The Attention Merchants
Tim Wu · 2016
"Wu traces how, from the first penny press to Instagram, the business of capturing and reselling human attention has grown into the dominant engine of media — and how every attention boom triggers a backlash that resets expectations about what should be free from capture."
Wu opens with 1833: Benjamin Day launches the New York Sun at a penny while rivals charge six cents, and recoups the loss by selling readers' attention to advertisers. The reader stopped being the customer and became the product.
Each medium discovers an attention surplus — blank pages, idle commutes, waiting rooms — and industrializes its harvest: radio into programming, television into seasons, the feed into infinite scroll. The cycle is boom (capture), saturation (resentment), and reform (ad blockers, subscription, regulation). Wu's usable move reframes product design: are you building a tool the user hires for a job, or an attention trap the user must resist to use?
What recurring cycle does Wu's history of attention merchants describe?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- The Attention Merchants & the attention economy (Tim Wu, 2016)Tim Wu / Wikipedia
Amusing Ourselves to Death
"Postman argued television doesn't just carry trivial content, it makes serious content trivial by forcing it into an entertainment form — so the danger is not that we are fooled, but that we are delighted into not wanting to know."