Just when I figured I had plumbed the depths of capitalism's toxicity, I came across yet more proof; in fact, the apotheosis of toxicity. The toxicity to end all toxicity. Chris Hayes' The sirens' call: How attention became the world's most endangered resource (2025) describes how, with the latest social media revolution, capitalism has managed to penetrate our skulls and steal our very consciousness, what makes you you.

It steal nature's precious wealth, chews it up and spits it out.

It steals our bodies, makes us punch clocks in our prime till we're too old to enjoy just being (idleness is a dirty word). Now our every thought is tapped for hints of what it can convince us to do, buy, be.

It uses the same scientistic thinking that brought you destruction of the rainforests, armaggedon for Earth and humanity. Like material commodity production, it starts with end. The widget. Produce a widget to make a profit. Now reverse-engineer to do this 'efficiently' i.e., as fast as you can mass produce it, regardless of nature or the humans being exploited. Machine-think. Basically, how to steal better. The mind is the final frontier (OK, colonizing Mars, but that's the exo-frontier and capitalism's working overtime now to figure out how to cash in on Mars et al out there).

The big trouble once you've figured mass production out is, of course, selling your product. The Internet, for a brief moment (till capitalism figured it out), was an Eden populated by openoffice computer nerds voluntarily setting up chat groups (remember the early '90s?). Real groups with back and forth democracy. But Mr Moneybags couldn't let that continue. Within a decade, we got the equivalent of the 7 Sisters for the era of Big Oil (ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, etc); namely, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon. Data is the new oil. The mind is the new/last frontier. Out with the nonprofit anarchists, in with the new Oligarchs. The Internet became Mr Moneybags II.

You wanna sell? Make some moolah? No problemo. Set up your lemonade stall and use our cool new models of trolling, complete with key words, search engine optimization. Of course to make money, you must spend money. 99% of Google's $3.2b revenue comes from ads. Google has its very own mint.

Sirenades 

Hail, grab, keep your victim. Not for any real purpose, only for theft of attention itself, i.e., for profit. We can dissect a frog but never create one. We can steal, kill, make profit from attention but never create consciousness, explore higher consciousness, transcendence, create beauty, bring peace, worship god, find meaning in life. Lol. Forget the metaphysical crap.

The Internet once held hope of community, sharing. Nurturing face-to-face, mutual exchange. Rather than share worries, problems with a friend or counselor, try to heal, you can 'surf the net', watch porn, live a half-life with lots of internet support. It isolates then steals, abuses our consciousness, nurtures conflict, disinfo. Dumbing down the net leads to the lowest common denominator, shallow, surveillance attention. Instead of enlightenment, constantly learning more about everything, we can know everything about nothing, Idiocracy.

Our age has many nicknames. Before computers, it was the value-neutral Information Age. More ominously, Auden's Age of Anxiety (1948). Hayes calls it the Attention Age. As Auden suggests, it creates, nurtures neurosis. Liah Greenfeld's Mind, Madness and Modernity (2013) documents the epidemic of madness in its new form—the big three of contemporary psychiatry—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression. And who wins the Nobel Prize, the gold medal? First place globally in production of madness goes to ... Team America!

The US, founded by merchants in 1776, the land of capitalism gone wild west, the lab for social experiments, slash-and-burn, destroy-rebuild-destroy-etc. It's not enough to monopolize the geopolitical world, it must monopolize our inner world, massage us into perfect widgets, figure out what we can be convinced to buy and then con us into buying it. Some highly targetting key 'ad words' charge $233 per click.ⁱ

Your every click is info to be 'shared' (stolen), to st(r)oke your narcissism, serve up more tasty morsels like the one you just consumed. Feeds. Endless scrolling of mindless chatter that you seem to like. Just for 'market share'. No! Market theft. Capitalism infects everything with aggressive zero sum logic. 'What's mine is mine and what's yours in mine.' More attention means more profit.

Originally, in the '90s Internet Stone Age, 'surfing the net' was still a bit like an adventure into the unknown; with no one watching, you could explore, connect with other nerdy explorers, have a gas. Now it means wading through top ranking ads and lots of clever attempts to sidetrack you, pick your pocket.

In James Joyce's Ulysses, Bloom empathizes with his wife's lover for 'falling a victim to her siren charms and forgetting home ties.' Ulysses' sirens, once seductresses, became capitalism's sirens, intrusive wails, also alerting us to death, the same kind of attention a baby's crying demands.

William James identified the 'effort of attention' (where to direct it) as the essential phenomenon of will. Whoever controls it controls us. The Greek sirens eventually warbled willless sailors to their own death. With mental illness always on the rise, birth rates in the commodified 'collective West' apporaching zero, life expectancy in a collapsing environment falling, we are serenaded by earphoned digital music into oblivion.

Everyone complains about their short attention span, ADHD. Not just still unprogrammed children, but adults too. This is just a symptom of high tech (mis)shaping our lives. A pill to suppress this symptom (developed by 'science' aka Big Pharma for profit) is not going to heal. Its side effects will just create more problems and, of course, more 'solutions'. The system is rigged, just like debt-based money means we have to grow forever, just to keep in the same place.

The chief energy source since Creation has been the sun. Capitalism preferred first coal, then oil -- toxic, but who cares? Cheap, fast, profitable. Sunlight is slow and lazy, hard to make a profit (though 'green capitalism' is learning). In fact, the most precious source of power is inside us, our consciousness, as The Matrix portrays. There, extraterrestrials wanted our energy, here it's capitalism. Everything is now reoriented around capturing attention.

Hayes walks us through the different attention levels:

*active attention, the ability to suppress irrelevant data, best illustrated by the gorilla-in-room experiment. Inattentional blindness.

*But even during the intense focused attention, the mind still processing info involuntarily. E.g., your name filters through other background noise (someone is 'paying' attention to Eric Walberg!). And sirens (both Ulysses and ambulance).

*Which leads us to social attention (and its absence, boredom, i.e., when no one pays me attention and I'm left alone with my thoughts) and collective attention (theatre, mass gatherings, fame).

Basic instinct and its opposite

Freud: our first and most important attention exchange is with mother (to a lesser extent father). The buck stops with her in forming our psyches, compulsions and neuroses. Our first basic instinct is not sex, not even hunger, but to seek attention per se.

Boredom is actually a defensive reaction to cover lack of attention. If forced to sit in room with no stimulus (attention), 2/3 of men will use electric shock out of boredom, a few constantly. Repetition compulsion, neurosis. Always filling our alienated consciousness. Kierkegaard labeled boredom the source of evil vs hunter-gatherer idleness, socializing, communal hanging out. Pre-capitalist languages have no word for 'bored'. The Warapiri tribe in central Australia use the English term for that neurosis which is now infecting them (just like small pox etc, for which they had no immunity because they never got sick). 

There was boredom before capitalism, but only for the elite, the king. The king's paradox is the template for our widget civilization. You have no real friends as king (relations of equality and mutual recognition), so you need to fill your dearth of human warmth, your boredom with entertainment, a fool, to dare to be honest while pretending he's mad.

The slot machine 'solves' the problem by providing the perfect artificial attention stimulus with prefectly efficiently. Intense attention for a few seconds. Suspense-resolution. Repeat. Not playing to win. Playing to stay in the machine zone where nothing else matters. In the eye of the storm. The king mesmorized by the fool's wit and stories. Now, scrolling 'the feed' at TikTok or Facebook.

Like the king, to paraphrase Pascal, we are 'unable to stay quietly in our own chamber.' So when the fool fails, we, today's faux kings, turn to war, dangers, sins to distract us 'from the restlessness of the mind, the craving for diversion, spiritual angst about our mortality.'

We like to give/'pay' our attention to Ulysses' sirens, but this must be reciprocal or it means only exploitation, slavery, death from mindless warbling (fleeing the terror of uninterrupted minds). So to maintain our health, it must be codified, say, in a religion, where we give ourselves but within limits, and rather than harmful (repetition compulsion leading to madness, starvation, death), it is a path to transcend lowly consciousness, trashy attention, leading to moral uplift, social good. We need religion/ morality to control our neuroses, addictions. Yes, addictions. Gambling, drugs, sexual perversions, all acting as defenses against the underlying neurosis of alienation.

Keynes predicted that soon there would be no need for work leading to ennui, boredom. He urged educating people to cultivate direct enjoyment of things. The way out is through. Not just 'keep busy'. Learn to be comfortable with your own thoughts. The Buddha's clearing the mind of attachments. Embrace idleness, daydream. Kierkegaard's 'principle of limitation'. Limiting yourself makes you more resourceful.

Social attention: Mother love, gossip, fame

Hayes is a fine thinker. Well read and sympathetic to Marx, creative in his use of the master critic of capitalism. They both identify alienation at the heart of our malaise. Social attention, or rather lack of, is the killer. Literally. 3/4 of disturbed children suffer from neglect vs 1/4 from physical abuse. And the fall out from neglect is more toxic than a priest diddling a little boy. You never recover fully from neglect. It shapes your personality to the grave. Horrible, evil, though child abuse is, it's at least attention! Babies who are being neglected often 'act out' to trigger abuse (spanking, anger) as proof that they matter. 

De Tocqueville came to the US to study the novel incarceration technique promoted by the Quakers -- solitary confinement. He was appalled at how debilitating it was, leading to physical and mental disintegration. It's still a favorite technique, especially in the US but throughout the 'collective West'. And solo living is as high as 60% (Stockholm). Social attention is like sunlight for plants. Lack of social attention in the crucial first few years inevitably leads to neurosis for life, if not death itself.

If you make it past the first maturation hurdle, your language facilitates social attention in the form of gossip, the central human activity, arguably the activity that led to the creation of all languages. The equivalent of grooming in apes, but turbo-charged by language and 'intelligence', as it's no longer one-on-one; you gossip with neighbours, Facebookers, about third parties. Language makes grooming communal and speeds it up. Ergo, language increases the fund of all forms of attention especially social. Perfect for Mr Moneybags II.

The two basic forms of social attention are with kin and gods/rulers/stars. Our interaction with the latter is called fame, social attention from strangers. Fame is an addiction not that different from the others centred around attention. In the good old days, there was one king/god and a lcoal lord, so not a lot of fame or people desiring fame. Capitalism expanded the field with lots of infinitely wealthy tradesmen, 'keeping up with the Joneses'.

Worshipping the famous (and vice versa) is not reciprocal mother love or even gossip, but you have illusion it is because normal social attention is reciprocal, so you 'love' your fans/citizens and your fans/citizens 'love' you. And you are just as easily hurt by negative critics as from gossipers or screaming babies. Fame operates like a virus invading the attention 'cell', capturing it and – voila! -- the whole body is addicted. AIDS. Even negative fame, infamy, is addiction. Just look at Trump.

There is much more in Sirens' Call that's enlightening about our moral dive into the abyss. Trolling, spam are the logical outcome of all this: hostile or meaningless info flooding the Internet, desperate to seize our attention. Peaceniks throwing paint at drone factories or da Vinci paintings, porn, Trump's 'conflict entrepreneur', mass shootings ...

Reclaiming our minds

Platform (business) logic: at the start, you're good to users, then, good to business customers, then, bad to both, claw back all value to yourself. Hayes uses the cd-back-to-vinyl movement as an analogy for overcoming this cynicism.

*As a journalist, he hopes newspaper will revive, free from online manipulation and capture of attention/ soul.

*He tells how a modest natural food store in Austin, Texas morphed into Whole Foods stores nationwide, which Amazon purchase in 2017 for $14b (I don't like that. I never use Amazon). And farmers' markets. These are examples of 'alternative attention products'.

*Ban screens for children home and school.

*Dumb phones.

*Intentional collectives online and in person.

*Reddit, Quora.

*Opensource software.

*DM chat groups.

*Signal messaging.

He compares these quasi-instinctual reactions to the ban on child labour, limiting work hours of the industrial revolution. Children can't 'consent' to child labour. But his view of the sale of Whole Foods to Amazon shows he's still Marx's bourgeois. The real key to working through our collective neurosis is getting rid of the money logic that brought us slavery culminating in our present apocalyptic endgame.

Demonetize. Figure out how to reclaim our Commons, be it land, water, air, or our inner Commons, our consciousness, now reduced to widget-think. Rediscover our spiritual essence, buried by things, money, fame, neurosis. This is happening. A young American convert to Islam explains the beauty of sharia in a minute (no %, no debt pyramid, real punishment for real criminals, protection of poor and orphans through charity ...). We need freedom to be idle! To daydream, pray, be thankful, be with family. Back to basics.

Dumb phones definitely halal

https://dissidentvoice.org/2025/08/social-media-sirenading-us-to-death/

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See Harnessing human nature to save the world ebook by Eric Walberg