Democrats Are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
About this episode
Hayes, author of 'The Sirens' Call,' argues attention has become what labor was in the Industrial Revolution: a commodified, extracted resource whose aggregate value dwarfs its per-unit price. Trump and Musk intuitively grasp this — Musk's $44 billion Twitter purchase bought attentional power worth far more — while Democrats still think in money and fear negative coverage. The episode explores trolling politics and the shock-jock model: Trump discovered that the volume of attention matters more than its valence, and that competitive attention markets select for negativity, conflict, and reactionary impulses. Klein and Hayes discuss Democrats' 'media problem' as really an attention problem — risk-averse 'not making news' instincts, obsolete gatekeeper thinking, the futile search for a liberal Joe Rogan — and close by predicting a coming backlash candidate who runs against the attention economy itself, channeling disgust at what constant connectivity is doing to public and inner life.