Book Therapy Project - The Sirens' Call

​Earlier this year, two months apart, appeared two books that immediately caught my attention – The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource & Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism.

​Both books appeared to be in conversation with each other, with Sirens focusing on how our attention has been fractured by tech, and Careless People focusing on the people behind the tech that made that happen.

​I hope you’ll join me to read and discuss either or both of these books, in Book Therapy Project’s very first “two-fer”. We’ll focus on Sirens in June, and Careless People in July. This is the event page for Sirens.

​“We all feel it—the distraction, the loss of focus, the addictive focus on the wrong things for too long. We bump into the zombies on their phones in the street, and sometimes they’re us. We stare in pity at the four people at the table in the restaurant, all on their phones, and then we feel the buzz in our pocket. 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 we are in the midst of an epoch-defining transition whose only parallel is what happened to labor in the nineteenth century: attention has become a commodified resource extracted from us, and from which we are increasingly alienated. The Sirens’ Call is the big-picture vision we urgently need to offer clarity and guidance.”

​Book: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource

​Article: The Attention Crisis is Just a Distraction (New Yorker)

​Podcast: Chris Hayes in Conversation with Kate Shaw (Free Library of Philadelphia)

​Food will be provided (always vegetarian and usually pizza). BYOB.