Give Chris Hayes points for honesty. The left-wing MSNBC host has a new book out, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. In it he makes a proposition: We spend too much time on our cellphones, and the government ought to prevent that.
“There are some basic approaches one could imagine,” Hayes writes, “a mandatory, legislated hard cap on, for instance, the number of hours of screen time on our phones, or perhaps something tailored per app.” Of course, “immediately you can imagine both the logistical problems—needing to answer a work email while running an errand only to find your screen time has run out—and deeper political and philosophical problems: Wouldn’t this be an intolerable assault on our cherished freedoms?”
Well, yes. However, according to Hayes, the idea “that the government could not interfere in a consenting economic transaction between adults” is similar to the idea that the government can set how many hours a manual laborer can work. Hayes points to the Supreme Court’s Lochner v. New York decision, which held that the government could not dictate how many hours a bakery owner could force his employee to work and was finally reversed during the New Deal.
Yet these examples are not the same. An employer making his employees work manual labor for 20 hours is cruel and violates common sense about the endurance of the human body. A person on their phone for 20 hours could be reading Saul Bellow and listening to the entire works of Beethoven.
It’s unfortunate that Hayes makes the argument for government control because there is much in The Sirens’ Call that is wise. Yes, people spend too much time staring at their phones. Our attention spans keep shrinking. We need to spend more time in contemplation and outdoors. Hayes presents plenty of evidence: scientific studies that show screen addiction leads to depression and low self-esteem. The New York Post called phone screens “digital heroin” that turn children into “psychotic junkies. The Atlantic asked: “Have smart phones destroyed a generation?” Many think the answer is yes.
Hayes argues that attention is “the very thing that most makes us human. And “unlike land, coal, or capital, which exist outside of us, the chief resource of this age is embedded in our psyches. Extracting it requires cracking into our minds.” What Hayes calls “attention capital” is also valuable externally, “the foundation for nearly all we do from the relationships we build to the way we act as workers, consumers, and citizens.”
It obviously bothers Hayes that our attentional capital is no longer imprisoned by the Left. For decades, our attention while seeking news was forced to focus on liberal newspapers and networks. With the digital revolution, suddenly conservatives had a voice. Joe Rogan played a crucial role in the 2024 election by simply allowing President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance to come on his show and talk for three hours. Not surprisingly, Hayes writes that Rogan “is not for me.” Hayes never says exactly why he doesn’t like Rogan, but the reasons are clear. Rogan cannot be contained in the left-wing ecosystem.
Hayes, a writer with all the information in the world leerily at his fingertips, time and again relies on leftist thinkers and liberal assumptions. Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Naomi Klein, and even laughable 1920s socialist Thorsten Veblen all make appearances in Sirens. Missing are Thomas Sowell, Jordan Peterson, and even Thomas Merton, the great Catholic monk who wrote so beautifully about the importance of contemplation.
The way Hayes addresses Elon Musk gives the game away. Musk, Hayes claims, is obsessed, “to a pathological degree” and with “an unsteady obsessiveness that’s thrown his entire fortune into question” with gaining recognition: “He wants to be recognized, to be seen in a deep and human sense. It’s what Willy Loman wanted and it’s what ended up killing him. Musk spent $44 billion to buy himself what poor pathetic Willy Loman couldn’t have. Yet it can’t be purchased at any sum. He tried to buy the recognition of others, but all he got was their attention. And even that will fade soon enough.”
Musk has sent rockets into space and opened up free speech on X. Anyone who’s listened to him for five minutes knows he cares a lot more about free speech and ideas than recognition. Hayes, like most liberals, wants people’s attention capital focused on places such as MSNBC, where he hosts the show All in with Chris Hayes.
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In one section of The Sirens’ Call, Hayes has a lovely recollection of the joy of long walks he took as a young man. “There are many words to describe the mental state I so loved during those walks: daydreaming, reverie, mind-wandering, lost-in-thought. … Daydreaming is a central experience of being alive, and also a casualty of the attention age.”
Thomas Merton once observed that “contemplation is the highest expression of man’s intellectual and spiritual life” and that “one who meditates does not merely think, he also loves.” For Merton, of course, love’s ultimate source was not the state, but God.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.