The Loudest Megaphone: How Trump Mastered Our New Attention Age

Hayes claims that we are now in “the attention age”, whose incentives “create a new model for public debate in which attention is its own end, to be grabbed by any means necessary”. It is a time when “amusement will outcompete information, and spectacle will outcompete arguments,” when democratic deliberation becomes “like trying to meditate in a strip club”. Trump is the master of this age, having hacked attention-age public discourse by “willing to court negative attention at the cost of persuasion.” So do we join in? “What good is persuasion if no one’s paying attention?” Do we have to accept that “you can be polite and civil and ignored, or you can fuck shit up and make people pay attention”?