Chris Hayes was beginning his third week internet hosting a brand new prime-time MSNBC present, All In, when tragedy struck in Boston. The lethal marathon bombing, and subsequent manhunt, he recollects, grew to become a TV “spectacle” that dominated the information for a few month. But at first of this month, he says, “a man with an ISIS flag killed 14 folks” in a New 12 months’s truck assault in New Orleans and the story rapidly pale.
“It’s wild to match Boston to that,” says Hayes. One troubling caveat, he notes, is that individuals have “turn into acculturated with mass acts of violence, like college shootings,” thus elevating the bar for what tales command and hold the general public’s consideration. Nonetheless, he says, there’s this “feeling that nothing sticks,” which pertains to Donald Trump, who each drives and advantages from in the present day’s hyperspeed news cycle.
Once I meet up with Hayes for breakfast in Park Slope, Brooklyn, there are nonetheless 10 days earlier than Trump will return to the White Home and, as soon as once more, dominate media protection by flooding the zone with govt orders and pronouncements. However the forty seventh president—in addition to Elon Musk—is an unavoidable matter of dialog over espresso and eggs that morning given the topic of Hayes’s newest e-book: consideration.
“These are two individuals who perceive at an nearly mobile stage how essential consideration is, I feel, partly due to their very own bizarre, damaged personalities,” he says. They’ve “discovered this core reality,” he provides, “that spotlight is probably the most invaluable useful resource of our time and that it’s best to do something you may to get it.”
Whereas Hayes confronts our screen-addled current in his upcoming launch, The Sirens’ Name, he begins a couple of thousand years again with the “Odyssey,” recalling the scene through which Odysseus needed to be tied to a ship’s mast to stop him from being drawn to an attractive music being sung by sirens, legendary creatures recognized for luring sailors to their demise. “The Sirens of lore and the sirens of the city streetscape each compel our consideration in opposition to our will,” Hayes writes. “And that have, having our thoughts captured by that intrusive wail, is now our everlasting state, our lot in life.”
All through the e-book, Hayes bats round huge concepts from philosophers (Plato, Pascal, Marx), media theorists just like the late Neil Postman—whose seminal 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Dying, feels particularly prescient at first of one other reality-show presidency—and a few deep thinkers from the early days of the web. Hayes charts how the Data Age has morphed into the Consideration Age, an epoch dominated by the likes of Amazon and Apple and through which consideration “is now commodified and might be traded, purchased, and offered in subtle, instantaneous algorithmic auctions that value a second of our eyes’ focus.”
But Hayes will get private too, reflecting on making an attempt to rein in his children’ display time—in addition to his personal—and revealing features of his skilled life as a result of, as he tells me, his “entire job” is “to maintain folks’s consideration.” That have as a cable information host “developed the concepts that ended up within the e-book to be theorized,” he says, including, “The e-book is type of the top product of all of the pondering that I do on daily basis, always, about this craft, and about how can we hold folks’s consideration and the way do I finish a monologue and what goes in what order.” And the method of writing the e-book, he says, has made him take into account making adjustments on air. “I wish to do extra radical experimentation, and I feel that there’s urge for food for that,” Hayes says. “That’s like a New 12 months’s decision.”
It ought to come as no shock that Hayes’s community bosses are additionally pondering so much about what’s retaining folks’s consideration. The earlier night time’s rankings—or “the numbers,” as they’re referred to inside 30 Rock—are intently scrutinized when shared round 4:15 p.m. “It’s like getting a grade each single day,” he writes, “however a grade that you just put on in your brow as you stroll round college.” What’s stunning, although, is that Hayes hasn’t been checking his personal rankings since 2020.
“Throughout COVID, I simply utterly checked out,” he says. “And I’ll let you know the rationale why: I used to be beginning to get burdened about them in some unspecified time in the future. After which I used to be like, It’s a pandemic, dude. We’ve got a task to play within the civic—and literal bodily—well being of the nation. Within the grand scheme of issues, it doesn’t matter. And me worrying about it doesn’t assist me. So I’m simply gonna attempt to do my job as finest as I can. And I caught with that for 5 years.”
