Finished reading: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

Like 30 related New Yorker pieces all strung together, this book is mostly a series of easy-to-read, quickly told stories about the rises and falls of various Attention Merchants, whose general M.O. is to draw our attention with apparently free stuff (entertainment, diversion, or even just email) then resell our attention to advertisers, but whose methods and means change as media technologies develop. The fundamental pattern is that a small number of nameable people with huge amounts of economic ambition and power have, for two centuries now, continually offered “grand bargains” to anyone whose attention is up for grabs, and most of us keep accepting their terms, which are typically not great.

And merchandising attention is socially corrosive in the long run.

I’m really on an attention kick this spring, since reading Attensity!, about attention and how it gets hijacked. Dopamine Nation was about the way our nervous systems can tend toward compulsive overconsumption that gets us stuck in ruts. The Attention Merchants paints a broader picture of massive attentional “markets” or contests (economic, political, moral and intellectual) where powerful people are playing to win the public mind via mass attention capture.

This book helped me get an historical perspective that mass production of the industrial revolution NEEDS mass attention capture, because it’s easier and easier to make more and more consumable goods, and the people who make them need consumers… Maintenance of Everything had a helpful outline of the developmental path of mass production, which is the development of precision manufacturing, which went: government guns, private guns, sewing machines, bikes, Ford autos…

Also helpful to be shown that many successful attentional captures have inspired revolutionary reactions. One way to look at the 1960s and early 70s is as an attentional revolution. Leary and Alpert had the “International Federation for Internal Freedom.” Herbert Marcuse suggested the “Great Refusal” might lead to the ultimate freedom of living without anxiety. The counter-cultural vision was that “public mind would attend to non-commercial stuff—nature, spiritual paths, friends, family, lovers… media would maybe be live concerts or public interest programming.” (159) That’s the milieu in which Feldenkrais first came into public prominence at Esalen in 1972, and that’s the same vibe that inspired me in Attensity! And yet, the book also shows that every revolution, so far, has ended up perpetuating the status quo, once a new technology comes along…

The book ends with the point that any economic or political or moral or intellectual contest or “market” actually consists of two: the competition “on the merits,” but PRIOR to that, the contest for attention that determines what options or choices seem available. So the availability of our attention means there is the constant risk that the contest for attention will make the contest on the merits irrelevant…