The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  So it took some nerve when Zuckerberg, now calling himself the “Founder, Master and Commander, Enemy of the State,” gathered his code posse to throw together a site named “Thefacebook.” He announced the undertaking with his usual confidence or presumption, depending on your view. “Everyone’s been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard,” Zuckerberg said. “I think it’s kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week.”

  A callow determination to prove himself better than everyone else, combined with a notable whiff of amoral heedlessness: in these traits the young Zuckerberg bore more than a passing similarity to the man he would follow in the race to become Harvard’s most successful dropout, Bill Gates. “He is not a bad guy,” would say a future employee eventually fired by an older Zuckerberg. “Maybe he’s not a good guy, but he’s not a bad guy.” In one respect, however, young Zuckerberg was quite different from the young Gates, who while on a first date at Harvard asked the woman her SAT score.*2 Though hardly a charmer himself, Zuckerberg had a subtle social sense, and was a particularly astute judge of other people’s vulnerabilities and needs. He did a dual concentration in psychology and computer science, later claiming, “I was always interested in how those two things combined.” When people asked if psychology had been a waste of time, Zuckerberg would answer, “Understanding people is not a waste of time.” He had, above all, an intuition, surely refined at Harvard, for what makes something seem socially desirable; and how the dynamics of acceptance and rejection work to create a sense of the cool crowd. Not that Zuckerberg was himself ever cool, exactly, but he understood what makes things seem to be.3

  In business, invention is often said to be overrated as compared with execution. Perhaps the best proof of this idea yet to be offered by the twenty-first century is the success of Facebook, a business with an exceedingly low ratio of invention to success. There is no lightbulb, or telephone, let alone a truly ingenious algorithm in the company’s history. And yet no firm, save Google, has harvested as much attention from the Internet, or commercialized it as effectively. As with Google, that attention would be a by-product of the needs, desires, and efforts of its users. But where Google prevailed by offering the best search, Facebook reached the top thanks to stable code and “network effect”: the phenomenon by which a system of connections grows in value with the number of its users. Zuckerberg understood this from the start.

  In its primitive way, AOL had proven decisively that the surest means of getting people to spend more time with their computers was to promise some kind of social experience. Since the 1980s, the geeks and nerds had embraced the online world as a safe space in which to socialize; AOL’s signal achievement was proving that with a much wider range of social milieus, a great many other types could be lured online as well to visit “cyberspace.”

  As that name suggests, over most of the 1990s, going online still had an element of science fiction or fantasy to it. Unlike our day of always-on Internet, back then one “jacked in” or perhaps passed through the back of the family wardrobe, and under a made-up name entered an entirely different kind of world populated by strangers, one where none of the usual rules applied. “Imagine,” said the cyber-pioneer John Perry Barlow, “discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions…where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato’s cave.”4

  It was pretty cool stuff for the 1990s, intriguing enough to get AOL and the early web its first user base. In retrospect, however, the concept had its limitations. For one thing, once the novelty wore off, online content was circumscribed by the imagination of its users; that makes it sound unlimited, but in practice that wasn’t the case. Anyway, the more serious problem was the trolls. From the early days, they (and their commercial cousins, the spammers) were a persistent and predictable feature of nearly every online environment. And they ruined not a few of them, including AOL.

  The troll abuses the terms of the attention agreement, by violating the decorum of what is meant to be quasi-conversation with outrageous and intemperate comments—expressing opinions not necessarily sincerely held but said for the purpose of provoking an emotional response. Most people aren’t trolls, but it doesn’t take many. One academic study found that trolling “correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism….[of] all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior.”5

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  AOL was an environment guaranteed to attract trolls, given its anonymity and sizable audience. In chat rooms and forums, mischief makers polluted perfectly pleasant interactions with impunity, eventually rendering the whole site noxious in one way or another to all other visitors. This only compounded media reports that AOL was a haven for pedophiles; the charge was mostly, though not entirely, untrue, but it’s not one easy to spin or brush off. (That great scourge of modern reputation, Internet rumor, a force often in league with the trolls, was already showing its speed and puissance.) It was as if the entire thing were designed to vindicate Freud’s view that repression of violent or sexual impulses was necessary to a functioning society. There was far more to the decline than just the trolls, but as AOL shed users to the point of collapse, it left in its wake enormous opportunities for anyone who could offer some kind of online place to express social desires and needs without the troll menace. The fall of online’s once mighty oak gave a series of Internet acorns their chance to grow into something quite different in the same niche. A big, proven horde of online attention was up for grabs.

  When Facebook launched in 2004, it was a hit at Harvard, registering thousands of users immediately; within the first month, half of the campus had joined. But in the bigger picture, Zuckerberg’s brainchild was a late entrant in the “social networking” stakes race. Since as early as 2000, others had been in the running; by 2004 there were platforms focused specifically on finding romance, like SocialNet and Match.com. All of these dating sites, as well as interest connectors and career sites, like Meetup.com and LinkedIn, required real names and real personal information, flushing out the usual hiding places and dark corners of cyberspace.

  Facebook’s clearest antecedent was Friendster, which in 2002 was the first company to crack the social networking nut. Jonathan Abrams, a Canadian living in San Francisco, was founder and designer of the company whose concept Facebook essentially copied. Like the dating sites, Abrams’s idea was inspired by the dissatisfactions with an anonymous cyberspace; his network designed to be “real,” and a troll-free zone: “No fakesters” was the policy. “I wanted to bring that real-life context that you had offline online—so instead of Cyberdude307, I would be Jonathan,” he explained.6

  Rather than drop you in a Hobbesian world of antisocial maniacs, Friendster made you a profile and sought to re-create online your actual social world—the people you really knew, friends, co-workers, family, and the like—while providing one place to deal with all of them. Like so many successful tech companies, it was marketing a form of human augmentation, in this case of social capacities. As Fortune magazine put it in 2003, if rather oddly: “There may be a new kind of Internet emerging—one more about connecting people to people than people to websites.”7

  By 2004, the field was nearly full of Friendster copies, of which Facebook was just one more. Google’s version, for instance, was Orkut, named after the employee who wrote the code in his spare time, Orkut Büyükkökten. There was a flamboyant Southern California–based clone named MySpace, which was somewhat looser, saving a bit of the “anything goes” ethos of AOL. It soon became a popular promotional site for bands and had a million users by the time Facebook launched.

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  Facebook’s rise in the face of this existing competition was something remarkable to behold.
Over the course of 2004, it leapfrogged from campus to campus, landing everywhere with a splash. It arrived with better, more stable software, but that wasn’t the key to its success. Still enrolled at Harvard, Zuckerberg and his team had an on-the-ground feel for the college social environment and its vectors, and thus a deep intuition of what could make his site seem rewarding and essential to his target audience. It didn’t hurt that it was based at Harvard, an object of some fascination on other campuses. The student newspapers welcoming Thefacebook give the best sense of how well it managed to encapsulate what users were looking for—namely, an affirmation of their social significance. As The Stanford Daily exclaimed:

  Classes are being skipped. Work is being ignored. Students are spending hours in front of their computers in utter fascination. Thefacebook.com craze has swept through campus….Modeled after social networking Web sites like Friendster.com, this site provides Stanford students with a network of their peers….A student with just over 100 friends can have a network of over 1,500 people. “I signed up on Tuesday morning and I was immediately addicted,” [a student] said. “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. It’s bonding and flattering at the same time.”8

  “This is absolutely ridiculous,” Duke’s student newspaper quoted a freshman named Tyler Green, gleeful to find himself with so many friends. “I just logged on and approved a bunch of people as my friends, and apparently I’m connected to 170 people. I’ve spent maybe 20 minutes on this in the past 24 hours.” From the beginning, there were critics. “It’s a system designed for people who feel insecure and need to numerically quantify their friends,” huffed one Stanford senior. It would indeed make the accumulation of “friends” another species of competition on already competitive campuses.9

  These early reports touch upon the effect that would always represent Facebook’s apologia pro vita sua: it was bringing people together. In truth, however, what Facebook was offering users was not a fuller and more ordered “social” life but something even more alluring: an augmented representation of themselves. Not as they were, exactly, but at their contrived best, with hundreds of friends (before success became equated with thousands) and others still in queue awaiting “approval.” It is useful to recall what limited functionality the site had when it started tempting thousands of students to spend hours playing with it. There were no messages, no pokes—no forms of social interaction but the invitation to be friends. Apart from stalking others on the network, there was nothing to do there except refine one’s own profile, reconsider one’s photograph, and marvel at one’s own numerically and geographically determined social cachet. The profile was really the attentional bait, the pool into which untold undergraduate Narcissi were staring while they ditched class.

  Of course, all of the networking sites had profiles and friends. What was Facebook doing that Friendster, Google, and MySpace were not? Nothing technical, to be sure; rather, it unmistakably defined itself as the place to be. The key to this was its campus origins. While the others obliged users to find their cohort in the great mass of undifferentiated humanity, Facebook re-created an existing and relatively bounded social reality of colleges, within and among which actual connections already existed. Everyone at Harvard knew at least someone on several of the campuses across which Facebook’s network was proliferating. The original university facebook goal of facilitating socialization was thus served by this thing that was student made, a fact that only lent it more social credibility. So Facebook was actually providing not something new but an enhanced representation of an existing social reality. The networks, so-called, were there already: Facebook simply made them visible, graphically manifest, and easier to keep track of.

  Many have theorized that this difference was only significant insofar as it pertained to the potential for hooking up; that Facebook’s success came from revealing the universe of people it might be practical to sleep with. Was that the case? It’s complicated. There can be no doubt that Facebook gained in its early days owing to potential for erotic encounter, particularly at a moment when volume was prized over quality of connection by many users. No student newspaper failed to mention dates arranged on the site; yet Facebook was always coy on this point, maintaining a plausible deniability, and never marketed itself as a dating site. Rather, it replicated the ambiguity of college life itself, with its collisions more like Brownian motion than traditional romantic pursuit. Everyone knew that joining a certain club or even attending college would eventually lead to opportunities; making it too explicit would only ruin the effect.

  In the long run Facebook’s indeterminacy would prove strategically shrewd, as other sites demonstrated the limitations of being defined by sex or romance. With its paying customers looking for love, Match.com would make some money but never approach Facebook financially, despite a head start. The social bonds created by dating are inherently more fragile, and of course only some fraction of the population is actively seeking a lover at any time. The older and more enduring links of friendships, family, classmates, and co-workers would turn out to be pretty important as well, without excluding the possibility of friendship with benefits, of course. A decade later, in fact, Facebook’s lure would be more sentimental than sexual, its necessity having less to do with hooking up than keeping up: the need to see what old friends or family were up to without the burden of talking to them. And in this way, the image of a social reality would more and more become the reality itself, with less connection “in real life” and more online.

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  The danger of being cast as a dating site wasn’t the only bullet Facebook dodged in its early history. Original Facebook was also attractive by dint of its lack of advertisements—there were almost none, or so few that no one noticed them. From Google, Zuckerberg and company had learned both the promise and peril of ads, as well as the existential importance of doing them right. On the one hand, Facebook knew perfectly well from the outset that in advertising lay its eventual big payday—for the founders the ultimate point of aggregating so much attention in the first place. The earliest pitches to advertisers in 2004 touted the platform’s “addicted” users and the potential of nanotargeting consumers at a level of specificity only dreamed of by PRIZM’s designers, using age, gender, stated interests, and—when the “like” button was first activated in 2009—all manner of preferences. Amazingly, it was information that users were all handing over for free, because, well, everyone else was, too. The power of networks. The madness of crowds.

  Zuckerberg, like Google’s founders, understood advertising’s potential to degrade his product; he had the technologist’s wariness of advertising and its tendency to ruin websites. As with Larry Page, so with Mark Zuckerberg, the Holy Grail was advertising that people actually wanted to see; Facebook figured that nanotargeting could make that happen. Until then, Zuckerberg would remain manifestly averse to anything that might interrupt the experience of his users. When, early on, Sprite offered $1 million to turn the site green for a day, he didn’t even consider it. As he once put it: “I don’t hate all advertising. I just hate advertising that stinks.”10

  Such an attitude was another competitive advantage, for MySpace, Facebook’s main competitor, had no such scruples. Its managers or its owners, the News Corporation, jammed the site with paid content. In its desperate desire to gain as many users as fast as possible—doubtless seeing this as the key to the social chase—MySpace was very casual about verifying user identities—the fatal flaw of AOL. MySpace also let users customize their pages using their own HTML code, while Facebook kept everyone on the same basic blue and forced them to come up with better content. Consequently the MySpace site was a mess of flashing ads and pseudonymous members, who were invariably scantily clad women (or at least claiming to be). It all began to look and feel a lot like Times Square circa 1977: squalid and a little dangerous.

  Friendster, in a way, had the po
tential to be the more formidable competitor. It had buzz, many of the right ideas, and had even begun making inroads into college campuses, but it was technically unprepared for its own success. Zuckerberg and his friends had hired better programmers than Friendster could ever find. As Friendster gained millions of users, its software collapsed under their weight, and was rarely if ever working again. As the founder Abrams admitted in a 2014 interview, “Fundamentally, people could barely log into the website for two years.”11

  In what was at the time a shocking collapse, MySpace and Friendster emptied like a bar at last call, and it was as if the Internet migrated en masse to Facebook. The social media critic danah boyd described it as a form of “White Flight.”12*3 As The Huffington Post wrote, by 2008 “MySpace lost over forty million unique visitors per month, lost both co-founders, laid off the vast majority of its staff and more generally, has diminished to a cluttered afterthought of the power it once was.”13

  The credible claim to being a social necessity was, in retrospect, the most important thing that Facebook achieved; its rivals would never come close to matching it. As Zuckerberg said in 2009, “Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They’re keeping up with their friends and family, but they’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They’re connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It’s almost a disadvantage if you’re not on it now.” It was not merely a matter of utility but a different way of being in the world that Facebook was able to offer and also to cultivate. The idea of the self as brand did not originate with Zuckerberg, but would certainly gain currency with the Facebook generation, who would be known for not remaining in one job too long and for thinking of themselves and their experience unironically as products to be marketed, professionally and even socially. As celebrities had become, the ordinary individual was now more of a business proposition.14