I read part of Chris Hayes’ book “The Sirens’ Call” while watching an NBA game. I wrote this story in short bursts, often stopping to check my email, read texts, do Wordle or read about Major League Baseball free-agent rumors. It wasn’t intentional, but it was fitting, given that the book’s subtitle is “How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.”

The book touches on all aspects of the battle for our attention, but much of it is about how Big Tech has taken advantage of unfettered capitalism, human nature and a knack for seductive algorithms to reap huge profits while warping our society in certain ways.

Still, Hayes, who writes honestly about his experience trying to grab and keep your attention from his job as an MSNBC host, makes a point of saying that this is not a Luddite’s polemic.

“I’m just searching for answers and trying to bring the reader along,” he said recently at his Brooklyn home, still in his basketball clothes after some time on the court away from his own emails, texts and other technology.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Why should people pay attention to this article?

A: This idea of attention is a central question. Attention is the substance of life, but we often find ourselves paying attention to things in spite of our volitional will. Reclaiming our attention is a means of reclaiming our dominion over ourselves. So it gets to some of the deepest stuff about who we are and what it means to be human — how to live in your own mind, how to direct your thoughts, what you want to do with your consciousness, as opposed to being tugged around like a donkey.

Q: You write about how everything new can cause social hand-wringing — not just TV and radio but even the advent of magazines. Why is this different?

A: Certain things we had moral panics about, like comic books, were silly, but others like television genuinely did fundamentally change all social relations and completely transformed American politics. The printing press led to the Reformation but also a lot of bloody sectarian warfare.

But the ubiquity of this technology is really new and distinct. You couldn’t take a TV with you. You could take a magazine but it ends at a certain point. This total ubiquity of access to the attentional pull of our phones is genuinely new. And there’s the social aspect: We never had interactions with strangers who have an opinion about you unless you were famous. And then there’s the scale — there was never a broadcaster reaching a billion people the way social media can.

These transformations can have both positive and negative effects. It’s a matter of figuring out how we deal with it and what’s progress and what’s negative.

Q: What are some of the positive aspects of how modern technology can grab our attention?

A: My daughter uses technology to sit on FaceTime with a friend who doesn’t live nearby while they do homework or to keep in touch with friends from her old school. Group chats are great because no one’s trying to sell you anything and they’re between people with preexisting relationships. It’s not about commercial and monetized spaces.

Another positive aspect of this “attention capitalism” is that it has gotten rid of gatekeepers. The old model was a bunch of executives who gave green lights to what they felt would grab people’s attention. Now everything just gets thrown online and stuff that would never have gotten a green light before can be great and be extremely successful. So as we think about how to remake digital culture with an intentional ecosystem that’s healthier, there’s stuff you want to preserve.

Q: You make distinctions between attention and information, and that people who frown at legacy media often don’t realize that these new corporate behemoths like Google and Meta can be even more problematic.

A: Information is everywhere. Attention is finite. Everything’s about data today but even the data is in the service of getting your attention, in the pursuit of selling you something. I don’t worry about what they’re going to do with my data but if they take my attention, that impacts my life.

Google started off with this great thing, but to monetize it they had to undermine their mission and cannibalize themselves with ads. Google used to be a useful way to find information, but now they just want to keep you on Google and you have to scroll down and down even if you just want to go to Wikipedia.

And it’s important to make a distinction with news, which we’ve lost as a separate category. If you ask people where they get their news, particularly the younger you go, they don’t even go to news sites or Google News. They get content from TikTok and say, “Joe Biden fell on the steps of the airplane. The aliens built the pyramids. There’s a Tiny Desk concert.” It’s all undifferentiated.

Curation for the news is done with some set of values and principles that’s independent of pure attentional concerns. Legacy media is not wholly subsumed by this. Journalism can give you the information necessary for self-governance. And that’s important. One thing that’s civically dangerous is the annihilation of those boundaries.

Q: On the personal level, you write instead about the difference between attention and connection.

A: Attention is necessary but not sufficient. When you’re talking about human relationships, what we really want is connection. The internet and social media gives you a lot of attention, which is adjacent but not quite as powerful. But it feels almost like what you want so you chase it.

Until you get social attention from strangers, you’d only gotten attention from someone you cared about, whether family, friend, a co-worker. You’re not wired to intake input from strangers and all of a sudden you’re making the mistake where if a stranger with some user name is yelling at you online or says something mean about you, it hits you as if someone you cared for said it. That can really get in your head, and you see people lose their minds online.

Q: Can we change course, on a societal and an individual level?

A: I’m not telling anyone how they should feel. I’m trying to give a framework for thinking about this if you don’t like where it has headed. I think more and more people feel that way. Writing this book over the last two years, I’ve seen the public mood change.

There is talk about regulation for children but also to put a cap on hours. I think you can start taxing screen time — taxing the companies, not the individuals — saying you’re monetizing people’s attention and after a certain amount of time you’ll pay taxes so they’d maybe change their algorithms.

One thing you can do yourself is to retrain your mind to be comfortable being alone with your own thoughts, not listening to anything and not looking at anything. I try to take a 20-minute walk every day where I’m just with my thoughts.