Perhaps the best metaphor to understand what is happening to us has been put into writing by Chris Hayes, the American journalist, whose essay, The Song of the Sirens, has just been translated into Spanish. It is a serious, informative, and at the same time very critical work of the current attention capitalism society, when we live immersed in a sea of continuous noise and have learned to pay attention only to what makes the most noise —what stands out amidst the continuous bustle—, or to the song of the sirens. But Ulysses chained himself to the ship's mast to avoid succumbing, he imposed limits on himself to avoid falling into what could distract him from the life he wanted to lead, something we find ourselves unable to do, always looking at screens. Although in principle it is not 'the screens' that are the problem, but rather the applications designed to capture and hold our attention in a enslaved manner and then make a profit from 'our eyes', reselling our attention to advertisers who insert advertising in the midst of the content that the algorithm has discovered fascinates us. This is how we spend our hours, attention time that we could dedicate to matters that are truly useful, or that give us some measure of happiness. If the average in Spain is three and a half hours per person per day of mobile phone use, how many things could we do to recover this time in our lives? How many languages could we learn? How many instruments could we master? How much love could we give to others instead of watching strange videos or participating in useless controversies? And how could everyone's culture improve if, instead of looking at a screen, books were read; therefore, people consumed more literature, which would also benefit the publishing market? The progress of humanity was based on the idea that a day would come when, beyond work time and night rest, we would have time to dedicate ourselves to our true interests, to our inner freedom. But now that we could finally have some leisure hours: why have we uselessly given them away? Let's focus on this: the ‘masters’ of this lost time are the richest men in the world, the owners of X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, etc. Networked capitalism has been built on the time we were supposed to emancipate ourselves from, just as industrial capitalism did on the time we were supposed to go to factories and mass production centers. Now we find ourselves even incapable of reading a short text, like this article, and let alone a whole novel, much less if it is long and perhaps a bit demanding. The only way, now, to read certain things is to ‘tie yourself’ to the mast of the ship, that is, disconnect the phone, even turn off the modem to avoid temptations to connect and check the screen every fifteen minutes. The fact that we are in this state, so interfered with, should worry us, because this is, literally, the alienation that Marxism intended to denounce. Your life is no longer yours if even the time of your freedom is blocked.
