2025-01-30 22:03:34
Yesterday, the United States suffered the first fatal crash of a U.S. airliner in 16 years. American Airlines Flight 5342, a regional jetliner, originated in Wichita, Kansas. Just before landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in northern Virginia, it collided with a military helicopter over the Potomac River. Scores of people were feared dead late Tuesday. Authorities haven’t yet determined the cause of the collision. The National Transportation Safety Board will lead an investigation, hoping to determine what happened and prevent any similar accidents in the future.
There is no reason to believe that the dramatic changes to the federal government made by the Trump administration, or the chaos they introduced, played any role in this tragedy. But the success of regulators in improving the safety of commercial aviation is among the great triumphs of the last half-century. And in its first week in office, the Trump administration did take one unrelated step that suggests a cavalier disregard for the consequences of politicizing those efforts: it dismissed all of the members of the federal Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a body which advised the Transportation Security Administration.
“The aviation security committee, which was mandated by Congress after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, will technically continue to exist but it won’t have any members to carry out the work of examining safety issues at airlines and airports,” the Associated Press reported last week. “Before Tuesday, the group included representatives of all the key groups in the industry — including the airlines and major unions — as well as members of a group associated with the victims of the PanAm 103 bombing. The vast majority of the group’s recommendations were adopted over the years.”
My colleague James Fallows, a longtime pilot who has reported on aviation for decades, noted yesterday that dismantling the committee one week ago “wasn’t part of tonight’s tragedy,” but argued that it is a thoughtless destruction of a taken-for-granted institution that will erode safety over time, when the United States should instead be conserving the gains of recent decades. Pointing his readers to a list of the board’s former members, Fallows wrote that it “was collaborative; it combined public, private, military, civilian, academic, and other institutions to pool knowledge; it avoided blame; but it focused relentlessly on lessons learned.”
I favor a smaller federal government, and will likely cheer some cuts that the Trump Administration makes. My hope is for a bureaucracy that does fewer things and does them well.
But aviation safety in America is the envy of the world––it’s among the few things that was working well, having improved significantly in recent decades under a status quo that Trump is disrupting. To what end? Perhaps the Trump administration has some compelling rationale that it hasn’t shared for disbanding the Aviation Security Advisory Committee. If so, it should speak up.
Instead, a Department of Homeland Security official offered a vague and unpersuasive statement to Aviation International News: “The Department of Homeland Security will no longer tolerate any advisory committee which pushes agendas that attempt to undermine its national security mission, the President’s agenda, or Constitutional rights of Americans,” he said.
Congress should demand better answers, for the sake of the due diligence that airline safety warrants, and because stripping a mandated board of all its members would seem to thwart its legitimate power with a technicality. If Congress judges that the board is still useful, it should use the power of the purse to force its restoration, rather than giving in to the president.
Will Republicans, who hold a majority in the House and the Senate, jealously guard the legislature’s powers and diligently discharge its oversight responsibilities? Perhaps not. Deferring to presidents from one’s own party is a bipartisan sin, however derelict it makes legislators in their duties. While Trump undoubtedly has a popular mandate for aspects of his agenda, however, no voter sent him to Washington to end an aviation safety committee. He is owed no deference on that move.
Trump is making a lot of changes very quickly. If GOP legislators won’t probe this one to see if it is arbitrary or ill-considered, it’s hard to imagine what will spur them to exercise their oversight responsibilities––after all, most members of Congress are frequent flyers.
2025-01-30 21:00:00
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By now you’ve probably noticed your attention being stolen, daily, by your various devices. You’ve probably read somewhere that companies much more powerful than you are dedicated to refining and perfecting that theft. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, MSNBC host and author of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource explains in painful detail what you’re really up against. “It’s absolutely endemic to modern life,” Hayes says. “Our entire lives now is the wail of that siren going down the street.”
Hayes talks about his own experience of becoming famous enough to be recognized and becoming a little addicted to that attention. He explains how companies have learned to manipulate natural biological impulses in ways that keep us trapped. And he invokes Marx, who argued that capitalism alienates workers from their labor, to explain how technology is now alienating all of humanity from attention, which is perhaps more insidious because it lives in our psyches. “I think it’s because there’s something holy or sublime in actual human connection that can’t be replicated.”
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
Child: When my parents are on the phone, it usually makes me feel, like, really bored and makes me want to do something, because I don’t really have anything to do. And I’m kind of just, like, sitting there and watching them on the phone.
Claudine Ebeid: And what do you think about the amount of time that Dad and I spend on the phone?
Child: Well, I think, like, when they had landlines and stuff, you wouldn’t spend too much more time on the phone, and you would spend it on other types of devices.
But now, since it’s all in the phone, you wouldn’t really be seeing your parents, like, on a computer. You’d only see them doing that for, like, work or something.
Hanna Rosin: That’s our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid, and her daughter. We’re hearing from them because when we talk about screen time or how phones are manipulating us, it’s often adults talking about kids. But of course, it goes the other way too.
Chris Hayes: Every kid is engaged in a kind of battle for their parent’s attention.
Rosin: This is Chris Hayes, my guest this week.
Hayes: I mean, I think every kid notices how distracted parents are by the phone.
Rosin: Who’s the meanest to you about it?
Hayes: My youngest.
Rosin: Really? (Laughs.)
Hayes: Yeah.
Rosin: Not the teenager?
Hayes: No, actually, I think the youngest, because youngest children have a real antenna for attention. They come into a family in which they recognize immediately that there is, at some level, a kind of Hobbesian war of all against all for parental attention.
Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin, and this week on the Radio Atlantic: the war for your attention.
You probably know Chris Hayes best as a host on MSNBC. He’s the author of a new book: The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource. And he doesn’t just mean parental attention. He’s talking about attention in politics, commerce, social media—basically, how capitalism found a uniquely human weakness to exploit.
But of course, since the topic is so often seen only through the lens of parents and children, we started out sharing how we can feel like hypocrites when we police our kids’ devices.
[Music]
Hayes: The one that I’ve caught myself doing is: your child asking for screen time when they’re, you know, not allowed to or it’s not normally the time, and giving them, like, a sharp “no”—and then going back to looking at your phone. (Laughs.)
Rosin: Oh, Chris. One thousand percent. Even the fact that we get to use the term screen time, and guess who doesn’t get to use the term screen time. They can’t be like, Dad, you only have an hour of screen time a day.
Hayes: That’s right. And one of the things I write about in the book is that when we think about the state of boredom, or being bored, I think we associate it with being a child. I mean, I remember days in the summer, particularly, where I was a little underscheduled. I was just sort of sitting around—these periods where you feel like, I have nothing to do.
And the reason I’ve come to believe that we associate [boredom] with childhood is, as soon as we are old enough to control our lives, we do everything possible to make sure we never feel it. That’s why it’s associated with childhood: because children don’t have full agency. Once we develop full agency, we’re like, I’m not gonna be in that state. I’m gonna do whatever it takes not to be in that state.
Rosin: Chris writes about how there are two kinds of attention: voluntary attention and compelled attention.
Hayes: So compelled attention is part of our deepest biological, neurological wiring. It’s the involuntary reaction if you are at a cocktail party and a waiter drops a tray of glasses.
[Glass breaking]
Hayes: You can’t help it. You cannot control whether you’re going to pay attention to that. It’s often the case with, you know, an explosion—
[Loud boom]
Hayes: —or the siren that is on top of an ambulance or a cop car as it goes down the street.
[Siren wailing]
Hayes: That involuntary attention is the part of our neurological wiring in which our attention is compelled, independent of our volition and will, as a kind of almost biological fact, due to the fact that we needed to be alert to danger, basically.
And then there’s voluntary attention, which is when we, using the conscious will, flash the beam of thought where we want it to go.
Rosin: So [if] I sit down and read your book, that’s voluntary attention.
Hayes: Correct.
Rosin: Is one better than the other?
Hayes: Well, I mean, I think that, look—involuntary attention is probably necessary for the survival of the species. So in that sense, it’s fundamental, and I wouldn’t say it’s worse. The problem is: So let’s say you’re reading the book. You’ve made this volitional decision, and as you’re reading the book, the little haptic buzz of a notification in your phone goes off.
[Tech vibration noise]
Hayes: Now, you notice that because it’s designed to use the deep circuitry of compelled attention to force your attention onto the physical sensation of the phone.
That is a perfect example of the one-way ratchet of what I call “attention capitalism,” is that the more important attention gets, and the more that people, corporations, and platforms have sort of optimized for it competitively, the more they will try to use the tactics of compelled attention to get our attention, rather than to get the part of us that’s volitional attention.
Now, of course, you still have human will. And in that moment, you’re going to decide, Am I going to take my phone out to see what the notification was or not? But that little moment, that little interruption, that’s pretty new at scale. I think it’s totally new at scale.
And it’s also just absolutely endemic to modern life. It’s our entire lives now, is that wail of the siren going down the street, the clatter of the drop tray.
[Siren wails, glass breaks, phone buzzes]
Hayes: There’s very powerful forces attempting to compel our attention away from where we might want to put it in any moment, because that’s a kind of hack for them for getting our attention.
Rosin: Right. You’re a little less than aware of it. Like, you’re not thinking, I want to look towards the waiter dropping the tray, or I want to look towards the ambulance. You’re just kind of reactive.
Hayes: Yeah, you’re reactive, and you’re at your sort of biophysical base, right? The comparison that I use in the book, and I think this might be helpful for people to think this through, is how hunger works. With food, we have these deep biological inheritances where there’s just universal deep wiring towards sweets, for instance, or fats, because they are extremely calorie dense.
You can exploit that at scale, as McDonald’s has and other food operations, and find that you could basically sell cheeseburgers and salty fries and Coca Cola all over the world, because you’re working on that deep biological substrate in people. But it’s also the case when you ask, Well, what do humans like to eat? it’s an impossible thing to answer, because the answer is: basically everything, right? It’s amazing, all the different things.
And what we see in sort of modern food culture and the food industry is a sort of fascinating kind of battle between these twin forces, right? The kind of industrialized production and fast food that is attempting to sort of find the lowest common denominator, speak to that deepest biological substrate so that they can sell corn syrup to everyone—and then all of the amazing things that people do with food and what food means as culture, as history, as self-expression, as expression of love and bonds.
And I think, basically, there’s a very similar dynamic that we now have with attention, where our compelled attention and our deep wiring is being extracted and exploited by very sophisticated, large, and powerful economic entities.
And yet we still do have this thing called voluntary attention. And you know, what’s sort of amazing, too, about the internet age is, like—and I say this in the book—like, I’ve watched hours of people cleaning carpets, which I find totally compelling and almost sort of sublime and soothing. And I wouldn’t have guessed that that was a thing I wanted to pay attention to.
You know, the internet has opened this cornucopia of different things you can pay attention to. So we’re constantly in this battle between these two forms of attention that are in our heads and the different entities that are trying to compel our attention against our will, and then our own kind of volitional attempt to control it.
Rosin: Chris, were you high when you were watching videos of cleaning carpets?
Hayes: (Laughs.) Mostly not. Occasionally yes, but mostly I have been sober while watching the cleaning carpets, and I’ve still found them incredibly calming.
Rosin: What? (Laughs.) So that’s your ASMR, is carpet cleaning?
Hayes: I don’t know if you’ve seen these, but they take these super, super dirty carpets—it’s like a genre video. There’s a million different ones now, which indicates that that’s not just me. Lots of people feel this way.
Rosin: It’s okay. It’s okay. There’s no judgment in this podcast at all.
Hayes: This is my kink.
Rosin: (Laughs.) You can find your calm wherever you need it. I’m just curious.
Hayes: (Laughs.) So yeah, that’s basically how I think about compelled involuntary attention. And I do think that, because I think we’re more familiar with it in the context of our appetites and hunger, I think it’s a really useful and grounding metaphor, because I think it functions in a very similar way.
Rosin: Essentially, what you’re saying is, the way this works is: We’ve got some biological impulses, let’s say, for example, to want social attention, just to be noticed by others. That’s in us, and that’s fine.
Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I think the reason that it’s so foundational, social attention— and I think it’s slightly counterintuitive because I think people have very different attitudes and personal dispositions towards social attention. Lots of people don’t like it. But the foundational truth about being a human is: We come into the world utterly helpless and dependent, completely, on care. And the thing prior to that care is attention.
And the best way to see this is the child’s wail. The most powerful tool that the newborn has is the cry. And the reason they have the cry is: It’s their siren. It compels our attention. And the reason that it compels our attention, and the reason they have to have the ability to compel our attention, is because without attention, they will perish. And that is our human inheritance. That need from the moment we come gasping into the world for others’ attention—that is foundational to every single one of us.
Rosin: So we have this need for social attention. It’s a basic need. Whether we’re an introvert or an extrovert, that’s not what we’re talking about. We just have this basic need for social attention. What is different about seeking social attention online?
Hayes: Okay, this is really, I think, a key thing to think about. Before civilization, you got social attention from people that you knew that you had relationships with, right? There weren’t really strangers. And you might be able to put your social attention on someone you don’t know, like a kind of godlike figure or a mythic hero that tales were told of, right? So you could put your attention on a person you don’t know, but the social attention you received was all from people that you had a bilateral relationship with. What happens with the dawn of what we might call fame—and there’s an amazing book about this that I cite—
Rosin: Leo Braudy.
Hayes: Yeah, Leo Braudy’s great book. He says Alexander, basically, is the first famous person, and he explains why. But fame is the experience of receiving social attention from people you do not know, and at scale.
Now this is a very strange experience. And the reason I know this is because I happen to live it. And so in the progression of civilization, you start to have famous people, and more and more people can be famous with the dawn of industrial media: movie stars, pop stars, all this stuff.
But it’s still a very, very, very tiny percentage of people that can be known by strangers—that can have social attention being paid to them by strangers. That just generally doesn’t happen for most people, and most people are gonna have received social attention from people they have relationships with, and they might put their social attention on all sorts of public figures—the president or celebrities and other people—but they’re not getting it from people they don’t know.
That just is a very tiny sliver of humans that can have that experience, and now it is utterly democratized for everyone for the first time in human history. I mean, it’s genuinely new, genuinely a break, has not happened before. Anyone can have enormous social attention from oceans of strangers on them. You can have a viral moment online. You can cultivate a following. This experience of social attention from strangers—precisely because it is so at odds, I think, with our inheritance—is weird and alienating. And there’s a bunch of ways it is. One of the ways it’s alienating is that we are conditioned to care what the people we love think about us.
We’re conditioned to care if we’ve hurt someone that we have a relationship with. But it’s very different if you’ve insulted or hurt just a total stranger who’s saying mean things to you, or you’ve disappointed them, or they’re angry at you. That comes into you, psychologically, indistinguishably from it coming from kin or lover or friend.
Rosin: So we just basically, our—I don’t know if I want to call them our intimacy compass—something gets scrambled. We just don’t have the category to react or manage that category of social attention. We just don’t know what to do with it.
Hayes: Truly, there’s a kind of clash here between the data set we’re trained on, if you will, and what we’re encountering. And the reason—again, this is a place that I really know, right? I didn’t used to have people come up to me on the street, and then I became famous enough that people did. And I’ve experienced all the ways that that’s strange and alienating, and I’ve given a lot of thought—partly as a kind of full-time psychological undertaking, so that I don’t go crazy, because I do think it’s kind of distorting and madness inducing in its own way.
And what we’ve done is basically democratize the madness-inducing aspects of celebrity for the entire society. Every teenager with a phone now can be driven nuts in precisely the way that we have watched generations of celebrities and stars go crazy.
Rosin: You mentioned Bo Burnham in your book and the movie he made, Eighth Grade. When he talked about why he made that movie, he said that same thing. He had a similar experience to you—he went viral at a pretty young age—and then he realized that every eighth grader was having the kind of experience that he had had, which he found so alienating but that had now become a common experience. Can you read a paragraph for me from your “social attention” chapter, which I think is relevant to this conversation?
Hayes: Sure. I’d love to.
Rosin: Just the paragraph that starts with “the social media combination.”
Hayes: “The social media combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting our friends to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.”
Rosin: That really hit me. It’s a dark vision. It’s like they tap into our thirst perfectly but then just keep the glass of water just out of reach, you know?
Hayes: Well, and I think that’s because there’s something holy or sublime in actual human connection that can’t be replicated.
Rosin: Yeah.
Hayes: —that, you know, the thing that we’re chasing is something ineffable and nonreplicable. And it’s the reason we chase it, because it’s what makes life worth living, at a certain level, is to be recognized and seen. Relationships of mutual support and affection and care with other people—you know, that’s it. That’s the stuff of it. And we are given a tantalizing facsimile that some deep part of us cannot help but chase, but it can’t also be the real thing.
Rosin: When we come back: who exactly is benefiting from this attention economy, why it feels so bad for the rest of us, and what we can do about it. That’s after the break.
[Break]
Rosin: We’re back. And we’re starting with something that everyone who gets social attention from strangers learns.
Hayes: What you quickly find is that positive compliments and recognition—they just sort of wash off you. But the insults and the negativity cuts and sticks. I mean, do you not feel that way as someone who has some public profile?
Rosin: Yes, yes. It’s happened to me, and I was so surprised at how hurt I was. And when I look back, I think, like, I literally don’t really know those people. Like, there’s just something so, Ugh. It’s, like, ancient, the feeling—like you’re being pilloried or something, like you’re in the public square—and it feels terrible, and I don’t understand why. Like, I could just shut my computer, and it’d be gone, but it does not feel that way, internally.
Hayes: Yeah, and I can think of days I spent in that haze. You know, when you come out of it, you’re like, Why did I let myself feel that way? Like, Why did I spend a whole day? Like, Why was I—I can even think of moments of being distracted from my kids because I was sitting there and feeling wounded and hurt and ruminating on a mean thing someone who I don’t know said online. And I’m distracted, and my attention’s on that instead of my wonderful child sitting on my lap, you know? (Laughs.)
Rosin: Well, I think the lesson to learn from that is what you’re talking about in this book, is how vulnerable we are. Even when it doesn’t make intellectual sense, there is some way that we’re vulnerable in this moment. We can’t completely control our reactions and choose, voluntarily, not to pay attention to this thing. We don’t have that kind of agency—not yet, anyway.
Hayes: That’s exactly right. You know, attention is the substance of life. That is what our lives add up to. It’s in every moment, we are choosing to pay attention to something, or we’re having it compelled, but we’re paying attention to something. And that’s what adds up to a day and a week and a month and a year and a life.
And it’s also finite. You know, this is one of the key points I make, is that part of the value—and the reason it’s so valuable, and the reason there is such competition for the extraction of attention—is that unlike information, it’s capped. It’s a finite resource. It’s that people are figuring out how to take one or two extra slices of the pie, not grow it. And that’s the other thing that leads to the feeling of alienation and the feeling that something has been taken away from us because of its finitude.
Rosin: Well, let’s talk about attention as a resource, because we’ve talked a lot about how it works in us, the individuals, and permeates our lives, but I want to talk about a broader social context. You make this very compelling analogy between our attention problem and Marxist ideas. I did have this image of you at a bookstore one day, like, being bored and coming across a copy of Das Kapital, and like, a lightning bolt goes off. Yes! It’s like Marx but for the information age. It’s a really compelling analogy. Can you explain it?
Hayes: Yes, I mean, you know, I started reading Marx in high school, which is a weird thing to say, but it’s true. Here’s the basic argument Marx makes about labor.
So he’s living at this time where there’s this new thing called “wage capitalism,” “wage labor.” People, you know, sell their labor on a per-hour basis.
Rosin: And how is that different from people’s relationship to labor before? Just so we get the analogy.
Hayes: Totally. So let’s think about a cobbler, right? You’re in the preindustrial age. You got your little shop. You make a shoe. And there’s a few things about this process that are distinct. One is, there’s a telos; there’s an arc to it. You start with the raw materials, then you put them together, then you put the sole on, then you put the finish on. In the end, you have a shoe, and you own that shoe, and then you sell it in your store in exchange for money.
Now, compare that experience to the wage laborer in a shoe factory who is at one position stamping soles 10 or 12 hours a day, six days a week. In both cases, you could say that sort of preindustrial cobbler and the shoe-factory worker are both laboring.
But now there’s this distinct thing called “labor as a commodity” that has a wage price and a set of institutions to take the labor in exchange for that wage, and a set of technological and economic developments that produce a situation in which you go from being the cobbler, who makes the whole shoe, to being in a factory 12 hours a day, stamping a sole.
And Marx talks about this as the root of alienation. You’re just alienated from yourself, from your humanity. You’re not doing a recognizably human thing. You’re doing something that feels robotic and mechanical, but also that the value that you’re creating is literally outside of you. I mean, to go back to the cobbler, when he makes the shoe, he actually owns the shoe. If he wanted to make the shoe and give it to his kids, he could do that—and sometimes cobblers would, right? But the factory worker doesn’t have that. The factory worker is alienated from the value of the shoe. He’s stamping the sole, and when it goes down the line, it gets sold off somewhere else. It’s literally outside of him. It’s alien to him.
So this is the basic Marx labor theory of value, right? That you have this transformation in society, economic conditions, institutions that took a thing that was fundamentally human—effort, toil, whatever you want to call it—and transformed it into this new thing that was a commodity that could be priced and bought and traded.
Rosin: Called labor.
Hayes: Called labor. And I think, basically, there’s something happening right now with attention that’s similar. People have always paid attention to things, and that attention has always had some value, and there’s people who have utilized that value for all kinds of purposes—P. T. Barnum, Mark Antony: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”
You know, there’s always been a value there, but we’ve entered an age that I think is similar to the industrial age—but for attention—where a set of institutions, technologies, and arrangements have produced a world in which our attention is being extracted from us, commodified, and sold at a price, often in millisecond auctions to advertisers.
And that extraction leads to a profound sense of alienation, similar in some ways to that sense of alienation and that alienation of the laborer. And yet there’s one more way in which it’s even more insidious, I would argue, which is that compelled, involuntary aspect.
So labor can be coerced forcibly. I mean, you can, you know, use a whip or a gun to make someone do something. If you put a gun to someone’s head and say, Dig a ditch, you’re coercing. You’re forcing that labor. But they know they’re doing it. If you fire a gun, your head will snap around before you know you’re even doing it.
And so because of this involuntary, compelled aspect of our biological wiring for attention, this new competitive attention capitalism is working to extract it at such a deep level that it’s compelling it, at some way, before we’re even able to make a volitional choice about it. And that feeling is this profound, deep feeling of alienation.
I think this alienation is so ubiquitous. I think we all feel versions of it, and I found the concept of alienation, which I always found a little foggy in the past, very clarifying. Something that should be within us is outside of us, and that within us is my control over my own thoughts. That’s the thing that should be within me. That’s the nature of consciousness itself, what it means to be of free will, and yet that is being extracted and commodified and taken outside of me.
Rosin: So we’re not exactly compelled. Nobody’s holding a gun to our head. So I don’t know that you could say it’s worse. It’s just more confusing because we are participating. So in some sense—
Hayes: Yes, that’s a good point. Yes, there’s not the same sense of violation, right? Because in some ways it feels like we’re consenting. I think you’re right. That muddies it and also gives us a weird feeling of shame and guilt.
Rosin: One consequence we’re seeing is the kind of people who thrive in this age—obviously, Donald Trump. You mention Elon Musk a lot in the book, which I think is a specific point. Like, the Trump point is kind of obvious. Like, why someone like that thrives in an age of attention, I think we intuitively understand that. Musk is a little more complicated.
Hayes: Well, look—here’s what unites them, right? It’s fundamentally: These are people that understand that attention matters more than anything, even at the cost of negative attention. And this is really the key thing to understand, I think, that has really warped our public discourse. The thing that separates social attention from other, more elevated forms of human interaction is that it’s necessary but not sufficient.
Someone flirting with you across the bar is social attention, a pleasant kind. Someone screaming at your face because you’re too close to them on the subway is also attention. And that’s the weird thing about attention. It could be of either valence and everything in between.
In a world that increasingly values attention over all else, what you get is you unlock the universe of negative attention and its power, because if all that matters is attention, then negative attention is just as good as positive attention. Now, most of us are conditioned to not like negative attention. But there’s a certain set of people who, either through a sort of intellectual understanding—sometimes this happens, where you’ll read interviews with creators who are like, Oh yeah. Once I started trolling, I got more views, right?
So part of it is: The algorithms select for negative attention. But part of it is just a deep brokenness in their personality, and I think this is true of both Donald Trump and Elon Musk, to seek out negative attention because it’s attention. And this creates a kind of troll politics writ large, and I think we’re sort of watching, in some ways, the Musk era supplant the Trump era, if that makes sense?
Rosin: What do you mean? What do you define as the Musk era?
Hayes: So most politicians, they want positive attention, and if they can’t get positive attention, they want no attention and then, underneath that, negative attention, right? So it’s like, you want people to like you and know your name, or you want to stay out of the news. And what Trump realized is that, no, it doesn’t matter whether it’s positive or negative, as long as you’re getting attention,
Musk has now taken this insight to actually having captured a platform that he purchased, where he is now operationalizing this at scale. So it’s like the higher synthesis of the insight of Trump. He’s understood that attention is the most valuable resource, and this is true in monetary terms. I mean, look at what’s happened—this I actually get wrong in the book because I was writing it too early.
Look what happened: He buys Twitter, okay? He buys it for $44 billion. So he gets it so he could be the main character on this. He so obsessively pursues this attention that it destroys the actual value of the entity. So lighting $25 billion on fire, right, all in this sort of broken pursuit of attention. But then, using this attention and using the platform, he helps elect a president who puts him, essentially, at the seat of power that produces an enormous boon in his personal wealth because people are like, Oh now he is close to power, and it has netted him hundreds of billions of dollars in his personal value.
And it’s the most incredible allegory for the entire attention age. Here are these two guys, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who seem to recognize more than anyone that attention is the most valuable resource and that you should do whatever you can to pursue it, even if that means acting like a maniac. And it’s kind of worked for both of them.
Rosin: That seems so huge and overpowering. I mean, there’s a way of listening to you and reading this book and fully seeing it. Like, we can see the train wreck in our own lives and sort of out there in the world. But you might read the book and think, Okay, this is my own ordeal—like, something I have to combat. I have to put my phone away. I have to chain myself to the trees or whatever.
Hayes: Yeah. I mean, so the first thing I would say is that the cause for optimism, which I have some, is that I feel this is pretty untenable and unsustainable, because I think the sense of exhaustion and alienation so ubiquitous and profound that I don’t think it can keep going that way. And actually, I think that there’s unbelievable latent energy for something different than what this is.
There are ways that attention can still be bought and sold that isn’t this particular to-the-second, algorithmic, infinite scroll that we’re all now trapped in, right? So I think you are going to see flourishing of alternate means. And you see this, I mean—Substack, the longform newsletter. We’re seeing it happen. Like, Substack is growing because people do want to read long things from people that they think are interesting, and not just algorithmic serving of short-form video. That’s a different model. It’s a for-profit model, but it’s a different model and, I think, a better one and one that’s less extractive and alienating for our attention.
You know, vinyl records were completely supplanted by cassette tapes and then CDs. And then, starting about 10 years ago, they started growing, and they’ve been growing every year, and they’ve been growing at huge paces, and there’s now a thriving vinyl industry. And the reason is that, I think, when you are streaming music, you have the twitchy, short-form attention extraction of going to the next song, or maybe I want something else. When you put on a record, you commit, right?
The commitment mechanism is the triumph of the volitional will over the involuntary attention compulsion, right? It’s like Odysseus lashing himself to the mast, right? We make a commitment: I’m going to read this email from this Substacker I subscribe to. I’m going to listen to this album, which I’ve put on vinyl. These commitment methods—and, again, they could be in for-profit context—I think we are going to see flourishing and more energy behind that.
And the other example I use, because I talked about hunger before, is to think about what’s happened with how opposition to the sort of corporate, industrial food system the U.S. has worked. So you’ve had an entire thriving ecosystem and set of businesses built up in opposition to precisely the forms of extractive and exploitative food capitalism that I think is parallel to attention capitalism.
And I think we are going to see that. There are people that market dumb phones now, and I think there’s gonna be a lot more of them. I can imagine a world in which, in the same way that a certain kind of parent doesn’t feed their kids fast food, you start to see that more and more, that people kind of just opt out of this entire system, to the extent they can.
Rosin: Do you think we’re being exploited, and we should be mad about it?
Hayes: Yeah, I do. I do. I think that there’s something pretty dark and insidious about how the major platforms, particularly, are engineering this kind of attention compulsion. And I think we are going to enter an era in which we start regulating attention seriously. You’re seeing this call—you know, in Australia, they’ve already banned social media for children under 16. You’re going to see more and more calls for that. But also, I can imagine other ways that we try to regulate it, whether it’s hard caps—regulated hard caps on screen time. I mean, that sounds so crazy and kind of un-American, but I don’t know. Maybe that’s a good idea!
Rosin: Well, I take hope in the schools. I mean, schools, not just in the U.S. but all over the world, are starting to get pretty serious about no phones at all during class time, which is radical. If you’re a teenager, that’s a radical change in your life. So that’s hopeful. I will say one thing your book has really done for me very concretely is make me appreciate my group chats.
Like, after I read your book, I went back and I thanked—you know, I thought, Oh, you know, I’ve got a couple of group chats that are so fun. And I just went and thanked everybody on them.
Hayes: That makes me so happy to hear that, because this is a book written by a person who genuinely loves the internet and has loved the internet most of his adult life. I mean, I’m an early internet adopter, and what the group chat is doing is: It’s using technology to connect actual people that know each other.
And there’s lots of stuff that could happen in group chat that could be messy or bad, because humans can be mean or gossipy to each other. But fundamentally, there’s not an interposition of some entity trying to monetize it. It’s a noncommercial space. It’s a technology that’s a noncommercial space.
It feels like the early noncommercial internet. You just go on with your friends, and you make jokes, and you share stuff, and that’s it. No one comes in with a five-second ad. No one tries to extract your attention against your will. It’s a set of bilateral relationships, voluntarily entered to, in a space that is noncommercial.
And that’s the other thing we really need. Like, we have physical public spaces that are noncommercial, and they are so vital, whether that’s schools or libraries or parks. Increasingly, the internet is just totally captured by commercial spaces. And it used to be entirely noncommercial, and now it’s entirely commercial. And those commercial spaces will ultimately further the kind of extractive attention capitalism I’m critiquing. But there are ways to create—and the group chat right now is the chief among them—noncommercial spaces of digital connection.
Rosin: Okay, everyone listening, go do more group chats. Just go engage in your group chats. And Chris, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for writing this book and explaining this all to us.
Hayes: Thank you for reading it. It really means a lot to me and thank you for having me.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. Rob Smierciak engineered, and Ena Alvarado fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
My thanks again to Chris Hayes for joining me. His new book is The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.
2025-01-30 20:00:00
I have a joke I like to make—though it’s not funny, and it’s not really a joke. Whenever I know I won’t be able to join my friends the next time they hang out, I make everyone promise to not have fun without me. Sometimes I have us go around in a circle so that each person can individually pledge to have a bad time. If I check in after my absence and ask how the night was, I expect a shrug, perhaps an assurance that It was fine, but you didn’t miss much. If someone says the time without me was great, I actually find that rude.
I don’t think I’m the center of the universe, nor do I want to get in the way of my friends’ happiness. No—I just have chronic FOMO: “fear of missing out.” I feel deeply haunted by the thought that if I don’t go to the party or the dinner or the coffee stroll, my one wild and precious life will be void of a joyful, transformative event—one I’d surely still be thinking about on my deathbed, a friend at my side tenderly holding my hand and whispering, Remember? That time we went bowling and the guy in the next lane over said that funny thing? Every year, my New Year’s resolution is to keep one night of the week free from social plans. Almost every week, I fail.
This is no way to live, you might be thinking. FOMO tends to be described as a dark impulse, something that keeps you from being present as you worry instead about what better option could be around the corner, or scroll miserably through the online evidence of what fun everyone is having without you. A quick Google search yields results nearly all about overcoming or dealing with or coping with the fear of missing out—usually by talking yourself out of it. But I suspect my FOMO may have served me well. Sometimes you need a little anxiety to push you into doing something positive. And if you don’t go on the hike or the beach trip or the roller coaster, you quite literally will miss out. Why are we all so set on pretending that’s not the case?
[Read: Americans need to party more]
When the author and speaker Patrick McGinnis coined the term FOMO, he didn’t consider the fear a sinister force. He was a wide-eyed business-school student from a small town, surrounded by intellectual, career, and social opportunities. He wanted to say yes to everything, he told me. Once, he tried to go to seven birthday parties in one night. Then 9/11 happened, and he felt an even greater urge to take advantage of every minute. FOMO was a sign of abundant potential—that he could learn, that he could have meaningful experiences, that each day might be different from the one before. “If you don’t believe there’s possibility,” he said, “why would you have FOMO?” The 2004 op-ed in which he named the phenomenon gently poked fun at his fellow business students madly juggling invites. He never guessed that more than a decade later, people would be talking about FOMO with such seriousness (nor, I imagine, studying it with grim rigor, publishing studies with titles such as “Fear of Missing Out, Need for Touch, Anxiety and Depression Are Related to Problematic Smartphone Use”).
The world has changed since 2004, though. Social media began feeding the feeling of always being left out of something. Optimization-and-productivity culture encouraged the idea that one can engineer their schedule to accommodate the ideal number of enlightening, spiritually fulfilling plans. Then, naturally, a backlash arrived. It might be best summed up by a newer term: JOMO, or the “joy of missing out.” The idea is that you should savor your solitude, fully embrace the choice to do what you want to do rather than what others are doing.
Sounds reasonable. And yet, as an introvert, I know that socializing often sounds unappealing before I actually start doing it. What I’m in the mood for isn’t a very good gauge of what I should do, or what future me will enjoy. (Let’s face it—she’s a stranger!) What is a helpful indicator is FOMO: whether I have the uneasy suspicion that if I do what’s comfortable, I might not undergo something that would have stretched me or brought me closer to people. Without it, I never would have jumped into the frigid ocean last February for a polar plunge, or gone camping in September with a group of more than 30 people, most of whom I didn’t know. I would never do anything after work, when I’m reliably exhausted.
That’s not to say you should run yourself into the ground trying to do everything. FOMO isn’t a master you need to obediently follow but, as McGinnis put it, a “tap on the shoulder” reminding you that your existence is transient and you need to decide how to spend it. He distinguishes between two types of FOMO. One is “aspirational FOMO,” which is when you identify an exciting or interesting experience—one that might make your life fuller. Simply imagining that potential reward can lead to the release of dopamine in the brain. The other is “herd FOMO,” which is the fear of getting left out of a collective encounter—a prospect so appalling that it can trigger a fight-or-flight response, complete with a rushing heartbeat and sweaty palms. “Part of the brain goes berserk,” McGinnis told me. He thinks that people should lean into the first type, the kind that’s about embracing possibility, not avoiding pain.
[Read: The easiest way to keep your friends]
Each time you act on aspirational FOMO, you get more data about what you enjoy, what matters to you, what’s worth making time for. In that sense, FOMO-driven action might lead you to feel less FOMO overall. Many college students, McGinnis said, fear missing out when they first arrive on campus—but this is what can lead them to meet people, discover interests, and ultimately have a better sense of what they don’t mind skipping. “When you’re 30 and somebody invites you to a bar and you’ve been to 4,000 bars,” he told me, “you have such perfect information about this thing that you can make a decision without even fretting.”
I am, admittedly, a FOMO extremist; on the precipice of turning 30, I still feel the need to go to the bar for the 4,001st time. Maybe that’s my herd FOMO talking. But I also think that I will never have enough data to know what any given night will be like. Every time, the conversation is a little different; every time, my knowledge of a friend is deepened or complicated, even if that change is barely perceptible. Every so often it turns out that someone really needed me there. The activity isn’t the point, after all; I’m not looking to stack my social résumé with pastimes that make it sound like I had fun. I’m trying to spend the time I have with people I love. And I do fear missing out on that.
2025-01-30 10:57:12
President Donald Trump intended his flood of executive orders to shock and awe his opponents. But on Monday night, a memo from the Office of Management and Budget instead shocked the Trump White House.
That memo, with its call for a “temporary pause” on all federal-government grants and loans, set off widespread panic and confusion within the federal government and among the millions of individuals and institutions reliant on federal funds. But it was released without going through the usual White House approval processes.
The memo was produced by the budget office alone, which failed to get proper sign-off from the White House, according to a senior White House official and a second person familiar with the memo. The team headed by Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, had requested to see the memo before it went out, but OMB never sent it over, these people said.
As a result, the White House was caught off guard as the memo sparked the sort of chaos that Trump’s team had hoped would be a vestige of his first term. Within 48 hours, OMB was forced to rescind the memo.
After the memo was initially released, White House staffers—knowing they faced a communications problem, if not also a policy one—prepared White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to handle questions on the funding freeze at her inaugural briefing yesterday.
As anticipated, reporters peppered her with questions about which federal programs might be affected by the freeze. “I have now been asked and answered this question four times,” a slightly exasperated Leavitt said. “To individuals at home who receive direct assistance from the federal government: You will not be impacted by this federal freeze.”
In response to the confusion, OMB sent out a clarification memo yesterday, insisting that the pause did “not apply across-the-board” and was intended to affect programs from the Biden administration that were not in sync with Trump’s day-one executive orders, such as DEI initiatives and “the green new deal”—which Republicans use as a catchall term for climate programs.
But if the OMB memo was not properly vetted, it should not have come as a complete surprise. A slide deck labeled “Office of Management and Budget” that outlines priorities and goals in line with Trump’s agenda—marked “confidential,” bearing the seal of the executive office of the president, and dated January 2025—has been circulating on Capitol Hill. The presentation, focused on what it calls “regulatory misalignment,” presents columns of problems paired with actions intended to address them.
The Impoundment Control Act of 1974, for instance, is listed as a problem because it undermines the president’s ability “to ensure fiscal responsibility.” The suggested action is restoring “impoundment authority” by challenging the act’s constitutionality in court. Both Trump and Russell Vought, his nominee to lead the budget office, have argued that the Watergate-era law—which generally prevents the executive branch from spending less than what Congress has appropriated for various programs and purposes—is unconstitutional.
Another problem, according to the presentation, is that “existing legal interpretations protect entrenched bureaucratic practices.” To solve that, it calls for the appointment of “a bold General Counsel at OMB with a mandate to challenge outdated legal precedents that protect the status quo.”
An OMB spokesperson, Rachel Cauley, told me that, despite outlining in detail many steps that Trump actually took once in office, the slide deck was not the work of Trump’s incoming team. “Trump officials have never seen this document before and it’s pretty apparent it was generated before Trump was in office,” Cauley wrote to me in a text message.
But whatever its origin, the slide deck seems to have been oddly prophetic. The source familiar with the OMB memo that touched off so much controversy this week said that it had been drafted by Mark Paoletta, who was appointed by Trump as the agency’s general counsel. OMB declined to comment on that claim.
Even after OMB rescinded its Monday memo, confusion reigned. This afternoon, Leavitt tried to clarify things with a post on X: “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” she wrote. “It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.”
Her post did little to resolve the lingering questions surrounding federal funds, but made it perfectly clear how the White House now feels about the memo.
2025-01-30 10:43:05
Put on the spot, a lot of Americans might hesitate over the difference between Medicaid and Medicare. People who aren’t affected by one of these programs, which together enroll about 150 million people in the U.S., don’t generally have a need to be well versed in their intricacies, and the two programs sound quite similar. The names don’t really hint that Medicare is a federal program that covers older Americans and Americans with disabilities, and that Medicaid covers low-income people in the United States.
Most Americans, though, are not nominated to become secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is. And yet today, at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee, he made clear that he also does not know very much about Medicare and Medicaid.
As HHS secretary, Kennedy would oversee a suite of government agencies, including the FDA, CDC, and National Institutes of Health, that are focused on improving American health. He also would oversee the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which, as the name implies, manages those two programs. HHS services, in other words, touch the lives of every American—and Medicaid and Medicare are, in particular, two of the most common ways for people to directly benefit from the government’s services.
During the three-and-a-half-hour hearing, in which the Senate committee pressed Kennedy on a range of issues—his anti-vaccine views, endorsements of conspiracy theories, stance on abortion, potential financial conflicts—senators grilled Kennedy on various aspects of the two government programs. In his new role, Kennedy could be charged with overseeing substantial changes to one of them. Donald Trump has pledged to preserve Medicare. He has made no such promise about Medicaid, which health-policy experts anticipate may be targeted for spending cuts. (On Tuesday, Medicaid reimbursement portals abruptly stopped working after the Trump administration ordered a freeze on federal grants and loans; states have since regained access to the portals.) Some Republicans have argued that an increased focus on public-health insurance in the U.S. won’t make Americans healthier, and Kennedy appeared to echo that viewpoint today when he criticized Medicaid, saying “our people are getting sicker every single year,” and lamented the program’s expansion to people with higher incomes. “The poorest Americans are now being robbed,” he said.
But Kennedy also seemed to mix up the two programs when he described them. Part of the issue with Medicaid, he said, is that “the premiums are too high, the deductibles are too high.” The majority of people enrolled in Medicaid don’t pay premiums or deductibles; federal law actually prohibits premiums for the program’s lowest-income enrollees. (He did seem better versed in Medicare Advantage, a program that provides private insurance coverage for older Americans and that he himself is enrolled in.)
To be fair, Kennedy was in a high-pressure situation. But being HHS secretary is a high-pressure job. Kennedy had time to prepare in advance of today’s hearing. If confirmed, he won’t need to master every minute detail of Medicare and Medicaid, but he will need to be able to navigate both programs—their differences, their weaknesses, and how they might evolve. People who are eligible for both programs, for instance, have created sticking points in the health-care system, in part because coordinating coverage between the two is difficult and can complicate care. When pressed by Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana on how to deal with that issue, Kennedy suggested that the programs should be “consolidated” and “integrated”—but when asked how that might happen, said, “I’m not exactly sure.”
Kennedy struggled with other policy specifics, too. One of his goals, Kennedy said, is to fulfill Trump’s directive to improve the quality of care and lower the price of care for all Americans. But he was vague on any plans to reform Medicaid, explaining that he’d “increase transparency” and “increase accountability.” When pushed by Cassidy to clarify, Kennedy said, “Well, I don’t have a broad proposal for dismantling the program.”
Nor did Kennedy have a clear sense of how he would approach one of the more contentious and legally sensitive health questions of the past few years: whether women whose lives are threatened by pregnancy should be able to receive emergency abortions under EMTALA, the law that requires emergency rooms that receive Medicare funding to provide care to anyone in a life-threatening situation. The Biden administration argued that this federal law supersedes state abortion bans, and in 2024, after the Supreme Court demurred on the issue, the administration made clear to doctors, in a letter co-authored by Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, that abortions could qualify as emergency treatment. Kennedy admitted this morning that he didn’t know the scope of the authority he’d have to enforce the law in his new job.
Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir, a clinical pharmacist at UC San Diego, told me that Kennedy’s apparent failure to understand the intricacies of the two programs wasn’t just a harmless fumble. If the health secretary is not well versed in the programs he’s tasked to run, he might not appreciate the impacts of his decisions. Should health coverage for some of the most vulnerable Americans be altered—perhaps even taken away—then health disparities in this country would likely widen. And if any part of his agenda does include increasing transparency, as Kennedy described in today’s hearing, expertise will have to be a prerequisite. “You can’t increase transparency on something you don’t have clarity on,” Abdul-Mutakabbir told me. (Kennedy’s press team did not immediately return a request for comment on his performance at today’s hearing.)
During the hearing, Kennedy’s more radical views on vaccines and infectious disease did come up. He copped to describing Lyme disease as “highly likely a militarily engineered bioweapon.” (The bacterium, which has been around for at least tens of thousands of years, is not.) He stood by his assertion that the measles vaccine killed two children in Samoa in 2018. (The vaccine did not; those children died following the administration of an improperly mixed vaccine by two nurses who were ultimately sentenced to five years in prison for the act.) He said that young children are at “basically … zero risk” from COVID-19. (Young children are at risk, especially babies under six months of age, who have similar hospitalization rates from the disease as adults 65 to 74 years old.) Kennedy’s falsehoods about infection and immunity were already well known, though. What the country learned today was that he may lack basic competency in some of the most wide-reaching aspects of his future job—and didn’t take the time to prepare answers for Congress, which he’ll ultimately have to answer to.
2025-01-30 06:51:27
Donald Trump spent decades in business gleefully suing and angrily being sued by his adversaries in civil court. But since winning reelection, he has suddenly posted a remarkable string of legal victories as litigants rush to settle their cases. Mark Zuckerberg is the latest. According to two people briefed on the agreement who requested anonymity to discuss the arrangement, Meta will spend $25 million on damages and legal fees, a remarkable turn of events that coincided with other demonstrations by Zuckerberg of new fealty toward Trump.
The Meta settlement follows a flurry of other legal developments. On November 20, 2024, lawyers for Trump and for Elon Musk’s company X filed a joint letter to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco without press release or fanfare. That court was expected to rule on the legal merits of a set of 2021 lawsuits that Trump had filed against X, Facebook, and YouTube, alleging that the companies had unlawfully removed his social-media accounts under government pressure weeks after the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Oral arguments in 2023 had gone poorly for Trump, and many legal observers saw little hope for him. As recently as August 2024, nearly two years after Musk took over the company formerly known as Twitter, X had filed a brief with the Ninth Circuit arguing that Trump’s case lacked merit and that it had been properly dismissed by a lower court.
[Read: Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing]
Now, the attorneys told the court in the November letter, no ruling would be needed in the case. “We write to advise the court that the parties are actively discussing a potential settlement,” read the joint letter, which was also signed by lawyers for Trump’s co-plaintiffs.
The attorneys did not explain the sudden shift in strategy. The merits of the case had not changed, but the broader context had: The litigants were no longer adversaries, and the plaintiff was about to become president of the United States. Musk had just spent more than $250 million to help elect Trump, moved into his Palm Beach property, accepted a position as a transition adviser, and was celebrating his new nickname—“first buddy.” The day before the letter was filed, Trump had appeared in South Texas with Musk to watch the launch of Musk’s latest Starship rocket.
In seeking to settle with Trump, X, it turned out, was at the start of a trend. A series of litigants that have fought the newly reinstated president in court—in some cases for years—have now lined up to negotiate. ABC News and its parent company, Disney, settled with Trump in December.
Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who had been threatened with jail by Trump as recently as September, traveled to Mar-a-Lago on January 10 to negotiate a settlement with Trump in the Facebook case, which named Zuckerberg personally as a defendant.The Wall Street Journal reported today that $22 million will go to fund Trump’s presidential library, and the rest will go to legal fees and the other plaintiffs. “We don’t have any comment or guidance to offer,” the Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told me in a text message, before confirming the $25 million settlement.
These agreements stand to give the most litigious president in American history symbolic victories for himself and financial victories for his legacy. The settlement negotiations raise the question of whether Trump is using his new powers to bully his legal opponents into submission, and whether the litigants are seeking to purchase favor as they try to navigate the many regulatory threats from his new government.
Neither X nor the president’s legal team has publicly disclosed the terms of their settlement discussions with Trump, or even confirmed whether the cases have been settled. Ari Holtzblatt, the attorney for X who filed the settlement notice in the Ninth Circuit, declined to comment when reached by phone. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Multiple co-plaintiffs with Trump, who filed his 2021 case as class-action lawsuits, also declined to comment this week when reached by The Atlantic. “No comment at this time,” Jennifer Horton, a Michigan schoolteacher who lost her Facebook account after posts that were flagged for COVID misinformation, wrote to me in a text message. “Check back with me later in week. I can’t talk right now,” the radio host Wayne Allyn Root, who lost his Twitter account, wrote in an email.
[Paul Rosenzweig: It’s not amateur hour anymore]
Trump based his 2021 legal crusade against the social-media giants on the assertion that they banned his accounts because of government pressure, in violation of the First Amendment. His co-defendants, including the feminist writer Naomi Wolf, have claimed substantial financial harm—“at least $1 million,” in Wolf’s case—from having their own accounts banned. The companies have argued that Trump has failed to show clear evidence that their decisions were directly dictated by a government power. Trump’s argument also has been complicated by the fact that he ran the federal executive branch at the time that his accounts were shut down; Joe Biden was still president-elect.
Ironically, some legal observers argue that Trump might now be committing the very sin that he accused Democrats of perpetrating against him—using the power of his incoming presidency to pressure private companies to take actions for his personal benefit. They worry that the companies are agreeing to settlements less from fear that they would lose in court than fear that they would win.
“Trump may be doing what he claimed Biden was doing, but he never really did,” Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University who has been tracking the X and Meta cases, told me. “If there is a cash settlement, it is because it’s just a staggering economic transaction to buy influence.”
The precedent for such legal surrender was established late last year by ABC News, which Trump sued for defamation; the case concerned comments by the network host George Stephanopoulos that Trump had “been found liable for rape,” when a New York court had found him liable for sexual abuse under state law—though the judge later clarified that the behavior in question was “commonly considered ‘rape’ in other contexts.” ABC News struck a settlement with Trump in mid-December that sent $15 million from its parent company, Disney, to help build his future presidential library and paid $1 million in legal fees, shocking First Amendment attorneys. (Attorneys for Disney had concluded that the case posed substantial risk, The New York Times reported, and that the settlement was a small price to pay to resolve it.)
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the parent company of CBS News, Paramount Global, was considering a settlement with Trump over his $10 billion claim that 60 Minutes illegally interfered with the election by favorably editing an interview with Vice President Kamala Harris. Paramount is in the process of merging with Skydance Media, a deal that would require approval by Trump appointees. “We have no comment,” the Paramount Global spokesperson Justin Dini told me in a statement.
Trump has also sued Gannett, the owner of The Des Moines Register, alleging consumer fraud for a poll that the Register published before the 2024 election that showed Harris with a lead over Trump in Iowa days before the election. (Trump won the state.) Gannett has signaled that it intends to contest the case in federal court.
The Founding Fathers, for all their foresight, did not concern themselves with the possibility that a future president might use civil litigation to extract money or fealty. The U.S. criminal code does little to prevent the president, who is exempt from its primary conflict-of-interest provisions, from continuing civil litigation or profiting from court cases once he takes office.
[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]
Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told me that the current situation gives enormous power to a president who has indicated a willingness to use litigation to get his way. “What law prevents him from basically extorting media companies? Absolutely no law at all,” Painter said. “These suits are going to settle. It is not just the money he is getting from it. We are going to have the media be cowed by the president of the United States.”
The Trump case against YouTube and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of its parent company, Google, filed in 2021 with the X and Meta cases, has been lying dormant in a Northern California courtroom since December 2023, pending the outcome of the Ninth Circuit appeal of the case against X.
Musk’s decision to settle before an opinion now opens the possibility that the YouTube case will be revived unless that company, too, seeks a settlement. Jose Castañeda, a spokesperson for Google, declined this week to comment on the company’s legal strategy.
