, right? Yes.
That's the whole point of it. That is an actual plan to do it and that's been a long time propaganda technique and i also think you know you you know this better than anyone but like all this talk about facebook and content moderation it's again these things are not hypotheticals like there was an actual genocide in which thousands of people were slaughtered in mayanmar yeah and that was years ago.
No, sorry. That's how they think, just so you know.
Part of what facilitated that was that the state, really, I mean, the sort of military, used Facebook as a platform to spread libelous hate speech against a disfavored minority in order to facilitate their mass expulsion and slaughter. Right.
And that was the thing that kind of prompted a lot of these changes. I just read Kate Conger and Mariah Mack's really good book about Twitter, Character Limit.
And one of the things you keep encountering over and over is that everyone keeps reinventing the wheel. So it's like Twitter was like, we're the free speech wing of the free speech party.

We don't do content moderation.

And then they had this enormous harassment problem

around Gamergate where users were being driven

off the platform.

And it's like, oh, we have to do something.

Like none of this stuff is abstract.

It keeps happening over and over and over

and over and over again.

We'll be back in a minute. could take me out of the moment.
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Today Explained here with Eric Levitt, senior correspondent at Vox.com, to talk about the 2024 election. That can't be right.
Eric, I thought we were done with that. I feel like I'm Pacino in three.
Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in. Why are we talking about the 2024 election again? The reason why we're still looking back is that it takes a while after an election to get all of the most high quality data on what exactly happened.
So the full picture is starting to just come into view now. And you wrote a piece about the full picture for Vox recently, and it did bonkers business on the internet.
What did it say? What struck a chord? Yeah, so this was my interview with David Shore of Blue Rose Research. He's one of the biggest sort of democratic data gurus in the party.
And basically, the big picture headline takeaways are... On Today, Explained.
You'll have to go listen to them there. Find the show wherever you listen to shows, bro.
Let's circle then back to politics because it has an impact on it. We've talked about Trump's talent for exploiting the attention age.
He's a genius at it. He's Olympic level.
But in the wake of the election, there's also been plenty of pieces arguing that the left from the Biden administration to Harris's campaign is bad at capturing people's attention. I would say AOC is good at it.
I actually compared her and Trump in that regard. Fetterman is good at it.
Biden didn't sell his work on the economy well enough. Kamala Harris didn't go on Joe Rogan, etc.
We know all these takes by now. They're all individual, but collectively, what's your analysis of, you know, we know the Republicans are good at it.
And my theory is, and I did this 20 years ago, I had Ralph, it was Ralph Reed into one of my conferences, because I was like, they're very active online. And then they were active in radio, which is another way to reach people.
And they excelled because they were shoved out of the mainstream media. What's your analysis of the Democratic Party's command of the attention age? And is it bad at understanding it or is it because they tend to focus in on shame and scolding more? what what is your your take on that well i think if you're talking about the political class like actual politicians their staff and all that yeah there's a real clear problem which is they still choose no attention over the possibility of negative attention i see okay it's literally that simple like the same thing i said about trump where like his one simple hack was choose negative attention over no attention.
P.T. Barnum, as long as you spell my name right, ma'am.
Yeah. They don't do that.
They're like, oh, there might be a gaffe. We might say like, look at J.D.
Vance. J.D.
Vance had a bunch of really bad interviews. Right.
He didn't matter. He was just like, I'm out here.
They have not internalized that. They're so, I mean, I'm sure you have worked with Democratic political PR facts.
Oh, I said, keep going. I'm like, keep going.
And I actually did talk to high-risk people and I said, just let her, they were worried about mistakes. She was terrified in that interview.
And I was like, let her make a mistake. Well, she can't because she's a woman of color.
I'm like, it doesn't matter. Just keep making mistakes.
Just make a lot of them. And then one of them won't be a mistake.
So when you think about that, besides AOC and Federer, does anyone on the left have that like talent? And should that be had? And so are they afraid of negative crests because they'll get beat up by their own team where Trump and MAGA candidates don't care, right? They're kind of a big hair don't care kind of people. Yeah.
I mean, yes, there's a's there's a bunch of different reasons for this. I mean, partly partly, too.
It's like there's actually good reasons, which is I think generally liberals care if they say things that are offensive to people.

They like facts. Well, and also like they don't look part of it is like a genuine pro-social adaptation, which is right.
I don't want to say things that hurt people unnecessarily, particularly groups that have historically been marginalized or disfavored. So that care, I think, is an important thing to preserve.
I do think AOC is a great example of someone who cares about that and also DGAF about everything else and courts attention and is very effective at it and is willing to go into spaces. She does these Instagram lives where she's just taking questions.
And I can imagine her staffers being like, oh, God, no, I can't control that. It's like, it's fine.
Good. You can't control it.
Good. Right.
Or the willingness to throw down. I think that's they don't like to attack each other way.
MAGA doesn't. I had a MAGA person, I did some really mean insult, and they're like, you know, how dare you be this mean? It was a MAGA person saying it to me.
And I said, I'm not that kind of liberal. Sorry, I'm not shame at all of saying this about you.
But do politicians have to play by these attention-seeking rules at all costs? Let me, you point, I'm going to give an example from your book, of Katie Hobbs, who beat MAGA opponent, former news anchor, Carrie Lake. Although I think she lost because she's unlikable.
But in any case, for the governor race in 2022, flipping the states, she refused to debate Carrie Lake and seemed to, as you put it, basically shun attention. That was years ago.
In that case, it probably was the better thing to do. It's like, don't put her, don't get on stage with her because she'll tear my hair out kind of thing.
But is that the choice or do you have to play by the Trump-like rules?

That's an awesome question that I don't know the answer to.

I'm sort of tempted to say two things that are basically in tension with each other.

One is, yes, you have to understand the current attention economy.

And the other is part of the magic of successful politics is innovating in a way that no one saw coming. And, you know, I say this all the time, because this was a formative part of my political career.
It's like, when Democrats lost in 2004 to George W. Bush, the idea that what they needed was a black constitutional professor from a big city who was an anti-war liberal named Barack Hussein Obama was like an absurd idea.
It was like, no, you need a regular guy that you want to have a beer with that middle American, like, and the idea that Donald Trump was what Republicans needed was an absurd idea. So part of the way this all works is we have this sort of pendulum of public opinion and backlash builds up.
And as Steve Jobs once said famously, and it's a quote I always use, it's not the customer's job to know what they want. And it's not the voter's job to know what they want until they see it.
You got to try stuff is the key. And maybe you got to try.
You can't reverse engineer transformative politics. Right.
You can't out Trump Trump. So don't try.
Try something else is what you got to innovate your way to it. And I don't I'm not a genius enough to know what that looks like.
If I did, I'd probably get into politics, but I don't. I think it's a mistake copying him.
He can't be copied. That's the problem.
I agree with that. Although Musk has kind of copied him successfully.
No, he's always been like that, right? He's always been like that. It's his natural.
I mean, you have to be genuine in some fashion. I think all these people you're talking about are genuine to themselves.
This is the key, actually. Yes, this is the key.
Or good, depending on who they are. With Trump and Musk, neither of them is in an act.
And I think that's really key. You can't, I think I'd put it this way, you can't fake being a sociopath.
Yes, that's true. That's a good way to put it.
All right. I'm going to go to a question that's sort of on point about this.
It's not from me. For every interview, we ask an outside expert to submit a question.
Let's hear yours. hey Chris Chris, it's your old pal, Rachel Maddow.
As scary as your book is, my question is, is your book scary enough? If you had known by the time your pub date arrived that we would have Elon Musk at the White House in an unelected but apparently all-powerful job, would that have changed your thesis at all? Would it specifically have changed your proposed fixes at the end of the book? And I'm thinking here a little bit about his control and influence in social media, but also about his company Neuralink, which makes computer chip brain implants, what the company calls a fully implantable, cosmetically invisible brain-computer interface. Does having him in the White House change the way you're thinking about any of these things at all? Love the book, Chris.
Good luck. Great question.
Are you scary enough? Go ahead. That's a great question from a brilliant mind.
I mean, let me say, let me first agree with Rachel on cop to something, which is that the book closed before Musk really threw himself into the election. Before he came out and spent a quarter of a billion dollars before he basically became co-president.
And in some senses, I undercounted him because I think what was driving his attention mania was something deep within his person in the same way as Trump. But I think he's backed into the same inside of Trump, which is that it's the most powerful resource.
And now he is using it to command power and fortunes. And so in that respect, I didn't quite predict that, even though Musk emerges as a prime figure in the book.

I do think there is a genuine dystopian vision ahead of us in which the last boundaries between us and this slot machine world, this constant ubiquitous casino is severed by a brain chip implant that's controlled by Elon Musk.

So in that respect, I think that is an even more frightening dystopia than we're approaching. But here's what I will say, and I do genuinely feel in my bones.
The backlash that is brewing to this experience of contemporary life is enormous. It is indeed.
It is growing by the second people do not like it. And whoever figures out how to channel that, and there's going to be a million different ways people are going to drop out.
There's going to be a kind of no phones offline movement. There's going to be people that try to build a new version of the non-commercial internet.
The folks who are now trying to do that with a blue sky develop protocol. There's, there's, there's people are going to opt out.
They're going to try to create niche businesses that block your phone. They're going to try light new changes to lifestyles.
They're going to try political movements that regulate attention, that take phones out of schools. There's going to be all this stuff.
but the backlash that is coming for this is every second i can feel more force going into it and i i can't predict how it will manifest itself i talk about a few examples and analogs in the book from yeah i want to talk about those solutions yeah go ahead but i think that and i do think the more dystopian in some ways to rachel's point musk and zuckerberg bezos aligning with trump is actually weirdly useful insofar as it's kind of clarifying for things who yeah it's clarifying things for people who have felt an inchoate not quite articulated sense of rage at the prison they've been put in. Right.
Right. Well, it reminds me of, you know, it's interesting.
One, I was right. Two is, oh, God.
You, Kara, you were right. I was.
Sorry, I was. They're terrible people.
I said that. No one thought they were.
But one of the things that I think everyone's suddenly going, oh, my God, it's Thanos, right? Oh, wait a minute. They're Thanos.
I'm like, yes, they're Thanos. We're Iron Man.
They're Thanos. Like, I think it was hard because of the money and they're interesting and they're – and they still have their fans.
Thanos has his fans, too. But one of the things that is really interesting is you start to feel like, wait a minute, it's actually gamed by them, right?

And so I want to talk about that.

We say we should look to the labor movement and how to regulate technology.

And you make a very radical suggestion, a mandatory legislated hard cap on the number of hours of screen time on our phones, which is never going to happen, Chris.

So I want to talk about that. Never say that.
Okay, it's not going to happen. On the other hand, people may want to opt out by themselves.
You predict there will be a growth in this attentional farmers markets. And I would like you to talk about a couple of these solutions very briefly, each of the ones I just mentioned.
So I think there's layers to how people will act in opposition to this form of attention capitalism, which I think has been profoundly alienating. one is people acting the way that a whole bunch of folks started to in the 60s and 70s in relation

to the industrial food system there was the dominant system it was industrial food prediction

and then there were people at the fringes who did things like start the back to the land movement and go and start farms and started the practice of organic farming and started opening natural food stores and started farmers markets. The first one in New York City in the early 1970s.
Now, at the time, these were all just kind of like bohemian hippie fringe weirdos, essentially. But it turned out they were on to something.
And like those bohemian fringe weirdos who were like, we don't, we're rejecting the way that the mainstream, you know, produces, purchases food. We're going to create our own little alternatives to it.
Ended up absolutely revolutionizing. For some people, not everybody.
Not for everybody, which is crucial and I think actually a warning. But genuinely revolutionized the way that food production and food culture works in the United States 40, 50 years later.
So that's one part of it. When you think about, I talk about vinyl records, right? The growth of vinyl records, which is now the single most popular form of music purchase after streaming, which I definitely would not have predicted buying CDs in 1993 at HMV.
And that's also because of a kind of mass movement away from one, the compressed quality of, uh, you know, streaming music, which is not as good as what you hear on vinyl, but also the sort of attentional jumpiness you get from a streaming playlist where you can skip ahead. Whereas where you put a record on, you're going to listen.
These are different versions of people just rebelling against the mainstream in their own small ways. Then there's bigger attempts.
Like Wikipedia is one of the last standing vestiges of the non-commercial internet, but the folks who built Signal- Which is why Musk is attacking it. Which is why Musk is attacking it.
The folks who built Signal as a non-profit messaging service that is a fully non-commercial form of messaging. And we could have non-commercial social networks.
We could have all kinds of non-commercial forms of the internet built as alternatives, including non-commercial open protocols, which have existed before. Like the RSS protocol partially developed by my departed friend, Aaron Swartz, is what podcasts rely on.
Great guy. Great guy.
And the reason that you hear the term wherever you get your podcast is because RSA podcasting publishing is an open protocol. You can get it in a bunch of places.
All of the internet used to be like that. Less and less of the internet is like that.
Podcasting is not centralized, interestingly enough. That's what I'm saying.
They can't capture it. Yeah, they can't.
Well, although in one case, let me say, farmers markets record collecting are for people who are wealthier. And I'll never forget in speech, I heard Van Jones, of all people who I don't consider particularly digital.
I was in San Francisco at a very famous church there, and he's talking to young African-American kids. And he said, how many of you people have downloaded things from the Internet? And the kids were like, who is this old man? Like, of course we have.
Like, and all of them raised their hands. And they were, you know, like, what is this guy saying? And then he said, how many people have downloaded things where you have control of it, where it's yours and it's not being taken from you, right? As opposed to you are the product.
And then he said, and I, again, never would have said it. He said, you're all digital sharecroppers to these rich people.
I'll never forget it. And I thought it was exactly right.
Does it have to be a rich person's thing to happen? And I have two more questions with that one. One, does it have to be a rich person thing? The second one is, is there an Ozempic for this? Because that's what's going on in food, right? And by the way, Ozempic addresses addiction too, by the way.

I mean, it's possible.

Well, first, let me answer that first.

We just did a whole podcast with a brilliant guy named Nick Garvel about the possibility of Ozempic as an addiction drug more broadly. It's possible the Ozempic for it is actually Ozempic or general development of GLP-1s for addictive behavior, which may actually have knock-on effects on all sorts of things that we compulsively do.
On the first thing, I think it's a really, really great and important point that the transformation in food culture had this incredible class division. And that you don't want the same digital movement to have the same.
And part of the reason I think that like non-commercial internet is important is to create open and free spaces for all kinds of people that can use it.

And then that gets to the sort of the, you know, these are sort of different business models,

civic projects, nonprofits, and then there's regulation and movements to regulate attention.

And that's why I talk about the labor movement and I talk about the Lochner decision. You know,

the Lochner decision is the Supreme court says you can't create a maximum number of hours worked

Thank you. to regulate attention.
And that's why I talk about the labor movement and I talk about the Lochner decision. The Lochner decision is the Supreme Court says you can't create a maximum number of hours worked for bakers in New York.
That's a violation of their 14th Amendment rights. That decision creates a line of jurisprudence that basically invalidates much of the New Deal and then is reversed.
There was a time where people would say, you'll never be able to limit the amount of hours people can work. It a free country they can work as many hours they want i think that we're gonna start regulating this and that you know part of it is breaking up these companies which i think are too big part of it is discussions about how to regulate it but i think we should be having a conversation about if we take seriously how valuable attention is and how relentlessly it's being extracted from us as a collective action problem, then the way that we pursue this is through collective solutions through our own democratic representatives.
All right. My last question, I interviewed the CEO of Yonder, which is those pouches, which is a physical way to get us away from those, right? Whether it's a concert or a school, there's a lot of them in schools.
Really interesting and very philosophical guy, actually, as it turned out. And I quoted him, you know, you're talking about an idea of sort of taking the mask off of these people, right? Taking the mask off and letting people see exactly what's happening here, right? With someone like Musk And them sitting all together as Zuckerberg Musk at the inaugural is quite a visual for people, right? And so one of the things I think is really powerful is the idea of showing people who they are, actually, away from all the propaganda and everything else.
And I quoted this Circe's Power. It's called Circe's Power by Louise Gluck, who's just a poet who just died, one of my favorite poets.
And the first line of the poem, which I used in my book, which I was trying to say what I'm trying to do here with this book was, I never turned anyone into a pig. Some people are pigs.
I make them look like pigs. How do we make them look like pigs, Chris? Because they are pigs.
Well, I think that the I think, like I said before, I think it is clarifying and useful for the people running these enterprises to more forthrightly announce what their politics and interests are. And I think that there was a kind of, I think both their politics have changed, but also the way they perform their politics has changed.
And I think that, again, there is a backlash coming. I don't know what it's going to look like, but I know that the more you delay it, like the more you stuff kinetic energy into it, the bigger it's going to be when it comes out.

And I just feel like day by day, you're pushing the spring down further and further and further.

And the more you push it down, the more explosively it's going to spring back up.

Chris, this is a great book.

Everybody should read it.

I really appreciate it. It's a great topic.
I really enjoyed this. Thanks so much for having me on.
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