Chris Hayes cuts a peculiar figure in the media landscape. He is omnivorously inquisitive, his owlish frames imparting the sense that he is always on the lookout for new information to hunt down and digest. He is an archetypal social-media know-it-all, equally confident dispensing his thoughts on sports, culture, and politics. And he is the rare pundit to have truly important insights into the workings of the world, predicting our anti-Establishment era in his 2012 book, Twilight of the Elites. Yet somehow he has ended up in cable news, as the host of MSNBC’s All In With Chris Hayes, making him an object of curiosity for those journalists who turn their noses up at the talking-head roundtable, the election countdown clock, and the sensationalist chyron. Is he one of us or what?
When Hayes met me on a frigid January afternoon at his stately, well-appointed townhouse in Park Slope, naturally my first thought was, Not one of us. Hayes wore dark slacks and a striped button-down shirt, underneath which glinted a large Zuckerberg-esque chain. This is a recently acquired accoutrement that has not gone unnoticed by fans since he embarked on a publicity tour for his new book, The Sirens’ Call, about how tech companies have precipitated a national crisis by creating products that severely diminish our attention spans. When one commenter called out his “gold” chain after Hayes appeared on Ezra Klein’s talk show, Hayes was quick to clarify that it was actually brass and a gift from his wife, former Obama White House lawyer Kate Shaw, with a retail value of only $60. So maybe he is like us after all.
Hayes’s book is similarly caught between circumstances that are both ubiquitous and uniquely applicable to him. He writes poignantly of his 6-year-old daughter asking him to read her a book and his “instinct, almost physical,” to look at the phone in his pocket instead. “I let it pass with a small amount of effort,” he writes. “But it pulses there like Gollum’s ring.” He realizes that the oligopolies of Silicon Valley not only have colonized our attention but are harvesting it in the way industrialists once exploited our physical labor. The attention economy, which voraciously turns our views and clicks and swipes into dollars, has seized our minds and subsequently transformed how we raise our children, talk with our friends, buy things, absorb information, and elect government officials. The disastrous results are already here for all to see, epitomized by the world’s richest man performing a very Nazi-ish salute to the new president’s adoring crowd — which is, if nothing else, an extremely attention-grabbing spectacle.
However, Hayes knows he made his living and his reputation capturing people’s attention and often on the very platforms he criticizes. “It’s precisely being immersed in it that made me think about how powerful a resource it is,” he told me at his kitchen table, his eyes gently boring into me the way they remain fixed on a camera’s gaze. “Keeping people’s attention is necessary for the work I do, but it’s not sufficient for me to feel good and satisfied about the work. This thing that’s at once totally fundamental and foundational but also not enough has been the occupying dilemma and paradox of my waking life for over a decade.” As a merchant of “attention capitalism,” as Hayes calls it, is he the right person to diagnose its ills? The answer may depend on whether readers are convinced he has healed himself.
Hayes’s book is the latest in a growing canon of literature about the deleterious effects of smartphones and apps, the most famous entry being Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, which argues that smartphones have caused a spike in depression and anxiety among youth. Hayes is more concerned with adults, showing how timeless problems like boredom and loneliness have been exacerbated by tech companies seeking to mill our restlessness into money. There are quotes from Kierkegaard (boredom as “the root of evil”) and Pascal (“The unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber”) and deft syntheses of data showing we’re indeed infinite-scrolling ourselves to death. “We flee from any moment of time in which our minds might be empty,” Hayes writes, “but in so doing find the reward we seek — to be absorbed, to have our attention fully occupied — harder and harder and harder to find.”
Hayes is also more concerned than his peers with the political implications of our Great Attention Deficit. When I asked whether the smartphone should be blamed for Donald Trump’s election, Hayes said, “I feel like the total theory of inflation plus ‘Biden’s too old’ gets you pretty far. But yes, the third component, I think, is the information environment.” In his book, he invokes the paradox of a king who has so many diversions available to him that he can never be satisfied — the kind of predicament, when applied to millions of app-addled voters, that might lead them to reach for the greatest diversion of them all. Trump’s modus operandi, Hayes told me, “is a form of attention domination, and maybe that’s all that matters.”
Whether Trump and Elon Musk, another attention dominator, are aware of what they’re doing is another question. “Musk used to shun attention,” Hayes said. “He used to be a hard person to get interviews with. He just got broken by being online. Through this sheer personal need for attention, he backed into this insight that Trump also backed into, which is that attention is the world’s most powerful resource, and if you collect it and you make yourself the main character, you accrue power to yourself.” The tragedy is Trump and Musk don’t realize that the prize they seek — deep, genuine recognition — is very different from the ephemeral high that comes from attention.
Hayes’s view on this matter is informed by personal experience. One of the more fascinating parts of the book is his reckoning with the relatively modest portion of fame he has earned as a TV personality, which nevertheless rocks his world. “I have, as a core constitutive feature of my personality, the desire for an audience,” he writes. “I want people to pay attention to me, and more than that I want them to like me.” The trap is believing mere attention will fulfill the primal need to be known and understood by others, a trap that now threatens to ensnare millions seeking fame in ways both small and large on various internet platforms and that Hayes seems to have avoided only through a herculean feat of self-awareness. As he told me, “It’s definitely something I work on all the time. I think that the initial experience of it in concentrated doses when I first got the prime-time show, particularly, was pretty psychologically toxic and difficult.”
It turns out that Hayes’s solution to his personal attention problem — his difficulty being comfortable in his own chamber — was to get a book contract and therefore have to write a book. “I had to read a bunch of books. I had to think deeply about stuff,” he said. “I had to go on long walks and work through sentences in my head. I had to come back to the text. All of that is the heavy lifting of focus that is really good for the soul and good for the brain, but it’s hard to find, and honestly there’s just no way I would’ve done it without that external mandate.”
What that means for the segment of humanity without book contracts is unclear. As we were talking, Hayes got a call from his child’s school that she was sick and needed to be picked up. (He’s one of us!) Shaw did the honors, and when the interview was over, as I stood on the sidewalk and watched Shaw and her daughter chatting happily as they ascended the broad stairs to their home, it occurred to me that perhaps Hayes occupies a singular space in the attention economy. Can you be a social-media influencer without destroying your mind? Can you be famous without turning into a pathological narcissist? He is on the knife-edge of these questions, and where he falls might indicate where the rest of us go, too.
