The Siren’s Call Book Club
The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by Chris Hayes, Penguin Press, 2025
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 attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated.
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 goal of the Sirens’ Call is to help us wrest back control of our lives.
Meeting dates:
September 24
October 8
October 22
November 5
November 19
December 3
Workshop details
- Date: Thursday, September 24, 2026
- Time: 3:30 PM–4:30 PM Central Time
- Location: McGraw 1
- Presenter: Amy Menzel and Dennis Elverman