The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu. 

4/5 rating. 344 pages.

Book #51 of 2023. Read December 10, 2023.

This book covers the history of advertising and the race to commandeer our attention.

You have become a product and every time that you log in online, companies are “compiling ever more detailed dossiers on every man, woman, and child” in a “more thoroughly invasive effort than any NSA data collection ever disclosed”. This is what we have inadvertently created.

Advertising has not necessarily been a traditional idea. Many places in the past forbade the idea of advertising – even on posters – as a crude overreach of companies. Until the first penny paper, there was not really any advertising as we know it now: with mediums peddling their customers as the actual product, and companies vying for our attention to buy their wares.

The history leading from newspapers, to radio propaganda, and TV is covered. These all had their own allure, but true over-reach could only really start when targeted marketing began with the creation of 40 different market “zones” within the US in the 1970s. The (finally acted upon) realization that the US was not a monolith and instead was made up of different types of groups – such as “Shotguns & Pickups”, “Young Suburbia”, or “Black Enterprise” – meant that “Now, firms could not only tailor ads to their desired consumer but also fine-tune the product itself, so as to be more alluring to his or her specific attention.”

“In this way, for the first time, to be at home and awake was, for most Americans, to be sold something.”

With the advent of the internet, we have truly signed a Faustian bargain to gain much data and access for “free” while giving up any privacy or ability to not be constantly sold to.

The most important question brought up in this book is: “Do we draw any lines between the private and commercial? If so, what times and spaces should we consider as too valuable, personal, or sacrosanct for the usual onslaught…” of advertising?

Quotes I Found Interesting:

“Twin Rivers is only one of the many school districts in the United States – mostly in poor or middle-class areas – that have begun to rely on selling access to their students as an essential revenue source.”

“Over the last century, however, we have come to accept a very different way of being, whereby nearly every bit of our lives is commercially exploited to the extent it can be. As adults, we are hardly ever unreachable; seldom away from a screen of some kind; rarely not being solicited or sold to.”

“What difference does the rise of the Attention Merchants make to me? Why should I care? Quite simply because this industry, whose very business is the influence of consciousness, can and will radically shape how our lives are lived.”

“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.”

“What [Benjamin Day in 1833] undersood – more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him – was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product.”

“If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.”

“Industries, unlike organisms, have no organic limits on their own growth; they are constantly in search of new markets, or of new ways to exploit old ones more effectively; as Karl Marx unsympathetically observed, they ‘nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.’”

“Every time you find attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent.”

“Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline [of religion]. Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game.”

“It is easy to ascribe the success of such hokum to the gullibility of another age, until we stop to reflect that the techniques successfully used to sell patent medicine are still routinely used today. The lotions and potions of our times inevitably promise youthfulness, health, or weight loss, thanks to exotic ingredients like antioxidants, amino acids, miracle fruits like the pomegranate and açaí berry, extracted ketones, or biofactors. There is scarcely a shampoo or lotion for sale that does not promise an extraordinary result owing to essence of coconut, or rosemary extracts, or another botanical. As devotees of technology we are, if anything, more susceptible to the supposed degree of difference afforded by some ingenious proprietary innovation, like the ‘air’ in Nike’s sports shoes, triple reverse osmosis in some brands of water, or the gold-plating of audio component cables. For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.”

“[In 1892, The Ladies’ Home Journal‘s] editor, Edward Bok, also revealed that the going rate for patent medicine endorsements in Washington, D.C., was seventy-five dollars for a senator and forty dollars for a congressman.”

“Before the democratic age, only the Church, as discussed, systematically sought and used access to the mind of the people. In fact, the very word ‘propaganda’ originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith.”

“True brand advertising is therefore an effort not so much to persuade as to convert. At its most successful, it creates a product cult, whose loyalists cannot be influenced by mere information: companies like Apple, Hermés, and Porsche are among those that have achieved this kind of immunity to competition, at least among their true believers. 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.”

“As original conceived, the so-called Tugwell Bill was very tough indeed. It combined the concepts of false labeling and false advertising, designating as the latter anything that was clearly untrue, or that, by ‘ambiguity or inference,’ created a false impression. The law also barred advertisements from purporting that a product could cure any of a long list of diseases. Products falsely labeled or advertised would be subject to seizure by the Department of Agriculture; their promoters subject to criminal prosecution.” – defeated by the advertisers and media

“As William James once put it, ‘My experience is what I agree to attend to.’”

“Whether they saw it or not – what Paley and Weaver – programming geniuses both – had ultimately wrought was a system for capturing more attention than ever commercially amassed before. Once that system existed, the logic of capitalism, though not decency, dictated it could be used for only one purpose: to make as much money as could be made. That the substrate for this process was the conscious hours of millions of Americans was hardly CBS’s or NBC’s problem. In a free society, you are free to do things that aren’t good for you, whether it be smoke, drink sugary drinks, or watch game shows.”

“As David Halberstam writes, ‘Whereas at the turn of the century, only an occasional door-to-door salesman visited the American home, by the middle of the century a ceaseless stream of the most subtle electronic impulses created by the nation’s most richly rewarded hucksters was beamed into this new marketplace, relentlessly selling not just the American dream but an endless series of material products through whose purchase that dream might be more quickly achieved.’ In this way, for the first time, to be at home and awake was, for most Americans, to be sold something.”

“There is no competition in television except among competitors trying to sell the attention of their audiences for profit. As a result, while television is supposed to be ‘free,’ it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandizing.”

“The real question,’ [former NBC president, Pat Weaver] said, ‘is whether we can afford to have our culture and artistic life become a byproduct of advertising. My answer is that we can’t.’”

“Now, firms could not only tailor ads to their desired consumer but also fine-tune the product itself, so as to be more alluring to his or her specific attention.”

“Perhaps the site by its nature never really meant to be a business exactly, but instead just a giant vacuum sucking up human attention.”

“Nothing validates your social existence like the knowledge that someone else has approved you or is asking for your permission to list them as a friend.”

“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 of a waste of time, which then leads to a decrease in mood’”

“There would soon follow not just an attentional habit but a new social norm, that of never parting from one’s device; of standing and stating at it, as if paralyzed, as the world goes by; of not looking up in the presence of others, except when the urge to take a picture erupts at the strangest moment…”

“Social media, especially how I used it, isn’t real. It’s contrived based on social approval, likes, validation in views, success in followers….I met people that are far more successful online than I am, and they are just as miserable and lonely and scared and lot. We all are.” – Essena O’Neill

“This is life now: one constant, never-ending stream of non sequiturs and self-referential garbage that passes in through our eyes and out of our brains at the speed of a touchscreen.”

“But these bright spots were engulfed by the vast areas of darkness, the lands of the cajoling listicles and the celebrity nonstories, engineered for no purpose but to keep a public mindlessly clicking and sharing away, spreading the accompanying ads like a bad cold. As the clicks added up, what was most depressing perhaps was that all this was for the sake of amassing no great fortune, but in fact relatively paltry commercial gains, rounding errors in the larger scheme of commerce.”

“Online tracking technologies evolved to a point that would have made a Soviet-era spy blush. Arrival at NYPost.com would trigger up to twenty or more urgent ‘tracking’ messages to online ad agencies, or ‘ad networks,’ advising them of any available intelligence on the user, in addition to specifying what stories they were reading. Attention merchants had always been ravenous for attention, but now they were gobbling up personal data as well. Perhaps the oversharing on social media had simply lowered the standard of privacy. Perhaps the Internet, with its potential to capture every turn of our attention, made this inevitable. Whatever the case, several commercial entities were now compiling ever more detailed dossiers on every man, woman, and child. It is a more thoroughly invasive effort than any NSA data collection ever disclosed – and one of even more dubious utility.”

“In the last few years…web ad quality and tolerability have plummeted, and annoyance, abuse, misdirection, and tracking have skyrocketed. Publishers don’t have an easy job trying to stay in business today, but that simply doesn’t justify the rampant abuse, privacy invasion, sleaziness, and creepiness that many of them are forcing upon their readers.”

“‘The best minds of my generation are thinking how to make people click ads,’ commented scientist Jeff Hammerbacher. ‘That sucks.’”

“Our society has been woefully negligent about what in other contexts we would call the rules of zoning, the regulation of commercial activity where we live, figuratively and literally. It is a question that goes to the heart of how we value what used to be called our private lives.”

“Do we draw any lines between the private and commercial? If so, what times and spaces should we consider as too valuable, personal, or sacrosanct for the usual onslaught?”

“Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and anytime.”

“And what are the costs to a society of an entire population conditioned to spend so much of their waking lives not in concentration and focus but rather in fragmentary awareness and subject to constant interruption? In this respect our lives have become the very opposite of those cultivated by the monastics, whether in the East or the West, whose aim was precisely to reap the fruits of deep and concentrated attention. What an irony it is that the lamentably scattered state of mind arises not from our own lack of drive but rather from the imperatives of one peculiar kind of commercial enterprise that is not even particularly profitable much of the time.”

“At bottom, whether we acknowledge it or not, the attention merchants have come to play an important part in setting the course of our lives and consequently the future of the human race, insofar as that future will be nothing more than the running total of our individual mental states. Does that sound like exaggeration? It was William James, the fount of American Pragmatism, who, having lived and died before the flowering of the attention industry, held that our life experiences would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one’s life is lived. That, if nothing else, ought to compel a greater scrutiny of the countless bargains to which we routinely submit, and, even more important, lead us to consider the necessity, at times, of not dealing at all. 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.”

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