As President Donald Trump proceeds with his seemingly endless attacks on laws and democratic norms, the question for many has become: What will turn the tide? They may imagine that conditions are ripe for a major scandal—some transgression, previously hidden but then revealed, that is so outrageous, so beyond the pale, that it will rally even those across the political divide.

In the past, that is the work that scandal often did. Exposure of serious official misconduct, the lifeblood of scandals, would create openings for reform. As bad as these scandals were—and the underlying story was usually bad, sometimes very bad—scandals contained within them the germ of change. But today, old-fashioned scandals are harder and harder to come by.

Watergate is in many ways the textbook example of a scandal and its reforming potential. It had it all: covert and illegal actions by a president in contravention of laws and norms, the revelation of the scandalous activities, and, eventually, bipartisan agreement on corrective action and reform. Those reforms included extensive new regulation of money and politics, protection against the abuse of surveillance power to spy on American citizens, and authority for independent investigations of possible executive-branch criminal misconduct.

[Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump]

This cycle of scandal and bipartisan reform is hardly imaginable today. In the Trump administration, what might have been deemed scandalous at another time, in another presidency, is instead a governing program. The components of the program—“radical constitutional” claims about presidential power, White House direction of investigations against political opponents, the abandonment of constraints on profiting from the office—are openly avowed and openly pursued. What was hidden until exposed in the Richard Nixon years is proclaimed in these Trump years as a show of presidential resolve and as the vindication of an electoral mandate. Nixon had resigned and left his office before he told an interviewer that, by definition, no presidential action can violate the law. Trump expressed the same view—that no president can violate the law if he is striving to save the country—in the first weeks of his second term. He is redefining the presidency, resetting expectations of his office.

The death of scandal is a blow to the mechanisms for defending a democracy. More than periodically useful in uncovering corruption, scandal is an essential feature of liberal democracy. It is certainly, the sociologist John Thompson writes, “more common [in such systems] than in authoritarian regimes or in one-party states.” This is because, in democracies, scandal is possible only because there is intense electoral competition, a free press, and protections from reprisal for news organizations, the political opposition, and others that allege and often expose corruption in the government in power. But when democratic norms fray or collapse, scandal collapses with them. In this way, the collapse of scandal is both cause and effect of democratic decline: It makes reform less possible, and it indicates erosion of the conditions that made such revelations possible in the first place.

Trump is directly attacking those conditions. He is maintaining and in some instances escalating lawsuits against news organizations. He has fired inspectors general who serve as “watchdogs” in 17 executive-branch agencies. Trump has fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, whose responsibilities include enforcement of the whistleblower statutes, and replaced him with a former Republican member of Congress who is also the secretary of Veterans Affairs—effectively making it a part-time position. He is exploiting the fractured and polarized media environment to create alternative realities, rendering it very difficult for any sort of unified narrative of scandal to emerge and take hold. A sterling example is his redefinition of the January 6 assault on the Capitol as “a day of love,” complete with pardons for most of those convicted for their involvement.

The corrective power of scandal was already weakened during the first Trump term. In those years, Trump did not hide his pursuit of profit while in office, and he made efforts to control the Department of Justice for his own personal and political purposes—though nothing like what we are seeing today. These and other actions of the time ignited major controversies and led to two impeachments, but none entailed revelations of actions he was denying. He proclaimed “perfect” the call to the president of Ukraine at issue in the first impeachment, and in the second, his rally and video communications related to the attack on the Capital could not have been more public. After Trump left office, reforms to constrain his version of the presidency were proposed in abundance but went nowhere.

Even where scandal does not yield statutory reform, it can serve to reinvigorate weakened norms. An example that may now seem quaint is the furor over the George W. Bush administration’s midterm firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The firing was public; the motive was the stuff of scandal: It emerged that the White House had been deeply involved in the dismissals, acting on concerns that these law-enforcement officials were insufficiently committed to rooting out alleged Democratic Party voting “fraud.” The attorney general denied any questionable motivation and agreed that “it would be improper to remove a U.S. attorney to interfere with or influence a particular prosecution for partisan political gain.”

But the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility jointly took up the matter and concluded, “The Department’s removal of the U.S. Attorneys and the controversy it created severely damaged the credibility of the Department and raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecutive decisions.” The Office of the Inspector General further judged that there was “significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor” in the dismissals. It affirmed that department officials had a “responsibility to ensure that prosecutorial decisions would be based on the law, the evidence, and Department policy, rather than political pressure.” In part because of this scandal, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned.

This was not all. A special counsel was appointed to consider whether the firings involved any violations of criminal law. She concluded that no violations had occurred but that the law did prohibit some forms of political interference in law enforcement. And she roundly affirmed department “principles” against “undue sensitivity to politics.” The Obama administration advised Congress of these findings and put a strong emphasis on the point: Its attorney general was committed to “ensuring that partisan political considerations play no role in law enforcement decisions of the Department.”

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

There is little reason to imagine that we would see a “scandal” concerned with “undue sensitivity to politics” in this presidency. The norms at the center of the U.S.-attorney scandal are not honored even in the breach, because the breach has been transformed into policy. As the legal scholar (and my collaborator on the Substack newsletter Executive Functions) Jack Goldsmith has noted, the Trump White House’s proclaimed policy of avoiding “‘the appearance of improper political influence’ in law enforcement is doublespeak for the reality of heavy political influence in law enforcement, just as the Justice Department’s ‘Weaponization Working Group,’ which builds on Trump’s ‘Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ executive order, is in reality a playbook to weaponize DOJ law enforcement like never before.” Officials appointed to high positions, including the U.S. attorney in D.C. and both the FBI’s director and its recently named deputy director, have appeared eager to investigate those who were involved in investigations of Donald Trump.

In this environment, there seems to be one potential opening for scandal on the old model: the role of Elon Musk. Some of the elements of scandal are present in this case of a businessman, situated both inside and outside the government, who has been provided with apparently massive but undefined authority. It’s never quite clear when Musk speaks for himself, for his businesses, or for the government. The administration has given varying accounts of his role in the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk himself has made the extraordinary claim that voters are at least an indirect source of his authority. Last month, he reposted on X: “Dems keep saying ‘No one elected Elon Musk.’ Yes we did. Elon was very visible with Trump and we elected Trump to utilize Elon.” Polls show that even among Republicans, Musk is a controversial figure. It is not impossible to imagine a reform at some point designed to impose limits, or at least greater accountability and transparency, on a president’s use of a private citizen to assume major government functions.

Perhaps the picture for reform even without the propulsive force of scandal will brighten if the administration fails to deliver on issues that bread-and-butter voters care most deeply about and they become less tolerant of “long live the king” presidential leadership. Monarchical ambition can founder on the price of eggs and bacon. It can also eventually run aground in conflict with a defining element of American political culture: distrust of government, a belief that it is, as the historian Garry Wills has written, a “necessary evil, one we must put up with while resenting the necessity.” Trump’s aggressive claim that the president is the law is altogether new, and coming fast at the electorate. Perhaps in this limited time, the voters are waiting and seeing. Trump and his allies may not appreciate that they are testing, and may not prevail over, America’s anti-government tradition. After all, they are the government now.

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting—where outgoing chair Jaime Harrison delivered a soliloquy about the party’s rules for nonbinary inclusion, and candidates for party roles spent the bulk of their time campaigning to identity-focused caucuses of DNC members.

Buttigieg said the meeting “was a caricature of everything that was wrong with our ability both to cohere as a party and to reach to those who don’t always agree with us.” He went on to criticize diversity initiatives for too often “making people sit through a training that looks like something out of Portlandia.”

Democrats talk a big game about “inclusion,” but as Buttigieg notes, they don’t produce a message that feels inclusive to most voters, because they’re too focused on appealing to the very nonrepresentative set of people who make up the party apparatus. Adam Frisch—a moderate Democrat who ran two strong campaigns for Congress in a red district in western Colorado but got little traction among DNC members when he sought to be elected as vice chair of the party—wrote about his own experience in the DNC campaign. He noted how just about the only people he’d encountered in his DNC politicking who hadn’t gone to college were “the impressive delegates from the High School Democrats of America.” Frisch lost out to two candidates who were much better positioned to speak to the very highly educated, very left-wing electorate that is the DNC membership: State Representative Malcolm Kenyatta, a “champion for social justice” who has lost multiple statewide campaigns in Pennsylvania by doing his best impression of Elizabeth Warren; and David Hogg, the dim-bulb gun-control advocate who still seems to think “Defund the Police” is good politics. Speaking of things that seem like they came out of Portlandia: Hogg believes that the gun-control movement was “started centuries ago by almost entirely black, brown and indigenous lgbtq women and nonbinary people that never got on the news or in most history books.”

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

[Read: The HR-ification of the Democratic party]

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped. And although DEI-speak can and does make Democrats seem weird and out of touch, that’s not the main problem with it. The big problem with the approach Buttigieg rightly complains about—and that Kenyatta and Hogg exemplify—is that it entails a strong set of mistaken moral commitments. These have led the party to take unpopular positions on crime, immigration, and education, among other issues. Many nonwhite voters correctly perceive these positions as hostile to their substantive interests.

What worldview am I complaining about? It’s a worldview that obsessively categorizes people by their demographic characteristics, ranks them according to how “marginalized” (and therefore important) they are because of those characteristics, and favors or disfavors them accordingly. The holders of this worldview then compound their errors by looking to progressive pressure groups as a barometer of the preferences of the “marginalized” population groups they purport to represent. That is, they decide that some people are more important than others, and then they don’t even correctly assess the desires of the people they have decided are most important.

Let’s look, for example, at what progressive Democrats have to offer to Asian voters—or, as a DNC member might say, “AANHPI voters.” On higher education, Democrats advocate for race-conscious admission policies that favor “underrepresented” groups and disfavor “overrepresented” ones. In practice, those policies have meant that Asian applicants must clear higher academic bars than white applicants—and much higher bars than Black and Latino applicants—to win admission to top schools. Progressives have also responded to demographic imbalances at selective public K–12 education programs (which are disproportionately Asian) by fighting to change the admission systems. In New York, progressives sought to to abolish the admission exam, which Asian students have dominated; in San Francisco, where the city’s most prestigious magnet school has become majority-Asian, they actually did away with the exam for a time; in Fairfax County, Virginia, they changed admission rules to be less favorable to Asian applicants. Within schools, they have opposed tracking and fought to remove advanced math courses, “leveling” the playing field by reducing the level of rigor available to the highest-performing students.

Democrats see Asian Americans disproportionately getting ahead in school as an “inequitable” outcome, so they try to stack the deck against them. Not a great pitch to the Asian community.

Of course, I’m sure Democrats who favor affirmative action would say that framing is very unfair. But these are the same people who keep telling us we need to focus on the effects of actions rather than intentions. When Democrats get control of education policy, they make changes that hurt Asians. Is it any kind of surprise that, as Democrats have become ever more obsessed with racial “equity” as a policy driver, Asian voters have swung hard against the party? Is it surprising that Republicans—in spite of overt racism among some operatives and activists in the party—have made strong inroads among Asian voters? I don’t find it surprising, given that Democrats are the party of official discrimination against Asians.

[Read: Democrats deserved to lose]

Or consider Democrats’ approach to crime. Progressives’ insistence on using marginalization as a marker of moral worth has led them to prioritize the needs of people who are engaged in antisocial behavior over those of ordinary citizens who abide by the social contract. After all, few people are more marginalized than criminals, or the “justice-involved,” as a DNC member might call them. As progressives have grown skeptical of police and policing, they have made it more difficult to detain dangerous defendants ahead of trial, and they have de facto (and sometimes de jure) decriminalized nuisances such as public drug use. These policies, combined with the effects of COVID and the George Floyd protests, have led to an increase in crime and disorder in cities. This has been unpopular. And because major cities are disproportionately nonwhite, the negative effects of the disorder have fallen disproportionately on nonwhite voters. So it makes sense that diverse cities swung harder against Democrats than did whiter suburbs, where physical distance has insulated the electorate.

On immigration, similarly, Democrats are excessively focused on the interests of the most marginalized group in the policy equation—foreign migrants—even though these migrants are not citizens and not really stakeholders in our politics. The Biden administration presided over the entry of millions of migrants into the country in a way that was not in accordance with any intentionally enacted public policy. It did this with the enthusiastic support of progressive groups that purport to speak for the interests of Latinos. But the broader population of Latinos reacted—surprise!—quite negatively to the migration wave, as they watched migrants receive expensive government services, overwhelm institutions of local government, and in some cases produce crime and disorder. Some of the hardest-swinging counties against Democrats from 2020 to 2024 were overwhelmingly Latino counties on the U.S.-Mexico border. If you wanted to predict how the migration wave would affect the Hispanic American vote, you would have done better to focus on the “American” aspect of their identity rather than on the “Hispanic” part; as it turns out, long-settled Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans don’t necessarily put a high premium on ensuring that our government spends a ton of money to house and care for economic migrants from Central and South America.

So the problem here is not really the $10 words. Consider the term BIPOC. This (decreasingly?) fashionable buzzword—which means either “Black and Indigenous people of color” or “Black, Indigenous, and people of color,” depending on whom you ask—contains a clear message about how progressives view the hierarchy of marginalization: Black Americans and Native Americans outrank Latinos and Asians. It seems that the message has been received: In 2024, Democrats hemorrhaged support from Latinos and Asians. But the problem can’t be fixed by dropping BIPOC from the vocabulary. To stop the bleeding, Democrats need to abandon the toxic issue positions they took because they have the sort of worldview that caused them to say “BIPOC” in the first place.

[Read: How to move on from the worst of identity politics]

Democrats should say that race should not be a factor in college admissions. They should say that the U.S. government should primarily focus on the needs of U.S. citizens, and that a sad story about deprivation in a foreign country isn’t a sufficient reason for being admitted to the United States and put up in a New York hotel at taxpayer expense. They should say that the pullback from policing has been a mistake. They should say that they were wrong and they are sorry! After all, Democrats talk easily about how the party has gotten “out of touch,” but they don’t draw the obvious connection about what happens when you’re out of touch: You get things substantively wrong and alienate voters with your unpopular ideas. To fix that, you have to change more than how you talk—you have to change what you stand for, and stand up to those in the party who oppose that change.

Even better, you can nominate people who never took those toxic and unpopular issue positions in the first place.

This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.

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By now you’ve probably noticed your attention being stolen, daily, by your various devices. You’ve probably read somewhere that companies much more powerful than you are dedicated to refining and perfecting that theft. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, MSNBC host and author of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource explains in painful detail what you’re really up against. “It’s absolutely endemic to modern life,” Hayes says. “Our entire lives now is the wail of that siren going down the street.”

Hayes talks about his own experience of becoming famous enough to be recognized and becoming a little addicted to that attention. He explains how companies have learned to manipulate natural biological impulses in ways that keep us trapped. And he invokes Marx, who argued that capitalism alienates workers from their labor, to explain how technology is now alienating all of humanity from attention, which is perhaps more insidious because it lives in our psyches. “I think it’s because there’s something holy or sublime in actual human connection that can’t be replicated.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Child: When my parents are on the phone, it usually makes me feel, like, really bored and makes me want to do something, because I don’t really have anything to do. And I’m kind of just, like, sitting there and watching them on the phone.

Claudine Ebeid: And what do you think about the amount of time that Dad and I spend on the phone?

Child: Well, I think, like, when they had landlines and stuff, you wouldn’t spend too much more time on the phone, and you would spend it on other types of devices.

But now, since it’s all in the phone, you wouldn’t really be seeing your parents, like, on a computer. You’d only see them doing that for, like, work or something.

Hanna Rosin: That’s our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid, and her daughter. We’re hearing from them because when we talk about screen time or how phones are manipulating us, it’s often adults talking about kids. But of course, it goes the other way too.

Chris Hayes: Every kid is engaged in a kind of battle for their parent’s attention.

Rosin: This is Chris Hayes, my guest this week.

Hayes: I mean, I think every kid notices how distracted parents are by the phone.

Rosin: Who’s the meanest to you about it?

Hayes: My youngest.

Rosin: Really? (Laughs.)

Hayes: Yeah.

Rosin: Not the teenager?

Hayes: No, actually, I think the youngest, because youngest children have a real antenna for attention. They come into a family in which they recognize immediately that there is, at some level, a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all for parental attention.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this week on the Radio Atlantic: the war for your attention.

You probably know Chris Hayes best as a host on MSNBC. He’s the author of a new book: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. And he doesn’t just mean parental attention. He’s talking about attention in politics, commerce, social media—basically, how capitalism found a uniquely human weakness to exploit.

But of course, since the topic is so often seen only through the lens of parents and children, we started out sharing how we can feel like hypocrites when we police our kids’ devices.

[Music]

Hayes: The one that I’ve caught myself doing is: your child asking for screen time when they’re, you know, not allowed to or it’s not normally the time, and giving them, like, a sharp “no”—and then going back to looking at your phone. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Oh, Chris. One thousand percent. Even the fact that we get to use the term screen time, and guess who doesn’t get to use the term screen time. They can’t be like, Dad, you only have an hour of screen time a day.

Hayes: That’s right. And one of the things I write about in the book is that when we think about the state of boredom, or being bored, I think we associate it with being a child. I mean, I remember days in the summer, particularly, where I was a little underscheduled. I was just sort of sitting around—these periods where you feel like, I have nothing to do.

And the reason I’ve come to believe that we associate [boredom] with childhood is, as soon as we are old enough to control our lives, we do everything possible to make sure we never feel it. That’s why it’s associated with childhood: because children don’t have full agency. Once we develop full agency, we’re like, I’m not gonna be in that state. I’m gonna do whatever it takes not to be in that state.

Rosin: Chris writes about how there are two kinds of attention: voluntary attention and compelled attention.

Hayes: So compelled attention is part of our deepest biological, neurological wiring. It’s the involuntary reaction if you are at a cocktail party and a waiter drops a tray of glasses.

[Glass breaking]

Hayes: You can’t help it. You cannot control whether you’re going to pay attention to that. It’s often the case with, you know, an explosion—

[Loud boom]

Hayes: —or the siren that is on top of an ambulance or a cop car as it goes down the street.

[Siren wailing]

Hayes: That involuntary attention is the part of our neurological wiring in which our attention is compelled, independent of our volition and will, as a kind of almost biological fact, due to the fact that we needed to be alert to danger, basically.

And then there’s voluntary attention, which is when we, using the conscious will, flash the beam of thought where we want it to go.

Rosin: So [if] I sit down and read your book, that’s voluntary attention.

Hayes: Correct.

Rosin: Is one better than the other?

Hayes: Well, I mean, I think that, look—involuntary attention is probably necessary for the survival of the species. So in that sense, it’s fundamental, and I wouldn’t say it’s worse. The problem is: So let’s say you’re reading the book. You’ve made this volitional decision, and as you’re reading the book, the little haptic buzz of a notification in your phone goes off.

[Tech vibration noise]

Hayes: Now, you notice that because it’s designed to use the deep circuitry of compelled attention to force your attention onto the physical sensation of the phone.

That is a perfect example of the one-way ratchet of what I call “attention capitalism,” is that the more important attention gets, and the more that people, corporations, and platforms have sort of optimized for it competitively, the more they will try to use the tactics of compelled attention to get our attention, rather than to get the part of us that’s volitional attention.

Now, of course, you still have human will. And in that moment, you’re going to decide, Am I going to take my phone out to see what the notification was or not? But that little moment, that little interruption, that’s pretty new at scale. I think it’s totally new at scale.

And it’s also just absolutely endemic to modern life. It’s our entire lives now, is that wail of the siren going down the street, the clatter of the drop tray.

[Siren wails, glass breaks, phone buzzes]

Hayes: There’s very powerful forces attempting to compel our attention away from where we might want to put it in any moment, because that’s a kind of hack for them for getting our attention.

Rosin: Right. You’re a little less than aware of it. Like, you’re not thinking, I want to look towards the waiter dropping the tray, or I want to look towards the ambulance. You’re just kind of reactive.

Hayes: Yeah, you’re reactive, and you’re at your sort of biophysical base, right? The comparison that I use in the book, and I think this might be helpful for people to think this through, is how hunger works. With food, we have these deep biological inheritances where there’s just universal deep wiring towards sweets, for instance, or fats, because they are extremely calorie dense.

You can exploit that at scale, as McDonald’s has and other food operations, and find that you could basically sell cheeseburgers and salty fries and Coca Cola all over the world, because you’re working on that deep biological substrate in people. But it’s also the case when you ask, Well, what do humans like to eat? it’s an impossible thing to answer, because the answer is: basically everything, right? It’s amazing, all the different things.

And what we see in sort of modern food culture and the food industry is a sort of fascinating kind of battle between these twin forces, right? The kind of industrialized production and fast food that is attempting to sort of find the lowest common denominator, speak to that deepest biological substrate so that they can sell corn syrup to everyone—and then all of the amazing things that people do with food and what food means as culture, as history, as self-expression, as expression of love and bonds.

And I think, basically, there’s a very similar dynamic that we now have with attention, where our compelled attention and our deep wiring is being extracted and exploited by very sophisticated, large, and powerful economic entities.

And yet we still do have this thing called voluntary attention. And you know, what’s sort of amazing, too, about the internet age is, like—and I say this in the book—like, I’ve watched hours of people cleaning carpets, which I find totally compelling and almost sort of sublime and soothing. And I wouldn’t have guessed that that was a thing I wanted to pay attention to.

You know, the internet has opened this cornucopia of different things you can pay attention to. So we’re constantly in this battle between these two forms of attention that are in our heads and the different entities that are trying to compel our attention against our will, and then our own kind of volitional attempt to control it.

Rosin: Chris, were you high when you were watching videos of cleaning carpets?

Hayes: (Laughs.) Mostly not. Occasionally yes, but mostly I have been sober while watching the cleaning carpets, and I’ve still found them incredibly calming.

Rosin: What? (Laughs.) So that’s your ASMR, is carpet cleaning?

Hayes: I don’t know if you’ve seen these, but they take these super, super dirty carpets—it’s like a genre video. There’s a million different ones now, which indicates that that’s not just me. Lots of people feel this way.

Rosin: It’s okay. It’s okay. There’s no judgment in this podcast at all.

Hayes: This is my kink.

Rosin: (Laughs.) You can find your calm wherever you need it. I’m just curious.

Hayes: (Laughs.) So yeah, that’s basically how I think about compelled involuntary attention. And I do think that, because I think we’re more familiar with it in the context of our appetites and hunger, I think it’s a really useful and grounding metaphor, because I think it functions in a very similar way.

Rosin: Essentially, what you’re saying is, the way this works is: We’ve got some biological impulses, let’s say, for example, to want social attention, just to be noticed by others. That’s in us, and that’s fine.

Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I think the reason that it’s so foundational, social attention— and I think it’s slightly counterintuitive because I think people have very different attitudes and personal dispositions towards social attention. Lots of people don’t like it. But the foundational truth about being a human is: We come into the world utterly helpless and dependent, completely, on care. And the thing prior to that care is attention.

And the best way to see this is the child’s wail. The most powerful tool that the newborn has is the cry. And the reason they have the cry is: It’s their siren. It compels our attention. And the reason that it compels our attention, and the reason they have to have the ability to compel our attention, is because without attention, they will perish. And that is our human inheritance. That need from the moment we come gasping into the world for others’ attention—that is foundational to every single one of us.

Rosin: So we have this need for social attention. It’s a basic need. Whether we’re an introvert or an extrovert, that’s not what we’re talking about. We just have this basic need for social attention. What is different about seeking social attention online?

Hayes: Okay, this is really, I think, a key thing to think about. Before civilization, you got social attention from people that you knew that you had relationships with, right? There weren’t really strangers. And you might be able to put your social attention on someone you don’t know, like a kind of godlike figure or a mythic hero that tales were told of, right? So you could put your attention on a person you don’t know, but the social attention you received was all from people that you had a bilateral relationship with. What happens with the dawn of what we might call fame—and there’s an amazing book about this that I cite—

Rosin: Leo Braudy.

Hayes: Yeah, Leo Braudy’s great book. He says Alexander, basically, is the first famous person, and he explains why. But fame is the experience of receiving social attention from people you do not know, and at scale.

Now this is a very strange experience. And the reason I know this is because I happen to live it. And so in the progression of civilization, you start to have famous people, and more and more people can be famous with the dawn of industrial media: movie stars, pop stars, all this stuff.

But it’s still a very, very, very tiny percentage of people that can be known by strangers—that can have social attention being paid to them by strangers. That just generally doesn’t happen for most people, and most people are gonna have received social attention from people they have relationships with, and they might put their social attention on all sorts of public figures—the president or celebrities and other people—but they’re not getting it from people they don’t know.

That just is a very tiny sliver of humans that can have that experience, and now it is utterly democratized for everyone for the first time in human history. I mean, it’s genuinely new, genuinely a break, has not happened before. Anyone can have enormous social attention from oceans of strangers on them. You can have a viral moment online. You can cultivate a following. This experience of social attention from strangers—precisely because it is so at odds, I think, with our inheritance—is weird and alienating. And there’s a bunch of ways it is. One of the ways it’s alienating is that we are conditioned to care what the people we love think about us.

We’re conditioned to care if we’ve hurt someone that we have a relationship with. But it’s very different if you’ve insulted or hurt just a total stranger who’s saying mean things to you, or you’ve disappointed them, or they’re angry at you. That comes into you, psychologically, indistinguishably from it coming from kin or lover or friend.

Rosin: So we just basically, our—I don’t know if I want to call them our intimacy compass—something gets scrambled. We just don’t have the category to react or manage that category of social attention. We just don’t know what to do with it.

Hayes: Truly, there’s a kind of clash here between the data set we’re trained on, if you will, and what we’re encountering. And the reason—again, this is a place that I really know, right? I didn’t used to have people come up to me on the street, and then I became famous enough that people did. And I’ve experienced all the ways that that’s strange and alienating, and I’ve given a lot of thought—partly as a kind of full-time psychological undertaking, so that I don’t go crazy, because I do think it’s kind of distorting and madness inducing in its own way.

And what we’ve done is basically democratize the madness-inducing aspects of celebrity for the entire society. Every teenager with a phone now can be driven nuts in precisely the way that we have watched generations of celebrities and stars go crazy.

Rosin: You mentioned Bo Burnham in your book and the movie he made, Eighth Grade. When he talked about why he made that movie, he said that same thing. He had a similar experience to you—he went viral at a pretty young age—and then he realized that every eighth grader was having the kind of experience that he had had, which he found so alienating but that had now become a common experience. Can you read a paragraph for me from your “social attention” chapter, which I think is relevant to this conversation?

Hayes: Sure. I’d love to.

Rosin: Just the paragraph that starts with “the social media combination.”

Hayes: “The social media combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting our friends to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.”

Rosin: That really hit me. It’s a dark vision. It’s like they tap into our thirst perfectly but then just keep the glass of water just out of reach, you know?

Hayes: Well, and I think that’s because there’s something holy or sublime in actual human connection that can’t be replicated.

Rosin: Yeah.

Hayes: —that, you know, the thing that we’re chasing is something ineffable and nonreplicable. And it’s the reason we chase it, because it’s what makes life worth living, at a certain level, is to be recognized and seen. Relationships of mutual support and affection and care with other people—you know, that’s it. That’s the stuff of it. And we are given a tantalizing facsimile that some deep part of us cannot help but chase, but it can’t also be the real thing.

Rosin: When we come back: who exactly is benefiting from this attention economy, why it feels so bad for the rest of us, and what we can do about it. That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: We’re back. And we’re starting with something that everyone who gets social attention from strangers learns.

Hayes: What you quickly find is that positive compliments and recognition—they just sort of wash off you. But the insults and the negativity cuts and sticks. I mean, do you not feel that way as someone who has some public profile?

Rosin: Yes, yes. It’s happened to me, and I was so surprised at how hurt I was. And when I look back, I think, like, I literally don’t really know those people. Like, there’s just something so, Ugh. It’s, like, ancient, the feeling—like you’re being pilloried or something, like you’re in the public square—and it feels terrible, and I don’t understand why. Like, I could just shut my computer, and it’d be gone, but it does not feel that way, internally.

Hayes: Yeah, and I can think of days I spent in that haze. You know, when you come out of it, you’re like, Why did I let myself feel that way? Like, Why did I spend a whole day? Like, Why was I—I can even think of moments of being distracted from my kids because I was sitting there and feeling wounded and hurt and ruminating on a mean thing someone who I don’t know said online. And I’m distracted, and my attention’s on that instead of my wonderful child sitting on my lap, you know? (Laughs.)

Rosin: Well, I think the lesson to learn from that is what you’re talking about in this book, is how vulnerable we are. Even when it doesn’t make intellectual sense, there is some way that we’re vulnerable in this moment. We can’t completely control our reactions and choose, voluntarily, not to pay attention to this thing. We don’t have that kind of agency—not yet, anyway.

Hayes: That’s exactly right. You know, attention is the substance of life. That is what our lives add up to. It’s in every moment, we are choosing to pay attention to something, or we’re having it compelled, but we’re paying attention to something. And that’s what adds up to a day and a week and a month and a year and a life.

And it’s also finite. You know, this is one of the key points I make, is that part of the value—and the reason it’s so valuable, and the reason there is such competition for the extraction of attention—is that unlike information, it’s capped. It’s a finite resource. It’s that people are figuring out how to take one or two extra slices of the pie, not grow it. And that’s the other thing that leads to the feeling of alienation and the feeling that something has been taken away from us because of its finitude.

Rosin: Well, let’s talk about attention as a resource, because we’ve talked a lot about how it works in us, the individuals, and permeates our lives, but I want to talk about a broader social context. You make this very compelling analogy between our attention problem and Marxist ideas. I did have this image of you at a bookstore one day, like, being bored and coming across a copy of Das Kapital, and like, a lightning bolt goes off. Yes! It’s like Marx but for the information age. It’s a really compelling analogy. Can you explain it?

Hayes: Yes, I mean, you know, I started reading Marx in high school, which is a weird thing to say, but it’s true. Here’s the basic argument Marx makes about labor.

So he’s living at this time where there’s this new thing called “wage capitalism,” “wage labor.” People, you know, sell their labor on a per-hour basis.

Rosin: And how is that different from people’s relationship to labor before? Just so we get the analogy.

Hayes: Totally. So let’s think about a cobbler, right? You’re in the preindustrial age. You got your little shop. You make a shoe. And there’s a few things about this process that are distinct. One is, there’s a telos; there’s an arc to it. You start with the raw materials, then you put them together, then you put the sole on, then you put the finish on. In the end, you have a shoe, and you own that shoe, and then you sell it in your store in exchange for money.

Now, compare that experience to the wage laborer in a shoe factory who is at one position stamping soles 10 or 12 hours a day, six days a week. In both cases, you could say that sort of preindustrial cobbler and the shoe-factory worker are both laboring.

But now there’s this distinct thing called “labor as a commodity” that has a wage price and a set of institutions to take the labor in exchange for that wage, and a set of technological and economic developments that produce a situation in which you go from being the cobbler, who makes the whole shoe, to being in a factory 12 hours a day, stamping a sole.

And Marx talks about this as the root of alienation. You’re just alienated from yourself, from your humanity. You’re not doing a recognizably human thing. You’re doing something that feels robotic and mechanical, but also that the value that you’re creating is literally outside of you. I mean, to go back to the cobbler, when he makes the shoe, he actually owns the shoe. If he wanted to make the shoe and give it to his kids, he could do that—and sometimes cobblers would, right? But the factory worker doesn’t have that. The factory worker is alienated from the value of the shoe. He’s stamping the sole, and when it goes down the line, it gets sold off somewhere else. It’s literally outside of him. It’s alien to him.

So this is the basic Marx labor theory of value, right? That you have this transformation in society, economic conditions, institutions that took a thing that was fundamentally human—effort, toil, whatever you want to call it—and transformed it into this new thing that was a commodity that could be priced and bought and traded.

Rosin: Called labor.

Hayes: Called labor. And I think, basically, there’s something happening right now with attention that’s similar. People have always paid attention to things, and that attention has always had some value, and there’s people who have utilized that value for all kinds of purposes—P. T. Barnum, Mark Antony: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

You know, there’s always been a value there, but we’ve entered an age that I think is similar to the industrial age—but for attention—where a set of institutions, technologies, and arrangements have produced a world in which our attention is being extracted from us, commodified, and sold at a price, often in millisecond auctions to advertisers.

And that extraction leads to a profound sense of alienation, similar in some ways to that sense of alienation and that alienation of the laborer. And yet there’s one more way in which it’s even more insidious, I would argue, which is that compelled, involuntary aspect.

So labor can be coerced forcibly. I mean, you can, you know, use a whip or a gun to make someone do something. If you put a gun to someone’s head and say, Dig a ditch, you’re coercing. You’re forcing that labor. But they know they’re doing it. If you fire a gun, your head will snap around before you know you’re even doing it.

And so because of this involuntary, compelled aspect of our biological wiring for attention, this new competitive attention capitalism is working to extract it at such a deep level that it’s compelling it, at some way, before we’re even able to make a volitional choice about it. And that feeling is this profound, deep feeling of alienation.

I think this alienation is so ubiquitous. I think we all feel versions of it, and I found the concept of alienation, which I always found a little foggy in the past, very clarifying. Something that should be within us is outside of us, and that within us is my control over my own thoughts. That’s the thing that should be within me. That’s the nature of consciousness itself, what it means to be of free will, and yet that is being extracted and commodified and taken outside of me.

Rosin: So we’re not exactly compelled. Nobody’s holding a gun to our head. So I don’t know that you could say it’s worse. It’s just more confusing because we are participating. So in some sense—

Hayes: Yes, that’s a good point. Yes, there’s not the same sense of violation, right? Because in some ways it feels like we’re consenting. I think you’re right. That muddies it and also gives us a weird feeling of shame and guilt.

Rosin: One consequence we’re seeing is the kind of people who thrive in this age—obviously, Donald Trump. You mention Elon Musk a lot in the book, which I think is a specific point. Like, the Trump point is kind of obvious. Like, why someone like that thrives in an age of attention, I think we intuitively understand that. Musk is a little more complicated.

Hayes: Well, look—here’s what unites them, right? It’s fundamentally: These are people that understand that attention matters more than anything, even at the cost of negative attention. And this is really the key thing to understand, I think, that has really warped our public discourse. The thing that separates social attention from other, more elevated forms of human interaction is that it’s necessary but not sufficient.

Someone flirting with you across the bar is social attention, a pleasant kind. Someone screaming at your face because you’re too close to them on the subway is also attention. And that’s the weird thing about attention. It could be of either valence and everything in between.

In a world that increasingly values attention over all else, what you get is you unlock the universe of negative attention and its power, because if all that matters is attention, then negative attention is just as good as positive attention. Now, most of us are conditioned to not like negative attention. But there’s a certain set of people who, either through a sort of intellectual understanding—sometimes this happens, where you’ll read interviews with creators who are like, Oh yeah. Once I started trolling, I got more views, right?

So part of it is: The algorithms select for negative attention. But part of it is just a deep brokenness in their personality, and I think this is true of both Donald Trump and Elon Musk, to seek out negative attention because it’s attention. And this creates a kind of troll politics writ large, and I think we’re sort of watching, in some ways, the Musk era supplant the Trump era, if that makes sense?

Rosin: What do you mean? What do you define as the Musk era?

Hayes: So most politicians, they want positive attention, and if they can’t get positive attention, they want no attention and then, underneath that, negative attention, right? So it’s like, you want people to like you and know your name, or you want to stay out of the news. And what Trump realized is that, no, it doesn’t matter whether it’s positive or negative, as long as you’re getting attention,

Musk has now taken this insight to actually having captured a platform that he purchased, where he is now operationalizing this at scale. So it’s like the higher synthesis of the insight of Trump. He’s understood that attention is the most valuable resource, and this is true in monetary terms. I mean, look at what’s happened—this I actually get wrong in the book because I was writing it too early.

Look what happened: He buys Twitter, okay? He buys it for $44 billion. So he gets it so he could be the main character on this. He so obsessively pursues this attention that it destroys the actual value of the entity. So lighting $25 billion on fire, right, all in this sort of broken pursuit of attention. But then, using this attention and using the platform, he helps elect a president who puts him, essentially, at the seat of power that produces an enormous boon in his personal wealth because people are like, Oh now he is close to power, and it has netted him hundreds of billions of dollars in his personal value.

And it’s the most incredible allegory for the entire attention age. Here are these two guys, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who seem to recognize more than anyone that attention is the most valuable resource and that you should do whatever you can to pursue it, even if that means acting like a maniac. And it’s kind of worked for both of them.

Rosin: That seems so huge and overpowering. I mean, there’s a way of listening to you and reading this book and fully seeing it. Like, we can see the train wreck in our own lives and sort of out there in the world. But you might read the book and think, Okay, this is my own ordeal—like, something I have to combat. I have to put my phone away. I have to chain myself to the trees or whatever.

Hayes: Yeah. I mean, so the first thing I would say is that the cause for optimism, which I have some, is that I feel this is pretty untenable and unsustainable, because I think the sense of exhaustion and alienation so ubiquitous and profound that I don’t think it can keep going that way. And actually, I think that there’s unbelievable latent energy for something different than what this is.

There are ways that attention can still be bought and sold that isn’t this particular to-the-second, algorithmic, infinite scroll that we’re all now trapped in, right? So I think you are going to see flourishing of alternate means. And you see this, I mean—Substack, the longform newsletter. We’re seeing it happen. Like, Substack is growing because people do want to read long things from people that they think are interesting, and not just algorithmic serving of short-form video. That’s a different model. It’s a for-profit model, but it’s a different model and, I think, a better one and one that’s less extractive and alienating for our attention.

You know, vinyl records were completely supplanted by cassette tapes and then CDs. And then, starting about 10 years ago, they started growing, and they’ve been growing every year, and they’ve been growing at huge paces, and there’s now a thriving vinyl industry. And the reason is that, I think, when you are streaming music, you have the twitchy, short-form attention extraction of going to the next song, or maybe I want something else. When you put on a record, you commit, right?

The commitment mechanism is the triumph of the volitional will over the involuntary attention compulsion, right? It’s like Odysseus lashing himself to the mast, right? We make a commitment: I’m going to read this email from this Substacker I subscribe to. I’m going to listen to this album, which I’ve put on vinyl. These commitment methods—and, again, they could be in for-profit context—I think we are going to see flourishing and more energy behind that.

And the other example I use, because I talked about hunger before, is to think about what’s happened with how opposition to the sort of corporate, industrial food system the U.S. has worked. So you’ve had an entire thriving ecosystem and set of businesses built up in opposition to precisely the forms of extractive and exploitative food capitalism that I think is parallel to attention capitalism.

And I think we are going to see that. There are people that market dumb phones now, and I think there’s gonna be a lot more of them. I can imagine a world in which, in the same way that a certain kind of parent doesn’t feed their kids fast food, you start to see that more and more, that people kind of just opt out of this entire system, to the extent they can.

Rosin: Do you think we’re being exploited, and we should be mad about it?

Hayes: Yeah, I do. I do. I think that there’s something pretty dark and insidious about how the major platforms, particularly, are engineering this kind of attention compulsion. And I think we are going to enter an era in which we start regulating attention seriously. You’re seeing this call—you know, in Australia, they’ve already banned social media for children under 16. You’re going to see more and more calls for that. But also, I can imagine other ways that we try to regulate it, whether it’s hard caps—regulated hard caps on screen time. I mean, that sounds so crazy and kind of un-American, but I don’t know. Maybe that’s a good idea!

Rosin: Well, I take hope in the schools. I mean, schools, not just in the U.S. but all over the world, are starting to get pretty serious about no phones at all during class time, which is radical. If you’re a teenager, that’s a radical change in your life. So that’s hopeful. I will say one thing your book has really done for me very concretely is make me appreciate my group chats.

Like, after I read your book, I went back and I thanked—you know, I thought, Oh, you know, I’ve got a couple of group chats that are so fun. And I just went and thanked everybody on them.

Hayes: That makes me so happy to hear that, because this is a book written by a person who genuinely loves the internet and has loved the internet most of his adult life. I mean, I’m an early internet adopter, and what the group chat is doing is: It’s using technology to connect actual people that know each other.

And there’s lots of stuff that could happen in group chat that could be messy or bad, because humans can be mean or gossipy to each other. But fundamentally, there’s not an interposition of some entity trying to monetize it. It’s a noncommercial space. It’s a technology that’s a noncommercial space.

It feels like the early noncommercial internet. You just go on with your friends, and you make jokes, and you share stuff, and that’s it. No one comes in with a five-second ad. No one tries to extract your attention against your will. It’s a set of bilateral relationships, voluntarily entered to, in a space that is noncommercial.

And that’s the other thing we really need. Like, we have physical public spaces that are noncommercial, and they are so vital, whether that’s schools or libraries or parks. Increasingly, the internet is just totally captured by commercial spaces. And it used to be entirely noncommercial, and now it’s entirely commercial. And those commercial spaces will ultimately further the kind of extractive attention capitalism I’m critiquing. But there are ways to create—and the group chat right now is the chief among them—noncommercial spaces of digital connection.

Rosin: Okay, everyone listening, go do more group chats. Just go engage in your group chats. And Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for writing this book and explaining this all to us.

Hayes: Thank you for reading it. It really means a lot to me and thank you for having me.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Ena Alvarado fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

My thanks again to Chris Hayes for joining me. His new book is The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.

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