Opinion
Hayes: X Serves Elon Musk's Political Project Rather Than Pure Attention
“X very clearly has an objective other than attention, which is the political project of its owner. You know what I mean? So like, there's a place where like, yes, that attention is being aggregated for a specific political process. Project. That political proj…”
Opinion
Hayes: Musk's Twitter takeover converted political power into financial gains via Trump
“What it did was it created a kind of political power That then created financial rewards on the backside, because once you get Donald Trump elected, all of a sudden everyone wants to be your buddy, and your stock price goes up.”
Opinion
Hayes: Regulating and capping screen time or attention consumption is not crazy
“I don't think that's a crazy idea. I mean, I don't want the Chinese model for a lot of things, but you know, there are some, certain things the Chinese are pretty good at. I think that we can, if we can regulate, you know, the argument I make in the book about…”
Insight
Hayes: Social Media Democratizes the Psychological Madness of Fame
“The reason fame makes people go crazy is because we're not conditioned properly to deal with social attention from strangers. What we have done is democratize the madness of fame for everyone. Now everyone can have an inflow of social attention from strangers …”
Insight
Hayes: TikTok's model outcompetes all media like casino slot machines
“And I basically think that the TikTok model, which is like short form video married to machine learning is the, like,
The way that slot machines outcompete everything on a casino floor, I just think that, like, outcompetes everything.”
Insight
Digital Creators Now Reverse Engineer Algorithms Instead of Producing Original Art
“There's a little bit of the, this reversing, like, what will sell out there? What will get attention? And then you reverse engineer and make that content, as opposed to, I have this to say. I want to write this poem. I want to make this song, like, I want to m…”
Opinion
Hayes: Biden's age and inflation explain 85% of 2024 election outcome
“Biden was old and inflation was high. It gets you, like, 85% of the way there, the causal story, and I think if you look across basically every democracy holding elections in the post-COVID age of inflation, the penalty against incumbency was, like, high range…”
Insight
New York Times Reporters Are Insulated From Direct Traffic Monetization
“A reporter at the New York Times is insulated from that. Like, they have a salary. Their livelihood doesn't go up or down. Like, there's a certain degree to which traffic is a coin of the realm institutionally, but they don't have, like, a direct monetary ince…”
Insight
Recommendation Algorithms Strip Media of Human Editorial Purpose
“The TikTok algorithm has no purpose other than that attentional purpose. And this is true even of, like, media companies, even NBC News or ABC News or Hollywood producers and directors. Like, they want big hits, yes, but they're also human beings that have, li…”
Opinion
Hayes: Musk's Media Play Mirrors Rupert Murdoch's Strategy
“I don't, in some ways I don't think what Musk is doing is that different than what Rupert Murdoch has done. Are both attentional plays, right?”
Assertion Contradicted
Most Social Media Platforms Except WhatsApp Face Declining Daily Active Users
“Most of the platforms are seeing declines in daily active users. WhatsApp is going up. Snapchat, eh, but, like, most of them are going down.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hayes: Users will reject TikTok and algorithmic feeds for new alternatives
“I think people are going to start to turn off from the algorithms, from TikTok. Like, we're leading towards a moment of rejection where people are going to want something different.”
Opinion
Hayes: Ad Tech Remains Highly Opaque With Pervasive Audience Fraud
“So I think one of the interesting critiques of ad tech is that, like, it's still a lot more opaque than you would imagine. The answer to this question, like, are, like, there's a lot of indications that there's just a lot of chum and maybe fraud, fraud's a leg…”
Insight
Hayes: Trump dominates politics by capturing public attention at all costs
“Trump's core insight is that attention's the most valuable resource, and getting it at all costs is the best way to dominate politics, and he's set himself to doing that in a bunch of novel ways.”
Opinion
Hayes: Public attention changed Elon Musk far more than Donald Trump
“I think Musk has been changed by it more than Trump has. I think, well, no, I just think he's been this way from an early time. For a long time. Whereas Musk, there's an interesting, over the trajectory of his career, it was very hard to, like, get Musk to tal…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Hayes: Musk is about to face downside risks of political polarization
“Even though this has been very effective for him so far, he's about to learn a little bit more about the downside risk.”
Opinion
Hayes: Content-independent attention caps could pass constitutional scrutiny
“If you thought about something like that hard cap, right, which is totally content independent, that it would be in a similar constitutional space.”
Insight
Hayes: Good Work Exists in Any Medium Despite Platform Incentives
“I think it's possible to do good work in any medium. Like, there are people who do great stuff on TikTok, great stuff on Instagram Reels. There are people posting on Blue Sky and X and Threads that I, like, learn from. There are amazing YouTube videos that I'v…”
Insight
Hayes: Audience attention and interest are forces outside a creator's control
“One of the things you learn is that attention and attentional flows and interest are these sort of forces that are outside your control. They kind of, like, move in and out like the wind, and then you try to do with them what you can.”
Insight
Skilled Broadcasters Like Rachel Maddow Draw Audiences to Obscure Topics
“The better you are, the more you can do obscure topics. I think now that I've done this for 12 years, I'm probably better at getting people's attention for things that they wouldn't otherwise pay attention to. I think Rachel Maddow is, like, amazing at doing t…”
Insight
Hayes: Algorithmically optimized media does not eliminate demand for long-form content
“Just because you have these sort of algorithmically optimized versions of our attention on one, in one channel, doesn't mean that all the other appetites go away.”
Insight
Hayes: Attention mirrors hunger and digital media is in its 1970s junk-food era
“I always compare it to food a lot because I think attention and hunger function similarly. They're like, they're both biological inheritances, but also reflections of our deep identity as humans. And, you know, I think we're kind of in the, like, late seventie…”
Assertion Supported
Hayes: UVA study found two-thirds of men self-shocked over solitude
“There's a big gender divide in that experiment, there's a psychology experiment at the University of Virginia, where like, it's like one-third of women choose to shock themselves, and two-thirds of men.”
Assertion Contradicted
Hayes: Sports betting has a nine-to-one male gender skew
“Sports betting right now which we know is, you know, rocketing up in use, and also has an enormous, probably nine-to-one gender divide in who's using it.”
Chris Hayes