From Tim Wu, writer of the award-profitable The Master Switch ( a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the time period “internet neutrality”—a revelatory, formidable and pressing account of how the seize and re-sale of human consideration turned the defining business of our time.
Feeling consideration challenged? Even assaulted? American enterprise is determined by it. In almost each second of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, promoting enticements, branding, sponsored social media, and different efforts to reap our consideration. Few moments or areas of our day stay uncultivated by the “consideration retailers,” contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our occasions. Tim Wu argues that this situation is just not merely the byproduct of current technological improvements however the results of greater than a century’s progress and enlargement within the industries that feed on human consideration. From the pre-Madison Avenue delivery of promoting to the explosion of the cellular net; from AOL and the invention of e mail to the eye monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to movie star energy manufacturers like Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, the essential enterprise mannequin of “consideration retailers” has by no means modified: free diversion in trade for a second of your consideration, bought in flip to the very best-bidding advertiser. Wu describes the revolts which have risen towards the relentless siege of our consciousness, from the distant management to the creation of public broadcasting to Apple’s advert-blocking OS. But he makes clear that focus retailers are all the time rising new heads, whilst their technique of getting inside our heads are altering our very nature–cognitive, social, political and in any other case–in methods unimaginable even a era in the past.
“A startling and sweeping examination of the more and more ubiquitous business effort to seize and commodify our consideration…We’ve turn into the shoppers, the producers, and the content material. We are promoting ourselves to ourselves.”
—Tom Vanderbilt, The New Republic
“An erudite, energizing, outraging, humorous and thorough historical past…A devastating critique of advert tech because it stands immediately, reworking “do not be evil” into the surveillance enterprise mannequin in just some brief years. It connects the dots between the sale of promoting stock in faculties to the weird ecosystem of trackers, analyzers and machine-studying fashions that permit the belongings you take a look at on the internet to look again at you…This stuff is my every day beat, and I discovered so much from Attention Merchants.”
—Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
“Illuminating.”
—Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review of Books
From the Hardcover version.
