The Gamification of Our World with C. Thi Nguyen
Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast
MS NOW, Chris Hayes
4.6 • 9.1K Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2026
⏱️ 59 minutes
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Summary
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| 0:00.0 | Value captures a case where your values are rich and subtle or in the process of developing that way. |
| 0:07.0 | And you get put in a setting or near a technology or an institution that presents you with a simplified, typically quantified version and the simplified version takes over. |
| 0:16.0 | Like going onto social media to connect to people and then becoming obsessed with likes or follows, |
| 0:21.6 | or becoming a journalist to give important news and then becoming obsessed individually |
| 0:26.9 | or as an institution with page views and clicks, or going to school out of a love of education |
| 0:34.6 | and becoming obsessed with GPA. |
| 0:36.8 | Or, I mean, the list is endless. |
| 0:39.0 | And I think what I became aware of was that there was, at first you might think it's just an |
| 0:44.2 | accident. |
| 0:44.7 | Like, these are just bad measures. |
| 0:46.0 | But when I started feeling was that there was some sense in which systematically |
| 0:50.2 | large-scale institutional metrics missed what was important. |
| 0:59.4 | Music dramatically, large-scale institutional metrics missed what was important. Hello and welcome. Why's this happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes. |
| 1:07.9 | Before we get started today, a brief point of personal privilege, which is that I wrote a book a year ago. |
| 1:13.8 | It's called The Sirens Call, how attention became the world's most endangered resource. |
| 1:18.1 | It's about, I tried to write a book of sort of pop philosophy in my own way. |
| 1:23.1 | I don't think my publisher wants me to describe it that way, but you'll see why I'm describing it that way when we get later in today's conversation. But that book came out last year. I know a |
| 1:31.0 | bunch of you read it and I got amazing feedback from a lot of you, but the paperback is coming out. |
| 1:36.8 | Today, the day that you were listening this in your ear holes, you can get it now in paperback. |
| 1:41.6 | If you haven't read it, I also read the audiobook. And I think increasingly |
| 1:45.8 | as we live through the madness that we live through, the attention keeps coming back around as a |
| 1:51.0 | sort of central resource of our age, the sort of feeling of alienation and abstraction we have all |
... |
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