Chris Hayes
Appearances
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think this is the key transformational insight of Donald Trump to politics. Generally in politics, you want to get people's attention for the project of persuading them. Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears, Mark Anthony says, before he proceeds to attempt to persuade them, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
What Trump figured out is that in the attention age, in this sort of war of all against all, that actually just getting attention matters more than whatever comes after it. And one way reliably to get people's attention is negative attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, if you insult people, act outrageously, I mean, this is literally, there was a commercial model for this, which is shock jocks of the 1980s and 90s that we grew up with, right? Like, they were in a competitive attentional marketplace in local places. Shock jocks said outrageous things. They weren't trying to get someone to vote for them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
They just wanted you to know that they were running the morning zoo.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think that's probably true. And I also think that the general shock jock model has now become a successful model in politics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So I agree with that. And I want to sort of take those in two parts because I think the politics is actually worth taking a second with. Mark Robinson ran for governor of North Carolina. He was already elected statewide as a lieutenant governor. Said lots of outrageous things all the time.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
He was discovered to be, almost certainly, I think he denies it, but it seems to me pretty plausible, a commenter on the Nude Africa site where he said all sorts of wildly offensive things, including, I am a black Nazi. Robinson lost that race in North Carolina, a state Trump carried. It's probably like a plus one or two Republican state at national level. It didn't work for him.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, Carrie Lake courted negative attention, lost two successive statewide races. Doug Mastriano. I could go down the list. So there's something really fascinating— underperformed in Ohio and his Senate.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So there is something happening where it has not proven to be a replicable strategy. That the old logic that we were just talking about the Democrats having and being outdated still does hold in a lot of races. That said, in terms of influence, I think negative attention is incredibly effective.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think you're seeing this shock jock, you can call it shock jock, you can just call it trolling politics. I mean, it is trolling politics. The idea of trolling and the reason that trolling exists is is it's easier to get negative attention than positive attention. It creates a conundrum for the other side, which is, do you ignore them while they say horrible stuff?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Or do you engage them and give them what they want? And I think this kind of trolling politics, which was really Donald Trump's insight... is the most transformational part of politics now. And you're 100% correct. The media management around Democrats is so much risk aversion. If the choice is negative attention or no attention, we take no attention every time. And that is the wrong choice.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, I think it does select for attentional sociopath. I would push back a little bit in this respect, though. I don't know how much of the negative feedback gets to Donald Trump and Musk. Like, I do think they have probably created... But he's sitting there watching MSNBC and getting mad at it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yes, but I guess what I'm trying to say is, like, I think it bothers him and Musk, too. Like, I guess I just don't buy that it rolls off their back. I mean, they're kind of obsessed with it also. Mm-hmm. So that fixation is manifest differently. It at least doesn't turn them back, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
They don't recede from the... But the idea that they're sort of zen-like, like, well, you know, people are just going to hate me. Like, that's not what's going on psychologically. Fair enough. So, yes, I do. I worry, actually, that it now selects for a kind of sociopathic disposition. Or just a very, like, broken and compulsive one. Because, like, I know just speaking for myself, like,
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
You know, I have the show-off demon in myself, and I've, from the time I was very young, wanted people to pay attention to me. I don't love that part of me. I don't think that's, like, the best part of me. I think that my relationship to it is a little fraught and intentionally managed. And I don't think that, like, I would be a better person if I let that beast run loose.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I worry that the incentives are to basically do that, both for everyone individually, in politics and culture everywhere, and also in the kind of collective public sphere. Let me say the thing that I think is the deepest problem here. I think fundamentally...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
the most competitive attentional regimes select for the parts of people that are, in the aggregate and over time, kind of the most reactionary. That's the deeper problem I worry about. Tabloid coverage of crime. Tabloid coverage from crime, which literally goes back to Benjamin Day's New York Sun. He was the first New York newspaper to have a court reporter who went to the court and said...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
you know, wrote down what he heard, right? Tabloid coverage of crime 100% has a ideological valence that is conservative, reactionary. So I think generally competitive attention markets select for negativity. They select for all kinds of things that are generally lead people towards their sort of most reactionary selves.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And then the negativity bias of competitive attentional markets also means it's really hard for incumbents. Think about 64, right? LBJ, huge landslide victory. Think about 72, Nixon, incumbent victory.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's a great question. One is just there's more competition, so much more competition. I mean, the notion now that at every single moment when you are competing for someone's attention, you are competing against literally every piece of content ever produced.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
This week we're running a new competition.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
There are worse fates. Does that resonate for you? It does resonate. I mean, you know, if you've ever talked to people in reality television, like they selected for people with... very flawed personalities, borderline personality disorder, narcissism, because that produced conflict, and conflict produced drama, and drama is, you know, conflict is what keeps attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And those people like attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Exactly right. And you don't pick people who are just sort of like shy and go along to get along, right? Because what does that get you? So that model, I think, explains a lot about the personalities that are selected for in context of intense attentional competition. In terms of the programming, I totally agree, although I do think it's totally, like, instinctual for him.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, I don't think it's that plotted out, but I do think fundamentally he thinks he needs the attention at all times. And he just has an intuitive sense of that. And... The Greenland thing is a perfect example. And there's been a thousand of them in the first Trump administration. There'll be a thousand more, which is like, what do you do with it?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, is it attention getting to be like the incoming president wants to take over Greenland? Like, yeah, it is. Is he serious? I don't know. Is it a good idea? No, it's not. Should we debate it? Should we talk about? I don't know. But we're all just now inside the attentional vortex, right? Of the Greenland conversation. And he's done that again and again and again.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like, I love this thing that happened a few years ago where like Suits, which was a network show that became like the most watched show on Netflix. And it's like, it never would have occurred to me back in 2013 that like, I might be fighting for eyeballs with someone watching Suits. But at every single moment that you are trying to get someone's attention now,
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yes. I mean, that latter point, I think he is selecting for people that will keep attention and communicate for sure. I mean, I still think there's a certain amount of casting look to it with all of, we should note, like all of the... biases that come with that, right? Like, if you're looking for a general on central casting, you're looking for a white man, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Which is part of, I think... Yeah, but you're not looking for Pete Hegseth. I guess, although I also think there's a certain amount of, like, who does he see up on the TV?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Oh, definitely. I mean, I also think, I think there's also an Occam's Razor Well, I don't know. I also think the man is the oldest man ever to be elected to be president of the United States and, like, maybe doesn't want to spend as much time doing everything and kind of, you know, if someone says, last season of the show, you had really long shooting days.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
This season, we're going to front some other characters so, like, we can cut your shooting days in half. Like, I think there's a little bit of that happening now.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I'd like to keep this going for years, and we can.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Well, I think there's two components to that. One, I think you cannot avoid is that whatever you think about Joe Biden's abilities to be president in the sense of doing the job day to day, he was very clearly, and I think irrefutably, incapable of occupying the bully pulpit. Like, I just don't think there's...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
any debate or argument on either side like empirically he gave fewer interviews he gave fewer press conferences he he i mean compare go watch barack obama be president and or george w bush or all these people did joe button like it just was the case that i think largely due to his age he was not capable of focusing and occupying the attentional space at the center of the presidency
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So you got to start with that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's basically what I think. I kind of agree with that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The totality of human content is the library of your competition. And that was definitely not true in 2000.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Of course it partly is. So that's the first layer, right? But that connects to the next layer, which is the obsession with what is called the mainstream media, the legacy media, all of which is like understandable, but is increasingly a conversation that like a relatively small part of the country is part of. And they're still laser focused on that. And again, I get that.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And they're laser focused on it in terms of not making news. Like, I think about this phrase all the time, like not making news as opposed to making news. Making news means getting people's attention. Not making news means not getting people's attention. And the goal of a lot of Democrats always in their communication is to not make news. And Donald Trump's goal is always to make news.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's my favorite phrase to come out of the election.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
If you're trying to back it out as a retrofit.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And you also have to get the attention of people at the periphery of politics. I mean, how do you get messages to people at the outer periphery? And part of the answer is, You need to draw a lot of attention generally. And it's not like they didn't know this. I mean, the idea of Beyonce, the idea of like using celebrities like, wait, well, these are these are attentional magnets.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
They're sort of avatars. But increasingly, it just doesn't work that way anymore.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Steve Jobs had this saying that it's not the customer's job to know what they want. And I do think there's a little bit of, like, democratic, like, obsession with numbers and market research that's like, well, what do the numbers say? And part of this is just innovation and improvisation and trying new stuff that hasn't been tried before as opposed to backing out what you think the expectation is.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And that's really true, I think, with attention entrepreneurship, which is not just to, like, look what does best in the algorithm and not just look at the data, but to try new things. Like, I don't love Joe Rogan's politics, but I... Rogan's a really good podcast host. It's a really good show. I have listened intermittently for years, particularly I used to more than I do now.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
You know, I've listened to a Rogan podcast where he does two and a half hours with an astrophysicist. And they're totally fascinating. I mean, part of the problem, too, as I sort of think this through, right... There is an asymmetry about risk. It just is the case that, like, a gaffe for a Democratic politician is going to kind of stick out more and stick more.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Partly, I think, as a self-enforcing cycle, which is that if you do less media, then the gaffes stick more. And partly because I'll do this take and then you can cut it out. I mean, we're definitely not cutting it out now. Well, this take has nothing to do with attention, but here's my take. Let's see. You're at a restaurant with your kids.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And the kid over there at the other table is just same age, just acting like crazy, watching a screen, doesn't have their napkin, making a mess. And your kid says, well, they don't have to do it. And I'm like, I don't care about them. It's not my kid. I feel like that's how the mainstream media basically treats the Democratic Party. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think that's partly it's partly the flip side of a correct conservative critique, which is that the vast majority of people who work in the mainstream media are products of a cultural milieu that is generally center left and Democratic voting. But it means that they hold Democrats to higher standards. And like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are those other kids at the table.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I don't care what they do. They're not my kids. And I truly believe this is true. This can get me in trouble.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Pretty close. I mean, I remember a version of the Elias Sports Bureau's, like, sports baseball compendium of stats. And I just read, you know, the top 40 ERA pictures.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And we see this in race after race after race. I mean, this has really been one of these stories of the MAGA era. is bad Republican candidates at all levels losing winnable races that they probably should have won because they were adhering to the exact same attentional incentives that produced Donald Trump up at the top. So part of what's happening is this malformation of the public, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
This malformation of different publics, of parties, of different audiences, right? is producing real pathologies that are in many cases, again, with among Republican candidates rejected by the people who are outside of that particular audience sphere that is being formed by that kind of propaganda.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
One place I think this is really true is on trans issues. I think people are conflicted on questions of policy around this. But I think one thing that is pretty clear both from electoral results and from polling is that The public writ large is nowhere near as obsessed.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, obsessed with this issue and with the lives and bodies of these fellow Americans of ours as the propaganda machine and the attention merchants on the right are finding. And again, they're covering that because it rates. And to be clear, like there's a feedback loop here. They're not just like telling people to care about this. There is a small group of people that do really care about it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But I think it has been distorting for them. And I think there's all kinds of races where they have like closed with this message.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I had, like, the blue book. Blue book, right, yeah. Yeah, and you would... In some ways, right, the lack of choice forced a kind of focus. I think you and I, you know, we're roughly the same cohort. I was at the sort of front end of, like, RSS Google readers and blogs and this idea that you could synthesize an insane amount of information...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I think that it's pretty clear to me that Musk's takeover has produced a kind of vibe shift and cultural influence for reactionary ideas that I think broadly benefits the right writ large, even if it sends a few Republican candidates over the cliff. Yeah. So I think there's sometimes there's tradeoffs between that, honestly. And I think that's probably true.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's true for Democrats, too. Like sometimes there are tradeoffs between ideas moving public opinion in one direction or another or normalizing things that seem ultra or radical that may cost a few candidates elections. And I think that those tradeoffs go in both directions.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The other thing is like there's consequences here that are more than political, like literally tens of thousands of people die that shouldn't have died during the pandemic because they didn't get vaccinated. Yeah. So, there's, like, real tangible results to all of this that...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But that's the kind of thing where— That's the risk you're running. I'm biased here, and people listening to this who don't share my politics are free to write this off or not. But I think the center-left, which still broadly consumes what we would call the mainstream media, legacy media, institutional media, that there's just more of this— reality checking happening there.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, you know, there's a big fight about like, is inflation happening or is it not? And then it was clear that inflation was happening. It was very high. And there are people who were talking about whether the inflation was the cause of the American rescue plan or whether it was really politically salient.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But you didn't get a bunch of inflation truthers saying that the books were cooked or they were wrong or like inflation was high. And that was that core fact suffused the coverage of all the people in that media ecosystem and sphere.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But I think if you saw 9% inflation under Donald Trump, I think you would have had a kind of similar, you know, reaction to the election, which is like, it's not happening. I think there's just a mechanism of denial, a mechanism of like sheer sort of cleaving off from reality in that attentional ecosystem that is staked.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
very quickly if you kind of curated it and you created processes to feed it into you. And those processes have gotten much harder and they've been totally overwhelmed by the evolution such that I now have a very hard time even figuring out what the funnel I'm trying to construct is.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And his key point here, which I think is just the bedrock for this analysis and so often left behind and so important, is that we're talking about collective understanding and collective publics as complicated organisms that are greater than the sum of their parts.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Because as he writes in the piece, like a lot of this discourse is about individuals, like a bunch of individuals hold these wrong beliefs, right? But democracy is something we do together. It's not a bunch of aggregated individual choices. And I think this argument is completely correct.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And partly it's because we're also being constantly pulled towards things that are the most intentionally salient, which is just a distinct category from like at a bedrock from what we think is important. I cannot stress this enough. Attention is not a moral faculty. There's a Lipman writing in 19-teens that I quote in the book. It's during Versailles.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And he says, the American people have a great deal of interests in what happens at Versailles, but they're not interested in it. He's like, he's like in the same way that like a child has a real interest in his father's business. He's going to inherit, but he's not interested in it. He's like, what we're interested in is like the gowns of the queen basically. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And you know, it's pretty funny cause it's bang on. And the point is that we all understand we have a category of words that going back to porn, like titillating, prurient, lurid. Obscene. Obscene, that describe the category of things that we think that we both know draw our attention but are morally dubious.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And what happens in the sort of collective malformation around attention as the most signature value, the only thing that matters in this competitive landscape, is a kind of moral degradation, right? Because it's pulling us towards things that we know at some level aren't that important or morally defensible, but do get our attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
when there was a version of the discourse we're going through now. The idea is like, you know what we need? a black guy with a foreign-sounding name who is a former professor and community organizer. Constitutional law professor, yes. That was ludicrous. Like, what we need is, like, a guy you can have a beer with who also has a ranch. And, like, that's what we need.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And it was like, no, we needed something totally different. Two things. One, I think it is important, again, to distinguish between, like, what is this doing to people more broadly and what is it doing to political professionals? Yes. You know? And I think it's extremely dangerous for political professionals to read social media as representative of the public. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I also think you shouldn't just ignore it as online or Twitter is not real life because increasingly there is no distinction between the two. But there are different selves that we have. There's a self that wants to read a novel and the self that scrolls Instagram. There's, you know, the self that doesn't want to eat that third cookie and the self that does eat the third cookie.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
There are different publics, too, in that same way. Within the public, there's... a public that feels very compassionate towards immigrants, feels proud of America being a nation of immigrants, and there's a public that feels like they're being ripped off and invaded. And sometimes they're the same people. Often they're the same people.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But Farrell's whole point is that these publics are formed collectively. So I think it's important, A, that political professionals don't make this simple representational mistake, which I agree with you, has led to a lot of poor choices. Like, people on this social media platform are screaming to me about this means there's some constituency behind them.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And yet, as the line between reality and online breaks down, the vanguard of people screaming really do have cultural significance.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So if you think about labor, right, labor long predates labor. labor as a wage commodity in the industrial revolution, right? Human beings did stuff with their effort and toil from the time that they essentially evolved, right? Like if you're hunting, gathering, picking berries, that's work.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I could not agree more. Even before we get to politics, you know, Thoreau for president. But not Thoreau. I really think this is important, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I think it's a keen insight. I agree. And what I thought about is like sometimes you'll read historical dispatches from like peak industrial London. Yeah. And people are just being like, this is the most disgusting place that has ever been put on God's earth. Like, it's just sewage and coal ash in the sky.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Just satanic mills. Just the sheer stench. And just like, what have we done? How far from God we have fallen in this shit? And they were right. Like, it's... Genuinely, it was genuinely disgusting. And, you know, it did reach a point with all of these things, particularly the worst depredations of the Industrial Revolution, where people had enough.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And they, you know, having enough represented in a million different political tendencies, cultural movements, manifestations. And in the course of writing this book, I mean, literally from the conceptualization of this book for an essay that I wrote, you know, 2022 to this book coming out now, We've already moved a tremendous amount.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, when I first started telling people about this book, we're like, huh, attention, huh. And now it's like, right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yes. And I think you and I are pretty disposed to be obsessed with it because the universe in which we operate is like, We're constantly trying to sort of screen information, get the good information, protect our attention, try to think in a way that's productive. But I just think the ubiquity of this, I mean, yes, I think there is an wellspring, an untapped wellspring. Yeah.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And labor evolved into an agrarian feudal systems and all kinds of different ways of small shopkeepers that did work recognizably. But what happens in the industrial revolution is that that human effort is
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
For a total rebellion against the way it feels to be inside your mind at this particular moment with this particular form of attention capitalism.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The one thing that I tried really hard in the first term, which I thought was important, and I think I mostly succeeded at, but certainly not always, was modulation. That to me is a central question of modulation. If you turn the dial on the stereo to 10 and leave it there, it will sound like 5 eventually. And then you can't turn it up past 10.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And this was something I was intentional about the first time, but I think even more intentional now. And I think you see some of this, like literally no one's saying anything about Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. Fine. That's fine. Yeah. That's a perfectly, that's fine. I mean, wouldn't be my choice, but I don't get to choose and wouldn't be a Democratic president's choice.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And that's not to say that, like, no one should raise any concerns.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
gets embedded in a set of institutions, legal institutions, market institutions, that commodify it so that every hour of wage labor is equal to every other hour of wage labor and then sold on a market for a price.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
He's also genuinely qualified for the job.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I mean, I think that I don't have a worked out theory for how to deal with that, but I think it's a good point. I have a broader thing I've been thinking about a lot. This phrase that is like on a brainstorming notepad of mine and I've thought about a million versions of it. The phrase is the opposite of doom.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think about this a lot because I think that we live in a doom-obsessed time, doom-scrolling. We do not live in an age in which we have a conception of the opposite of doom. We do not live in an age where we have a lot of conceptualizations of utopias. You know, there's different ages where all sorts of different people are planning their utopias.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Spiritual leaders, architects, political leaders, this is it. This is what it's going to look like when we figure it all out. No one does that anymore. I mean, literally no one does that. Like, I can't think of a modern...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
contemporary version of utopia maybe in some version the sort of trump i'll fix everything personalist is the closest we get personalist vision of fixing everything and the reason i think about this is i think it's probably really important to us in our collective public and individually to put our attention towards a vision of what we think something great would be
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And it relates to this question about the individual coverage decisions, which are absolutely affected by negativity bias, like 100%. And conflict, too. Like, there's a fight over Exeth, as there should be, and there's not a fight over Rubio, and the conflict drives the news. I mean, that's as old as news.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
But the reason I bring all this up is because I sometimes think about it just in terms of like putting attention on things that have worked as opposed to things that haven't worked. So not so much about individuals or members of the cabinet. But like I was thinking about this the other day, like 30 years ago, it just was inconceivable we would cure HIV AIDS. It's amazing how...
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And that's an enormous transformation in the human experience, total transformation in all social relations, political relations, economic relations, and also, crucially, the subjective experience of being alive in the world. I think something similar is happening with attention.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
that we essentially have. And we've done it through the labor and work of people across all sectors of society over the course of decades that took a thing that just felt horrible and intractable and made it so much better. And there's just so much less attention on those stories. And I think it is making it harder and harder for us to conceptualize that it is possible even.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
to do good things and to solve problems.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And it started a while ago, the same way that the Industrial Revolution actually starts sort of earlier than we think of it at its peak. But we're reaching a crescendo where this thing, attention, which predates it being commodified, people have always paid attention to stuff, is now this market commodity that's extracted and sold.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I want to make a point that I'm afraid is like boringly technical after what you just said, which I am chewing on. I also think the technological infrastructure of podcasts matters tremendously. That line from, I forget who wrote, wherever you get your podcasts, it's a radical statement.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That the fact that podcasts have built audiences largely outside of algorithmic feeds, have built them through an open protocol called RSS, right? that that technical backbone actually matters for precisely what you're talking about.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Part of the reason podcasts have flourished, two, three-hour podcasts, podcasts with novelists about obscure topics, long solo monologues about history, I mean, all sorts of stuff, is because they're not embedded in the same technical attentional marketplace. And I think that really matters a lot.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think it's actually really hopeful because I think one of the things to remember here, this is really an important point, Everyone has wiped this from their memory, but the first version of the mass internet was an entirely commercially engineered mass internet with Prodigy, CompuServe, and AOL. AOL emerged as the winner. AOL acquired Time Warner.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
AOL was the bell of the ball in this huge company, and it was a walled garden, and you dialed up, and you were in this little world that was curated by these large commercial entities. And that was destroyed, partly, ironically, because of Marc Andreessen's development of a graphical user interface, to open internet. That rewarded curiosity. That rewarded people connecting about obscure topics.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
It rewarded hobbyism. It rewarded obsessive small little corners of knowledge. It's already been the case once that open internet animated by curiosity defeated a closed commercial internet. It doesn't have to be the case that the version of the commercial internet we have now is still the same one. That to me is really hopeful, though, you know, because it's like we have divided selves.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
We have divided desires. There's different parts of us that want different things and different market setups, technical setups, institutional setups can cultivate different parts of those selves. It's not like we lose one part or another. The other part is still there. It's a question about the systems around us drawing forth those different parts of us or not.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So first I'll start with a classic, which is Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. The goat. The goat. In this discourse, I think it still totally holds up. The first chapter, which is... Somewhat predicts Donald Trump. Yes, totally. In an explicit way. Yes. Totally, yes. In an explicit way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Also, you know, the first essay, which is just about different versions of the dystopian future between 1984, which is Information Constraint, and Brave New World, which is overflow of entertainment and information about how we ended up in the Brave New World. Great.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Another book that has been mentioned on your podcast a lot and relevant, which is, again, I feel like I'm sort of citing canonical texts here. And it's important for me to do because I want to be clear, as we all are as authors, you You know, lots of people have been thinking about this very well and very hard. But Jenny O'Dell's How to Do Nothing is a fantastic book.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
It's strange and distinct and is much more, I would say, like, spiritually omnivorous than the book that I've written. More sort of interior in its focus, too, about how you do this work with yourself and And with other people as a kind of like collective radical undertaking.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
No other human being would write that book. There's no comp for that book. It is its own thing. And it's also a book that... I love books like that. I love books like that, too. And I also think it's a rare thing to write a nonfiction book where you can't get 85% of the way there by just, like, hearing the author on a podcast or reading a review. Like, you got to actually read the book.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And then my final is a work of fiction. It's by an author named Tony Tula-Tamudi. It's a book of short stories called Rejection. And it is... The bleakest.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Not safe for work. It is the bleakest and one of the most unremittingly punishing pictures of the hell that we've built for ourselves. And yet, I say this, that doesn't sound like a book you want to read. I absolutely tore through it. I read the whole thing in basically a day and it just stuck with me and I really recommend it highly. One of the most intense reading experiences.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
There is a 10 to 12 page granular description of a sexual fantasy in this book. That your full body will basically, you will like hit a point of physical paralysis as you read this, but also can't stop reading and also are so amused. It's so funny and it's so dark. I've never read anything like it.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So there's a prehistory here, which is that from the birth of what we would call recognizably modern media, and the penny press and magazines are probably the first place that you would call it that, particularly Benjamin Day's New York Sun, which has the idea that you charge people a penny for a newspaper, you lose money on each newspaper, but you sell the advertising, right?
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
So the thing you're selling is the audience. Modern media has had this model for a long time, and basically it's all been selling attention. Billboards, newspapers, magazines, radios, TV. There's a few things that make it a difference in kind now, I would say.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
One is the sophistication of how minutely you could capture people's attention and how quickly and sophisticatedly you could bring it to market. So you've now got these nanosecond auctions that are auctioning off your eyeballs and in the moment you're loading a webpage or in the moment that Instagram Reels is going through. So that's one change. The other is just the ubiquity.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The TV can't travel with you. Magazines can, but eventually you read everything in the New Yorker and that's it. The birth of the smartphone produces a ubiquity of attention to be captured and sold that just represents a kind of break.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I agree. And I think, you know, when you had Graham Burnett on the show, who's great on this and attention researcher, you know, he talks about fracking, right? And the point of the metaphor fracking, right, is that you need more supply. So, you know, there used to be a certain category of oil you could get, and then market demand said you had to go get more of it, and they figured out a way.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And there is something very similar happening, obviously, here, right? The expanded supply. So, like, eating into your sleep hours, that's more supply. Getting children, that's more supply. Looking at two or three things at once, which would have seemed totally, like, antisocial and borderline deranged. Two or three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Like if someone did that 10 years ago, you would have been like, what are you? It would be so weird. The qualitative or subjective experience of what attention is, is shifting.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Yes, the book was written before I think he kind of got a second chapter.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That's a great point. Yes, I think he backed into the purchase of Twitter based on a kind of howling personal void. But in the same way that Donald Trump backed into the same insight born of his personality and his – upbringing in New York tabloid world, he figured something out that has been obviously tremendously valuable in dollar terms.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
One of the really important ironies here, which I think does map onto labor, is that the aggregate of attention, like lots of attention or the collective public attention is wildly valuable. Right. Volodymyr Zelensky is a great example of this. Right.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
The president Ukraine, like he understands that attention on Ukraine's plight is essentially the engine for securing the weaponry and resources his country needs to defend itself.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And yet, even though the aggregate of attention is very valuable in market terms, each one of our individual attention, the second a second is like pennies, fractions, not even pennies, not even pennies, fractions of pennies. And that was exactly what it was like with labor.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
when Marxists would say labor is a source of all value, they were right in the aggregate, take away all the workers and the industrial revolution doesn't happen. But to the individual worker in the sweatshop, the little slice of labor that you're producing is both everything you have as a person and worth nothing in the market, almost nothing.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
And I think we have the same thing with attention where it's like, it's really valuable pooled and aggregated, like the most valuable, but Each individual part of it that we contribute is essentially worthless, is pennies. And then subjectively to us, it's all we have.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
I really like this theory. I think you're totally right to identify that they kind of – it's sort of a sliding scale between the two, which is to say –
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
politics that had the least attention money matters the most right so in a state rep race yes right money really matters state rep race partly because no one's paying attention to who the state rep is local media has been got in can buy their attention money can buy their opinion so you're like you could put out glossy mailers you could there's a lot you can do that the further up you go from that to senate to president the more attention there is already the less the money counts and you saw this with the harris campaign
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
They raised a ton of money and they spent it the way that most campaigns spend it, which is on trying to get people's attention, whether that's through advertising or door knocking. Right. But largely attention and then persuasion. Right. I'm running for president. Here's what I want to do. Here's why you should vote for me.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
Now you can do that at billions of dollars worth and everything is just like drops of rain in a river. Right. Because there is so much competition for attention. And so what they figured out, I think, was that they being Harris or they being Trump, they being Trump and I think Musk, is that what matters is the total attentional atmosphere.
The Ezra Klein Show
Democrats are Losing the War for Attention. Badly.
That in some ways it's kind of a sucker's game to try to like pop in and be like, I got an ad. Hey, hey, do you like tax cuts? You're like, what do you like? Like all that's just going to whiz past people. that the sort of attentional atmosphere, that's where the fight is. And that's what Musk's Twitter purchase ended up being an enormous, almost like Archimedean lever on the electorate.