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The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
Feeling attention challenged? Even assaulted? American business depends on it. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising enticements, branding, sponsored social media, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Few moments or spaces of our day remain uncultivated by the "attention merchants," contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to the explosion of the mobile web; from AOL and the invention of email to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to celebritypower brandslike Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, the basic business model of "attention merchants" has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu describes the revolts that have risen against the relentless siege of our awareness, from the remote control to the creation of public broadcasting to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants are always growing new heads, even as their means of getting inside our heads are changing our very nature--cognitive, social, political and otherwise--in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.
403 pages, Hardcover
First published October 4, 2016
About the author
Tim Wu
10 books815 followersTim Wu is an author, a professor at Columbia Law School, and a contributing writer for the New York Times.. He has written about technology in numerous publications, and coined the phrase "net neutrality."
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June 13, 2017
Learned an awful lot writing it.
November 16, 2019
The development of manipulation tools is described from medieval times until now and while the oldfashioned methods, from snake oil salesmen to war propaganda, until the beginning of the 20th century may seem obvious, the methods have meanwhile improved so far that nobody can be sure to be unmanipulated any more. From film to TV, personal computer, smartphone and whatever the next step will be, I tip on bio-digital fusion with tech.
As the most interesting aspect, I will pick the manipulation of social media, search results, update feeds and personal ads, because they combine all, good working, methods with the possibilities of technology.
The social aspect, be it in small, family groups or a whole city or nation, is directly triggering very old mechanisms. And no matter where someone is on the spectrum of ideology and political beliefs, the algorithms will feed him and his friends with news, books, ideas and products (as far that that is possible in this more metaphysical context) to deepen the belief and form the famous filter bubble. And people love to invest some amount of time to produce free content on all platforms to enrich the owner and get nothing from it but followers, subscribers, likes and in a very few cases, real monetization. Hm, I feel something like a bit of suppressed self-irony at this moment, strange. And as an extra, the users are turned in products that are sold to companies by the platform owners with the promise to keep them hanging on the infusion of endless consumerism by feeding them personalized commercials.
For learning and work, it may be handy to do more looks over the fence of one´s profession and not specialize more and more. But you know, learning new things is very hard work and improving on things one is already an expert in is much quicker and easier more satisfying and easy-going. So the AI doesn´t want one to sweat and gives more and more detailed information about a favorite topic instead of helping to improve the interdisciplinary approaches.
Finally, the own self, defined by hobbies, interests, activities. How did we tend to get ideas before this internet thing escalated so quickly? Recommendations by friends and family, to certain point coincidences, but certainly not chosen by a higher entity. Now what could fit and be liked is suggested with the help of the collected behavioral data of million alter egos with the same interests. It is great on the one hand, because it saves time, brings better results and the option to connect with others with the same interest easily. On the other hand, unlisted, unrated and not suggested content will never get spread, which opens the option of a preemptive censorship system.
Related problems are memory and attention span. Try to check how much you try to remember, instead of googling it. How long the focus can be held on one topic when online without new ideas and impulses plopping up like banner ads in your mind. Lovely ads of course, but quite creepy, especially because the machinery is even so sophisticated to add extra fails and wrong suggestion so that one doesn´t find it so disturbing that a machine knows so much about one, more than a loved one and probably more than oneself.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this, yuck, ugh, boo, completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interne...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem...
As the most interesting aspect, I will pick the manipulation of social media, search results, update feeds and personal ads, because they combine all, good working, methods with the possibilities of technology.
The social aspect, be it in small, family groups or a whole city or nation, is directly triggering very old mechanisms. And no matter where someone is on the spectrum of ideology and political beliefs, the algorithms will feed him and his friends with news, books, ideas and products (as far that that is possible in this more metaphysical context) to deepen the belief and form the famous filter bubble. And people love to invest some amount of time to produce free content on all platforms to enrich the owner and get nothing from it but followers, subscribers, likes and in a very few cases, real monetization. Hm, I feel something like a bit of suppressed self-irony at this moment, strange. And as an extra, the users are turned in products that are sold to companies by the platform owners with the promise to keep them hanging on the infusion of endless consumerism by feeding them personalized commercials.
For learning and work, it may be handy to do more looks over the fence of one´s profession and not specialize more and more. But you know, learning new things is very hard work and improving on things one is already an expert in is much quicker and easier more satisfying and easy-going. So the AI doesn´t want one to sweat and gives more and more detailed information about a favorite topic instead of helping to improve the interdisciplinary approaches.
Finally, the own self, defined by hobbies, interests, activities. How did we tend to get ideas before this internet thing escalated so quickly? Recommendations by friends and family, to certain point coincidences, but certainly not chosen by a higher entity. Now what could fit and be liked is suggested with the help of the collected behavioral data of million alter egos with the same interests. It is great on the one hand, because it saves time, brings better results and the option to connect with others with the same interest easily. On the other hand, unlisted, unrated and not suggested content will never get spread, which opens the option of a preemptive censorship system.
Related problems are memory and attention span. Try to check how much you try to remember, instead of googling it. How long the focus can be held on one topic when online without new ideas and impulses plopping up like banner ads in your mind. Lovely ads of course, but quite creepy, especially because the machinery is even so sophisticated to add extra fails and wrong suggestion so that one doesn´t find it so disturbing that a machine knows so much about one, more than a loved one and probably more than oneself.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this, yuck, ugh, boo, completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interne...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem...
December 13, 2016
As a new book, this was only a 14 day loan from the library, and I felt like there was an implicit challenge from the author to finish the book before it was due. "You're probably wasting so much of your time staring at screens that you don't even have the ability to focus on a book long enough to finish it in 2 weeks."
This book is a history of how advertisers have tried to get inside our heads for the last 100 years. I enjoyed learning the story of Clark Stanley, the original snake oil salesman who successfully marketed a snake oil liniment that neither was made from snake oil nor had any of the curative properties it was advertised to have.
There are chapters on the ways that governments have developed propaganda to recruit soldiers. In the book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann developed the concept that consent could be manufactured. Advertisers are not just providing information about products people may want; they are creating demand for the products.
After World War I, the profession of advertising developed and people were starting to be persuaded that a particular brand of product would solve some problem that no one even believed they had before the advertiser told them they needed to solve it. Then the advertisers persuaded people that they needed to change their whole lifestyle. In the 1930s, the first laws were developed to require labeling and prohibit false advertising.
Before radio, advertising was limited to billboards, posters and print. With the advent of radio, advertisers intruded into people's homes, which had previously been private spheres without constant voices trying to grab people's attention in order to sell them things.
I never realized how big Amos 'n' Andy was until I read this book. And its main sponsor Pepsodent was able to leverage its ownership of the attention of 10s of millions of people during a new thing called "prime time," a huge chunk of time when Americans just sat at home doing nothing but listening to a radio program and ads for the product its sponsor was selling.
From radio, to TV, to game shows, to soap operas, to daytime talk shows. With the invention of the remote control and cable, it just became a given that people would spend hours every day flipping channels and listening to constant advertising. In the 1960s, Timothy Leary told people to tune in, turn on and drop out, but in reality people were just tuning in more and more.
Computers led to people constantly checking email, which included tons of spam. The book recounts the early history of the internet when people got CDs in the mail in order to try out America Online. Yes, I was one of them.
With the rise of reality television and social media, the attention merchants realized they could eliminate the cost of producing content and just get ordinary people to produce content to get their 15 minutes of fame, but the advertisers could still get just as much exposure. Someone with a YouTube channel produces content on "monetized" stations, but in most cases the only real payment is the microfame of having a few thousand subscribers.
Wu appears to extol Google as a company that offers real value for free with unobtrusive targeted advertising that people actually experience as a value-added feature of the main services that Google is providing. But the Internet as a whole is awash in pop-up ads, clickbait and many different techniques to force you to experience advertising while mindlessly flitting your attention from one thing to the next.
The point of all this is that by now people really ought to realize that Apple's Tim Cook is correct: when an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product. In general, the media companies are selling advertising, and in return they promise the advertisers that they can capture your attention, and these days also get your personal data.
So the takeaway is that getting free media in exchange for being constantly subjected to advertising and data mining is a Faustian bargain. Rather than sell your soul to corporate America, you would be much better off paying for high-quality content. This is the growing trend with services like Netflix, etc., where you can just pay to get what you actually want without the advertising.
In my opinion, cable television has always been a colossal rip-off. It's the worst of both worlds, costing a lot of money just to get channels that have commercials anyway. I've never paid for cable, and I don't plan to any time soon. On the other hand, we still watch PBS all the time using an old-fashioned outdoor antenna which captures the signal from the air for free.
This book convinced me that it was time for me to get a paid subscription to Pandora, so I can stop seeing all of the pop-ups and listening to all of those incredibly annoying ads! So congratulations Wu; your freaking book cost me $60 per year (lol).
This book is a history of how advertisers have tried to get inside our heads for the last 100 years. I enjoyed learning the story of Clark Stanley, the original snake oil salesman who successfully marketed a snake oil liniment that neither was made from snake oil nor had any of the curative properties it was advertised to have.
There are chapters on the ways that governments have developed propaganda to recruit soldiers. In the book Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann developed the concept that consent could be manufactured. Advertisers are not just providing information about products people may want; they are creating demand for the products.
After World War I, the profession of advertising developed and people were starting to be persuaded that a particular brand of product would solve some problem that no one even believed they had before the advertiser told them they needed to solve it. Then the advertisers persuaded people that they needed to change their whole lifestyle. In the 1930s, the first laws were developed to require labeling and prohibit false advertising.
Before radio, advertising was limited to billboards, posters and print. With the advent of radio, advertisers intruded into people's homes, which had previously been private spheres without constant voices trying to grab people's attention in order to sell them things.
I never realized how big Amos 'n' Andy was until I read this book. And its main sponsor Pepsodent was able to leverage its ownership of the attention of 10s of millions of people during a new thing called "prime time," a huge chunk of time when Americans just sat at home doing nothing but listening to a radio program and ads for the product its sponsor was selling.
From radio, to TV, to game shows, to soap operas, to daytime talk shows. With the invention of the remote control and cable, it just became a given that people would spend hours every day flipping channels and listening to constant advertising. In the 1960s, Timothy Leary told people to tune in, turn on and drop out, but in reality people were just tuning in more and more.
Computers led to people constantly checking email, which included tons of spam. The book recounts the early history of the internet when people got CDs in the mail in order to try out America Online. Yes, I was one of them.
With the rise of reality television and social media, the attention merchants realized they could eliminate the cost of producing content and just get ordinary people to produce content to get their 15 minutes of fame, but the advertisers could still get just as much exposure. Someone with a YouTube channel produces content on "monetized" stations, but in most cases the only real payment is the microfame of having a few thousand subscribers.
Wu appears to extol Google as a company that offers real value for free with unobtrusive targeted advertising that people actually experience as a value-added feature of the main services that Google is providing. But the Internet as a whole is awash in pop-up ads, clickbait and many different techniques to force you to experience advertising while mindlessly flitting your attention from one thing to the next.
The point of all this is that by now people really ought to realize that Apple's Tim Cook is correct: when an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product. In general, the media companies are selling advertising, and in return they promise the advertisers that they can capture your attention, and these days also get your personal data.
So the takeaway is that getting free media in exchange for being constantly subjected to advertising and data mining is a Faustian bargain. Rather than sell your soul to corporate America, you would be much better off paying for high-quality content. This is the growing trend with services like Netflix, etc., where you can just pay to get what you actually want without the advertising.
In my opinion, cable television has always been a colossal rip-off. It's the worst of both worlds, costing a lot of money just to get channels that have commercials anyway. I've never paid for cable, and I don't plan to any time soon. On the other hand, we still watch PBS all the time using an old-fashioned outdoor antenna which captures the signal from the air for free.
This book convinced me that it was time for me to get a paid subscription to Pandora, so I can stop seeing all of the pop-ups and listening to all of those incredibly annoying ads! So congratulations Wu; your freaking book cost me $60 per year (lol).
December 12, 2016
I wasn’t so much disappointed with what’s in the book as what isn’t in the book. Like most people, I’ve lived through a lot of the technological changes detailed here; a blow-by-blow of the basics doesn’t really serve any purpose at this point. Unfortunately, that’s mainly what this book consist of: the obvious. It’s not wrong, and it’s well-written, but the book ultimately fails to do anything new or worthwhile.
Perhaps the most insidious thing about this kind of book is that it relies on its own myopia—or professional chauvinism—to make its point. All commercial activity is pigeonholed and categorized exclusively by its relationship to its “attention harvesting” potential. Yes, that is an important consideration, but it’s certainly not the only perspective that can provide insight—particularly when dealing with systems as complex as those that govern art and culture (let alone technology and commerce). In a way, that so many “attention merchants” stumble into (and out of) their fortunes by happenstance gives the lie to the notion that attentional concerns are the cornerstone of modern communication.
Perhaps the most insidious thing about this kind of book is that it relies on its own myopia—or professional chauvinism—to make its point. All commercial activity is pigeonholed and categorized exclusively by its relationship to its “attention harvesting” potential. Yes, that is an important consideration, but it’s certainly not the only perspective that can provide insight—particularly when dealing with systems as complex as those that govern art and culture (let alone technology and commerce). In a way, that so many “attention merchants” stumble into (and out of) their fortunes by happenstance gives the lie to the notion that attentional concerns are the cornerstone of modern communication.
June 20, 2017
It may be disappointing to some, but Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants reads like a history first and foremost and infrequently as analysis. The history is framed around this notion of an "attention merchant," - namely one who captures attention and re-sells it for commercial intent-
and while the term is a result of analyzing the trends of advertising and pop culture, there's not much room for trend analysis in the text. On one hand, while I prefer some analysis to accompany the history, it's fallacious to fault a book for not living up to a projected expectation. It documents the titular "epic scramble to get inside our heads," and does so competently.
The Attention Merchants re-treads familiar ground, and for that I agree with the book's detractors, but it often does so in ways that are new to me because of the way the book frames its protagonists and antagonists as attention merchants. I find Wu's reasoning in favor of binge-watching television as a positive means of advertising-free immersion into a story to be not just refreshing, but surprising: something I would consider a weirdly addictive and manipulative toxic habit is something he sees as meeting a basic human need. Netflix opted to steer away from ads when every other web outlet was overly seduced by them, and had mistakenly opened the door to immersive, ad-free, hyper-serial storytelling. It's a fresh perspective that I don't always agree on: the product here is bait to purchase the subscription, and the product is a distraction to take you from other personal goals in the same way Hulu or AOL or Amos n' Andy would. But I found the perspective fascinating.
Another interesting angle to the attention merchants' success is the varying degree by which they replicate the earliest attention merchants: churches, especially those can imbue their congregations with religious fervor. Tim Wu hits this theme too hard and in my opinion erroneously, but makes good use of the comparison in his analysis on Oprah. Oprah, he claims, is offering a form of salvation - albeit a more commercial one - and through a sort of focused empathy and her generosity can bring the evangelical zeal out of her audience. I'm not doing the analysis enough justice here.
As is often the case with histories, the pleasure lies in realizing that the differences between eras are merely separate refractions out of the same prism: we are looking at repetitions of the same principles, as well as varying manifestations of revolutions against those principles. Whether people balked at advertising in newspapers - some of which have peddled fake news since the beginning - or balked at advertising in television - an invasion and offense to the audience's eye - or to the "walled garden" ad space of America Online, there exists an ever-constant push-and-pull between those seeking to harvest human attention and those resisting the means by which the harvest is done. It is a perverse pleasure to extract from histories, but it is a pleasure nonetheless: to see precisely how our times are not that different from others.
There are instances as well where the history is just as compelling as the analysis could be, specifically with The Real World's origin story compared to Wu's analysis of the elevated trash tabloid genre of People magazine. However, a good history is one that is reliably comprehensive, but yet The Attention Merchants is so casual in sections that it worries me that it's perhaps under-researched. Wu, like I mentioned in Schulman's book Conflict Is Not Abuse keeps to references that are familiar to him but are perhaps not suitable quotes for the material being analyzed; for example, he uses a snippy but meaningless aphorism from Malcolm Gladwell. It's fitting considering that Gladwell is a snippy but meaningless person with snippy but meaningless ideas, but it's altogether misplaced. Wu sticks to some sociologists that he's familiar with, but the connection to Marcuse is more contrived than it would have been had he sought out a better subject matter expert. Nitpicky, sure, but his most egregious citation and gravest mistake is his mention of Skinner's behavioral science and "operant conditioning" in relation to checking e-mail. Even I know that Skinner's behavioralist bullshit was roundly beaten about by Noam Chomsky in a downright classic New York Review of Books essay that still is topic of great mention in his current lectures and guest talks. It's a big faux pas that Wu rectifies later by outlining the benefits of these habits, but it threw Wu's credibility into doubt. While Wu's casual sense of humor is downright wonderful, the bizarrely chosen and seemingly tossed-off quotes don't bode well when juxtaposed with some considerable omissions. Tim Wu credits the adblocking wave to Apple, but does not even mention the Electronic Frontier Foundation as an active fighter for Internet privacy rights. His treatment of the successes of Western propaganda being co-opted by the Nazis is fittingly ironic but does not escape the sense of being reductive.
The book has other great moments of analysis in it as well: page 180 of the hardcover talks about how the '60s countercultural movement to individualism was so seamlessly hegemonized by the attention merchants, as well as how agents of illusory choice ended up being more paralyzing and problematic for human attention than the intended and opposite effect. It's a golden page about how a great refusal can lead us back to where we started, an easy favorite.
The Attention Merchants is great when it is a balanced history: it gives us a solid appraisal of the goings-on from a credible poise, and provides a succinct analysis to bolster the history itself. It does this, but not as often as it could: some chapters are slight but arbitrarily so, as if the topic doesn't fascinate the author as much as the others. Some chunks of the book are episodic and disjointed, and it doesn't always carry from one part of a thesis argument to the next. The epilogue is a fabulous op/ed piece about reclaiming one's own attention, but as a reinvigorating and energizing statement it feels like it took time to arrive at a passionate moment that didn't last very long. The parts that taught me to think differently about what I do know, the parts that taught me new things, and the parts that showed me how to put what I did know into a new frame of "attention harvesting" are all very fascinating. But then there are the parts where you know it's not telling you what you should know, and with that, it would've easily harvested more of my attention.
and while the term is a result of analyzing the trends of advertising and pop culture, there's not much room for trend analysis in the text. On one hand, while I prefer some analysis to accompany the history, it's fallacious to fault a book for not living up to a projected expectation. It documents the titular "epic scramble to get inside our heads," and does so competently.
The Attention Merchants re-treads familiar ground, and for that I agree with the book's detractors, but it often does so in ways that are new to me because of the way the book frames its protagonists and antagonists as attention merchants. I find Wu's reasoning in favor of binge-watching television as a positive means of advertising-free immersion into a story to be not just refreshing, but surprising: something I would consider a weirdly addictive and manipulative toxic habit is something he sees as meeting a basic human need. Netflix opted to steer away from ads when every other web outlet was overly seduced by them, and had mistakenly opened the door to immersive, ad-free, hyper-serial storytelling. It's a fresh perspective that I don't always agree on: the product here is bait to purchase the subscription, and the product is a distraction to take you from other personal goals in the same way Hulu or AOL or Amos n' Andy would. But I found the perspective fascinating.
Another interesting angle to the attention merchants' success is the varying degree by which they replicate the earliest attention merchants: churches, especially those can imbue their congregations with religious fervor. Tim Wu hits this theme too hard and in my opinion erroneously, but makes good use of the comparison in his analysis on Oprah. Oprah, he claims, is offering a form of salvation - albeit a more commercial one - and through a sort of focused empathy and her generosity can bring the evangelical zeal out of her audience. I'm not doing the analysis enough justice here.
As is often the case with histories, the pleasure lies in realizing that the differences between eras are merely separate refractions out of the same prism: we are looking at repetitions of the same principles, as well as varying manifestations of revolutions against those principles. Whether people balked at advertising in newspapers - some of which have peddled fake news since the beginning - or balked at advertising in television - an invasion and offense to the audience's eye - or to the "walled garden" ad space of America Online, there exists an ever-constant push-and-pull between those seeking to harvest human attention and those resisting the means by which the harvest is done. It is a perverse pleasure to extract from histories, but it is a pleasure nonetheless: to see precisely how our times are not that different from others.
There are instances as well where the history is just as compelling as the analysis could be, specifically with The Real World's origin story compared to Wu's analysis of the elevated trash tabloid genre of People magazine. However, a good history is one that is reliably comprehensive, but yet The Attention Merchants is so casual in sections that it worries me that it's perhaps under-researched. Wu, like I mentioned in Schulman's book Conflict Is Not Abuse keeps to references that are familiar to him but are perhaps not suitable quotes for the material being analyzed; for example, he uses a snippy but meaningless aphorism from Malcolm Gladwell. It's fitting considering that Gladwell is a snippy but meaningless person with snippy but meaningless ideas, but it's altogether misplaced. Wu sticks to some sociologists that he's familiar with, but the connection to Marcuse is more contrived than it would have been had he sought out a better subject matter expert. Nitpicky, sure, but his most egregious citation and gravest mistake is his mention of Skinner's behavioral science and "operant conditioning" in relation to checking e-mail. Even I know that Skinner's behavioralist bullshit was roundly beaten about by Noam Chomsky in a downright classic New York Review of Books essay that still is topic of great mention in his current lectures and guest talks. It's a big faux pas that Wu rectifies later by outlining the benefits of these habits, but it threw Wu's credibility into doubt. While Wu's casual sense of humor is downright wonderful, the bizarrely chosen and seemingly tossed-off quotes don't bode well when juxtaposed with some considerable omissions. Tim Wu credits the adblocking wave to Apple, but does not even mention the Electronic Frontier Foundation as an active fighter for Internet privacy rights. His treatment of the successes of Western propaganda being co-opted by the Nazis is fittingly ironic but does not escape the sense of being reductive.
The book has other great moments of analysis in it as well: page 180 of the hardcover talks about how the '60s countercultural movement to individualism was so seamlessly hegemonized by the attention merchants, as well as how agents of illusory choice ended up being more paralyzing and problematic for human attention than the intended and opposite effect. It's a golden page about how a great refusal can lead us back to where we started, an easy favorite.
The Attention Merchants is great when it is a balanced history: it gives us a solid appraisal of the goings-on from a credible poise, and provides a succinct analysis to bolster the history itself. It does this, but not as often as it could: some chapters are slight but arbitrarily so, as if the topic doesn't fascinate the author as much as the others. Some chunks of the book are episodic and disjointed, and it doesn't always carry from one part of a thesis argument to the next. The epilogue is a fabulous op/ed piece about reclaiming one's own attention, but as a reinvigorating and energizing statement it feels like it took time to arrive at a passionate moment that didn't last very long. The parts that taught me to think differently about what I do know, the parts that taught me new things, and the parts that showed me how to put what I did know into a new frame of "attention harvesting" are all very fascinating. But then there are the parts where you know it's not telling you what you should know, and with that, it would've easily harvested more of my attention.
December 26, 2016
Yesterday was two months I was building my next startup and for a while was thinking about how to bring customers there for free (or as much as possible for free). Also for some time I was following some interesting projects on Facebook (ex., "ドープ Acolyte", above pic or "Keule Ruke", hey ;), below pic) and was thinking that previously mentioned goal can be achieved via some creative marketing. Last time I was just using something called "guerilla/ stealth marketing", ex. go to competitors' seminars and leave your business cards on the chairs of competitor gathered prospects. That was free, but not so clever as it can possibly be done. This book would be one for some help.
From Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal, we know how to do it - get through reptilian brain defenses (e.g. grab attention).
Oprah Winfrey story somewhat confirms what I had thought long ago. Despite my liking of "success stories" like Joy I think all this "success" really comes from a lie (or a fantasy, whatever you can call it). People like fantasies and dreams. They like to live believing even weirdest things. Like with Joy Mangano, you probably can make a better product, which like advertising says saves time and effort, but there's still a lie. Those lies become evident when you collect data and find that you actually paid more than before for the same value.
In real life most of the "progress" is most probably is just an illusion, like, for example, "over century 2x increased lifespan" (which is due to less newborn deaths, not that you live 2x longer life). What is real value for people? Only land, real estate, food, relationships, on what survival is dependent. Everything else can say "this make your life better", but this is an illusion for very short time after which you'll need another "best thing". We had so much those "best things" garages of some people are full of this useless sh*t. We can call it a game, one winning party creates illusions for the other party of slaves. Governments are interested in making slaves happy and full of sh*t too.
OK, this sounds terribly from the point of view of outside the game, in the game you should believe that your sh*t (if that's not directly tied to survival) is the real thing.
For lesser abstractions, the biggest increase in living quality (U.S.) was uncorrelated to education. Later education levels increased and tools of trade made more sophisticated with increased competition. The more you learn, the more you need put effort to outlearn the peers in order to survive. Now we have such situation complex information technology that we should spend a lot of time to even keep up with small things. And as data shows that doesn't guarantee anything. We spend more time in work now and generate less real above mentioned value. Even if you build the best value product that doesn't guarantee you anything a bigger competitors can easily make it their own. What you can do is rare lucky things or just small things. For example, 98.6% of retail businesses employ fewer than 50 people (source), meaning it is not scalable and probably due to all factors their owners earn just for food and shelter. Do we believe they would increase their revenue firing all the people and replacing them with robots?
How wealth is created, or what is wealth? Wealth is some real things, real estate, cars and "free" transportation (travel). That "wealth" should look like where everyone put their belief where the value is. Meaning, latest "design" (illusion of), expensive sh*t. If deconstructed, you still need hard things, to mine those expensive metals and other constituents of good looking sh*t from which you can crate your own design, an illusion you are "wealthy". Most people don;t think over it, and it is why they just waste their time and money for empty space ("brands"), not "hard value things". As we can't create this end-user sh*t with our hands only, from constituents, we should have some medium. I think the only medium there is is having a share in the companies that make and sell that sh*t. Problem here is it wouldn't make you wealthy as those companies earn on the scale only. You still need to produce some alpha on your own, e.g. make and sell some trendy sh*t yourself. Not any sh*t as if no above mentioned companies would buy your company, then you're just a freelancer. You should make trendy and scalable sh*t. hard thing here is how to rise above usual human being "small business" thought. My friend this year traveled through Europe and in person sold photos of hotels for their owners as there is small thing their photos aren't good. Although he made several thousand euros, what is this? It's not scalable, just small monkey-business that generates none of the wealth in the long run (you just waste it as every business in the first place should be a system - some inflows give valuable outflows).
The more there is sh*t, the more attention and time it steals. People adapt, and where does it lead? And most importantly - why? Like said above, "slave masters" make sh*t to keep slaves busy and themselves rich (until it stops working).
April 6, 2017
If you’ve been paying attention, you can’t have missed the changes in the character of advertising over the course of your life. Certainly, I have. Chances are, you were born in the age of radio, at the earliest. If so, you’ve witnessed a string of new technologies enter the realm of news and entertainment, almost always paired with aggressive advertising sooner or later: network television, cable TV, the personal computer, the Internet, and the smartphone.
In his insightful history of the business of advertising, Columbia University law professor Tim Wu casts a wider net. Beginning with the advent of the penny press in the 1830s, he explores in telling detail the now centuries-long battle between the commercial interests who want to seize our attention for their own ends and the individuals who want to keep our lives private and access news, information, and entertainment without distraction. This is a colorful story, and Wu tells it well.
Though Wu opens with the introduction of the Sun in New York in 1833, his history more properly begins much later in the 19th century with the emergence of the advertising industry to sell Snake Oil and other patent medicines. (Yes, Snake Oil Liniment was actually a widely sold product Good for Man and Beast.) “From the 1890s thr0ugh the 1920s,” he writes, “there arose the first means for harvesting attention on a mass scale and directing it for commercial effect . . . [A]dvertising was the conversion engine that, with astonishing efficiency, turned the cash crop of attention into an industrial commodity.”
The penny press, Amos ‘n Andy, and pop-up ads
Beginning in the early years of the 20th century, Wu frames his story around the development of radio and the four “screens” that have dominated our attention over the decades that followed: the “silver” screen (film), television, the personal computer, and the smartphone. The author relates the history of each of these technologies as a human story, describing the often outrageous personalities who pioneered and dominated each of these media in turn. However, in focusing on radio and the four screens, Wu overlooks the billboards that mar every urban line of sight and barely mentions the direct mail that floods our mailboxes. Though less than comprehensive, his historical account is engrossing and enlightening.
Here you’ll learn about the development of propaganda by the British government in World War I and its perfection by Nazi Germany . . . the first radio serial that was a smash hit (the grossly racist “Amos ‘n Andy“) in the 1920s . . . the invention of the soap opera in the 1930s . . . the battle between the networks on radio and later on TV from the 1930s through the 1990s . . . the development of geodemographic targeting for ads in the 1970s . . . the emergence of celebrity culture in the 1980s and its perversion by reality television in the 2000s . . . the wild proliferation of blogging in the 2000s . . . the identity theft committed by Google and Facebook in the 2000s and beyond . . . and, finally, “unplugging” and the emergence of free online streaming services like Netflix in the 2010s. This is not a pretty story.
A harsh judgment
The author is not a fan of the “new media” that have come to hold our attention in recent years. “The idealists had hoped the web would be different,” he notes, “and it certainly was for a time, but over the long term it would become something of a 99-cent store, if not an outright cesspool.” Similarly, Wu’s judgment about the advertising industry is harsh. “[U]nder competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative . . .” It’s difficult to find fault with any of this.
About the author
He’s the man who coined the term “network neutrality.” A specialist in media and technology, Tim Wu has written several books and numerous articles, all nonfiction. His work has influenced the development of national media policy under the Obama Administration.
In his insightful history of the business of advertising, Columbia University law professor Tim Wu casts a wider net. Beginning with the advent of the penny press in the 1830s, he explores in telling detail the now centuries-long battle between the commercial interests who want to seize our attention for their own ends and the individuals who want to keep our lives private and access news, information, and entertainment without distraction. This is a colorful story, and Wu tells it well.
Though Wu opens with the introduction of the Sun in New York in 1833, his history more properly begins much later in the 19th century with the emergence of the advertising industry to sell Snake Oil and other patent medicines. (Yes, Snake Oil Liniment was actually a widely sold product Good for Man and Beast.) “From the 1890s thr0ugh the 1920s,” he writes, “there arose the first means for harvesting attention on a mass scale and directing it for commercial effect . . . [A]dvertising was the conversion engine that, with astonishing efficiency, turned the cash crop of attention into an industrial commodity.”
The penny press, Amos ‘n Andy, and pop-up ads
Beginning in the early years of the 20th century, Wu frames his story around the development of radio and the four “screens” that have dominated our attention over the decades that followed: the “silver” screen (film), television, the personal computer, and the smartphone. The author relates the history of each of these technologies as a human story, describing the often outrageous personalities who pioneered and dominated each of these media in turn. However, in focusing on radio and the four screens, Wu overlooks the billboards that mar every urban line of sight and barely mentions the direct mail that floods our mailboxes. Though less than comprehensive, his historical account is engrossing and enlightening.
Here you’ll learn about the development of propaganda by the British government in World War I and its perfection by Nazi Germany . . . the first radio serial that was a smash hit (the grossly racist “Amos ‘n Andy“) in the 1920s . . . the invention of the soap opera in the 1930s . . . the battle between the networks on radio and later on TV from the 1930s through the 1990s . . . the development of geodemographic targeting for ads in the 1970s . . . the emergence of celebrity culture in the 1980s and its perversion by reality television in the 2000s . . . the wild proliferation of blogging in the 2000s . . . the identity theft committed by Google and Facebook in the 2000s and beyond . . . and, finally, “unplugging” and the emergence of free online streaming services like Netflix in the 2010s. This is not a pretty story.
A harsh judgment
The author is not a fan of the “new media” that have come to hold our attention in recent years. “The idealists had hoped the web would be different,” he notes, “and it certainly was for a time, but over the long term it would become something of a 99-cent store, if not an outright cesspool.” Similarly, Wu’s judgment about the advertising industry is harsh. “[U]nder competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative . . .” It’s difficult to find fault with any of this.
About the author
He’s the man who coined the term “network neutrality.” A specialist in media and technology, Tim Wu has written several books and numerous articles, all nonfiction. His work has influenced the development of national media policy under the Obama Administration.
December 21, 2016
"As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine." Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants
The only thing missing from this read is the chapter I'm sure Wu will include in the paperback about this election.
The only thing missing from this read is the chapter I'm sure Wu will include in the paperback about this election.
January 9, 2017
Tim Wu’s “The Attention Merchants” is part history and part social analysis. The history related in “The Attention Merchants” tells us something we all basically know—that economic forces simultaneously drive businesses to offer us “free” entertainment, while at the same time making our attention to that entertainment a product to be sold to advertisers. Hence the title. And, since everybody likes free stuff, and in a free market, new markets will always be sought and exploited, there is a natural tendency for advertising to intrude into previously private spaces, making the sphere of the truly private ever smaller.
Wu acknowledges that we get something for allowing our attention to be sold, which is why we agree to the exchange. This book is not a jeremiad against the free market; there is no implicit or explicit demand for less “free” in the “free market.” Nor is this a Larry Lessig-type call for more government control, always somehow tilted to benefit the Left, under the guise of pseudo-libertarianism (Lessig’s specialty—Lessig is all for less government control, as long as the result is calculated to deliver more power for the Left). Wu just thinks we should consider more deeply whether the bargain we each strike with the merchants is worth it.
“The Attention Merchants” follows the expanding sale of attention from the late 19th Century to Snapchat, tracing how technology makes capturing and selling attention ever easier, even though occasionally some segments of society resist. With television, intrusion into the private sphere expanded greatly. Then the 1960s and 1970s, a time of expressive individualism, resulted in even more advertising success—for the desire to be an individual “was a desire [the advertising] industry could cater to, just like any other.” And, as an advertising executive said at the time, “The hippies are in their peak acquisitive years, and their relative affluence enable them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level.” Not for Wu a starry-eyed belief in the virtue of the Age of Aquarius.
Of course, with the rise of the Internet and then of mobile devices, advertising intrusion into the private sphere has become nearly continuous for the vast majority of people. This intrusion today is both nearly constant and extremely finely tuned to the individual target using proven methods of grabbing and keeping attention. Wu decries this, but not as a preacher would, rather with the knowledge that for most people, they think this is a good deal, or they wouldn’t do it. (And he’s funny: “On Facebook, all happy families were alike; the others may have been unhappy in their own way, but they were not on Facebook.”) His call is for more consideration, and a more measured approach, by each of us.
This is not a book of economics. Wu touches briefly on academic discussions about advertising, and describes attention as a commodity, but does not involve himself in questions of whether advertising is in part deadweight loss, as claimed by some. I suppose he thought that would be too much of a departure, and he’s probably right, but I would have been interested to learn more about different views on the topic.
Wu also does not explore another avenue that I think would have been profitable to explore—the effect of class. He does not seem aware, or at least does not address, that his concerns are confined to the educated classes—namely, the type of people who read his book. The lower classes are not reflective, usually, in the way that Wu suggests we be, and they will not hear his call. If they did, they would probably reject it with the contempt shown to Luke Wilson’s character in “Idiocracy,” as yet another way the snobbish elites are trying to control them and lord it over them. The lower classes do not debate taking “Internet Sabbaths.” Steve Jobs strictly limited all forms of screen time for his children; the lower classes use, whether by necessity or choice, all forms of electronics, accompanied by constant advertising, as babysitters, for both children and grownups.
In fact, many of Wu’s suggestions would actually increase the class divide in America—yes, premium TV, which Wu identifies as part of a current (and probably temporary) “retreat and revolt,” has fewer advertisements, but it’s generally not consumed by the lower classes. In an interview in The Atlantic, Wu said “We have to get over our addiction to free stuff. Suck it up and pay.” This message only resonates with those who have money. Those with extra money may choose to spend it on limiting exposure to ads and increasing privacy, but those with little money will more likely choose the bargain of cheaper entertainment, or free entertainment, at the cost of more ads and less privacy. And let’s be honest—lack of reflection and self-control is a key characteristic of the lower classes, one reason they ARE the lower classes, so they are unlikely to instead read “Middlemarch.” That’s just the nature of human society, and the reality of human nature.
On a broader level, although Wu is left-liberal (he ran as a Democrat for Lieutenant Governor of New York) this book at first appears non-political. True, it’s sprinkled with references to New Left nonsense philosophers, from Habermas to Marcuse. They’re used for pithy quotes, though, not for their ideological claptrap. (It’s not at all clear Wu really grasps the actual ideology of the New Left, especially since he claims that they (and the “youth movement” of the late 1960s) “envisioned an end to all forms of repression,” which was “a more ambitious aim than anything hoped for even by Karl Marx and his followers, who simply sought liberation from an unfair economic system.” I suppose at some level that characterization of the New Left, Marx and Marxism is true, but it omits everything important. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”)
But as I say, these references to the Left are window dressing in what appears to be a non-political book. It is not non-political, though. In fact, “The Attention Merchants” is a deeply conservative book. Moreover, it is not conservative as “libertarian,” which is sometimes acceptable to our elites as long as the focus is increasing atomizing choice likely to lead to leftist goals like destruction of the family and traditional religious beliefs (again, think Larry Lessig). Rather the book is deeply culturally and socially conservative. I’m not sure if Wu realizes or would acknowledge this, but it is nonetheless true.
Why do I say is this a conservative book? First, Wu explicitly recognizes that the materialism that drives the sale of attention is a substitute for religious belief. Wu notes that as religious faith in the West has declined, “Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline.” This is a common conservative insight, but rarely seen on the Left, which generally believes that religion is inherently doomed, that disbelief does not result in reaching for substitutes, and that materialism is driven by malevolent capitalist forces, not by us.
Second, Wu shows constant skepticism towards government, especially because it is a source of and key user of propaganda. As he relates in detail, this has been true since as soon as propaganda became technologically feasible and Americans temperamentally less resistant to it, from Woodrow Wilson on. This propaganda, Wu emphasizes, is not just the crude emotional manipulation of Kitchener’s “I Want You.” Rather, it lies in corralling the thoughts of the masses into certain patterns. He quotes one mid-20th Century writer, “the task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses toward certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses’ field of vision.” Admittedly this writer was Hitler, but we would call this today “setting the narrative”—not by rational exposition and discussion, but by emotional appeals under the guise of facts.
And such emotional appeals are all the Left offers today, although Wu does not say this and does not take the step to realize that such propaganda is today less a formal government activity and more a coordinated activity of the ruling cultural elite, led by people like George Soros. Modern left-liberal appeals, from gun control to Obamacare to Not Trump to unrestricted abortion, don’t make the mistake of engaging the complex merits of an issue, before, or after, engaging the listener (which is what makes propaganda fail, as Wu points out). Raw appeals to simplistic emotions characterize today’s entire program of the Left—it is conservatives, lacking the megaphone of the news-setting media that allows the Left to set the narrative to whatever is today’s Left focus, who have to lead with the complex merits of an issue.
Third, Wu is highly skeptical of easy solutions. His measured approach to every problem shows repeatedly that Wu has the “constrained vision” identified by Thomas Sowell as underlying the conservative approach to the world. He is skeptical of magic solutions that promise something for nothing, again in contravention to Left ideology (and in contradiction to every single New Left idol that he quotes). Wu simply does not buy into the standard Left belief that human nature and human society is perfectible; he is an incrementalist, which means he is fundamentally a conservative.
But these are small beans compared to the main reason why this is a conservative book. Wu’s solution to the social problems he identifies is, although he doesn’t use these words, a call for a cultural renewal along conservative lines. He notes that until recently, “custom,” “tradition,” and “religion” “used to define certain inviolable spaces and moments . . . . And while there was much about the old reality that could be inconvenient or frustrating, it had the advantage of automatically creating protected spaces, with their salutary effects.” Here is the spot where nearly any modern writer, a foot soldier in the Gramscian culture wars, would perform a ritual denunciation of supposedly endemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., that characterized the “old reality,” and apologize profusely for suggesting that something good might have existed then, even if the author nonetheless maintained that a tiny thread of virtue did exist that might have been lost. Not Wu. He just says nothing of the sort—in fact, calling the past “inconvenient” and “frustrating,” but nothing else, suggests a deliberate choice to reject sacrificing at the altars of the Left’s gods. He just makes his point and moves on.
Next he channels, for all practical purposes, the conservative writer Yuval Levin, noting that today’s unprecedented individualism is both good and bad, but “What is called for might be termed a human reclamation project.” He calls for us to become like “the monastics, whether in the East or the West, whose aim was precisely to reap the fruits of deep and concentrated attention.” In essence, Wu calls for us to seek the Good. “At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived.” He calls for us to “desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture.” No different than Aristotle or Abelard, he notes that the Good is not obtained from passive acceptance of a barrage of materialist demands, but from a spiritual focus on obtaining something objectively good.
Along the same lines, Wu makes the extremely conservative point that man seeks above all transcendence, or meaning, and we obtain only false transcendence from accepting as key to our being the wares paraded before us by the attention merchants. As Wu says of Apple and other companies to whom brand loyalty and identity is critical: “What is offered to adherents is not merely a good product (though often it is), but something deeper and more deeply fulfilling—a sense of meaning that comes with the surrender of choice.” But true meaning cannot be obtained through this mechanism, only false meaning. That Wu, even implicitly, distinguishes between true meaning, that leads man to the Good, and false meaning, makes him deeply conservative.
In fact, Wu’s plan dovetails precisely with the plans advanced by conservative thinkers, such as Rod Dreher and Roger Scruton, to take back culture as part of an active plan of resistance to, and perhaps ultimate victory over, the New Left. A key part of that resistance is rebuilding intermediary institutions in which we actively participate, and, as Scruton says, “under whose auspices people can flourish according to their social nature, acquiring the manners and aspirations that endow their lives with meaning.” These institutions are the opposite not only of government social control, but also of the passive acceptance of commercial messages and the granting to those messages of control both over our private lives and, even, the meaning of our lives. Or as Scruton also says of consumerization, “The fact is we know the solution, and it is not a political one. We must change our lives. And to do this we need spiritual authority, the ability to make sacrifices, and a refusal to be degraded into the machines désirantes of Deleuze and Guattari.” That sentence would fit seamlessly into Wu’s book.
Now, it’s true that Wu effectively writes not only in opposition to left-liberals, but also in opposition to Chamber of Commerce Republicans, who think that the unfettered free market is inherently productive of the Good and refuse to recognize that powerful forces of social atomism necessarily result from the free market. Conservatism is much more fragmented than it once was. It’s not like Wu is going to be speaking at the next Republican National Convention. But his straightforward analysis and original thought is both very interesting and clarifying, and people of any political bent can benefit from reading his book.
Wu acknowledges that we get something for allowing our attention to be sold, which is why we agree to the exchange. This book is not a jeremiad against the free market; there is no implicit or explicit demand for less “free” in the “free market.” Nor is this a Larry Lessig-type call for more government control, always somehow tilted to benefit the Left, under the guise of pseudo-libertarianism (Lessig’s specialty—Lessig is all for less government control, as long as the result is calculated to deliver more power for the Left). Wu just thinks we should consider more deeply whether the bargain we each strike with the merchants is worth it.
“The Attention Merchants” follows the expanding sale of attention from the late 19th Century to Snapchat, tracing how technology makes capturing and selling attention ever easier, even though occasionally some segments of society resist. With television, intrusion into the private sphere expanded greatly. Then the 1960s and 1970s, a time of expressive individualism, resulted in even more advertising success—for the desire to be an individual “was a desire [the advertising] industry could cater to, just like any other.” And, as an advertising executive said at the time, “The hippies are in their peak acquisitive years, and their relative affluence enable them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level.” Not for Wu a starry-eyed belief in the virtue of the Age of Aquarius.
Of course, with the rise of the Internet and then of mobile devices, advertising intrusion into the private sphere has become nearly continuous for the vast majority of people. This intrusion today is both nearly constant and extremely finely tuned to the individual target using proven methods of grabbing and keeping attention. Wu decries this, but not as a preacher would, rather with the knowledge that for most people, they think this is a good deal, or they wouldn’t do it. (And he’s funny: “On Facebook, all happy families were alike; the others may have been unhappy in their own way, but they were not on Facebook.”) His call is for more consideration, and a more measured approach, by each of us.
This is not a book of economics. Wu touches briefly on academic discussions about advertising, and describes attention as a commodity, but does not involve himself in questions of whether advertising is in part deadweight loss, as claimed by some. I suppose he thought that would be too much of a departure, and he’s probably right, but I would have been interested to learn more about different views on the topic.
Wu also does not explore another avenue that I think would have been profitable to explore—the effect of class. He does not seem aware, or at least does not address, that his concerns are confined to the educated classes—namely, the type of people who read his book. The lower classes are not reflective, usually, in the way that Wu suggests we be, and they will not hear his call. If they did, they would probably reject it with the contempt shown to Luke Wilson’s character in “Idiocracy,” as yet another way the snobbish elites are trying to control them and lord it over them. The lower classes do not debate taking “Internet Sabbaths.” Steve Jobs strictly limited all forms of screen time for his children; the lower classes use, whether by necessity or choice, all forms of electronics, accompanied by constant advertising, as babysitters, for both children and grownups.
In fact, many of Wu’s suggestions would actually increase the class divide in America—yes, premium TV, which Wu identifies as part of a current (and probably temporary) “retreat and revolt,” has fewer advertisements, but it’s generally not consumed by the lower classes. In an interview in The Atlantic, Wu said “We have to get over our addiction to free stuff. Suck it up and pay.” This message only resonates with those who have money. Those with extra money may choose to spend it on limiting exposure to ads and increasing privacy, but those with little money will more likely choose the bargain of cheaper entertainment, or free entertainment, at the cost of more ads and less privacy. And let’s be honest—lack of reflection and self-control is a key characteristic of the lower classes, one reason they ARE the lower classes, so they are unlikely to instead read “Middlemarch.” That’s just the nature of human society, and the reality of human nature.
On a broader level, although Wu is left-liberal (he ran as a Democrat for Lieutenant Governor of New York) this book at first appears non-political. True, it’s sprinkled with references to New Left nonsense philosophers, from Habermas to Marcuse. They’re used for pithy quotes, though, not for their ideological claptrap. (It’s not at all clear Wu really grasps the actual ideology of the New Left, especially since he claims that they (and the “youth movement” of the late 1960s) “envisioned an end to all forms of repression,” which was “a more ambitious aim than anything hoped for even by Karl Marx and his followers, who simply sought liberation from an unfair economic system.” I suppose at some level that characterization of the New Left, Marx and Marxism is true, but it omits everything important. “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”)
But as I say, these references to the Left are window dressing in what appears to be a non-political book. It is not non-political, though. In fact, “The Attention Merchants” is a deeply conservative book. Moreover, it is not conservative as “libertarian,” which is sometimes acceptable to our elites as long as the focus is increasing atomizing choice likely to lead to leftist goals like destruction of the family and traditional religious beliefs (again, think Larry Lessig). Rather the book is deeply culturally and socially conservative. I’m not sure if Wu realizes or would acknowledge this, but it is nonetheless true.
Why do I say is this a conservative book? First, Wu explicitly recognizes that the materialism that drives the sale of attention is a substitute for religious belief. Wu notes that as religious faith in the West has declined, “Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline.” This is a common conservative insight, but rarely seen on the Left, which generally believes that religion is inherently doomed, that disbelief does not result in reaching for substitutes, and that materialism is driven by malevolent capitalist forces, not by us.
Second, Wu shows constant skepticism towards government, especially because it is a source of and key user of propaganda. As he relates in detail, this has been true since as soon as propaganda became technologically feasible and Americans temperamentally less resistant to it, from Woodrow Wilson on. This propaganda, Wu emphasizes, is not just the crude emotional manipulation of Kitchener’s “I Want You.” Rather, it lies in corralling the thoughts of the masses into certain patterns. He quotes one mid-20th Century writer, “the task of propaganda lies not in a scientific training of the individual, but rather in directing the masses toward certain facts, events, necessities, etc., the purpose being to move their importance into the masses’ field of vision.” Admittedly this writer was Hitler, but we would call this today “setting the narrative”—not by rational exposition and discussion, but by emotional appeals under the guise of facts.
And such emotional appeals are all the Left offers today, although Wu does not say this and does not take the step to realize that such propaganda is today less a formal government activity and more a coordinated activity of the ruling cultural elite, led by people like George Soros. Modern left-liberal appeals, from gun control to Obamacare to Not Trump to unrestricted abortion, don’t make the mistake of engaging the complex merits of an issue, before, or after, engaging the listener (which is what makes propaganda fail, as Wu points out). Raw appeals to simplistic emotions characterize today’s entire program of the Left—it is conservatives, lacking the megaphone of the news-setting media that allows the Left to set the narrative to whatever is today’s Left focus, who have to lead with the complex merits of an issue.
Third, Wu is highly skeptical of easy solutions. His measured approach to every problem shows repeatedly that Wu has the “constrained vision” identified by Thomas Sowell as underlying the conservative approach to the world. He is skeptical of magic solutions that promise something for nothing, again in contravention to Left ideology (and in contradiction to every single New Left idol that he quotes). Wu simply does not buy into the standard Left belief that human nature and human society is perfectible; he is an incrementalist, which means he is fundamentally a conservative.
But these are small beans compared to the main reason why this is a conservative book. Wu’s solution to the social problems he identifies is, although he doesn’t use these words, a call for a cultural renewal along conservative lines. He notes that until recently, “custom,” “tradition,” and “religion” “used to define certain inviolable spaces and moments . . . . And while there was much about the old reality that could be inconvenient or frustrating, it had the advantage of automatically creating protected spaces, with their salutary effects.” Here is the spot where nearly any modern writer, a foot soldier in the Gramscian culture wars, would perform a ritual denunciation of supposedly endemic racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., that characterized the “old reality,” and apologize profusely for suggesting that something good might have existed then, even if the author nonetheless maintained that a tiny thread of virtue did exist that might have been lost. Not Wu. He just says nothing of the sort—in fact, calling the past “inconvenient” and “frustrating,” but nothing else, suggests a deliberate choice to reject sacrificing at the altars of the Left’s gods. He just makes his point and moves on.
Next he channels, for all practical purposes, the conservative writer Yuval Levin, noting that today’s unprecedented individualism is both good and bad, but “What is called for might be termed a human reclamation project.” He calls for us to become like “the monastics, whether in the East or the West, whose aim was precisely to reap the fruits of deep and concentrated attention.” In essence, Wu calls for us to seek the Good. “At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived.” He calls for us to “desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture.” No different than Aristotle or Abelard, he notes that the Good is not obtained from passive acceptance of a barrage of materialist demands, but from a spiritual focus on obtaining something objectively good.
Along the same lines, Wu makes the extremely conservative point that man seeks above all transcendence, or meaning, and we obtain only false transcendence from accepting as key to our being the wares paraded before us by the attention merchants. As Wu says of Apple and other companies to whom brand loyalty and identity is critical: “What is offered to adherents is not merely a good product (though often it is), but something deeper and more deeply fulfilling—a sense of meaning that comes with the surrender of choice.” But true meaning cannot be obtained through this mechanism, only false meaning. That Wu, even implicitly, distinguishes between true meaning, that leads man to the Good, and false meaning, makes him deeply conservative.
In fact, Wu’s plan dovetails precisely with the plans advanced by conservative thinkers, such as Rod Dreher and Roger Scruton, to take back culture as part of an active plan of resistance to, and perhaps ultimate victory over, the New Left. A key part of that resistance is rebuilding intermediary institutions in which we actively participate, and, as Scruton says, “under whose auspices people can flourish according to their social nature, acquiring the manners and aspirations that endow their lives with meaning.” These institutions are the opposite not only of government social control, but also of the passive acceptance of commercial messages and the granting to those messages of control both over our private lives and, even, the meaning of our lives. Or as Scruton also says of consumerization, “The fact is we know the solution, and it is not a political one. We must change our lives. And to do this we need spiritual authority, the ability to make sacrifices, and a refusal to be degraded into the machines désirantes of Deleuze and Guattari.” That sentence would fit seamlessly into Wu’s book.
Now, it’s true that Wu effectively writes not only in opposition to left-liberals, but also in opposition to Chamber of Commerce Republicans, who think that the unfettered free market is inherently productive of the Good and refuse to recognize that powerful forces of social atomism necessarily result from the free market. Conservatism is much more fragmented than it once was. It’s not like Wu is going to be speaking at the next Republican National Convention. But his straightforward analysis and original thought is both very interesting and clarifying, and people of any political bent can benefit from reading his book.
February 5, 2017
Excelente continuação para The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Em Master Switch, o Tim Wu fala sobre como surgiram as mídias de broadcast e como acontece o monopólio da informação. Neste livro ele discute como a publicidade surgiu junto dessas mídias e como surge o comércio da atenção de quem as consome.
O livro passa pela publicidade no jornal, no rádio e na TV, para em seguida falar da internet. E ao mesmo tempo discute o vai e vem entre as forças do conteúdo popular, para atrair muita atenção e vender a preço de atacado, e o conteúdo de qualidade, que muitas vezes pode ser pago e sem publicidade. Um livro bastante importante e atual, nestes tempos de conteúdo pago v.s. ads, clickbait e venda de informação pessoal. E, neste caso, como o livro é do final de 2016, não sofre do mal do primeiro e insere o Facebook na discussão do controle de informação e venda de dados.
Bônus: é bem curioso ler sobre os primeiros tipos de programa de rádio e tv e relacionar com o que a tv brasileira ia plagiar anos depois.
O livro passa pela publicidade no jornal, no rádio e na TV, para em seguida falar da internet. E ao mesmo tempo discute o vai e vem entre as forças do conteúdo popular, para atrair muita atenção e vender a preço de atacado, e o conteúdo de qualidade, que muitas vezes pode ser pago e sem publicidade. Um livro bastante importante e atual, nestes tempos de conteúdo pago v.s. ads, clickbait e venda de informação pessoal. E, neste caso, como o livro é do final de 2016, não sofre do mal do primeiro e insere o Facebook na discussão do controle de informação e venda de dados.
Bônus: é bem curioso ler sobre os primeiros tipos de programa de rádio e tv e relacionar com o que a tv brasileira ia plagiar anos depois.
August 10, 2018
When you listen to half a book in April, then the rest in July, then immediately leave town for two weeks, then sit down for a review, you're first thought might be something like, what was the book about again?
So, in the discombobulated and scattered pieces of my recent memory, I can confidently say this was a pretty fun history of advertising. Wu really begins with the early news papers, especially the ones in the early 1800's that hit on the idea that they could make more money from advertising then from sales of papers, and therefore they should strive to get as many readers as possible, even if they just gave the papers away. Perhaps you notice a reflection of our current mindset there. Wu moves forward through patent medicine, England PR for support in WWI which inspired Nazi PR ideas, to some oddball country listening to Amos and Andy blackface on the radio, and watching, en mass, I Love Lucy on TV and so on. I had the impression of a theme through AOL email and chat rooms, and a little aside on how The Drudge Report started internet brainwashing, but by Google, the Blackberry (he skips the iPod/iPhone), and Facebook it felt a little more like a book report padded on...or maybe that three months waiting to renew confused me.
So, fun, of value and perfect for those who like nonfiction audiobooks.
-----------------------------------------------
41. The Attention Merchants : The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (audio) by Tim Wu
reader: Marc Cashman
published: 2016
format: 15:26 Overdrive Audiobook (~428 pages)
acquired: Library
listened: Apr 15-27, Jul 19-26
rating: 4
So, in the discombobulated and scattered pieces of my recent memory, I can confidently say this was a pretty fun history of advertising. Wu really begins with the early news papers, especially the ones in the early 1800's that hit on the idea that they could make more money from advertising then from sales of papers, and therefore they should strive to get as many readers as possible, even if they just gave the papers away. Perhaps you notice a reflection of our current mindset there. Wu moves forward through patent medicine, England PR for support in WWI which inspired Nazi PR ideas, to some oddball country listening to Amos and Andy blackface on the radio, and watching, en mass, I Love Lucy on TV and so on. I had the impression of a theme through AOL email and chat rooms, and a little aside on how The Drudge Report started internet brainwashing, but by Google, the Blackberry (he skips the iPod/iPhone), and Facebook it felt a little more like a book report padded on...or maybe that three months waiting to renew confused me.
So, fun, of value and perfect for those who like nonfiction audiobooks.
-----------------------------------------------
41. The Attention Merchants : The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads (audio) by Tim Wu
reader: Marc Cashman
published: 2016
format: 15:26 Overdrive Audiobook (~428 pages)
acquired: Library
listened: Apr 15-27, Jul 19-26
rating: 4
Want to read
March 5, 2018I liked this article from the author: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/op...
June 27, 2021
A thoroughly fascinating history of the ad industry from its earliest days in the penny press and painted posters to the current ubiquity and power it wields over a mass of humanity through various channels provided by ever-improving technologies. Even though it is full to the brim with information, it is nevertheless a page turner, never causing boredom.
November 2, 2016
Great summary of the history of media and advertising - highly relevant for everyone in the media business. I expected some more details on how the latest generation of attention merchants work to track down their targets and where the industry is moving now, but the great historical chapters make up for it. This book will be my Christmas gift to my colleagues in Aftenposten - a Norwegian newspaper traditionally living off ads (80% of revenues) but increasingly converting to a digital subscription model. Wu did not mention this, but we might now also be at the first time in history when readers actually pay for quality news reporting - with their wallets and not their attention to our ads. Just look at Nytimes, WSJ, FT globally and on a national level, the newspapers in Norway.
With falling ad-prices, advertising might turn out to be almost irrelevant. This of course hurts in the short run - but imagine the products we can make when free from banner ads and constant click chasing.
My biggest concern in this new era is that we optimize too hard on the subscription side, ending up with tons of self help and emotional stuff and that newspapers will not prioritize traditional breaking news and common stories - it is hard to sell subs on news that is covered by all other outlets as well.
With falling ad-prices, advertising might turn out to be almost irrelevant. This of course hurts in the short run - but imagine the products we can make when free from banner ads and constant click chasing.
My biggest concern in this new era is that we optimize too hard on the subscription side, ending up with tons of self help and emotional stuff and that newspapers will not prioritize traditional breaking news and common stories - it is hard to sell subs on news that is covered by all other outlets as well.
December 21, 2017
A fascinating, sobering and thought provoking survey of the eternal quest to "harvest" attention by various "agents", starting from organized religion since ancient times, to military recruitment advertisements during the world wars, culminating in the modern techniques of print, radio, TV and social media.
The book succeeds in giving a rich, whirlwind tour of both development of technologies as well as many, many personalities involved in spearheading the campaigns used on these platforms. I had never heard of most of these people, but their actions had a profound effect on the course of history.
I promise you will never view "media" in the same way after reading this little bombshell of a book.
The book succeeds in giving a rich, whirlwind tour of both development of technologies as well as many, many personalities involved in spearheading the campaigns used on these platforms. I had never heard of most of these people, but their actions had a profound effect on the course of history.
I promise you will never view "media" in the same way after reading this little bombshell of a book.
May 8, 2021
Before the rise of attention merchants, there were places in our lives that were sanctuaries from advertising and commerce. As advertising has become ubiquitous to lives, our lives have become, as much as possible, commercially exploited. Advertising can be value adding through market discovery and useful services, or it can be value subtracting by taking away attention from what really matters. Either for appropriate or inappropriate reasons, those who influence others are considered attention merchants. As what they do is drive attention to them and their message. The attention merchants now mediate our lives more than ever, as they direct where our attention goes. When attention merchants misused people’s attention, there was backlash and people took more control of where their attention goes, but the attention merchants find different ways to access attention and with it, their ability to direct it. This book showcases the evolutionary history of attention merchants and how they changed the way we live our lives.
Wu makes it easy to understand what attention merchants do. Their modus operandi is to attract attention by providing supposedly free products, and then sell that attention to others. The operation depends on gaining and holding attention. With competition for attention which seek to attract attention, to keep attention the attention merchants provide content that is more stimulating. The problem is that the more stimulating content is very provocative and is directed at what can be called baser instinct. This usually leads to a race to the bottom, all in the effort to harvest attention.
Advertising can either make markets more efficient or be detrimental to markets. Advertising can be a form of market discovery which is vital in a market and competitive process. Allowing potential customers to find out about the products, which otherwise they would never have heard about so could not consider purchasing. The trouble begins with the advertising manufacturing demand by instilling a want in the customers by presenting false information. Failure to disclose product information or deceiving and misleading the customer defeats the market process.
Paying attention has its capacity. It can be directed at something, or disregard things. The need to have people pay near constant attention to something has resulted in information overload. Wu sees attention as a kind of resource which is gradually being spent. By being ubiquitously placed, advertisers catch viewers in between purposeful mental engagement. Gazing at the world is now exploited for commercial purposes. Hard to ignore a constant appeal to solve problems and satiate desire.
The commercialization of attention has its drawbacks as it drives people crazy. This leads to backlash, a public revolt. Revolting against the attention merchants is a recurrent dynamic which shaped how the industry operates. A minor version of backlash is the disenchantment effect which occurs when the means of attention gathering has lost its charm and people see through its exposure as if its not there. The major version of backlash is when the attention is perceived to be ill-used which has serious commercial consequences that leads to either a reinvention of the way attention gathering is approached, reconfigure the industry, or inspire regulatory action. What every attention merchant needs to know is how to have enough advertising to earn an income, while not enough advertising to make the listener resentful.
What started this industry is a newspaper selling its paper at a loss, below the cost of production. The business model was not the paper, but selling the attention of the audience to advertisers. There were earlier advertisers in papers, but they were informational and of limited scope. What the New York Sun did was sell readers attention to substantial advertisers. To make this effective, readership needed to be large, and to get lots of readers, the paper would do anything, such as not be bound by facts. Due to its cheapness, readership became so high that it gave rise to public opinion. Competitors initially did not understand how the Sun was able to sell at a loss, but over time took up the same business model.
The next step in advertising were the illustrations. Posters used to be primarily text with some illustration, but Cheret pioneered giant mass-produced posters. By making them attractive and locating them everywhere, the posters garnered attention.
An industry which generated lots of advertisements, resulting in a rise in their income was healthcare. The lesson learned was that attention could be transformed into an income. The problem was the advertisement were selling a product that did not claim what the advertisement did. Even worse, the product was hurtful. The revolt against this industry caused regulations to make misbranding illegal and required a list of dangerous materials used.
WWI launched the government into the attention industry, which is known as propaganda. Initially an appeal for the British people to join the war effort. No invention was involved, except the scale and organization. All media outlets and technical means were used to spread the message. The message could not be missed. The result was that many joined the war not because they were coerced, but because they were persuaded. This tool of galvanizing a people would later be used by governments and commercial actors alike, but the message would not always be ethical, and sometimes were insidious. Taking this lesson next was the US, which to create a war-will, persecuted antiwar dissenters. A manufactured public consent. Nazi were later to use those strategies to create their worldview. It was the Nazi regime’s coercive demands which raised questions about what controlling attention does to freedom.
The next feature of the attention merchant tool kit was to direct the advertisement to a particular group, what is called targeted advertisement. The initial targeted advertisement was to women. During the 1920s, women made most of the purchases and so being the key to commerce. This eventually leads to branding. Branding enables a more stable customer base which is not easily influences by alternative information.
Advertising via broadcasting breached the barrier between public and private space. Initially, broadcasting was thought to facilitate the betterment of human society and that advertising would not be allowed there. Then Templin noticed that during a popular radio show, people stopped what they were doing and listened intently for the duration of the show. A time when people ignored one another to listen to the radio, created what is now known as prime time. With the later and quick adoption of television, people would voluntarily be immersing in the bait for commercials, the shows themselves. The revolt from too many television commercials inspired the first adblocker, the remote.
What the internet did was commercialize fame. Being famous meant using influence and directing it to the attention of advertisers. Fame did not require an induvial do have an instantly recognizable name, but could be micro famous which means being known to a group. To earn money, bloggers and other micro famous people, presented an image to the public that was different than who they were. This created a psychological problem that made many suffer. Part of what the internet did was also allow advertisers to be more specific at whom the advertisement is directed to. Some advertisements follow the individual to every site they visit. A revolt against too many advertisements saw the rise of companies which depend on paid subscription rather than advertising revenue.
Attention merchants changed the normal business model which impacted the way everyone consumes products and services. Changing the way in which humans behave. Problems within the attention driven system drew attention to solutions, adapting to different circumstance. Attention can be used for valuable purposes, or it can be misused for insidious purposes. What matters in this book is to inform the reader of how attention is directed, to provide context to the choices being made.
Wu makes it easy to understand what attention merchants do. Their modus operandi is to attract attention by providing supposedly free products, and then sell that attention to others. The operation depends on gaining and holding attention. With competition for attention which seek to attract attention, to keep attention the attention merchants provide content that is more stimulating. The problem is that the more stimulating content is very provocative and is directed at what can be called baser instinct. This usually leads to a race to the bottom, all in the effort to harvest attention.
Advertising can either make markets more efficient or be detrimental to markets. Advertising can be a form of market discovery which is vital in a market and competitive process. Allowing potential customers to find out about the products, which otherwise they would never have heard about so could not consider purchasing. The trouble begins with the advertising manufacturing demand by instilling a want in the customers by presenting false information. Failure to disclose product information or deceiving and misleading the customer defeats the market process.
Paying attention has its capacity. It can be directed at something, or disregard things. The need to have people pay near constant attention to something has resulted in information overload. Wu sees attention as a kind of resource which is gradually being spent. By being ubiquitously placed, advertisers catch viewers in between purposeful mental engagement. Gazing at the world is now exploited for commercial purposes. Hard to ignore a constant appeal to solve problems and satiate desire.
The commercialization of attention has its drawbacks as it drives people crazy. This leads to backlash, a public revolt. Revolting against the attention merchants is a recurrent dynamic which shaped how the industry operates. A minor version of backlash is the disenchantment effect which occurs when the means of attention gathering has lost its charm and people see through its exposure as if its not there. The major version of backlash is when the attention is perceived to be ill-used which has serious commercial consequences that leads to either a reinvention of the way attention gathering is approached, reconfigure the industry, or inspire regulatory action. What every attention merchant needs to know is how to have enough advertising to earn an income, while not enough advertising to make the listener resentful.
What started this industry is a newspaper selling its paper at a loss, below the cost of production. The business model was not the paper, but selling the attention of the audience to advertisers. There were earlier advertisers in papers, but they were informational and of limited scope. What the New York Sun did was sell readers attention to substantial advertisers. To make this effective, readership needed to be large, and to get lots of readers, the paper would do anything, such as not be bound by facts. Due to its cheapness, readership became so high that it gave rise to public opinion. Competitors initially did not understand how the Sun was able to sell at a loss, but over time took up the same business model.
The next step in advertising were the illustrations. Posters used to be primarily text with some illustration, but Cheret pioneered giant mass-produced posters. By making them attractive and locating them everywhere, the posters garnered attention.
An industry which generated lots of advertisements, resulting in a rise in their income was healthcare. The lesson learned was that attention could be transformed into an income. The problem was the advertisement were selling a product that did not claim what the advertisement did. Even worse, the product was hurtful. The revolt against this industry caused regulations to make misbranding illegal and required a list of dangerous materials used.
WWI launched the government into the attention industry, which is known as propaganda. Initially an appeal for the British people to join the war effort. No invention was involved, except the scale and organization. All media outlets and technical means were used to spread the message. The message could not be missed. The result was that many joined the war not because they were coerced, but because they were persuaded. This tool of galvanizing a people would later be used by governments and commercial actors alike, but the message would not always be ethical, and sometimes were insidious. Taking this lesson next was the US, which to create a war-will, persecuted antiwar dissenters. A manufactured public consent. Nazi were later to use those strategies to create their worldview. It was the Nazi regime’s coercive demands which raised questions about what controlling attention does to freedom.
The next feature of the attention merchant tool kit was to direct the advertisement to a particular group, what is called targeted advertisement. The initial targeted advertisement was to women. During the 1920s, women made most of the purchases and so being the key to commerce. This eventually leads to branding. Branding enables a more stable customer base which is not easily influences by alternative information.
Advertising via broadcasting breached the barrier between public and private space. Initially, broadcasting was thought to facilitate the betterment of human society and that advertising would not be allowed there. Then Templin noticed that during a popular radio show, people stopped what they were doing and listened intently for the duration of the show. A time when people ignored one another to listen to the radio, created what is now known as prime time. With the later and quick adoption of television, people would voluntarily be immersing in the bait for commercials, the shows themselves. The revolt from too many television commercials inspired the first adblocker, the remote.
What the internet did was commercialize fame. Being famous meant using influence and directing it to the attention of advertisers. Fame did not require an induvial do have an instantly recognizable name, but could be micro famous which means being known to a group. To earn money, bloggers and other micro famous people, presented an image to the public that was different than who they were. This created a psychological problem that made many suffer. Part of what the internet did was also allow advertisers to be more specific at whom the advertisement is directed to. Some advertisements follow the individual to every site they visit. A revolt against too many advertisements saw the rise of companies which depend on paid subscription rather than advertising revenue.
Attention merchants changed the normal business model which impacted the way everyone consumes products and services. Changing the way in which humans behave. Problems within the attention driven system drew attention to solutions, adapting to different circumstance. Attention can be used for valuable purposes, or it can be misused for insidious purposes. What matters in this book is to inform the reader of how attention is directed, to provide context to the choices being made.
September 1, 2017
Czy mamy prawo żyć bez reklam?
Książka opisuje jak kolejne bariery prywatności są przebijane przez handlarzy uwagą: gazeta w domu, radio przy spotkaniach rodzinnych, telewizor przy obiedzie, później komputer w pracy, telefon podczas każdej wolnej chwili - wyciskanie ostatnich sekund z doby na ekspozycje na reklamę.
Autor opisuje cztery różne przypadki rewolty społecznej przeciwko reklamie, sytuacje gdy reklama została niemalże zgnieciona pod presją społeczną - ostatnia z takich to rewolucja adblocków połączona z płatnymi treściami (Netflix). Za każdym razem jednak handlarze znajdują nowe sposoby żeby wyhodować nową uwagę i sprzedać ją reklamodawcom - a jedynym sposobem ograniczania ich pazerności jest prawo.
Historia reklamy opisana w książce jest pokazana z nowej perspektywy - pokazuje mnóstwo ciekawostek o tym jak powstawały media i jak nawiązywało się (nie)święte przymierze między mediami a reklamą. Oraz jak z każdym dziecięcioleciem technologia dostarcza im nowych narzędzi do coraz dokładniejszego określenia jakie mechanizmy najlepiej ukradną uwagę swoim użytkownikom
Na koniec autor stawia pytanie: czy ci użytkownicy mają prawo się przed tym bronić? Szczególnie teraz, gdy technologia jest wręcz częścią ludzkiego ciała i gdzie nie spojrzymy jest świecący ekran?
Książka wywarła na mnie spory wpływ i przestawiła kilka elementów światopoglądowych. Wcześniej miałem poczucie, że reklama jest ważna bo napędza gospodarkę i ma wpływ na niższą cenę produktów i usług. Teraz jednak nie mam już wątliwości, że walka ze śledzeniem, segmentowaniem, remarketingiem i całą resztą tych szemranych, śliskich technik kradzieży uwagi jest potrzebna. Raczej nie wygram, ale będę czuł satysfakcję, że łatwo na mnie nie zarobią kradnąc moją uwagę.
Pierwszy punkt walki z handlarzami: zrozumienie, że nasza uwaga jest najważniejszym zasobem jakim dysponujemy.
Książka opisuje jak kolejne bariery prywatności są przebijane przez handlarzy uwagą: gazeta w domu, radio przy spotkaniach rodzinnych, telewizor przy obiedzie, później komputer w pracy, telefon podczas każdej wolnej chwili - wyciskanie ostatnich sekund z doby na ekspozycje na reklamę.
Autor opisuje cztery różne przypadki rewolty społecznej przeciwko reklamie, sytuacje gdy reklama została niemalże zgnieciona pod presją społeczną - ostatnia z takich to rewolucja adblocków połączona z płatnymi treściami (Netflix). Za każdym razem jednak handlarze znajdują nowe sposoby żeby wyhodować nową uwagę i sprzedać ją reklamodawcom - a jedynym sposobem ograniczania ich pazerności jest prawo.
Historia reklamy opisana w książce jest pokazana z nowej perspektywy - pokazuje mnóstwo ciekawostek o tym jak powstawały media i jak nawiązywało się (nie)święte przymierze między mediami a reklamą. Oraz jak z każdym dziecięcioleciem technologia dostarcza im nowych narzędzi do coraz dokładniejszego określenia jakie mechanizmy najlepiej ukradną uwagę swoim użytkownikom
Na koniec autor stawia pytanie: czy ci użytkownicy mają prawo się przed tym bronić? Szczególnie teraz, gdy technologia jest wręcz częścią ludzkiego ciała i gdzie nie spojrzymy jest świecący ekran?
Książka wywarła na mnie spory wpływ i przestawiła kilka elementów światopoglądowych. Wcześniej miałem poczucie, że reklama jest ważna bo napędza gospodarkę i ma wpływ na niższą cenę produktów i usług. Teraz jednak nie mam już wątliwości, że walka ze śledzeniem, segmentowaniem, remarketingiem i całą resztą tych szemranych, śliskich technik kradzieży uwagi jest potrzebna. Raczej nie wygram, ale będę czuł satysfakcję, że łatwo na mnie nie zarobią kradnąc moją uwagę.
Pierwszy punkt walki z handlarzami: zrozumienie, że nasza uwaga jest najważniejszym zasobem jakim dysponujemy.
February 21, 2019
‘Attention could be harvested on a mass scale and converted into unprecedented levels of commerce and military might.’
Wu detailed the evolution of the attention merchants, people who create things that get our attention and trade it for stuff. First there was patent medicine advertisements involving treatment such as the original ‘snake oil’, which gave rise to its meaning of useless medicine. Backlash was swift but World War I found advertisements work better than conscription, at least for Britain. Then The Sun in New York proved that advertisement can help lower the price of a newspaper and increase its reach and profit. We had been getting subsidised content in magazines and newspapers ever since. When TV came along, commercials sponsored its free content. Celebrities then arose and helped sell all kinds of stuff rather effectively. Lastly we have Google with its target Ad making it one of the most profitable companies in the world. And there is facebook with its privacy-intruding Ads (funeral service ad for man with cancer, say).
Since we have always been trading our attention for free stuff and service, the current targeted ads are just extension of the old ads, just far more effective. This is when it gets really spooky.
Wu detailed the evolution of the attention merchants, people who create things that get our attention and trade it for stuff. First there was patent medicine advertisements involving treatment such as the original ‘snake oil’, which gave rise to its meaning of useless medicine. Backlash was swift but World War I found advertisements work better than conscription, at least for Britain. Then The Sun in New York proved that advertisement can help lower the price of a newspaper and increase its reach and profit. We had been getting subsidised content in magazines and newspapers ever since. When TV came along, commercials sponsored its free content. Celebrities then arose and helped sell all kinds of stuff rather effectively. Lastly we have Google with its target Ad making it one of the most profitable companies in the world. And there is facebook with its privacy-intruding Ads (funeral service ad for man with cancer, say).
Since we have always been trading our attention for free stuff and service, the current targeted ads are just extension of the old ads, just far more effective. This is when it gets really spooky.
October 5, 2020
The basic premise of this book reflects my cynical world view 100%, so the author was preaching to the choir. I have a hatred for the constant barrage of advertising and marketing messages that rudely invade our senses incessantly.
This book tells the history of this invasion of our attention. Beginning, in the author’s version of the story, with a clever newspaper publisher in NYC in the early 1800’s who found a way to undercut his more expensive competitors. The author then tells the beats of the history of advertising from then until now — not from the perspective of advertising’s creativity and accomplishments, but from the perspective of the business’ mission creep. Starting with a newspaper which the consumer chose to purchase and could toss at any moment; to street signs and billboards on the roadway every time you left your home; to the big turning point, when advertising found a way to penetrate the privacy of our homes (thank you, radio and tv); and finally, now -- the world where the attention merchants will stop at nothing to spy on our every thought and custom target our every vision with just the right message for each individual (thank you, internet).
The story will make you sick.
Speaking of being sick, one of the highlights is the section on the early 20th century, where the techniques of attention grabbing really got going by (unregulated) snake oil salesmen who hawked their sham products as the Miracle Cure for every medical ailment. If any of you have watched daytime cable TV, you have noticed that this trailblazing side of the business has never gone away.
I always wondered why I enjoyed my frequent trips to Cuba to visit my kids who were living there... why I felt more relaxed there, the moment I stepped off the plane. It isn’t the weather. It’s the COMPLETE absence of marketing messaging throughout the island. Ahhhhh.
My recommendation - read this book, and then go climb a mountain or fly to Cuba. It’s time to tune out!
This book tells the history of this invasion of our attention. Beginning, in the author’s version of the story, with a clever newspaper publisher in NYC in the early 1800’s who found a way to undercut his more expensive competitors. The author then tells the beats of the history of advertising from then until now — not from the perspective of advertising’s creativity and accomplishments, but from the perspective of the business’ mission creep. Starting with a newspaper which the consumer chose to purchase and could toss at any moment; to street signs and billboards on the roadway every time you left your home; to the big turning point, when advertising found a way to penetrate the privacy of our homes (thank you, radio and tv); and finally, now -- the world where the attention merchants will stop at nothing to spy on our every thought and custom target our every vision with just the right message for each individual (thank you, internet).
The story will make you sick.
Speaking of being sick, one of the highlights is the section on the early 20th century, where the techniques of attention grabbing really got going by (unregulated) snake oil salesmen who hawked their sham products as the Miracle Cure for every medical ailment. If any of you have watched daytime cable TV, you have noticed that this trailblazing side of the business has never gone away.
I always wondered why I enjoyed my frequent trips to Cuba to visit my kids who were living there... why I felt more relaxed there, the moment I stepped off the plane. It isn’t the weather. It’s the COMPLETE absence of marketing messaging throughout the island. Ahhhhh.
My recommendation - read this book, and then go climb a mountain or fly to Cuba. It’s time to tune out!
May 8, 2017
Disappointing, lazy, and superficial. This highly selective history is not even justified by a clear theory or argument. It's not that it's selective because it is trying to cherry pick facts to make an argument, there is no argument, it's just a weak history. I was waiting for a big redeeming discussion at the end, but it never came.
That said, it begins well: interesting background on snake oil, a bit about propaganda, French burlesque posters, etc, but it falls apart as it enters the second half of twentieth century. (Though chapter 18 on Oprah was interesting, but probably because i'm not American – it's unlikely to add add much for anyone who's already familiar with Oprah's career.)
Much of the writing is a bizarre conglomeration of stock phrases welded together in a glib aphoristic style … and that's the better bits. There are a couple of 800lb gorillas mentioned in the book, but a few lines later one of them is referred to as the tiger in the room. A screen is descried as being the size of a piece of bacon on its side (…?). Doubt is cast on the Huffington Post's journalistic rigour (and im not arguing with that) then in a different area Huffington Post is used as a source.
Unless you've never heard of Buzzfeed, there's no reason to read this book.
That said, it begins well: interesting background on snake oil, a bit about propaganda, French burlesque posters, etc, but it falls apart as it enters the second half of twentieth century. (Though chapter 18 on Oprah was interesting, but probably because i'm not American – it's unlikely to add add much for anyone who's already familiar with Oprah's career.)
Much of the writing is a bizarre conglomeration of stock phrases welded together in a glib aphoristic style … and that's the better bits. There are a couple of 800lb gorillas mentioned in the book, but a few lines later one of them is referred to as the tiger in the room. A screen is descried as being the size of a piece of bacon on its side (…?). Doubt is cast on the Huffington Post's journalistic rigour (and im not arguing with that) then in a different area Huffington Post is used as a source.
Unless you've never heard of Buzzfeed, there's no reason to read this book.
August 1, 2021
For a book about the Attention Merchants this book was really unable to capture much of my attention—an irony I quickly came to realize.
The book’s first and final chapters are great. But everything in between was really boring for me. It read like a long history of everything that has ever happened in advertising. Maybe I just didn’t know what I was getting myself into but I was hoping for more of a behavioral-Econ kind of book—what makes us tick? What helps these merchants harvest our attention? There was a bit of that, but it was the same thing again and again—give them lots of clickbait and rouse an emotional reaction and you’ll have their attention. Okay, I get it. Did I need to spend 5 hours on it to get that point? Nah.
Enjoyment level was 1 for me (personal preference), but author effort felt like a 5 because there was just so much in it, so this ends up as a 3 star read.
The book’s first and final chapters are great. But everything in between was really boring for me. It read like a long history of everything that has ever happened in advertising. Maybe I just didn’t know what I was getting myself into but I was hoping for more of a behavioral-Econ kind of book—what makes us tick? What helps these merchants harvest our attention? There was a bit of that, but it was the same thing again and again—give them lots of clickbait and rouse an emotional reaction and you’ll have their attention. Okay, I get it. Did I need to spend 5 hours on it to get that point? Nah.
Enjoyment level was 1 for me (personal preference), but author effort felt like a 5 because there was just so much in it, so this ends up as a 3 star read.
April 29, 2024
Fascinating read chronicling advertising’s history over the past 200 years and the use of tech/media as forms of engagement. Learned so much. The linearity of the development interestingly mapped onto my governance studies from grad school which made my brain happy. I want Tim Wu to explain more things to me.
NOTE: would like an updated edition to include more big tech scandal, the advent of short form content, more on influencer economy plz and thx
NOTE: would like an updated edition to include more big tech scandal, the advent of short form content, more on influencer economy plz and thx
November 14, 2016
I enjoyed this book (listened to the audio version) though I didn't find anything particularly revelatory about it. I was hoping for some insights into our media infatuation that would cause me to look at things in a new light, and I felt like this was a pretty standard telling of this history. . .
August 19, 2018
Ciekawa historia mediów oraz pozyskiwania i sprzedaży reklamodawcom uwagi odbiorców - od pierwszych plakatów, poprzez gazety, radio, telewizję, aż po internet i serwisy społecznościowe. Wu pokazuje negatywne efekty rozwoju przemysłu pozyskiwania i sprzedaży uwagi i jak przy okazji zwiększało się zapotrzebowanie firm na dane.
March 22, 2017
This book is a history of entertainment, advertising, and the way we are fed information. We do not have to have advertising. We must take control of the social contract or understand the bargain we have made if we are to demand a change in terms.
January 31, 2017
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2016. $28.95)
At a recent small college basketball game I was in the stands with perhaps twenty or thirty other fans, most, unlike me, parents of players, or friends of coaches, along with a few teachers and academic administrators. Sitting near me was the father of a female player who I knew to be on the court as a starter. This man, perhaps fifty years old, paunchy, pale and badly dressed, stared down at his smartphone. I could see him checking email, surfing the net, sending and receiving texts. He rarely looked up and almost never saw his daughter in action. He sat that way through the entire first half until rising to go outside. I followed him, curious about what he’d do out there. He was standing in the cold, staring down at his WMD (wireless mobile device!). The second half was the same story, this father staring down at his mobile device, fingering it, putting it in his pocket for maybe fifteen seconds, then getting it out again, firing it up, surfing the net, checking his email, sending and receiving a text. When the women’s game was over, his daughter left the court. But she returned to the stands and joined her father for the second (men’s) game. Then they both got out their mobile devices and instead of talking and watching the game, they buried themselves in their screens. This is not a particularly unusual story. It happens all the time and everywhere.
Tim Wu, policy advocate and professor of law at Columbia University, writes for The New Yorker and is a science expert on technology use. His new book, “The Attention Merchants” is a distressingly brilliant dissection of a global disease that threatens our social, moral, emotional and political wellness and “well-being”. Wu documents the rise of advertising from the penny newspapers of a burgeoning New York City (circa 1880), through the rise of the movies (the first screen), television (second screen), the computer (the third screen) and, finally, the personal “device” (the fourth screen). At its inception, it was simply “advertising”, a conversion engine that, with astonishing efficiency, turned the cash crop of attention into an industrial commodity. As such, attention “could not only be used but resold.” Wu’s story is distressing in that it carefully documents our individual surrender of our time and privacy, and the loss of our “intentional motivation” through the steady invasion of our “heads” by both the state and the corporation. Originally, our human attention was paid to danger and pleasure—animals that might eat us, and to plants and animals we might eat. We paid attention to art, to other people’s faces, particularly their eyes and expressions; we paid attention to the stars and the our sun, to our Gods and heroes, and sometimes to our poets and our philosophers. Too many times we paid attention to our Generals and went to war. Often we paid attention to our demagogues and lost our political liberties. And over millions of years as animals on earth we gathered a harvest of emotional and cognitive intelligence that gradually set us relatively free now and then.
Wu’s book is thus the story of a loss of autonomy. It is a carefully calibrated and beautifully told tale, all the more stunning in its fearsome currency. There is a lot to learn in Wu’s book—the story of newspaper advertising, posters on Paris streets, the rise of movies, radio and television, the invention of ‘Prime Time’, the march to the exaltation of brands and celebrities and our final descent into a complete and total surrender of our autonomy as we stare constantly at our screens as they tell us who and what we are, and under what conditions we may live. Wu discusses how the Nazis learned to use propaganda to appropriate human attention (a lesson taken to heart by Stalin), though in truth the first great propagandists were the British during World War I (followed not far behind by the Americans under Woodrow Wilson). Wu shows how the long downward grind toward total annihilation occurred during the “Internet Period” that slowly devolved to the WMD, a technology that has obliterated human personality and created the human being that consists of little but states of “partial attention”, a fractured narcissist.
In some ways the ultimate result is Donald J. Trump, himself the apotheosis of a fractured narcissist, a modeled result of propaganda, corporate branding, and perpetual serial distraction.
Tolstoy once said that those who most want to change the world seldom want to change themselves. Well, we’d better get started changing ourselves.
FROM: THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS: THE EPIC SCRAMBLE TO GET INSIDE OUR HEADS BY TIM WU:
“In the ensuing contest (between late nineteenth century penny newspapers in New York) we can observe a very basic and perhaps eternal dynamic of the attention industries. We’ve already seen the attention merchant’s basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. But a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience’s baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant—just how far will he go to get his harvest. If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.”
“The invention of ‘Prime Time’—the attentional habit of turning on the radio (later, the television) at the designated hour each and every evening of the year—was a momentous cultural as well as commercial innovation at a point where the two categories were drifting steadily closer. For it transformed the lives of those whose attention was now there for the taking. We have already remarked how who we are can be defined, at least in part, by what we attend to—how much more so this is when what we attend to is determined less by our volition and more by ambience. When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, ‘My experience is what I agree to attend to.’”
Total Attention Control, or the Madness of Crowds:
Early in the twentieth century, the Nazis had developed an advanced understanding of how to gain and use access to the minds of the public. It is a fact no less fascinating and relevant for being so depressing to contemplate. For by testing the extremes of what attention capture could accomplish the Third Reich obliges us to confront directly the relationship between what we pay attention to and our individual freedom. In producing “the people’s community” that the Nazis referred to as Volksgemeinshchaft, the Nazis affected a shutdown of free thought in the land of Kant, Schiller, and Goethe.
A Meeting Between Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan!
“Among other things, Leary and his followers were deeply committed to what might fairly be termed an attentional revolution. They wanted the public to block our the messages of the mainstream media and other institutions, which they saw as little more than tools of mass manipulation…By the time of his lunch with McLuhan, Leary was growing in fame and wanted to bring his ideas to a broader audience; his great ambition was to reach the young, now understood to be broadly disillusioned with how things were and looking for something different. (Afterwards…) Most would take Leary’s words (Tune in, Turn on, Drop out) as a call to pay attention to where your attention is being paid; mind what you open your mind for. If this was not America’s first call to attentional revolt—Packard and Lippman had each issued his own, as we’ve seen—Leary’s proposed a far broader compass of things to ignore, not only for messages from television and government but college, work, parents, as well as other sources of authority. He called for a complete attentional revolution.”
The Cognitive Psychology of “Checking Email” (Ie., Free will as an illusion)
“According to (B.F.) Skinner, we, too, in most aspects of our lives, are like pigeons pecking at a button to receive little snacks. And this, according to the cognitive scientist Tom Stafford, explains the check in impulse behind email and other online technologies. Unlike a food pellet, email isn’t always rewarding; in fact, it is often annoying (though with fewer people and less spam, it was surely more rewarding back in the 1970s). Once upon a time, there could be no new email for days at a time. Much of what we get is uninteresting or indeed difficult to deal with. But every so often we get a message we are very glad to have. That such “rewarding” email comes unpredictably does not dim its allure or keep us from looking for it. On the contrary: as Safford points out, the most effective way of maintaining a behavior is not with a consistent, predictable reward, but rather with what is termed “variable reinforcement”—that is, rewards that vary in their frequency and magnitude.”
Think for a minute about activities that entrance their practitioners, like gambling, shopping or fishing…”
Facebook and Depression
“…more and more people began to complain that being on the site made them unhappy. It should have been no surprise, given what we know about human nature and the way Facebook was first conceived to play on the social dynamics of anxious adolescents, but watching the highlight reels of other people’s lives was bound to make you feel inadequate. Others found Facebook (like email) a compulsion in that same Skinneresque manner—usually disappointing, but rewarding enough to keep you hooked. A variety of studies—none entirely conclusive, to be sure—associated depressive symptoms with Facebook usage, one finding that “compared to browsing the Internet, Facebook is judged as less meaningful, less useful, and more a waste of time, which leads to a decrease in mood.” One is reminded of Marcuse’s observation that people in the industrialized West had ‘made mutilation into their own liberty and satisfaction.’”
Instagram and Narcissism
“Let us review our story in brief, as it might relate to Instagram: For most of human history, the proliferation of the individual likeness was the sole prerogative of the illustrious, whether it was the face of the emperor on a Roman coin or the face of Garbo on the silver screen…With the arrival of the smartphone and Instagram, however, much of the power of a great film studio was now in every hand attached to a heart yearning for fame…
Perhaps a century of the ascendant self, of the self’s progressive liberation from any trammels not explicitly conceived to protect other selves, perhaps this progression, when wedded to the magic of technology serving not the state or even the corporation but the individual ego, perhaps it could reach no other logical end point, but the self as its own object of worship.”
“New forms of expression arise from new media, but so do new sensibilities and new behaviors. All desire, the philosopher and critic Rene Girard wrote, is essentially mimetic; beyond our elemental need, we are led to seek after things by the example of others, those whom we may know personally or through their fame. When our desires go beyond the elemental, they enter into their metaphysical dimension, in which, as Girard wrote, ‘All desire is to be,’ to enjoy an image of fulfillment such as we have observed in others…By encouraging everyone to capture the attention of others with the spectacle of one’s self it warps our understanding of our own existence and its relation to others. That this should be come the manner of being for us all is surely the definitive dystopic vision of late modernity.
But perhaps it was foretold by the metastatic proliferation of the attention merchants’ model throughout our culture.”
In conclusion:
1. The past half century has been an age of unprecedented individualism, allowing us to live in all sorts of ways that were not possible before. The power we have to construct our attentional lives is an under appreciated example.
2. But with the new horizon of possibilities has also come the erosion of private life’s perimeter.
3. It is a paradox that in having so thoroughly individualized our attentional lives we should wind up being less ourselves and more in thrall tour various media and devices.
4. Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and anytime.
5. What is called for might be termed a human reclamation project. While the goals of reclaiming our time and attention are easy to praise, they can prove surprisingly difficult to achieve. The difficulty reflects years of conditioning and the attention merchants’ determination to maximize, by any means possible, the time spent with them.
6. At stake is how one’s life is lived.
7. If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.
For further reading:
The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture by Terry E. O’Reilly and Mike Tennant (Toronto, Random House Canada, 2009)
Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes by Jacques Ellul (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1968)
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse (London, Routledge Classics, 1964)
The Rise of the Computer State: The Threats to Our Freedoms, Our Ethics, and Our Democratic Process by David Burnham (Random House, New York, 1983)
At a recent small college basketball game I was in the stands with perhaps twenty or thirty other fans, most, unlike me, parents of players, or friends of coaches, along with a few teachers and academic administrators. Sitting near me was the father of a female player who I knew to be on the court as a starter. This man, perhaps fifty years old, paunchy, pale and badly dressed, stared down at his smartphone. I could see him checking email, surfing the net, sending and receiving texts. He rarely looked up and almost never saw his daughter in action. He sat that way through the entire first half until rising to go outside. I followed him, curious about what he’d do out there. He was standing in the cold, staring down at his WMD (wireless mobile device!). The second half was the same story, this father staring down at his mobile device, fingering it, putting it in his pocket for maybe fifteen seconds, then getting it out again, firing it up, surfing the net, checking his email, sending and receiving a text. When the women’s game was over, his daughter left the court. But she returned to the stands and joined her father for the second (men’s) game. Then they both got out their mobile devices and instead of talking and watching the game, they buried themselves in their screens. This is not a particularly unusual story. It happens all the time and everywhere.
Tim Wu, policy advocate and professor of law at Columbia University, writes for The New Yorker and is a science expert on technology use. His new book, “The Attention Merchants” is a distressingly brilliant dissection of a global disease that threatens our social, moral, emotional and political wellness and “well-being”. Wu documents the rise of advertising from the penny newspapers of a burgeoning New York City (circa 1880), through the rise of the movies (the first screen), television (second screen), the computer (the third screen) and, finally, the personal “device” (the fourth screen). At its inception, it was simply “advertising”, a conversion engine that, with astonishing efficiency, turned the cash crop of attention into an industrial commodity. As such, attention “could not only be used but resold.” Wu’s story is distressing in that it carefully documents our individual surrender of our time and privacy, and the loss of our “intentional motivation” through the steady invasion of our “heads” by both the state and the corporation. Originally, our human attention was paid to danger and pleasure—animals that might eat us, and to plants and animals we might eat. We paid attention to art, to other people’s faces, particularly their eyes and expressions; we paid attention to the stars and the our sun, to our Gods and heroes, and sometimes to our poets and our philosophers. Too many times we paid attention to our Generals and went to war. Often we paid attention to our demagogues and lost our political liberties. And over millions of years as animals on earth we gathered a harvest of emotional and cognitive intelligence that gradually set us relatively free now and then.
Wu’s book is thus the story of a loss of autonomy. It is a carefully calibrated and beautifully told tale, all the more stunning in its fearsome currency. There is a lot to learn in Wu’s book—the story of newspaper advertising, posters on Paris streets, the rise of movies, radio and television, the invention of ‘Prime Time’, the march to the exaltation of brands and celebrities and our final descent into a complete and total surrender of our autonomy as we stare constantly at our screens as they tell us who and what we are, and under what conditions we may live. Wu discusses how the Nazis learned to use propaganda to appropriate human attention (a lesson taken to heart by Stalin), though in truth the first great propagandists were the British during World War I (followed not far behind by the Americans under Woodrow Wilson). Wu shows how the long downward grind toward total annihilation occurred during the “Internet Period” that slowly devolved to the WMD, a technology that has obliterated human personality and created the human being that consists of little but states of “partial attention”, a fractured narcissist.
In some ways the ultimate result is Donald J. Trump, himself the apotheosis of a fractured narcissist, a modeled result of propaganda, corporate branding, and perpetual serial distraction.
Tolstoy once said that those who most want to change the world seldom want to change themselves. Well, we’d better get started changing ourselves.
FROM: THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS: THE EPIC SCRAMBLE TO GET INSIDE OUR HEADS BY TIM WU:
“In the ensuing contest (between late nineteenth century penny newspapers in New York) we can observe a very basic and perhaps eternal dynamic of the attention industries. We’ve already seen the attention merchant’s basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. But a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience’s baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant—just how far will he go to get his harvest. If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.”
“The invention of ‘Prime Time’—the attentional habit of turning on the radio (later, the television) at the designated hour each and every evening of the year—was a momentous cultural as well as commercial innovation at a point where the two categories were drifting steadily closer. For it transformed the lives of those whose attention was now there for the taking. We have already remarked how who we are can be defined, at least in part, by what we attend to—how much more so this is when what we attend to is determined less by our volition and more by ambience. When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, ‘My experience is what I agree to attend to.’”
Total Attention Control, or the Madness of Crowds:
Early in the twentieth century, the Nazis had developed an advanced understanding of how to gain and use access to the minds of the public. It is a fact no less fascinating and relevant for being so depressing to contemplate. For by testing the extremes of what attention capture could accomplish the Third Reich obliges us to confront directly the relationship between what we pay attention to and our individual freedom. In producing “the people’s community” that the Nazis referred to as Volksgemeinshchaft, the Nazis affected a shutdown of free thought in the land of Kant, Schiller, and Goethe.
A Meeting Between Timothy Leary and Marshall McLuhan!
“Among other things, Leary and his followers were deeply committed to what might fairly be termed an attentional revolution. They wanted the public to block our the messages of the mainstream media and other institutions, which they saw as little more than tools of mass manipulation…By the time of his lunch with McLuhan, Leary was growing in fame and wanted to bring his ideas to a broader audience; his great ambition was to reach the young, now understood to be broadly disillusioned with how things were and looking for something different. (Afterwards…) Most would take Leary’s words (Tune in, Turn on, Drop out) as a call to pay attention to where your attention is being paid; mind what you open your mind for. If this was not America’s first call to attentional revolt—Packard and Lippman had each issued his own, as we’ve seen—Leary’s proposed a far broader compass of things to ignore, not only for messages from television and government but college, work, parents, as well as other sources of authority. He called for a complete attentional revolution.”
The Cognitive Psychology of “Checking Email” (Ie., Free will as an illusion)
“According to (B.F.) Skinner, we, too, in most aspects of our lives, are like pigeons pecking at a button to receive little snacks. And this, according to the cognitive scientist Tom Stafford, explains the check in impulse behind email and other online technologies. Unlike a food pellet, email isn’t always rewarding; in fact, it is often annoying (though with fewer people and less spam, it was surely more rewarding back in the 1970s). Once upon a time, there could be no new email for days at a time. Much of what we get is uninteresting or indeed difficult to deal with. But every so often we get a message we are very glad to have. That such “rewarding” email comes unpredictably does not dim its allure or keep us from looking for it. On the contrary: as Safford points out, the most effective way of maintaining a behavior is not with a consistent, predictable reward, but rather with what is termed “variable reinforcement”—that is, rewards that vary in their frequency and magnitude.”
Think for a minute about activities that entrance their practitioners, like gambling, shopping or fishing…”
Facebook and Depression
“…more and more people began to complain that being on the site made them unhappy. It should have been no surprise, given what we know about human nature and the way Facebook was first conceived to play on the social dynamics of anxious adolescents, but watching the highlight reels of other people’s lives was bound to make you feel inadequate. Others found Facebook (like email) a compulsion in that same Skinneresque manner—usually disappointing, but rewarding enough to keep you hooked. A variety of studies—none entirely conclusive, to be sure—associated depressive symptoms with Facebook usage, one finding that “compared to browsing the Internet, Facebook is judged as less meaningful, less useful, and more a waste of time, which leads to a decrease in mood.” One is reminded of Marcuse’s observation that people in the industrialized West had ‘made mutilation into their own liberty and satisfaction.’”
Instagram and Narcissism
“Let us review our story in brief, as it might relate to Instagram: For most of human history, the proliferation of the individual likeness was the sole prerogative of the illustrious, whether it was the face of the emperor on a Roman coin or the face of Garbo on the silver screen…With the arrival of the smartphone and Instagram, however, much of the power of a great film studio was now in every hand attached to a heart yearning for fame…
Perhaps a century of the ascendant self, of the self’s progressive liberation from any trammels not explicitly conceived to protect other selves, perhaps this progression, when wedded to the magic of technology serving not the state or even the corporation but the individual ego, perhaps it could reach no other logical end point, but the self as its own object of worship.”
“New forms of expression arise from new media, but so do new sensibilities and new behaviors. All desire, the philosopher and critic Rene Girard wrote, is essentially mimetic; beyond our elemental need, we are led to seek after things by the example of others, those whom we may know personally or through their fame. When our desires go beyond the elemental, they enter into their metaphysical dimension, in which, as Girard wrote, ‘All desire is to be,’ to enjoy an image of fulfillment such as we have observed in others…By encouraging everyone to capture the attention of others with the spectacle of one’s self it warps our understanding of our own existence and its relation to others. That this should be come the manner of being for us all is surely the definitive dystopic vision of late modernity.
But perhaps it was foretold by the metastatic proliferation of the attention merchants’ model throughout our culture.”
In conclusion:
1. The past half century has been an age of unprecedented individualism, allowing us to live in all sorts of ways that were not possible before. The power we have to construct our attentional lives is an under appreciated example.
2. But with the new horizon of possibilities has also come the erosion of private life’s perimeter.
3. It is a paradox that in having so thoroughly individualized our attentional lives we should wind up being less ourselves and more in thrall tour various media and devices.
4. Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and anytime.
5. What is called for might be termed a human reclamation project. While the goals of reclaiming our time and attention are easy to praise, they can prove surprisingly difficult to achieve. The difficulty reflects years of conditioning and the attention merchants’ determination to maximize, by any means possible, the time spent with them.
6. At stake is how one’s life is lived.
7. If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.
For further reading:
The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture by Terry E. O’Reilly and Mike Tennant (Toronto, Random House Canada, 2009)
Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes by Jacques Ellul (Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1968)
One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse (London, Routledge Classics, 1964)
The Rise of the Computer State: The Threats to Our Freedoms, Our Ethics, and Our Democratic Process by David Burnham (Random House, New York, 1983)
December 21, 2021
I'm quite interested in the attention economy, but didn't find this memorable or pleasant to read.
Admittedly, I dived into it without a good understanding of what the aim of the book was -that is to provide a (geographically limited) historical account of the commercial harvest of attention. I thought that it would spend more time focusing on today's attention economy, and particularly social media. So I just didn't find what I was looking for.
This may just be my mistake, so it is not the reason why I'm only giving this 3 stars. Although decently researched and informative, the historical account overall felt very superficial. I remember thinking that none of the insights amounted to more than a succession of Wikipedia pages about a given person, company or device. The book quickly jumps from one thing to the next, providing a linear narrative of the evolution of the media in the United States with an emphasis on the marketing strategies centred on audiences' attention. As I am not an American, I caught none of the pop culture references. I also found that one-man-stories were overused, that X or Y advertising coup was some guy's idea is one thing, but I don't really need to know this whole man's life story to get to the point where he had X or Y idea.
I suppose that if a history of advertising in the US is exactly what you're looking for, this can be a nice read. Otherwise, I don't know that there is anything very new in there. It's really missing a critical or even developed perspective on the modern attention merchants, which is why I'd picked this for. But then again, given the rating of the book, I think that many people found something to it. I was very bored and aware that none of it would make a lasting impression on me, but I would not discourage a friend from giving this a try as it's not unequivocally bad. It just wasn't of any interest to me at all.
Admittedly, I dived into it without a good understanding of what the aim of the book was -that is to provide a (geographically limited) historical account of the commercial harvest of attention. I thought that it would spend more time focusing on today's attention economy, and particularly social media. So I just didn't find what I was looking for.
This may just be my mistake, so it is not the reason why I'm only giving this 3 stars. Although decently researched and informative, the historical account overall felt very superficial. I remember thinking that none of the insights amounted to more than a succession of Wikipedia pages about a given person, company or device. The book quickly jumps from one thing to the next, providing a linear narrative of the evolution of the media in the United States with an emphasis on the marketing strategies centred on audiences' attention. As I am not an American, I caught none of the pop culture references. I also found that one-man-stories were overused, that X or Y advertising coup was some guy's idea is one thing, but I don't really need to know this whole man's life story to get to the point where he had X or Y idea.
I suppose that if a history of advertising in the US is exactly what you're looking for, this can be a nice read. Otherwise, I don't know that there is anything very new in there. It's really missing a critical or even developed perspective on the modern attention merchants, which is why I'd picked this for. But then again, given the rating of the book, I think that many people found something to it. I was very bored and aware that none of it would make a lasting impression on me, but I would not discourage a friend from giving this a try as it's not unequivocally bad. It just wasn't of any interest to me at all.
January 9, 2021
An impressive and wide-ranging history of media and advertising from the late 19th century to today — interspersed with psychological research and philosophies of celebrity and consumption.
Like many good histories, Wu takes care in explaining phenomenon not in naturalistic, predestined terms but as the result of human decisions — often arbitrary, ego-driven and tainted by the sins of society. The origin of all sit coms was an audio blackface act underwritten by a consumer goods company as a last-ditch marketing ploy. The ascendant social media platform Facebook is the product of Ivy League horny hubris.
In a story that starts with actual snake soil salesman and concludes with online shitposting, Wu makes the argument that with every innovation frontier in technology, communications, or culture, commercial interests are never far behind to monetize. Capitalism's strength, he convincingly shows, is in its adaptability in subsuming any form, even forms critical of it (like coopting anti-consumerist counterculture). This is the way things go, the way a water falls into streams down slopes.
There are times where the stories are too clean and the origin points are too cleanly delineated. Nevertheless, Wu is a masterful storyteller and this book helps me both rationalize and be more disgusted by why I can only go to bed at night by swiping through Tik Toks about the Ratatouille musical.
Like many good histories, Wu takes care in explaining phenomenon not in naturalistic, predestined terms but as the result of human decisions — often arbitrary, ego-driven and tainted by the sins of society. The origin of all sit coms was an audio blackface act underwritten by a consumer goods company as a last-ditch marketing ploy. The ascendant social media platform Facebook is the product of Ivy League horny hubris.
In a story that starts with actual snake soil salesman and concludes with online shitposting, Wu makes the argument that with every innovation frontier in technology, communications, or culture, commercial interests are never far behind to monetize. Capitalism's strength, he convincingly shows, is in its adaptability in subsuming any form, even forms critical of it (like coopting anti-consumerist counterculture). This is the way things go, the way a water falls into streams down slopes.
There are times where the stories are too clean and the origin points are too cleanly delineated. Nevertheless, Wu is a masterful storyteller and this book helps me both rationalize and be more disgusted by why I can only go to bed at night by swiping through Tik Toks about the Ratatouille musical.
June 1, 2020
I thought that I’ve already read this for a university class a long, long time ago, but apparently not! The Attention Merchants charts the rise of modern attention-grabbers, starting with the first newspapers and posters.
While you could probably piece together the story by reading books about the main players (newspapers, Google, Oprah, etc), The Attention Merchants manages to tie everything together through an emphasis on how each development changed the way the human attention was harvested and sold. First, there were the newspapers, who made their money selling advertisements rather than the news (so the readers were already the product, not the customer even in those days), then we had the radio, where people realised that in that particular period of time, they could hold the attention of the entire nation of America (or nearly the whole nation) and feed them what they wanted to say. From there, we had television, games, the rise of influencer celebrities, and now the Internet with its micro-celebrities.
I made a lot of bookmarks throughout the book, but the one thing that stood out was that many of the things that we complain about now are not new. The customer as the product? That was there from the start. Clickbait headlines? Also not a new thing. People using anti-consumerism to sell things? Well, the Charlie Brown Christmas special is a good example about how that’s been the case for a while.
Another thing that struck me was that although a lot of this takes place in the recent past, the technologies mentioned feel dated. AOL? I barely recall the days of dial-up, but if I think about it, I was using some form of it when I was in primary school during the early 2000s. MTV? Oh yeah, I used to watch that too! Just looking at the start dates for shows like Simpsons and Friends made me realise how old the shows were!
Of course, the road to the domination of our attention has not always been smooth sailing. There have been several blowbacks but so far, the attention merchants have always managed to evolve and win. I suppose it’s really up to us to decide how we want to break free (or not). After all, books like this one, Indistractible, and Trust Me, I’m Lying have already shown us how our attention is being harvested and ways we can break free. The next step, is up to us.
This review was first posted at Eustea Reads
While you could probably piece together the story by reading books about the main players (newspapers, Google, Oprah, etc), The Attention Merchants manages to tie everything together through an emphasis on how each development changed the way the human attention was harvested and sold. First, there were the newspapers, who made their money selling advertisements rather than the news (so the readers were already the product, not the customer even in those days), then we had the radio, where people realised that in that particular period of time, they could hold the attention of the entire nation of America (or nearly the whole nation) and feed them what they wanted to say. From there, we had television, games, the rise of influencer celebrities, and now the Internet with its micro-celebrities.
I made a lot of bookmarks throughout the book, but the one thing that stood out was that many of the things that we complain about now are not new. The customer as the product? That was there from the start. Clickbait headlines? Also not a new thing. People using anti-consumerism to sell things? Well, the Charlie Brown Christmas special is a good example about how that’s been the case for a while.
Another thing that struck me was that although a lot of this takes place in the recent past, the technologies mentioned feel dated. AOL? I barely recall the days of dial-up, but if I think about it, I was using some form of it when I was in primary school during the early 2000s. MTV? Oh yeah, I used to watch that too! Just looking at the start dates for shows like Simpsons and Friends made me realise how old the shows were!
Of course, the road to the domination of our attention has not always been smooth sailing. There have been several blowbacks but so far, the attention merchants have always managed to evolve and win. I suppose it’s really up to us to decide how we want to break free (or not). After all, books like this one, Indistractible, and Trust Me, I’m Lying have already shown us how our attention is being harvested and ways we can break free. The next step, is up to us.
This review was first posted at Eustea Reads
May 15, 2019
Od jakiegoś czasu ograniczam czas spędzony na FB, raz na jakiś czas wchodzę na krótko na Instagram i tylko na Twitterze spędzam nieco więcej czasu codziennie. Mam co prawda smartfona, ale wyłączyłem wszystkie powiadomienia i korzystam raczej dość oszczędnie. Telewizji nie oglądam od kilku lat. O tym, że jestem produktem i że lepiej spędzać czas na bardziej wartościowych rzeczach wiedziałem już wcześniej, ale Tim Wu dobrze to udokumentował i zilustrował. Polecam!
Na książkę trafiłem dzięki Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Na książkę trafiłem dzięki Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
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