El Canto de Las Sirenas / The Sirens' Call. How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

Todos lo hemos sentido: la distracci鏮, la p廨dida de concentraci鏮, la atenci鏮 secuestrada durante demasiado tiempo por las cuestiones equivocadas. El ir y venir de zombis pegados a sus tel嶨onos por la calle. Todos hemos mirado con cierta l嫳tima en un restaurante a esas cuatro personas de la mesa de al lado absortas en sus pantallas, justo antes de sentir la vibraci鏮 en nuestro bolsillo. Algo ha cambiado en nuestras vidas.

En este fascinante ensayo, el escritor y periodista Chris Hayes argumenta que nos encontramos en el epicentro de una transici鏮 definitoria, cuyo paralelo m嫳 cercano ser燰 la transformaci鏮 del trabajo en el siglo XIX. Hoy, nuestra atenci鏮 se ha convertido en un recurso mercantil, extra獮o con fines de lucro y responsable de que nos sintamos cada vez m嫳 alienados. Las sirenas que fueron dise鎙das para obligarnos a prestar atenci鏮 ante un peligro suenan en nuestros dormitorios y cocinas, a todas horas del d燰 y de la noche, a las 鏎denes de las empresas m嫳 valiosas de la historia. Nuestras estructuras neurol鏬icas, herencias evolutivas e impulsos sociales habitan un nuevo entorno dise鎙do para aprovechar, distorsionar y destruir aquello que nos hace humanos. El canto de las sirenas es un intento por ofrecernos claridad y orientaci鏮 para que podamos recuperar el control de nuestras vidas, de nuestra pol癃ica y de nuestro futuro.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

The #1 New York Times Bestseller

- One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading List Picks

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society

"An ambitious analysis of how the trivial amusements offered by online life have degraded not only our selves but also our politics." --New York Times

"Brilliant book . . . Reading it has made me change the way I work and think." --Rachel Maddow

"A useful primer on how social media and the attention economy have warped our democracy and reshaped our lives." --Barack Obama

We all feel it--the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. Something has changed utterly: For most of human history, the boundary between public and private has been clear, at least in theory. Now, as Chris Hayes writes, "With the help of a few tech firms, we basically tore it down in about a decade." Hayes argues that we are in the midst of a transi­tion whose only parallel is that of labor in the nineteenth century: Attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens' Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.

Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes shares, "Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolution­ary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human." The Sirens' Call is the book that snaps everything into a single holistic frame­work so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.