The Attention Merchants.pdf

ALSO BY TIM WUThe Master SwitchTHIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A.KNOPFCopyright Tim Wu 2016All rights reserved.Published in the United States by Alfred A.Knopf,a division of Penguin RandomHouse LLC,New York,and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada,a division of PenguinRandom House Limited,TKnopf,Borzoi Books,and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames:Wu,Tim,author.Title:The attention merchants:the epic scramble to get inside our heads/Tim Wu.Description:First edition.|New York:Knopf,2016.Identifiers:LCCN 2016010140|ISBN 9780385352017(hardback)|ISBN 9780385352024(ebook)Subjects:LCSH:AdvertisingSocial aspectsHistory.|AdvertisingPsychological aspectsHistory.|MarketingHistory.|Consumer behaviorHistory.|BISAC:BUSINESS&ECONOMICS/Industries/Media&Communications Industries.|HISTORY/Social History.|SOCIAL SCIENCE/Popular Culture.Classification:LCC HF5811.W82 2016|DDC 659.1/042dc23 LC record available athttps:/lccn.loc.gov/2016010140Ebook ISBN9780385352024Cover design by Jon Grayv4.1epContentsCoverAlso by Tim WuTitle PageCopyrightDedicationIntroduction:Heres the DealPart I:Masters of Blazing ModernitiesChapter 1:The First Attention MerchantsChapter 2:The AlchemistChapter 3:For King and CountryChapter 4:Demand Engineering,Scientific Advertising,and WhatWomen WantChapter 5:A Long Lucky RunChapter 6:Not with a Bang but with a WhimperPart II:The Conquest of Time and SpaceChapter 7:The Invention of Prime TimeChapter 8:The PrinceChapter 9:Total Attention Control,or The Madness of CrowdsChapter 10:Peak Attention,American StyleChapter 11:Prelude to an Attentional RevoltChapter 12:The Great RefusalChapter 13:Coda to an Attentional RevolutionPart III:The Third ScreenChapter 14:Email and the Power of the Check-inChapter 15:InvadersChapter 16:AOL Pulls Em InPart IV:The Importance of Being FamousChapter 17:Establishment of the Celebrity-Industrial ComplexChapter 18:The Oprah ModelChapter 19:The PanopticonPart V:Wont Be Fooled AgainChapter 20:The Kingdom of Content:This Is How You Do ItChapter 21:Here Comes EveryoneChapter 22:The Rise of ClickbaitChapter 23:The Place to BeChapter 24:The Importance of Being MicrofamousChapter 25:The Fourth Screen and the Mirror of NarcissusChapter 26:The Web Hits BottomChapter 27:A Retreat and a RevoltChapter 28:Whos Boss Here?Epilogue:The TemenosAcknowledgmentsNotesA Note About the AuthorFor SierraIINTRODUCTIONHERES THE DEALn 2011,the Twin Rivers school district in central California faced a toughsituation.The district,never wealthy,was hit hard by the housing crisis ofthe early 2000s and the state governments own financial meltdown.By the2010s,schools were cutting not only extracurricular activities but even someof the basics,like heat.One day in winter,a student posted a picture of aclassroom thermostat reading 44 degrees Fahrenheit.Such were the circumstances when the Twin Rivers board was approachedby a company named“Education Funding Partners.”EFP offered a tantalizingnew way to help solve the districts financial problems,using what it called“the power of business to transform public education.”Acting as broker,thefirm promised that it could bring the district as much as$500,000 in privatemoney per year.And,EFP stressed,its services would cost nothing.“EFP ispaid solely out of corporate contributions,”the pitch explained,“essentiallyproviding a free service to districts.”To gain this free bounty,the board didnt actually have to do anything.Itneeded only to understand something:that the schools were already holding anasset more lucrative than any bake sale.That asset,simply stated,was theirstudents,who by the very nature of compulsory education were a captiveaudience.If the schools could seize their attention for the purpose ofeducating them,why not sell off a bit of it for the sake of improving theeducational experience?Specifically,EFP was proposing that Twin Riversallow corporate advertising within the schools.Moreover,EFP explained,itwould bundle students from Twin Rivers with those in other school districtsaround the nation so as to appeal to bigger brandsthe Fortune 500companieswith deeper pockets.If EFP was promising the district free money,its pitch to corporateadvertisers was no less seductive:“Open the schoolhouse doors,”it said,promising“authentic access and deep engagement with audiences in theschool environment.”Advertisers have long coveted direct access to theyoung,who are impressionable and easier to influence.Establishing a warmassociation with Coca-Cola or McDonalds at an early age can yield payoffsthat last a lifetimeor,in the lingo,“drive purchase decisions and build brandawareness.”That in essence is what EFP offered its clients:“an unparalleledsystem for engagement in the K12 market”a chance to mold theconsumers of the future.Twin Rivers soon began to see the light.“We need to be innovative aboutthe assets we have and learn how to bring in more revenue,”said aspokeswoman.In other parts of the country,the prospect of opening schoolsto commercial advertising had prompted public debate.Not so in Twin Rivers,where the administrators seemed to regard signing the deal,which they did in2012,as a matter of duty.“In these challenging economic times,”said thechief business officer,“our students are counting on us to find ways to makeour resources stretch further than ever before.”EFP,for its part,promised allmessaging would be“responsible”and“educational.”With that,the schooldoors were thrown open.Twin Rivers is only one of the many school districts in the United Statesmostly in poor or middle-class areasthat have begun to rely on selling accessto their students as an essential revenue source.Some schools plaster adsacross student lockers and hallway floors.One board in Florida cut a deal toput the McDonalds logo on its report cards(good grades qualified you for afree Happy Meal).In recent years,many have installed large screens in theirhallways that pair school announcements with commercials.“Take your schoolto the digital age”is the motto of one screen provider:“everyone benefits.”What is perhaps most shocking about the introduction of advertising intopublic schools is just how uncontroversial and indeed logical it has seemed tothose involved.The deals are seen as a win-win,yielding money that it wouldbe almost irresponsible to refuse.Yet things were not always this way.Therewas once a time when,whether by convention or technological limitation,many parts of lifehome,school,and social interaction among themweresanctuaries,sheltered from advertising and commerce.Over the last century,however,we have come to accept a very different way of being,wherebynearly every bit of our lives is commercially exploited to the extent it can be.As adults,we are hardly ever unreachable;seldom away from a screen ofsome kind;rarely not being solicited or sold to.From this perspective,theschool administrators are merely giving students a lesson in reality,exposingthem to what is,after all,the norm for adults.But where did the norm comefrom?And how normal is it?This book explains how our current state of affairs came to be.It is theconsequence of the dramatic and impressive rise of an industry that barelyexisted a century ago:the Attention Merchants.Since its inception,theattention industry,in its many forms,has asked and gained more and more ofour waking moments,albeit always,in exchange for new conveniences anddiversions,creating a grand bargain that has transformed our lives.In theprocess,as a society and individually,we have accepted a life experience thatis in all of its dimensionseconomic,political,social,any way you can thinkofmediated as never before in human history.And if each bargain inisolation seems a win-win,in their grand totality they have come to exert amore ambiguous though profound influence on how we live.Who exactly are the attention merchants?As an industry,they are relativelynew.Their lineage can be traced to the nineteenth century,when in New YorkCity the first newspapers fully dependent on advertising were created;andParis,where a dazzling new kind of commercial art first seized the eyes of theperson in the street.But the full potential of the business model by whichattention is converted into revenue would not be fully understood until theearly twentieth century,when the power of mass attention was discovered notby any commercial entity but by British war propagandists.The disastrousconsequences of propaganda in two world wars would taint the subsequent useof such methods by government,at least in the West.Industry,however,tooknote of what captive attention could accomplish,and since that time hastreated it as a precious resource,paying ever larger premiums for it.If the attention merchants were once primitive,one-man operations,thegame of harvesting human attention and reselling it to advertisers has becomea major part of our economy.I use the crop metaphor because attention hasbeen widely recognized as a commodity,like wheat,pork bellies,or crude oil.Existing industries have long depended on it to drive sales.And the newindustries of the twentieth century turned it into a form of currency they couldmint.Beginning with radio,each new medium would attain its commercialviability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange forits“free”content.As we shall see,the winning strategy from the beginning has been to seekout time and spaces previously walled off from commercial exploitation,gathering up chunks and then slivers of our un-harvested awareness.Withinliving memory it was thought that families would never tolerate the intrusionof broadcasting in the home.An earlier generation would find it astonishingthat,without payment or even much outcry,our networks of family,friends,and associates have been recruited via social media to help sell us things.Now,however,most of us carry devices on our bodies that constantly find ways tocommercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention.Thus,bit bybit,what was once shocking became normal,until the shape of our livesyielded further and further to the logic of commercebut gradually enoughthat we should now find nothing strange about it.This book shares with my previous one,The Master Switch,the basicobjective of making apparent the influence of economic ambition and poweron how we experience our lives.As in that book,Id like to pose at the outsetthe cynics eternal question:What difference does the rise of the AttentionMerchants make to me?Why should I care?Quite simply because thisindustry,whose very business is the influence of consciousness,can and willradically shape how our lives are lived.It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense ofattentional crisis,at least in the Westone captured by the phrase“homodistractus,”a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsivelychecking his devices.Who has not sat down to read an email,only to end upon a long flight of ad-laden clickbaited fancy,and emerge,shaking his or herhead,wondering where the hours went?While allowing that many of us are perpetually distracted,spend too muchtime on social media or watching television,and consequently consume moreadvertising than could ever serve our own useful purposes,the cynic may stillask:But isnt it simply our choice to live this way?Of course it isit is wewho have voluntarily,or somewhat voluntarily,entered into this grand bargainwith the attentional industry,and we enjoy the benefits.But it is essential thatwe fully understand the deal.Certainly some of our daily attentional bartersfor news,good entertainment,or useful servicesare good deals.But othersare not.The real purpose of this book is less to persuade you one way or theother,but to get you to see the terms plainly,and,seeing them plainly,demandbargains that reflect the life you want to live.For the history also reveals that we are hardly powerless in our dealingswith the attention merchants.Individually,we have the power to ignore,tuneout,and unplug.At certain times over the last century,the industry has askedtoo much and offered too little in return,or even been seen to violate thepublics trust outright.At such moments,the bargain of the attentionmerchants is beset with a certain“disenchantment,”which,if populargrievance is great enough,can sometimes turn into a full-fledged“revolt.”During those revoltsof which there have been several over the last centurythe attention merchants and their partners in the advertising industry havebeen obliged to present a new deal,revise the terms of the arrangement.Wemay,in fact,be living in such a time today,at least in those segments of thepopulation committed to cord-cutting,ad-avoiding,or unplugging.We arecertainly at an appropriate time to think seriously about what it might mean toreclaim our collective consciousness.Ultimately,it is not our nation or culture but the very nature of our livesthat is at stake.For how we spend the brutally limited resource of ourattention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not tothink about.As William James observed,we must reflect that,when we reachthe end of our days,our life experience will equal what we have paid attentionto,whether by choice or default.We are at risk,without quite fully realizingit,of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.The goal of whatfollows is to help us understand more clearly how the deal went down andwhat it means for all of us.PART IMASTERS OF BLAZING MODERNITIESSince the rise of capitalism,it has been known that capturing someones attention couldcause him to part with some money.Even before that,there was paid spectacle,like themodern theater.But as recently as the late nineteenth century,the first real industries ofattention capture were still embryonic,though by then,printed matter like books andbroadsheets had joined live spectacle as mental fodder created for profit.From the 1890s through the 1920s,there arose the first means for harvesting attention ona mass scale and directing it for commercial effect,thanks to what is now familiar to us inmany forms under the name of advertising.At its inception it was as transformative as thecotton gin.For advertising was the conversion engine that,with astonishing efficiency,turned the cash crop of attention into an industrial commodity.As such,attention could benot only used but resold,and this is where our story begins.ICHAPTER 1THE FIRST ATTENTION MERCHANTSn the summer of 1833,with The New York Times and The Wall StreetJournal both decades from their first editions,New York Citys leadingnewspaper was The Morning Courier and New York Enquirer,a four-pagedaily with circulation of just 2,600 in a city of almost 300,000.1 At 6 cents,itwas something of a luxury item,which was just as well,since like several ofits rivals,including The Journal of Commerce,it was aimed at the citysbusiness and political elite.Most New Yorkers,in fact,did not readne