The Attention Merchants

by Tim Wu

  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 been given to construct our attentional lives is an underappreciated example. Even while waiting for the dentist, we have the world at our finger tips: we can check mail, browse our favorite sites, play games, and watch movies, where once we had to content ourselves with a stack of old magazines. But with the new horizon of possibilities has also come the erosion of private life’s perimeter. And so it is a bit of a paradox that in having so thoroughly individualized our attentional lives we should wind up being less ourselves and more in thrall to our various media and devices. Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and anytime. If there is to be some scheme of zoning to stem this sprawl, it will need to be mostly an act of will on the part of the individual.

  What is called for might be termed a human reclamation project. For comparison, consider the sort of effort undertaken to reclaim some (other) natural resource, as when returning the land under an abandoned parking lot to wilderness. Over the coming century, the most vital human resource in need of conservation and protection is likely to be our own consciousness and mental space. In practice, a movement might begin with individuals making incremental changes, ones as simple as setting aside blocks of time, like the weekend, to be spent beyond the reach of the attention merchants. The first stirrings can be seen in the existing practices of “unplugging” or taking “digital Sabbaths.” The same impulse can lead also to reclaiming more physical sanctuaries, not only the writer’s backyard shed, but the classroom, the office, and the home, as well—any place where we mean to interact with one another or achieve something we know requires a serious level of concentration. In this way, the practice starts paying communal dividends as well as profiting the individual.

  While the goals of reclaiming our time and attention are easy to praise, they can prove surprisingly difficult to achieve. Even for a weekend, it can be painful to resist deeply ingrained habits like checking email, Facebook, and other social media; browsing random news stories, let alone more titillating clickbait; or flopping onto the couch to channel surf for a few hours. The difficulty reflects years of conditioning and the attention merchants’ determination to maximize, by any means possible, the time spent with them. When engrossed in work, reading a book, or playing with children, we may as well be stealing by the attention merchants’ lights. They want—need—us to be constantly poking around for dibs and dabs of their entertainment, to be tuned to commercial breaks in their programming, or to be catching up with friends in a manner that can also serve some branding effort.

  If any practical motivation were needed to work through the discomfort of reclaiming the attention that is one’s own, it is useful to consider the accruing costs of our failure to do so. Whatever our personal goals, the things we’d like to achieve, the goals of the attention merchants are generally at odds with ours. How often have you sat down with a plan, say, to write an email or buy one thing online, only to find yourself, hours later, wondering what happened? 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. The rest of the private sector may well have as much cause for complaint as the individual and society. It would no doubt be shocking to reckon the macroeconomic price of all our time spent with the attention merchants, if only to alert us to the drag on our own productivity quotient, the economist’s measure of all our efforts.

  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 experience 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.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I wish to thank my editor, George Andreou, who brought focus and style to a scattered and awkward draft, and my agent, Tina Bennett, who does her job better than anyone I’ve met, and who intervened at important moments. Columbia Law School deans David Schizer and Gillian Lester provided enormous support for this work, as did my Columbia colleagues. Many of the ideas for this book were worked out in writings for The New Yorker, under Nick Thompson’s editing, and at The New Republic, where James Burnett was my editor. Scott Hemphill and Kathryn Tucker were generous early readers, Philip Bobbitt helped set a tone, and Onil Bhattacharyya provided guidance at the end. Other helpful readers were Derek Slater, Jonathan Knee, Michael Wolff, and James Williams. My extended family also helped steer the book, especially Barbara Burton and Charles Judge, and my mother who helpfully panned the (original) introduction. I also thank audiences at Oxford Internet Institute, Yale Law School, Cleveland-Marshall Law School, the New American foundation, and Columbia Law School, where I presented early drafts. I thank the Columbia Journalism School and Dean Steve Coll as well. Early work also benefited from the Derek Brewer fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge University.

  I am grateful for help researching this book provided by Rebecca Shafer of the New America foundation, Chloe Nevitt of McGill, and at Columbia, Kathleen Farley, Tim Grey, Morgan Petkovich, Janice Lee, Erin Patricia Walsh, Greg Wolfe, Zoe Carpou, Patricia Haynes, Scott Yakaitis, Julia E. Murray, and Stephanie Wu. I am enormously grateful to the research librarians at Columbia Law School who hunted down some particularly obscure materials, especially related to Zenith and telepathy. Thanks also to Brenna McDuffie, Helen Tobin, Dani Toth, and other members of the Knopf publicity team. I am grateful to Jacqueline Gottlieb of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science who along with some of her students helped me better understand the science of attention.

  I am most grateful to my loving wife and partner, Kate—an unfailingly enthusiastic supporter of this book who also put up with an awful lot along the way, including not just the usual obsessions but also a run for public office. And finally, to my dear daughter, Sierra, “without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book might have been finished in half the time.”

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1: THE FIRST ATTENTION MERCHANTS

  1. Sources for the rise of the New York Sun and its rivals include Frank O’Brien, The Story of the Sun, New York, 1833–1918 (New York: George H. Doran, 1918); Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth Century New York (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Other sources on the New York press of the 1830s include John D. Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Lorman A. Ratner and Dwight L. Teeter Jr., Fan
atics and Fire-eaters: Newspapers and the Coming of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

  2. Blair Converse. “The Beginnings of the Penny Press in New York” (MA thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1918); Leo Bogart, “The Business of Newspapers,” in Press and Public: Who Reads What, When, Where, and Why in American Newspapers (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989).

  3. Day imported one more trick from Britain: hiring boys, some as young as five, as well as poor immigrants to hawk his papers in the street, shouting out the headlines, a preindustrial way of gathering attention. Supplied with 100 papers for 67 cents cash (or 75 cents credit), the boys were guaranteed a nice profit if they could sell out their supply.

  4. The theory of a growing “public sphere” in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries belongs to Jürgen Habermas, who premised it on the rise of newspaper reading, coffeehouse discussions, and other places for communications among members of the public. See also Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); and Robert E. Park, “Sociology and the Social Sciences: The Social Organism and the Collective Mind,” American Journal of Sociology 27 (1921).

  5. For more on cognitive models on attention, see Michael I. Posner and Charles R. R. Snyder, “Attention and Cognitive Control,” in Information Processing and Cognition: The Loyola Symposium, ed. R. L. Solso (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1975).

  6. The original text of the story has since been reprinted. See Richard Adams Locke and Joseph Nicolas Nicollet, The Moon Hoax; or, A Discovery That the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings (New York: William Gowens, 1859), 8.

  7. H. Hazel Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity: Culture and Consumption in the Nineteenth Century, 189 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Alexander Cowan and Jill Steward, eds., The City and the Senses: Urban Culture Since 1500 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007), 167–70.

  8. The great William James understood how important is the ability to ignore, when in 1890, he wrote that attention “is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” and that it “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.” William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1890), 403–4.

  9. Guus Pijpers, “Brain Matters,” in Information Overload: A System for Better Managing Everyday Data (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010); E. Bruce Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 4th ed. (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2015).

  10. H. Hazel Hahn, “Street Picturesque: Advertising in Paris, 1830–1914” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1997). See also “A Brief History of the Poster,” International Poster Gallery, accessed November 25, 2015, http://www.internationalposter.com/​about-poster-art/​a-brief-history-of.aspx.

  11. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Minneapolis: Filiquarian Publishing, 2005), 10.

  12. Terry E. O’Reilly and Mike Tennant, The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture (Toronto: Random House of Canada, 2009), 35–40.

  CHAPTER 2: THE ALCHEMIST

  1. Claude C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1917), 202. Though an autobiography, and therefore anecdotal in nature, Hopkins claims that his book was primarily intended to serve not “as a personal history, but as a business story” to coach others in the art of advertising.

  2. For more detailed information about Hopkins, see Stephen R. Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 52.

  3. Drayton Bird, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing (London: Kogan Page, 2007), 336.

  4. Hopkins had first been hired as assistant bookkeeper, eventually becoming head bookkeeper for the Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company. Later, he had come across an inadequate advertising pamphlet for carpet sweepers and requested to re-create it. The company eventually adopted Hopkins’s advertising pamphlet. Subsequently, he focused on ways to increase product demand and recognized that Christmas was fast approaching. For this reason, Hopkins designed a campaign that would advertise the carpet sweepers as “the Queen of Christmas Presents.” For more information, see Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz, The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010); and Robert Schorman, “Claude Hopkins, Earnest Calkins, Bissell Carpet Sweepers and the Birth of Modern Advertising,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2008).

  5. See Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 78, for more information on perspectives of publicity and propaganda during the era.

  6. Phillip Schaff, ed., The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2004).

  7. Paul F. Bradshaw, Early Christian Worship: A Basic Introduction to Ideas and Practice (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 73.

  8. According to a recent Pew study, one fifth of the U.S. public do not affiliate with religion, increasing just over 15 percent from five years prior. The growth of these religiously unaffiliated Americans, known as the “nones,” likely results from generational displacement. For more information, as well as leading theories that attempt to explain the rise of the “nones,” see “ ‘Nones’ on the Rise,” Pew Research Center, last modified October 9, 2012, http://www.pewforum.org/​2012/​10/​09/​nones-on-the-rise/; and “A Closer Look at America’s Rapidly Growing Religious ‘Nones,’ ” Pew Research Center, last modified May 13, 2015, http://www.pewresearch.org/​fact-tank/​2015/​05/​13/​a-closer-look-at-americas-rapidly-growing-religious-nones/.

  9. At Dr. Shoop’s he met and likely worked with a Canadian copywriter named John C. Kennedy. Kennedy would later be remembered as the inventor of something called “reason-why” advertising, though early advertising lore, like early advertising itself, is full of spurious claims. (For his part, Kennedy claimed to be a former Royal Canadian Mountie, though doubts have been raised about the truth of that as well.)

  10. For images of the described advertisements Kickapoo Indian Medicine Co.’s Sagwa and Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil, among other similar medical remedy advertisements from the late 1800s and early 1900s, see “Here Today, Here Tomorrow: Medical Show,” U.S. National Library of Medicine, last modified September 21, 2011, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/​exhibition/​ephemera/​medshow.html.

  11. The full advertisement can be found in the Farmers’ Review, published on January 1, 1902. See “Farmers’ Review, 1 January 1902,” Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections, accessed January 26, 2016, http://idnc.library.illinois.edu/​cgi-bin/​illinois?a=d&d=FFR19020101.2.37.

  12. Dan Hurley, Natural Causes: Death, Lies, and Policies in America’s Herbal Supplement Industry (New York: Broadway Books, 2006), 24. It appears, however, that the original fascination with snake oil followed from the arrival of the Chinese railroad workers in the 1800s, who had brought with them snake oil. The remedy was made from the oil of the Chinese water snake, which was rich in omega-3 acids and reduced inflammation of the joints. Eventually, the remedy would be shared with Americans, but with the lack of Chinese water snakes in the U.S., many wondered how they would be able to create their own version. Ultimately, Clark Stanley touted the healing power of the rattlesnake, without reference to the original Chinese snake oil. For more information on the history of snake oil, see Lakshmi Gandhi, “A History of ‘Snake Oil Salesman,’ ” NPR, August 26, 2013, http://www.npr.org/​sections/​codeswitch/​2013/​08/​26/​215761377/​a-history-of-snake-oil-salesmen.

  13. This Liquozone ad, including a coupon for a free bottle, appeared in many newspapers. For an example, see T.P.’s Weekly 6 (December 1, 1905).

  14. Within a year o
f running the first ad for Liquozone, the company received over 1.5 million requests for a free bottle. While the average cost per request was only 18 cents, the average sale per request was 91 cents.

  15. This claim by Liquozone was later featured in Samuel Hopkins Adams’s article “Liquozone,” part of a series exposing the fraudulent patent medicine industry. Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1906).

  16. Samuel V. Kennedy, Samuel Hopkins Adams and the Business of Writing (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999).

  17. Samuel Hopkins Adams, “Medical Support of Nostrums,” Maryland Medical Journal 49 (1906). Hopkins urged those investigating patent medicine to make sure that their attacks on the industry were careful and supported by the truth, or else they would lose public confidence.

  18. Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud, supra.

  19. In fact, the six guinea pigs inoculated with diphtheria bacilli and treated with Liquozone died within seventy-two hours, whereas two out of three untreated guinea pigs remained alive after receiving the same amount of diphtheria culture.

  20. Theodore Roosevelt, “Applied Ethics in Journalism,” The Outlook, April 15, 1911, 807.

  21. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Notices of Judgment Under the Food and Drugs Act,” N.J. 4944 (1918).

  22. Hopkins gave a speech before the Sphinx Club of New York on January 14, 1909, confessing, “Perhaps you, as I, have longed to be a Jack London. It is a happy position where one may contribute to the amusement of mankind. Such men are known and applauded. They are welcomed and wanted, for they lift the clouds of care. But those who know us, know us only as searchers after others’ dollars.” Stephen R. Fox, The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997).