Tim Wu is an expert on concentrations of power. An author, activist and lawyer, he is most famous for coining the phrase “net neutrality” – the idea that the oligopoly that owns our internet infrastructure shouldn’t charge differently for different kinds of data. In his new book, he targets another kind of corporate domination: the industry that monopolises our attention.
According to Wu, this industry emerged from the first world war. In 1914 Germany could mobilise 4.5 million men; the best Britain could do was 700,000. To build a bigger army, the British government embarked on the first systematic propaganda campaign in history. It printed 50 million big, colourful recruitment posters and plastered them on shops, houses, buses and trams throughout the country. It staged rallies and parades. It filled vans with film projectors and screened patriotic films in towns across Britain. And it worked: stirred by this unprecedented experiment in state-sponsored persuasion, millions of young men marched off to gruesome, pointless deaths in a gruesome, pointless war.
Wu identifies this moment as a major turning point in what he calls the “industrialisation of human attention capture”. The overwhelming success of the British propaganda effort proved “the power of mass attention”, he writes, and taught corporations everywhere a valuable lesson. If governments could convince their citizens to choke to death on poison gas in a foreign country, surely the private sector could apply the same techniques to persuade people to buy things. Thus the modern advertising industry was born.
Like many lucrative industries then and since, advertising took a publicly financed innovation and repurposed it for profit. Over the course of the 1920s, a powerful class of commercial propagandists emerged, particularly in the US. In addition to enriching themselves and their corporate clients, these “attention merchants” performed a critical economic function. Many decades of rapid industrial expansion in the capitalist west had produced an excess of productive capacity. One way to deal with this problem had been to conquer parts of Asia and Africa and make new markets by force – imperialism. Another was to boost demand at home, by creating new desires for consumer goods and allowing wage levels to rise to the point where people could act on them. The first involved literal colonisation; the latter, the colonisation of everyday life.
Wu’s book tells the story of this conquest, recording the extraordinarily successful attempts by advertisers to occupy more and more of our attention over the past 100 years. It is less a history of advertising than of how this enclosure happened: the technologies, platforms and formats that have made it possible for media to penetrate an ever-growing portion of our waking lives.
Wu is no technological determinist. While he acknowledges that the invention of radio, television and the internet created enormous new potential for attention capture, he’s careful to point out that there was nothing inevitable about that potential being fulfilled. Just because new tools made it easier to reach more people didn’t guarantee people would pay attention. To use Wu’s metaphor, companies had to cultivate attention before they could harvest it.
Sometimes this involved creating an entirely new cultural form, such as the radio serial or reality TV. Sometimes it involved improving an existing one, like Oprah’s elevation of the tabloid talkshow format into respectable middlebrow fare. Wu’s book crams many case studies into its pages, but the basic recipe remains remarkably consistent over the years. Companies come up with new ways to get our attention, and then sell that attention to other companies. And as mass media mediates more of our time – as the average American’s media consumption goes from an hour spent huddled around the family radio to endless hours on Google or Twitter or Facebook – the amount of attention available for resale grows.
Occasionally, however, people revolt. In the 1930s, a rising consumer movement forced the US federal government to start policing ads for factual inaccuracies. In the 1950s, the invention of the remote control gave television watchers the power to press mute – thus “arming a new popular resistance against the industrialised harvest of attention”, Wu writes. Yet these small rebellions did little to halt advertising’s ascent. If anything, they probably accelerated it. One of the most interesting observations from Wu’s history is that advertising adapts to resistance extremely well. Like a mutant strain of bacteria that nurses on antibiotics to become invincible, advertising uses its enemies to grow stronger – not only by co-opting any and all countercultures, from hippiedom to punk rock to hip-hop, but by recruiting its greatest haters into its ranks.
As Wu observes, both Google and Facebook were founded by engineers who despised online ads. So they created better ones: ads that slip more easily into your field of view and speak more specifically to your searches and likes and clicks. They ended up with the world’s most sophisticated machinery for converting attention into cash, the basis of a business model that makes Madison Avenue at the height of the Don Draper era look poor and unimaginative by comparison.
Wu’s book isn’t just a history. It’s a polemic. The reason we need to understand where the attention industry comes from, he believes, is because it poses a mortal threat to human happiness and flourishing. It does this by inhibiting good attention, and encouraging bad attention. Good attention is “deep, long-lasting and voluntary” – the kind we get from reading a book. Bad attention is “quick, superficial and often involuntarily provoked” – the kind we get from checking our Twitter mentions. Good attention is the spiritual space needed for self-realisation. Bad attention makes us stupider, more susceptible to advertising and “less ourselves”.
This is an ancient complaint, and a rather silly one. Every media innovation since the invention of writing has triggered a moral panic about whether the human experience would be hopelessly corrupted as a result. Socrates agonised about wax tablets; the monks of the late middle ages railed against the printing press. In Wu’s case, however, the impulse is particularly unfortunate because it derails his discussion of the subject where he has the most expertise: the internet.
There are few people more qualified than him to perform a nuanced analysis of online attention capture. Instead, he devotes the last 50 pages of his book to denouncing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and BuzzFeed for destroying the internet. In their hunger for advertising revenue, Wu declares, these companies have degraded the digital sphere into a “cesspool” of selfies, images of celebrities, listicles – anything that might cultivate clicks by catering to the “very basest human impulses of voyeurism and titillation”.
There’s no doubt Silicon Valley’s appetite for attention has debased public discourse. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory, many commentators have blamed Facebook for spreading fake news stories that played a role in the result. And even the most cursory user of social media knows that Nazis love Twitter. Under the cynical pretext of “free speech”, the tech giants have long since decided that capital accumulation trumps any civic or ethical considerations. After all, Nazi eyeballs pay just as well as non-Nazi ones.
Yet even amid post-election pessimism, this characterisation feels far too harsh. Wu sees contemporary digital life as wholly, irredeemably corrupt. As a result, it’s nearly impossible to recognise the actual internet in his cartoonish portrait. Absent is Twitter’s contribution to political organising, for instance, or BuzzFeed’s valuable reporting on sexual assault. These oversights would be more forgivable coming from someone with less expertise, or a smaller soapbox. But Wu enjoys a reputation as one of the US’s foremost thinkers on technology, and his opinions influence people. When he condemns the contemporary internet as an exercise in mass idiocy, he risks doing real damage to public debate.
His outlook also forecloses the possibility of forming an adequate political response. Wu is right to sound the alarm about advertising’s total takeover of our “attentional environment”. Corporate domination of the internet is an urgent political problem, as the US election has starkly demonstrated. But when it comes to potential solutions, Wu’s moralism leads him to a dead end. Our best hope, he believes, is a personal improvement project: he asks us to spend less time on the internet, and more time doing things that demand a “serious level of concentration”. This will empower us to “make our attention our own again”, he says, “and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living”.
Even if you accept the dubious premise that our wholeness as human beings depends on whether we read books or BuzzFeed, this proposal is incapable of producing actual change. The attention industry can easily absorb individual gestures of defiance. A stronger approach requires collective solutions. As Wu points out, the attention merchants of Silicon Valley earn billions of dollars a year from our data. By posting, searching and liking, we perform the free labour that powers one of the most profitable sectors of the economy. It’s not unreasonable to expect that our contributions should entitle us to a say over how these platforms are governed – including how and when they sell our attention to advertisers. This means democratising the digital sphere, not abandoning it.
• The Attention Merchants: From the Daily Newspaper to Social Media, How Our Time and Attention Is Harvested and Sold is published by Atlantic. To order a copy for £16.40 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
