The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  A correspondent for The Washington Post described the crowd’s response:

  Words cannot impart the strange and curious magnetism which filled the atmosphere. Bedlam broke loose, delirium reigned supreme. In the spoken word of the orator thousands of men had heard the unexpressed sentiments and hopes of their own inmost souls. The great mass of humanity threw forth the fiery lava of its enthusiasm like Vesuvius in eruption…the stamping of the feet was as the roll of thunder among the echoing Alps, and the hurricane of sound almost caused the steel girders of the roof to tremble with its perceptible volume. Every man in the vast audience climbed upon his chair and, infected by the cyclonic frenzy of the moment, seemed absolutely oblivious to what he did or what he said….The almost lunatical excitement was shown by the incident of one woman, who, standing upon a chair, shouted like a savage, and danced like a savage.

  So persuasive was Bryan’s performance that the crowd carried him aloft on their shoulders before nominating him. And yet it seems obvious that if the same speech were delivered tonight in your living room you might not even remain awake through the end. In fact, Bryan himself had delivered much the same speech in Nebraska the week before, drawing little attention, never mind acclaim.4

  Over the last decade or so, scientists have begun to investigate joint attention, confirming the intuition that the brain’s attentional faculties do operate differently when one is in a group paying attention to the same thing. They’ve discovered, for example, that when individuals pay attention jointly to a mental rotation test, each actually solves it faster than if he were working in isolation—amazingly, since each person is working independently. It is therefore only more interesting that humans are not born with the ability to pay joint attention; it develops over the first eighteen months of life, as an infant first learns to follow a parent’s gaze and pay attention to what he or she is looking at.5

  Almost everyone who heard the führer agreed that his speeches were mesmerizing. Hanfstaengl allowed that “what Hitler was able to do to a crowd in 21⁄2 hours will never be repeated in 10,000 years.” He gave some credit to biology. “Because of his miraculous throat construction, he was able to create a rhapsody of hysteria.” Albert Speer described himself on first hearing Hitler speak as being “intoxicated” and feeling that “all can be changed.”

  Another contemporary put it this way: “Hitler responds to the vibration of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph…enabling him, with a certainty with which no conscious gift could endow him, to act as a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least permissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation.”

  Le Bon and Freud are now hardly considered cutting-edge guides to how the mind works, but here, in the words of the enraptured, their ideas seem to shine through.

  Alfons Heck would remember attending a Nazi rally as a boy in the 1930s. He was not particularly partial to or interested in Hitler; yet at the conclusion of the führer’s speech the boy was transformed: “From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul.” The rally Heck attended, one of those held annually at Nuremberg, boosted Hitler’s oratorical effects with various other elements—lights, giant swastika banners, and marching men—to create what Albert Speer called “total theatre.” As one attendant described the experience:

  Nothing like it has ever been seen before. The wide field resembles a powerful Gothic cathedral made of light….One hundred and forty thousand people…cannot tear their eyes away from the sight. Are we dreaming, or is it real? Is it possible to imagine a thing like that?…Seven columns of flags pour into the spaces between the ranks….All you can see is an undulating stream, red and broad, its surface sparking with gold and silver, which slowly comes closer like fiery lava.

  As Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who documented the 1935 gathering called the “Rally of Freedom,” wrote, “What I witnessed in Nuremberg…is one of the most remarkable events I have ever experienced. It was all so gripping and grandiose that I cannot compare it to anything I experienced before as an artist.”6

  It was in 1933, soon after his appointment as chancellor of Germany, that Hitler began to engineer the institutions for his conquest of German minds through the new Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, run by his loyal lieutenant Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, then just thirty-six years old. Goebbels, if anything, would exceed Hitler in understanding how to capture attention on a mass scale and what to do with it.

  At the core of the Third Reich’s attention project was a relatively simple idea: to scale the enrapturing effects of Hitler’s speeches so as to influence the whole population. Hitler’s speeches were, after all, what had turned a party with just fifty-five members into the Nazi movement and a threat to the entire world. They furnished the effort its spiritual dimension. The technical challenge for the ministry, then, was to project the effects of the rally, which at most reached hundreds of thousands of party loyalists, across the nation of 80 million. Under previous dictatorships, the limits of mass attention had been defined by the size of a physical venue—so that the triumphal parade or mass rally was the outer bound. Using radio and film, however, the ministry saw how such physical limits might be dissolved, making it possible to hold the intimate joint attention of millions.7

  In August 1933, Goebbels gave a speech outlining his priorities. “The radio,” he said, “is the most influential and important intermediary between a spiritual movement and the nation, between the idea and the people.” As such, it had to be the center of the Nazi project: “A government that has determined to bring a nation together so that it is once more a center of power in the scales of great world events has not only the right, but the duty, to subordinate all aspects of the nation to its goals, or at least ensure that they are supportive. That is also true for the radio. The more significant something is in influencing the will of the broad masses, the greater its responsibility to the future of the nation.”8

  That radio could be used this way was not an idea that had originated with Goebbels; over the 1920s and 1930s a number of states had depended on it to promote national unity and inspiration. As in other areas of propaganda, Britain was arguably the pioneer: in the 1920s, the BBC was by far the most advanced state-owned radio system in the world, and by 1924, it would first begin broadcasting speeches by King George V—long before the stammering George VI would have to rally the nation to challenge the Third Reich. Likewise, Lenin’s regime took over Russian radio soon after the communist revolution, and made Radio Moscow the most powerful station on earth in the 1930s, since its main concern was fomenting revolution abroad. As for the United States, where the radio station was invented, the system there was to remain in private hands, used for advertising, with the exception of the occasional fireside chat.

  In 1933 the Third Reich trailed England, and possibly the Soviet Union, but as in so many areas it caught up quickly and outstripped its models, borrowing, in a sense, from both Soviet and Western techniques. Like the Soviets, the German ministry took over every detail of programming, with sole discretion over the content. As chief programmer, Goebbels determined that the right formula for forging the people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft) was not unrelenting speeches but, rather, light musical entertainment punctuated by political material in place of advertising, and the occasional big event—a speech by Hitler or Goebbels, termed a “national moment.” He learned, as the Western attention merchants had learned, that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And in this way, exposure to the central themes of the National Socialist Party became part of the daily diet of nearly every German.

  To the American scholar Max Lerner, writing in 1933, it was obvious how much the ministry had borrowed from America. “The democratic state…evolved a technique of advertising and of high pressure salesmanship, a flamboyant journalism, a radio and a cinema that stamped the same stereotypes on millions of brains…the most damning blow the dictatorships have struck at democracy has been the co
mpliment they have paid us in taking over and perfecting our most prized techniques of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses.” In short, the Third Reich had grasped the lessons of 1910s propaganda and 1920s advertising and put them to its own use.9

  Toward its objective of complete inclusiveness, the ministry introduced, as mentioned, the Volksempfänger, or “people’s receiver.” Easily within the means of the average worker, the radio was marketed extensively; so that by 1942 Germany had increased its radio audience from 4.5 to over 16 million households. The Nazi state matched Britain and America in radio penetration, giving the leadership the sort of intimate access to homes that Amos ’n’ Andy enjoyed.

  There was one feature, however, that had eluded NBC and CBS. Radio can be ignored or turned off; one might even choose to listen to foreign stations. The Propaganda Ministry’s answer to such problems was to outfit a small army called the Funkwarte, the Radio Guard, party loyalists assigned to every neighborhood or apartment block to make sure that the radio was being listened to. As Eugen Hadamovsky, head of broadcasting, wrote, the Radio Guard were the “living bridge” between the party and the nation, who created the “human contact between radio and its listeners” and also, later, reported anyone who dared seek alternative sources of information.

  The German Radio Division saved its greatest efforts for the “national moments,” (Stunden der Nation), like the one at the beginning of this chapter, for which the entire nation suspended activity and the Radio Guard herded all the people into listening rooms. The resemblance to congregating for a religious service was no accident but a conscious mimicry of the “total experience of worship in a church.” It has been debated whether Nazism constituted a “political religion.” Certainly, in keeping with the theory of political religions, it did try to supplant the spiritual authority of the existing churches, Lutheran and, to a lesser degree, Catholic.* One of the prime means of accomplishing this at the popular level was by imposing regular and compulsory shared attention of the sort that religion has always demanded of its adherents.10

  The Nazi regime’s extreme, coercive demands on attention oblige us to consider the relationship between control over one’s attention and human freedom. Take the most elementary type of freedom, the freedom to choose between choices A and B, say, chocolate or vanilla.

  The most direct and obvious way authoritarians abridge freedom is to limit or discourage or ban outright certain options—NO CHOCOLATE, for instance. The State might ban alcohol, for example, as the United States once did and a number of Muslim nations still do; likewise it might outlaw certain political parties or bar certain individuals from seeking office. But such methods are blunt and intrusive, as well as imperfect, which is true of any restriction requiring enforcement. It is therefore more effective for the State to intervene before options are seen to exist. This creates less friction with the State but requires a larger effort: total attention control.

  Freedom might be said to describe not only the size of our “option set” but also our awareness of what options there are. That awareness has two degrees. One is conceptual: if you don’t know about a thing, like chocolate ice cream, you can hardly ask for it, much less feel oppressed by the want of it. The second degree of awareness comes after we know about things conceptually and can begin to contemplate them as real choices. I may be aware that man has gone into space but the idea that I might choose to go there myself, while conceivable, is only a notion until I find out that Virgin Galactic has started scheduling flights.11

  To take a more common recent example: in the 1990s, switching to a Mac from a PC seemed implausible. Then, Apple ran an advertising campaign showing how it might be done, and what the advantages of doing so were. Soon, there were many happy Mac users, and Apple’s market share grew dramatically. When done well, and on behalf of a worthwhile product, advertising can, in this way, advance human freedom, by showing that choices exist and making them seem real. But advertising can also obscure choices, or (as we have seen) present false ones (e.g., “Use this product or suffer the embarrassing consequences”). Nonetheless the advertiser, unless a monopolist, usually remains within the realm of persuasion among a background of choice. True propaganda, by contrast, aims to obliterate that marketplace and the choices as such, by making them seem unthinkable or nonexistent. Only in rare cases is commercial advertising that powerful.

  Stated differently, Hitler was not just selling a choice, but a comprehensive vision of reality. To make such a sale, the message had to be complete, monolithic, without a single crack or weakness. The State, as Hitler put it, must “serve its own truth uninterruptedly,” for “as soon as by one’s own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one’s own right is laid.” Alternative views, like alternative choices, had no place in this scheme, in which the purposes and ideas of the individual are subsumed into that of the whole, in keeping with the Volksgemeinschaft. That this itself can serve as a kind of carrot is often lost amid liberal idealism, which can overestimate how deep our devotion to choice really runs. Choice may be the cornerstone of individual freedom but, as the history of humanity shows, the urge to surrender to something larger and to transcend the self can be just as urgent, if not more so. The greatest propagandists and advertisers have always understood this.

  With total attention control, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry was able to sell a new faith, one vested not in the power of choice but in the glory of something greater and of giving oneself over to it. “There are two ways to make a revolution,” Goebbels wrote in 1933. “One can fire at the opponent with machine guns until he recognizes the superiority of those who have the machine guns. That is the simplest way. One can also transform a nation through a revolution of the spirit, not destroying the opponent, but winning him over.” This he meant not in the sense of winning an argument, but actually displacing individual thought and all its conflicting impulses. As Goebbels put it, “We want to replace liberal thinking with a sense of community that includes the whole people.”12

  The Third Reich’s propaganda was so extreme, its manipulations so blunt and destructive, and its practitioners so vile that it necessarily left a profound impression on the rest of the century, one even greater than the British and American campaigns of the First World War. In the immediate aftermath, it was as if three completely different lessons were drawn, one by the Soviet Union (which controlled East Germany), another by West Germany, and a third by the former Allies, including the United States.

  As mentioned, the Soviets had a State-controlled media before the war, and in some ways the Nazis had learned from it. After the war, the Soviets would repay the compliment: Stalin and the rest of the Politburo concluded that Soviet propaganda needed to operate at a greater scale, for the Germans had shown what it meant to be truly pervasive. Radio broadcasting, which had been used during the war to mobilize the population, was continued and supplemented with television. The Soviets would never fully match the degree of organizational skill of the Nazis, or the spiritual cultivation—such perhaps are the limits of Marx’s materialism. Nonetheless, for decades to come, the State would decide what information would be available at all, as it sought to establish its single and, to a substantial degree, galvanizing truth.

  West Germany, chastened by the disgrace of the Nazi state, went to the opposite extreme. The Allied occupiers rebuilding the shattered nation were determined that it should never come under the same sort of attentional control that had made ascendant Nazism possible. They therefore reconstituted the broadcast infrastructure so as to make it notably ill-suited for government or corporate propaganda. Both radio and television were decentralized, the network broken up into independent, nonprofit regional broadcasters. To preserve its independence, broadcast would be funded by licensing fees paid by every household and institution, including municipalities; the undue influence engendered by financial reliance on commercial advertising (as in the U.S.) or State grants (as
in the U.K.) was thus avoided.

  A similar lesson was drawn in the United States and in other parts of Western Europe but, of course, it could not be implemented as fully in the unvanquished countries, where there wasn’t the luxury to start from scratch. Most of the Western powers did become decidedly averse to any large, State-run propaganda projects, even Great Britain and the United States, the original inventors and innovators. What efforts continued were directed at the Red threat overseas (as with Radio Free Europe) or with matters of unambiguous public interest, like fire prevention (the Smokey Bear ads) or the dangers of drug addiction. Otherwise, even the word “propaganda”—once neutral or positive enough to serve as the title of Edward Bernays’s book on corporate public relations—became an unambiguous pejorative. And it is surely no coincidence that during the same interval, over the 1950s, the American First Amendment first came to life and began to be used as a serious check on government’s power over speech.

  But if official propaganda fell into ignominy, there was no such effect on its commercial cousin, advertising. Indeed government’s discontinuation of wartime media messaging, in a sense, left the field more open for business interests, who, just as they had immediately following the previous world war, filled the vacuum. After the war, commercial broadcasters would enjoy both the powers of centralized control and the perennial lure of advertising revenues.13