The Rooms We Think In

Chris Hayes opens The Sirens’ Call with a claim that sounds obvious until you sit with it: attention is the most endangered resource we have. Not time, not money, not even trust. Attention. His argument is that what happened to human labor in the nineteenth century is now happening to human attention. It has been turned into a commodity, something extracted from us at scale, metered and sold whether or not we consented to the sale. We live in an economy of infinite information and finite notice, and the institutions that thrive in it are the ones that have gotten very good at taking the one thing we can’t manufacture more of.

I’ve been thinking about that book for months, because it names the water I’ve been swimming in. My own work in radical attention management has had two faces. One is fighting the ever-growing stream of distractions, dopamine hits, and manufactured conflict. The other is building media that educates and informs while protecting the audience’s attention where it counts most.

What I want to argue here is small and, I think, hopeful. Defending ourselves from extracted attention is necessary, but it is not the whole answer. We also have to build places worth giving our attention to.

Start with where attention goes to die. The broadcast channel, the feed, the timeline, the quote-tweet pile-on, is not a neutral pipe. It is an environment with a metabolism of its own. It runs on spectacle, because spectacle is what reliably converts a stranger’s glance into a measurable unit of engagement. The payout is in reactions. The winning move isn’t to be right; it’s to be seen. And because the medium pays out in visibility, the behavior it breeds is the behavior that maximizes visibility: outrage, certainty, the performance of conflict for an audience that is itself the product being sold.

This is exactly Hayes’ point, and it’s why the platforms feel inescapable. They work exactly as intended. The intent just has nothing to do with us thinking well together.

We keep making the same mistake. We try to do serious collective work inside that environment and then act surprised when it goes badly. We try to deliberate on platforms built for spectacle. We try to make decisions in rooms optimized for fights. We try to reach agreement in a medium whose economic logic rewards never agreeing, because the disagreement is the content. Then we conclude that the people are the problem, that they’re too tribal, too angry, too far gone to govern themselves.

I don’t think it’s the people. I think it’s the room.

I came across a sharp version of this idea recently in, of all places, a debate about how an online community should govern itself. The framing borrowed a term from philosophy. A heterotopia is a space that runs on different norms than the world around it. A library is one. So is a courtroom, a place of worship, an operating theater. You behave differently when you cross the threshold. Your rights don’t evaporate at the door; the space simply has a purpose, and you’ve agreed to honor it so that purpose can be served. Nobody experiences a library’s quiet as censorship. We understand, intuitively, that some kinds of value can only be produced in protected conditions.

The proposal was simple. Stop trying to govern in the coliseum. Build a different room, one whose only job is to host the kind of conversation that converges on a decision instead of spiraling into a performance. Give it a purpose, a social contract, and enough structure that good-faith disagreement can actually do its work and then resolve.

You can apply that idea to almost anything we’ve outsourced to the feed and watched curdle: a neighborhood’s argument with itself, a profession’s standards, a company’s strategy. The medium we reach for by default is the one least suited to the task. We have confused reach with deliberation. They are not the same activity, and they may not even be compatible ones.

This is where it connects back to attention, and to what I’ve been calling radical attention management.

If you want to have the conversation, you’ve got to remove the distraction. If you want to make progress, you’ve got to change the incentives for all of the participants. If you want your stakeholders to take you seriously, they have to feel safe enough to engage. Every one of those tenets requires a space fundamentally different from the social media environment we default to. What you need is a space designed to leave the ready distractions and the force-fed responses behind. It should be a place where an idea can breathe, where a conflict can be heard and a resolution proposed. We have to be deliberate about where our attention goes. If we don’t build a ready outlet for it, the Silicon Valley distraction machine will be all too happy to fill the void.

If Hayes is right that attention has been enclosed and commodified, then reclaiming it can’t only be a personal discipline, like a better morning routine or a grayscale phone. Those help, but they leave the extraction machine running; they just unplug one person from it for an hour. The more radical move is structural. It’s to build commons for attention: spaces we enter on purpose, with others, under rules we’ve agreed to, so that our collective notice can be spent on something other than the next outrage.

A purpose-built deliberative space is radical attention management made concrete. It is a group of people saying: here, in this room, we will attend to this question, in this way, until we reach something. The conduct rules aren’t bureaucratic overhead; they’re the walls that keep the spectacle economy from leaking in and draining the room of what it exists to gather.

I want to be honest about the obvious objection, because it’s a serious one. Any space with a purpose and a door has to decide who’s inside and what’s out of bounds, and that power can be abused. A room built to protect deliberation can quietly become a room built to protect incumbents. Refusing to build rooms isn’t the answer; that just cedes the ground back to the feed, which is the least accountable room of all. The safeguard is to make the rules explicit, the membership broad, the moderation transparent, and the whole arrangement amendable by the people inside it. A heterotopia earns its legitimacy; it doesn’t get to assume it. That’s a design problem, and design problems have solutions.

Hayes ends The Sirens’ Call on a hopeful note, almost a summons: the war for attention is winnable, but only if we treat attention as something worth organizing around rather than something we passively lose. I read his book as a diagnosis. I’ve come to think the prescription is partly architectural. We don’t just need to resist the rooms that take our attention. We need to build the rooms that deserve it.

That’s the next build for me. I’m going to work with a team making one of these rooms. Purpose-fit. Time-bound. With explicit goals and transparency about the outcomes. I’ll do my best to capture what we learn here as we go. And if you’ve built an online space dedicated to a specific cause, I’d love to learn from you. Reach out and tell me about your experience refocusing attention where it matters.