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Bardavon with Oblong Books Presents
Chris Hayes -
The Sirens’ Call Tour
Saturday, February 15th at 8:00pm
At Ulster Performing Arts Center
Tickets are on sale now through Ticketmaster!
(Kingston, NY) From the New York Times bestselling author, and Emmy Award-winning MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and the very fabric of our society.
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.
Because there is a breaking point. Sirens are designed to compel us, and now they are going off in our bedrooms and kitchens at all hours of the day and night, doing the bidding of vast empires, the most valuable companies in history, built on harvesting human attention. As Hayes writes, “Now our deepest neurological structures, human evolutionary inheritances, and social impulses are in a habitat designed to prey upon, to cultivate, distort, or destroy that which most fundamentally makes us human.” The Sirens’ Call is the big book we all need to snap everything into a single holistic framework so that we can wrest back control of our lives, our politics, and our future.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Chris Hayes is the Emmy Award–winning host of All In with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and the New York Times bestselling author of A Colony in a Nation and Twilight of the Elites. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and children.
Tickets – $47.00 - includes 1 signed copy of The Sirens’ Call
To purchase tickets, visit the Bardavon and UPAC box offices from Tuesday - Friday 10am – 4pm. To purchase tickets online 24 hours a day go to http://www.ticketmaster.com (fees will apply).