The Attention Merchants E-Book

Tim Wu

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 770

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the 'attention merchants', contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to TV's golden age to our present age of radically individualized choices, the business model of 'attention merchants' has always been the same. He describes the revolts that have risen against these relentless attempts to influence our consumption, from the remote control to FDA regulations to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants grow ever-new heads, and their means of harvesting our attention have given rise to the defining industries of our time, changing our nature - cognitive, social, and otherwise - in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.

Leseprobe

Praise for Tim Wu’s

THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS

“Wu is much better than most, partly because he is a sceptic, but mainly because he has narrative flair and an eye for the most telling examples.”

—The Sunday Times

“Comprehensive and conscientious, readers are bound to stumble on ideas and episodes of media history that they knew little about. [Wu] writes with elegance and clarity, giving readers the pleasing sensation of walking into a stupendously well-organized closet.”

—The New York Times

“[A] startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention. . . . We’ve become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves.”

—The New Republic

“The book is studded with sharp illustrations of those who have tried to stop the encroachment of advertising on our lives, and usually failed. . . . Wu dramatizes this push and pull to great effect.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“An engaging history of the attention economy. . . . [Wu] wants to show us how our current conditions arose.”

—The Washington Post

“[Wu] could hardly have chosen a better time to publish a history of attention-grabbing. . . . He traces a sustained march of marketers further into our lives.”

—Financial Times

“Engaging and informative. . . . [Wu’s] account . . . is a must-read.”

—The Washington Times

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tim Wu is an author, policy advocate, and professor at Columbia University. He has been variously named as one of the leaders in science and technology, one of Harvard’s 100 most influential graduates and America’s 100 Most Influential Lawyers, and in 2014 and 2015 he was named to the ‘Politico 50.’ He formerly wrote for Slate, winning the Lowell Thomas Gold medal for Travel Journalism, and is a contributing writer for the New Yorker. In 2015, he was appointed to the Executive Staff of the Office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

www.timwu.org

ALSO BY TIM WU

The Master Switch

First published in 2016 in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Limited, Toronto.

First published in Great Britain in hardback and e-book in 2017 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2017 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © Tim Wu, 2016, 2017

The moral right of Tim Wu to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 485 3

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 484 6

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Sierra

______________________

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

—WILLIAM JAMES

I tremble for the sanity of a society that talks, on the level of abstract principle, of the precious integrity of the individual mind, and all the while, on the level of concrete fact, forces the individual mind to spend a good part of every day under bombardment with whatever some crowd of promoters want to throw at it.

—CHARLES L. BLACK, JR.

Learning how to think . . . means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

—DAVID FOSTER WALLACE

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION Here’s the Deal

PART I MASTERS OF BLAZING MODERNITIES

  CHAPTER 1 The First Attention Merchants

  CHAPTER 2 The Alchemist

  CHAPTER 3 For King and Country

  CHAPTER 4 Demand Engineering, Scientific Advertising, and What Women Want

  CHAPTER 5 A Long Lucky Run

  CHAPTER 6 Not with a Bang but with a Whimper

PART II THE CONQUEST OF TIME AND SPACE

  CHAPTER 7 The Invention of Prime Time

  CHAPTER 8 The Prince

  CHAPTER 9 Total Attention Control, or The Madness of Crowds

CHAPTER 10 Peak Attention, American Style

CHAPTER 11 Prelude to an Attentional Revolt

CHAPTER 12 The Great Refusal

CHAPTER 13 Coda to an Attentional Revolution

PART III THE THIRD SCREEN

CHAPTER 14 Email and the Power of the Check-in

CHAPTER 15 Invaders

CHAPTER 16 AOL Pulls ’Em In

PART IV THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING FAMOUS

CHAPTER 17 Establishment of the Celebrity-Industrial Complex

CHAPTER 18 The Oprah Model

CHAPTER 19 The Panopticon

PART V WON’T BE FOOLED AGAIN

CHAPTER 20 The Kingdom of Content: This Is How You Do It

CHAPTER 21 Here Comes Everyone

CHAPTER 22 The Rise of Clickbait

CHAPTER 23 The Place to Be

CHAPTER 24 The Importance of Being Microfamous

CHAPTER 25 The Fourth Screen and the Mirror of Narcissus

CHAPTER 26 The Web Hits Bottom

CHAPTER 27 A Retreat and a Revolt

CHAPTER 28 Who’s Boss Here?

CHAPTER 29 An Absorbing Spectacle: The Attention Merchant Turned President

EPILOGUE             The Human Reclamation Project

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

THE ATTENTION MERCHANTS

INTRODUCTION__________________

HERE’S THE DEAL

In 2011, the Twin Rivers school district in central California faced a tough situation. The district, never wealthy, was hit hard by the housing crisis of the early 2000s and the state government’s own financial meltdown. By the 2010s, schools were cutting not only extracurricular activities but even some of the basics, like heat. One day in winter, a stu dent posted a picture of a classroom thermostat reading 44 degrees Fahrenheit.

Such were the circumstances when the Twin Rivers board was approached by a company named “Education Funding Partners.” EFP offered a tantalizing new way to help solve the district’s financial problems, using what it called “the power of business to transform public education.” Acting as broker, the firm promised that it could bring the district as much as $500,000 in private money per year. And, EFP stressed, its services would cost nothing. “EFP is paid solely out of corporate contributions,” the pitch explained, “essentially providing a free service to districts.”

To gain this free bounty, the board didn’t actually have to do anything. It needed only to understand something: that the schools were already holding an asset more lucrative than any bake sale. That asset, simply stated, was their students, who by the very nature of compulsory education were a captive audience. If the schools could seize their attention for the purpose of educating them, why not sell off a bit of it for the sake of improving the educational experience? Specifically, EFP was proposing that Twin Rivers allow corporate advertising within the schools. Moreover, EFP explained, it would bundle students from Twin Rivers with those in other school districts around the nation so as to appeal to bigger brands—the Fortune 500 companies—with deeper pockets.

If EFP was promising the district free money, its pitch to corporate advertisers was no less seductive: “Open the schoolhouse doors,” it said, promising “authentic access and deep engagement with audiences in the school environment.” Advertisers have long coveted direct access to the young, who are impressionable and easier to influence. Establishing a warm association with Coca-Cola or McDonald’s at an early age can yield payoffs that last a lifetime—or, in the lingo, “drive purchase decisions and build brand awareness.” That in essence is what EFP offered its clients: “an unparalleled system for engagement in the K–12 market”—a chance to mold the consumers of the future.

Twin Rivers soon began to see the light. “We need to be innovative about the assets we have and learn how to bring in more revenue,” said a spokeswoman. In other parts of the country, the prospect of opening schools to commercial advertising had prompted public debate. Not so in Twin Rivers, where the administrators seemed to regard signing the deal, which they did in 2012, as a matter of duty. “In these challenging economic times,” said the chief business officer, “our students are counting on us to find ways to make our resources stretch further than ever before.” EFP, for its part, promised all messaging would be “responsible” and “educational.” With that, the school doors were thrown open.

Twin Rivers is only one of the many school districts in the United States—mostly in poor or middle-class areas—that have begun to rely on selling access to their students as an essential revenue source. Some schools plaster ads across student lockers and hallway floors. One board in Florida cut a deal to put the McDonald’s logo on its report cards (good grades qualified you for a free Happy Meal). In recent years, many have installed large screens in their hallways that pair school announcements with commercials. “Take your school to the digital age” is the motto of one screen provider: “everyone benefits.”

What is perhaps most shocking about the introduction of advertising into public schools is just how uncontroversial and indeed logical it has seemed to those involved. The deals are seen as a win-win, yielding money that it would be almost irresponsible to refuse. Yet things were not always this way. There was once a time when, whether by convention or technological limitation, many parts of life—home, school, and social interaction among them—were sanctuaries, sheltered from advertising and commerce. Over the last century, however, we have come to accept a very different way of being, whereby nearly 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 of some kind; rarely not being solicited or sold to. From this perspective, the school administrators are merely giving students a lesson in reality, exposing them to what is, after all, the norm for adults. But where did the norm come from? And how normal is it?

This book explains how our current state of affairs came to be. It is the consequence of the dramatic and impressive rise of an industry that barely existed a century ago: the Attention Merchants. Since its inception, the attention industry, in its many forms, has asked and gained more and more of our waking moments, albeit always, in exchange for new conveniences and diversions, creating a grand bargain that has transformed our lives. In the process, as a society and individually, we have accepted a life experience that is in all of its dimensions—economic, political, social, any way you can think of—mediated as never before in human history. And if each bargain in isolation seems a win-win, in their grand totality they have come to exert a more ambiguous though profound influence on how we live.

Who exactly are the attention merchants? As an industry, they are relatively new. Their lineage can be traced to the nineteenth century, when in New York City the first newspapers fully dependent on advertising were created; and Paris, where a dazzling new kind of commercial art first seized the eyes of the person in the street. But the full potential of the business model by which attention is converted into revenue would not be fully understood until the early twentieth century, when the power of mass attention was discovered not by any commercial entity but by British war propagandists. The disastrous consequences of propaganda in two world wars would taint the subsequent use of such methods by government, at least in the West. Industry, however, took note of what captive attention could accomplish, and since that time has treated it as a precious resource, paying ever larger premiums for it.

If the attention merchants were once primitive, one-man operations, the game of harvesting human attention and reselling it to advertisers has become a major part of our economy. I use the crop metaphor because attention has been widely recognized as a commodity, like wheat, pork bellies, or crude oil. Existing industries have long depended on it to drive sales. And the new industries of the twentieth century turned it into a form of currency they could mint. Beginning with radio, each new medium would attain its commercial viability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange for its “free” content.

As we shall see, the winning strategy from the beginning has been to seek out time and spaces previously walled off from commercial exploitation, gathering up chunks and then slivers of our un-harvested awareness. Within living memory it was thought that families would never tolerate the intrusion of broadcasting in the home. An earlier generation would find it astonishing that, 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 to commercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention. Thus, bit by bit, what was once shocking became normal, until the shape of our lives yielded further and further to the logic of commerce—but gradually enough that we should now find nothing strange about it.

This book shares with my previous one, The Master Switch, the basic objective of making apparent the influence of economic ambition and power on how we experience our lives. As in that book, I’d like to pose at the outset the cynic’s eternal question: What difference does the rise of the Attention Merchants make to me? Why should I care? Quite simply because this industry, whose very business is the influence of consciousness, can and will radically shape how our lives are lived.

It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the West—one captured by the phrase “homo distractus,” a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices. Who has not sat down to read an email, only to end up on a long flight of ad-laden clickbaited fancy, and emerge, shaking his or her head, wondering where the hours went?

While allowing that many of us are perpetually distracted, spend too much time on social media or watching television, and consequently consume more advertising than could ever serve our own useful purposes, the cynic may still ask: But isn’t it simply our choice to live this way? Of course it is—it is we who have voluntarily, or somewhat voluntarily, entered into this grand bargain with the attentional industry, and we enjoy the benefits. But it is essential that we fully understand the deal. Certainly some of our daily attentional barters—for news, good entertainment, or useful services—are good deals. But others are not. The real purpose of this book is less to persuade you one way or the other, but to get you to see the terms plainly, and, seeing them plainly, demand bargains that reflect the life you want to live.

For the history also reveals that we are hardly powerless in our dealings with the attention merchants. Individually, we have the power to ignore, tune out, and unplug. At certain times over the last century, the industry has asked too much and offered too little in return, or even been seen to violate the public’s trust outright. At such moments, the bargain of the attention merchants is beset with a certain “disenchantment,” which, if popular grievance is great enough, can sometimes turn into a full-fledged “revolt.” During those revolts—of which there have been several over the last century—the attention merchants and their partners in the advertising industry have been obliged to present a new deal, revise the terms of the arrangement. We may, in fact, be living in such a time today, at least in those segments of the population committed to cord-cutting, ad-avoiding, or unplugging. We are certainly at an appropriate time to think seriously about what it might mean to reclaim our collective consciousness.

Ultimately, it is not our nation or culture but the very nature of our lives that is at stake. For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. The goal of what follows is to help us understand more clearly how the deal went down and what it means for all of us.

PART I__________________

MASTERS OF BLAZING MODERNITIES

Since the rise of capitalism, it has been known that capturing someone’s attention could cause him to part with some money. Even before that, there was paid spectacle, like the modern theater. But as recently as the late nineteenth century, the first real industries of attention capture were still embryonic, though by then, printed matter like books and broadsheets had joined live spectacle as mental fodder created for profit.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, there arose the first means for harvesting attention on a mass scale and directing it for commercial effect, thanks to what is now familiar to us in many forms under the name of advertising. At its inception it was as transformative as the cotton 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 be not only used but resold, and this is where our story begins.

CHAPTER 1__________________

THE FIRST ATTENTION MERCHANTS

In the summer of 1833, with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal both decades from their first editions, New York City’s leading newspaper was The Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, a fourpage daily with circulation of just 2,600 in a city of almost 300,000.1 At 6 cents, it was something of a luxury item, which was just as well, since like several of its rivals, including The Journal of Commerce, it was aimed at the city’s business and political elite. Most New Yorkers, in fact, did not read newspapers at all; “they went their way, if not entirely unaware of their presence, at least untouched by their influence,” as one historian put it. “There was little or nothing about these papers to attract the average reader.”2

In this sluggish market a young man named Benjamin Day thought he spied an opportunity. A print shop proprietor who had once worked at a newspaper, the twenty-three-year-old Day decided he’d try publishing a paper of his own. The venture was risky, for his motives were different from those of many other newspapermen of his time. Day did not have a particular political agenda, nor was he a rich man subsidizing a vanity press for the presentation of his views. As one might gather from a painting of him scowling in a tall stovepipe hat, Day saw himself as a businessman, not a journalist. “He needed a newspaper not to reform, not to arouse, but to push the printing business of Benjamin H. Day.”

Day’s idea was to try selling a paper for a penny—the going price for many everyday items, like soap or brushes. At that price, he felt sure he could capture a much larger audience than his 6-cent rivals. But what made the prospect risky, potentially even suicidal, was that Day would then be selling his paper at a loss. What Day was contemplating was a break with the traditional strategy for making profit: selling at a price higher than the cost of production. He would instead rely on a different but historically significant business model: reselling the attention of his audience, or advertising. What Day understood—more firmly, more clearly than anyone before him—was that while his readers may have thought themselves his customers, they were in fact his product.

It wasn’t, of course, as if newspapers had never tried advertising as a revenue source. Since the first dailies in the early eighteenth century, there had been forms of advertising or paid notices. But the line between news and advertising could be blurry, and so it’s hard to identify the first true advertisement. (In 1871, The New York Times would assign the distinction—in English at least—to a publication announcement of the heroic poem “Irenodia Gratulatoria” in 1652.) Indeed, the earliest newspapers “treated advertising as a form of news . . . presumably because it was considered interesting to readers.” Unlike the persuasive, rhetorical advertisements to come, early ads were purely informational. Most were what we’d call classifieds—lost items, things for sale, job openings, and private notices of various kinds.

Day’s idea was not to offer such a notice board but rather to sell his readers’ attention en bloc to more substantial advertisers. But for such undifferentiated attention to be valuable to anyone, he would have to amass a giant readership. That would mean making the New York Sun alluring to the broadest segment of society—by any means necessary.

The New York Sun first appeared on September 3, 1833: all text and in smaller format than the broadsheets, to save on costs. Day did it all—he was “proprietor, publisher, editor, chief pressman, and mailing clerk.” For the paper’s first issue, he took the unusual step of filling it with advertisements from businesses he had never solicited. You might say that he ran advertisements, in effect, to try and find advertisers. Such could also be understood from his statement on the front page: “The object of this paper,” he wrote, “is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for advertising.” His plan for delivering on the promise of such a broad readership was to feature stories from which no one could look away.

“MELANCHOLY SUICIDE—a Mr. Fred A. Hall . . . put an end to his life on Sunday last by taking laudanum,” read the first headline in the very first issue. Young Mr. Hall, the story revealed, was about to be shipped off to Indonesia by his father to end a romance. Unable to bear the separation, he took his life. “He was about twenty-four years of age, of engaging manners and amiable disposition, and one whose loss, even under less affecting circumstances, would have been deeply lamented.”

The first issue of the Sun told also the story of William Scott and Charlotte Grey. Scott was jailed for assaulting Grey, his female companion. Brought before the magistrate, Scott was offered release on one condition: that he promise to marry Grey, the injured party. “Mr. Scott cast a sheep’s eye towards the girl, and then looking out of the window, gave the bridewell a melancholy survey. [He] was hesitating which he should choose—a wife or prison. The Justice insisted on an immediate answer. At length he concluded that he ‘might as well marry the critter,’ and they left the office apparently satisfied.”

On its first day, the New York Sun reportedly sold about three hundred copies. It was a start, but still a money-loser; to get it off the ground Day would have to do much better. He continued to find his best stories at New York’s police court, with its “dismal parade of drunkards and wife beaters, con men and petty thieves, prostitutes and their johns.” Copying a British publication, therefore, he hired a man called George Wisner (for $4 a week) just to cover the court, creating quite possibly “the first full-time news reporter in U.S. history.” Day’s man went to court every day, returning with a wealth of lurid or comic material from the proceedings, such as the following testimony from “a little curly-pated fellow by the name of John Lawler,” who was brought before the court on a charge of kicking over the mead stand belonging to Mary Lawler, the complainant:

MAGISTRATE: Well, let’s hear your story. Do you know the boy?

COMPLAINANT: The boy, did you say? Indeed, sir, divil a bit o’boy is here about the baste, nor man neither, barring he drinks brandy like a fish. (loud laughter)

MAGISTRATE: Did you ever see him before?

COMPLAINANT: Indeed, I guess I did. Many years ago he was my husband, but your honor sees, I gave him a divorce. That is, ye see, I gave him a bit of paper stating that I would live with him no longer. (laughter)

PRISONER: It’s no such thing, yer honor. She used to go off with other men, so I sold her for a gill of rum.

Unlike other papers, the Sun also offered detailed coverage of New York’s slave trade, including stories of captured runaways (despite having abolished slavery in 1827, New York still honored the property rights of slave state residents) and of the misery of slave marriages sundered by the auction block. Though otherwise apolitical and nonpartisan, the New York Sun, mainly owing to Wisner, took a consistent principled stand in favor of abolition. “We believe the day is not far distant,” the Sun said, “when the clanking of slavery’s chains will be heard no more—and Americans stand before the world practicing, as well as preaching, the glorious doctrine that all men are created free and equal.”

Such stories gained Day the audience and attention he sought. Within just three months, he was selling thousands of copies a day, threatening the established papers. The more copies he printed, however, the more money he lost based on the penny price alone.3 So it all depended on the advertising revenue, which was growing as well. At some magical moment during that first year, it happened: the lift generated by paid advertising exceeded the gravity of costs. And at that point, like the Wrights’ aeroplane, the New York Sun took flight, and the world was never really the same again.

By the end of 1834, the New York Sun claimed five thousand readers a day, making it the city’s leading paper. Day had wanted only to bolster his modest income, but he wound up proving that newspapers could work as a freestanding business. The Sun’s success showed that a paper need not serve as a party organ, need not rely on a rich patron to fund its losses. For their part, rival papers could not at first fathom how the Sun was able to charge less, provide more news, reach a larger audience, and still come out ahead. What Day had figured out was that newsstand earnings were trivial; advertising revenue could make it all happen.

Besides striking it rich, Day accomplished something else, too. For even more than the business model, the long-term social consequences of a newspaper for the masses were profound. Large numbers of people taking in daily news gave rise to what Jürgen Habermas has called a “public sphere”4—a more quotidian term for this effect is “public opinion,” but by whatever name, it was a new phenomenon, and one dependent on the nascent but growing attention industry.

Unfortunately for Day, the competition eventually figured out how he was doing it. And soon his business model faced copycats. One of them, the New York Transcript, an evening paper, became an early ancestor of ESPN by focusing on sports coverage, which at the time was limited to horse races and prizefights. But the greatest challenge came from The Morning Herald, another penny paper first published in 1835 by a former schoolmaster named James Gordon Bennett. Severely cross-eyed, Bennett was a strange man—a shameless braggart who promoted himself as a paragon of gentility while also feeding the public’s appetite for the lurid and debauched. One historian would call him “a flagrant charlatan—but always a charlatan who accomplished his ends.” In his paper’s second issue Bennett announced that his mission was “to give a correct picture of the world . . . wherever human nature and real life best displays their freaks and vagaries.”

From the beginning, The Herald established a specialty in the coverage of violent death. By one count, it reported in its first two weeks “three suicides, three murders, a fire that killed five persons, an accident in which a man blew off his head, descriptions of a guillotine execution in France, a riot in Philadelphia, and the execution of Major John André half a century earlier.” Bennett would pioneer on-the-scene crime reporting, beginning with his sensational account of the murder of Helen Jewett, a prostitute killed with a hatchet and left on a burning bed. Bennett was let in to see the naked corpse:

It was the most remarkable sight I ever beheld. . . . “My God” I exclaimed, “how like a statue!” The body looked as white, as full, as polished as the purest marble. The perfect figure, the exquisite limbs, fine face, the full arms, the beautiful bust, all surpassed, in every respect, the Venus de Medici. . . . For a few moments I was lost in admiration of the extraordinary sight. . . . I was recalled to her horrid destiny by seeing the dreadful bloody gashes on the right temple.

When not chronicling death in its many forms, Bennett loved to gain attention for his paper by hurling insults and starting fights. Once he managed in a single issue to insult seven rival papers and their editors. He was perhaps the media’s first bona fide “troll.” As with contemporary trolls, Bennett’s insults were not clever. He attacked the older, 6-cent Courier and Herald and its portly editor, respectively, as “bloated” and “big-bellied.” The Sun’s editors he condemned as the “garbage of society,” and the paper as “too indecent, too immoral for any respectable person to touch, or any family to take in.” Taking notice of its support for the complete abolition of slavery, he blasted it as a “decrepit, dying penny paper, owned and controlled by a set of woolly-headed and thick-lipped Negroes.”

As politicians, professional wrestlers, and rappers know well, trash-talking remains an effective way of getting attention, and it worked well for Bennett. Like those practitioners of the art in our own time, he did not hesitate to tout his own magnificence. His New York Herald, he proclaimed, “would outstrip everything in the conception of man,” for he was making The Herald into “the great organ of social life, the prime element of civilization, the channel through which native talent, native genius, and native power may bubble up daily, as the pure sparkling liquid of the Congress fountain at Saratoga bubbles up from the centre of the earth, till it meets the rosy lips of the fair.”

Bennett’s blend of murder and highfalutin beatdown was evidently worth a penny to many, and in less than a year, The Herald claimed a circulation of seven thousand, drawing roughly even with the Sun. The race was on to see which paper—and which kind of appeal—would harvest the most attention in New York.

In the ensuing contest we can observe a very basic and perhaps eternal dynamic of the attention industries. We’ve already seen the attention merchant’s basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. But a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent.5 The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience’s baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant—just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.

In the case of the New York Sun, however, there is little evidence of even theoretical limits. For in reacting to its new competitors, the paper readily discarded what we would consider the paramount journalistic ethic, that of being bound by facts.

In 1835, not long after the launch of The Herald, the Sun ran a headline story, styled as a reprint from an Edinburgh newspaper, of “astronomical discoveries” by the famous scientist Sir John Herschel. Herschel, son of another famous astronomer, had in fact moved to the Cape of Good Hope in 1834 to build a new telescope. From the Southern Hemisphere, the Sun reported, “[he] has obtained a distinct view of objects in the moon, fully equal to that which the unaided eye commands of terrestrial objects of the distance of a hundred yards.”6 Over the next several weeks, a five-part series reported all that Herschel had discovered: the moon was covered with great seas and canyons, pillars of red rock and lunar trees, unlike any other, save the “largest kind of yews in English churchyards, which they in some respects resemble.” But Herschel’s greatest discovery was life on the moon, or more precisely: large, winged creatures, which when not borne aloft could pass for humans:

Certainly they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared, and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified. . . . They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-coloured hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs. We scientifically denominated them as Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat; and they are doubtless innocent and happy creatures, notwithstanding that some of their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.

The depiction of the moon, and one with life on it (not just life, but unicorns and flying man-bats with insistent libidos), was, apparently, widely accepted, in part thanks to the scientific style of the correspondent, the pretense that the story was reprinted from a respectable Edinburgh journal, and the impossibility of replicating with the naked eye the findings of the world’s largest telescope. The series was, understandably, a sensation, and the initial runs of the newspaper sold out, with crowds surrounding its offices, hungrily awaiting the next installment. Benjamin Day had invented “fake news” and demonstrated its appeal. When the dust settled, the New York Sun, founded just two years prior, had driven its circulation to a very precise-sounding 19,360, sailing past not only the other New York dailies but even the London dailies founded decades earlier, to take its place as the most widely read newspaper in the world.

By demonstrating that a business could be founded on the resale of human attention, Benjamin Day and his competitors became the first attention merchants worthy of the title. Over the next two centuries, Day’s model would spawn generations of imitators, from radio networks and broadcast television to Google and Facebook. He and his rivals had also, within just five years, discovered the public’s weakness for death and violence, incessant trolling, and, finally, fake news.

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Posters had been around since 1796. But no one had ever seen the likes of those that began to appear in Paris in the late 1860s, some of them seven feet high, with beautiful, half-dressed women gamboling over fields of vibrant color. “Luminous, brilliant, even blinding,” one journalist wrote, marveling at the “vivid sensations and intense emotions, rapidly blunted, [only] to be revived again.” Contemporaries marveled at what was happening to the Paris cityscape. It was “the education of everyone through the retina . . . instead of the bare wall, the wall attracts, as a kind of chromolithographic salon.”

The new posters were the invention of Jules Chéret, an aspiring artist and onetime printer’s apprentice who’d spent seven years in London studying lithography, then a relatively new technique by which images were rendered in oil on soft limestone. Bringing the latest in British technology back to Paris and adding some of his own innovations, Chéret began to produce by commission an altogether new species of commercial art.

Before Chéret the poster had usually been a block of text, sometimes with a small illustration—not unlike the title page of a book, only larger. We can usefully think of the mass-produced poster as an early screen—though a static version, to be sure—the phenomenon now so ubiquitous in our lives. The giant Parisian poster wasn’t the first mass-produced poster; it was, however, a technological and conceptual innovation.* For despite being static, the Parisian posters evoked a sense of frantic energy in their bright, contrasting colors, and beautiful, half-dressed women—elements that made them nearly impossible to ignore. There were always, of course, arresting sights to behold in art and nature. But the posters were commercial and scalable. “A master of blazing modernities,” as one critic called him, Chéret could print thousands of them, producing their mesmeric effects on millions of passersby. As such, his posters are the second milestone in the industrialized harvesting of attention.7

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The neuroscience of attention, despite having greatly advanced over the past few decades, remains too primitive to explain comprehensively the large-scale harvesting of attention. At most it can shed light on aspects of individual attention. But there is one thing scientists have grasped that is absolutely essential to understand about the human brain before we go any further: our incredible, magnificent power to ignore.

Have you ever found yourself speaking to someone at length only to realize they haven’t heard a single thing you’ve said? As remarkable as our ability to see or hear is our capacity to disregard. This capacity, along with the inherent need to pay attention to something at any given moment, has dictated the development of the attention industries.

Every instant of every day we are bombarded with information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds (respectively) across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths; our skin and the rest of our innervated parts send their own messages of sore muscles or cold feet. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full bore. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom.

Fortunately, we have a valve by which to turn the flow on or off at will. To use another vernacular, we can both “tune in” and “tune out.” When we shut the valve, we disregard almost everything, while focusing on just one discrete stream of information—like the words on this page—out of the millions of bits coming in. In fact, we can even shut out everything external to us, and concentrate on an internal dialogue, as when we are “lost in thought.” This ability—to block out most everything, and focus—is what neuroscientists and psychologists refer to as paying attention.8

We ignore so much stuff for a simple reason: if we didn’t, we’d quickly be overwhelmed, our brains flooded until they seized up. Depending on the kind of information, it takes our brains some amount of time to process it, and when we are presented with too much at once we begin to panic, like a waiter who has too many orders shouted at him at once.

But our capacity to ignore is limited by another fact: we are always paying attention to something. If we think of attention as a resource, or even a kind of currency, we must allow that it is always, necessarily, being “spent.” There is no saving it for later. The question is always, what shall I pay attention to? Our brains answer this question with varying degrees of volition, from “shhh—I’m reading this” to letting our minds wander in the direction of whatever might draw it in, whether in the corner of our screen or along some road we are walking. That is where the attention merchant makes his opportunity. But to succeed he must motivate us to withdraw our attention from where it is and surrender it to something else. It needn’t be a thoughtful calculation.9

This puts us in a position to understand the success and significance of the Parisian posters. With their bold and contrasting colors—fields of yellow, red, and blue that tend to spill over onto each other, the posters were practically impossible to ignore. The attention-grabbing effect of bright colors was, at the time, understood only intuitively, but it has since been described by brain scientists. The depiction of exuberant women in some state of undress perhaps requires less comment, but that they appear to be moving is significant. The impression of motion is achieved by painting multiple versions of the same dancer, each in a slightly different attitude, as in a well-known poster for the Folies-Bergère. Taking these in rapidly in sequence creates the impression of flip-book or Mutoscope. In an early ad for Vin Mariani, the woman is almost running off the poster, skirts trailing, as she pours a glass.

But there is more to the posters’ allure. Significantly, they catch the viewer on his way somewhere, the “in between” moments of the day that are in the interstices of our more purposeful mental engagements. That is, times when one might be bored, waiting for a streetcar, or simply strolling around, looking for something to catch the eye. The attentional habit of gazing at the world with nothing better to do has doubtless been a human practice since the species emerged. But its exploitation for commercial purposes is relatively new.

What used to be thought of as the “reptilian core” of our brains—let’s now simply speak of those neural circuits governing behavior that seems reflexive, like flinching at a loud noise—should not be underestimated where the harvesting of attention is concerned; for once you recognize the triggers, you begin to see them everywhere: the flashing signs employed by vendors, those bouncing icons on your computer screen, the little pictures of cats or sexy women attached to Internet links. All of these stimuli set off neural responses that cause us to engage, whether we mean to or not. Flipping through a book of classic posters is instructive, for it is almost a catalogue of attention triggers. Motion, color, critters of every kind, sexualized men and women, babies and monsters seem to work best on us. It was the achievement of the late nineteenth century’s poster pioneers to recognize these responses and put them to profitable use—a lesson that neither advertisers nor their eventual imitators in government would ever forget.

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At first the Parisian posters were welcome and admired. At the height of Jules Chéret’s success, the Third Republic awarded him the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian decoration. But he was prolific, and so were his imitators, resulting in an all-out “poster craze” that spread through Europe and the Americas. There were soon dozens of French poster artists, including those now more famous for fine art, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose can-can dancers sitting on the laps of customers are unmistakable.10 At the start of the twentieth century, however, perhaps with foresight, Chéret and other artists began to abandon the business, while Toulouse-Lautrec died from a combination of alcoholism and syphilis. Despite this loss of artistry, the poster craze continued, overspreading the city without limit.

Industries, unlike organisms, have no organic limits on their own growth; they are constantly in search of new markets, or of new ways to exploit old ones more effectively; as Karl Marx unsympathetically observed, they “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”11 Soon, the posters came to define Paris; by one contemporary account, the city was “hardly more than an immense wall of posters scattered from the chimneys down to sidewalks with clusters of squares of paper of all colors and formats, not to mention simple inscriptions.”

Eventually it was too much; the novelty was no more. Here for the first time, but certainly not the last, attention harvesting, taken too far, engendered a vehement social reaction; the proliferation of commercial art and its displacement of other things began to drive people crazy. As the famous adman David Ogilvy once put it, “I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard.”

In Paris the same aesthetic objections were made: critics said that the advertising poster was destroying her reputation as the world’s most beautiful city. Groups including the Society for the Protection of the Landscape and Aesthetics of France, and Les Amis de Paris (Friends of Paris), gained followings by declaring war on the “ugly poster.” Sometimes decrying advertising as “unhygienic” or comparing it to prostitution, they proclaimed their goal to make Paris “more beautiful—materially and morally.”12

Let us pause here to remark a major recurrent dynamic that has shaped the course of attention industries: “the revolt.” Industries may have an inherent tendency to “nestle everywhere,” but when the commodity in question is access to people’s minds, the perpetual quest for growth ensures that forms of backlash, both major and minor, are all but inevitable. The minor version I shall refer to as the “disenchantment effect”; this describes what happens when a once entrancing means of harvesting attention starts to lose its charm. Our ability to ignore things is adaptive; with enough exposure it can make us indifferent to any stimulus, until, say, a poster that was once arresting becomes one we can see through as if it did not exist. It is because of this effect that the attention merchant’s approach is always trending in the direction of going too far, almost to the point, sometimes even reaching it, of causing shock.

But the revolts can also take another, more dramatic form that is central to our story. When audiences begin to believe that they are being ill-used—whether overloaded, fooled, tricked, or purposefully manipulated—the reaction can be severe and long-lasting enough to have serious commercial consequences and require a significant reinvention of approach. Almost like a financial bubble bursting, a mass public revolt can reconfigure the industry or inspire regulatory action. That is what happened in Paris, where the anti-poster movement began to lobby the city to impose restraints on where advertisements might be placed, to impose taxes on posters to limit their spread, and to ban billboards along the train tracks. Since it was France, the issue was always stated as an aesthetic concern, but as so often, behind aesthetic concerns there was something deeper at work. Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent. Perhaps that feeling of violation was what Ogilvy felt when he wrote that “when I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?”

Indeed as we shall see, behind such impassioned backlash is very often an awareness that the exploitation of human attention is in some deeper way the exploitation of our persons. Buffeted by constant intrusions, we sometimes reach the point of feeling we’ve had enough, and that feeling is ultimately one the attention industries cannot ignore. In Paris, the municipal authorities did indeed take aggressive action, restricting the placement of posters, which they came to view as a blight, a weed in need of containment. Those limits still exist and are perhaps one reason visitors continue to find the city beautiful.

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* In technique if not technology, Chéret did have a precedent. In Japan, a few decades earlier, advertisers had begun block-printing large posters featuring beautiful women, albeit more fully clad than their French counterparts. Historians of design have described the influence of Japanese prints on Chéret and his imitators. See Stephen Eskilson, Graphic Design: A New History,2d. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 59–61.

CHAPTER 2__________________

THE ALCHEMIST

With his round spectacles, thin mustache, and balding pate, he must have often gone unnoticed. Except for the fuchsia boutonniere he always wore, he was indifferent to self-adornment—“my limit on shoes is $6.50,” he once allowed.1 Perhaps it was just as well, since he was something of “a timid introvert,” a nervous fellow, to judge by the dried licorice root he chewed on during idle moments. There were few other self-indulgences; “he allowed himself virtually no diversions, no sports, music, politics, books, plays.”2

Claude C. Hopkins was perhaps an unlikely figure to revolutionize the business of harvesting and using human attention, but that is what he did in the early twentieth century, when he became one of advertising’s greatest innovators. Still in its infancy, this new form of communication was, as we have said, the means by which attention could be converted into cash, for Hopkins was a particular master of the art of using attention to create demand for new products. As adman Drayton Bird writes, “If the advertising business ever produced a full-blown genius, Claude Hopkins may have been the man.”3

Hopkins was born in 1866 in a small town in Michigan. His mother was Scottish, his father a newspaperman from a long line of Freewill Baptist ministers. Claude was subject to a strict evangelical upbringing, by the lights of which, as he would write, “seemingly every joy in life was a sin.” When his father abruptly abandoned the family, Hopkins, aged ten, became the sole wage earner, laboring as a boy janitor, delivering papers, and selling silver polish. At age seventeen, he followed family tradition and found work at the church as a religious instructor and un-ordained minister. “I was destined to be a clergyman,” he wrote. “My given names were selected from the Who is Who of clergymen.”

If Hopkins had remained true to this vocation, our story would be different. But in his late teens he began to have a crisis of faith and came to “consider the harmless joys of life which had been barred to me.” He made up his mind to quit the ministry, preaching to his congregation of nearly eight hundred one last sermon, a heretical jeremiad “against hell fire, against infant damnation, against the discipline I knew. It even questioned the story of the creation and of Jonah and the whale.” The congregants left in stunned silence, and the next day his mother disowned him. Hopkins was now irrevocably an outsider, a status that he seemed to relish for reasons perhaps only he knew.

Hopkins left home to seek his fortune, though by his own often unreliable account, he was not after wealth or fame, merely the freedom for what he loved most, which was hard work. “I have always been an addict to work,” he would recall. “I love work as other men love play. It is both my occupation and my recreation.” Indeed after working through a series of menial jobs, Hopkins was hired as a “scheme man” for a company selling carpet sweepers, as writers of early advertisements were known long before copywriting acquired the glamour of a David Ogilvy or Don Draper. The new man’s talent was discovered when he conceived of an advertisement picturing Santa Claus employing the Bissell Carpet Sweeper. “What article can you buy at the same cost that will contribute so much genuine, lasting pleasure and comfort to the recipient as a Bissell Sweeper?4 It will be a constant reminder of the giver for ten years or more.” The fallen preacher had found his life’s true calling.

His early career as a preacher may seem an incongruous footnote to the one that would make his name, but it is in fact quite significant if considered in the larger history of attention capture. Before the nineteenth century, human attention was a largely untapped resource in relation to its eventual commercial and political applications. One reason was the lack of advertising such as we would recognize it today. Yes, there have always been commercial notices and signs; the Greeks and Romans used them to indicate wares for sale, as did merchants in China. Some of the graffiti covering the walls of Pompeii, preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius, turn out to be advertisements for erotic services. But as we shall see, there is a crucial difference between this sort of signage and the industrialized capture of attention.

Attention in our sense of it was not vital for commerce as it has become. In a manner that still holds for some professions, like medicine, or for small businesses, merchants typically relied on a good reputation or a network of custom to attract business. As for advertising, it “was thought to be the work of the vulgarian; it was also thought useless.”5 Nor did the State, with the occasional exception of particular kings and emperors—the first two Napoleons, for instance—find it useful to seek regular access to the public mind. Before the democratic age ushered in by the nineteenth century, most political powers had no need to influence the governed.

This is not to say that there were no regular claimants on human attention, only that commercial and political ones hadn’t yet arrived. When they did, however, they were met by one that had stood for centuries. With its combination of moral injunctions as well as daily and weekly rituals, organized religion had long taken human attention as its essential substrate. This is especially true of monotheisms, whose demands for a strict adherence to the one true God naturally promote an ideal of undivided attention. Among early Christians, for example, total attention to God implied ceaseless prayer. The early Church father Clement of Alexandria wrote of the “Perfect Christian” as one who “prays throughout his entire life, endeavoring by prayer to have fellowship with God.”6 Likewise the desert monastics of the fourth century took as their aim “to maintain there as near as possible a ceaseless vigil of prayer, punctuated only by the minimal interruption for food and sleep.”7

Such an aspiration to monopolize the attention of believers was hardly abandoned after Christianity’s early days. Some 1700 years later, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, prescribed various means for keeping the mind attuned to God, such as the practice of thinking of him immediately upon waking, right before falling asleep, for at least an hour during the day, and before taking any important action. (This discipline shares some similarity with the Jewish practice of offering brachot, or blessings, at various routine moments, such as before eating or drinking, or more exceptional ones, as when thunder is heard, among other practices codified in the Mishnah in the third century CE.)

To be sure, it isn’t as if before the twentieth century everyone was walking around thinking of God all the time. Nevertheless, the Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it. But over the twentieth century, organized religion, which had weathered the doubts raised by the Enlightenment, would prove vulnerable to other claims on and uses for attention. Despite the promise of eternal life, faith in the West declined and has continued to do so, never faster than in the twenty-first century.8 Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline. Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game. But let us not get too far ahead of the story.

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If you’d attended the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, you might have spotted him. Far from the Ferris wheel and main concourses, Clark Stanley stood before his booth in an elaborate cowboy outfit, a beaded leather jacket with a colorful bandana, his hair worn long with a prominent goatee and mustache. Behind him, his booth crawled with rattlesnakes. Apparently comfortable with the reptiles, Stanley handled the creatures like pets, petting them and draping them around his neck. “I am not the least afraid of being bitten” he reported. “In fact, I have been bitten hundreds of times.”

While spectators watched, Clark would reach into a sack, pluck out a fresh snake, asphyxiate it with ether, and plunge it into a pot of boiling water. As he did so, fatty remnants of the snake rose to the top, which Clark skimmed and, on the spot, mixed into an elixir. The resulting potion he called “Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil Liniment” and sold to onlookers. The Snake Oil, Clark boasted, had the power to cure many ailments: it was “good for man and beast.”

Of Stanley’s life we have only his own account, which he called The Life and Adventures of the American Cowboy, by Clark Stanley Better Known as the Rattlesnake King, a slim volume that functioned both as an autobiography and advertising brochure. By his account he was born in central Texas in the 1850s and hit the cattle trail at age fourteen. After more than a decade as a cowboy, he was invited one day to visit the Hopi Indians to witness their secret snake dance. Befriending the medicine man, who was impressed with Stanley’s Colt revolver and “fancy shooting,” he was invited to live with the Indians and learn their secrets, including, most precious of all, “the secret of snake oil” that was entrusted to him alone.

How much of this story is true we may never know, but what we do know for certain is that, at the time, Clark Stanley the Rattlesnake King was among the most successful advertisers in America, forming a part of the growing “patent medicine” industry. His snake oil liniment was only one of dozens of products, like “Lydia Pinkham’s Herb Medicine” or “Kickapoo’s Indian Sagwa,” that were sold through advertising and traveling shows and promised quick cures for nearly any ailment. Yet patent medicine’s most important influence was not on medicine but on advertising. As the industry grew, its pressing advertising needs drew many of the nation’s most creative and talented copywriters, who would come up with some of modern advertising’s most important techniques. It was also through the sale of patent medicine that advertising first proved conclusively its real utility, as a kind of alchemy, an apparently magical means of transforming basically useless substances into commercial gold.

It should be no wonder, then, that sometime in the 1890s, the restless Claude Hopkins made his way to Racine, Wisconsin, to become the advertising manager of Dr. Shoop’s Restorative, a patent medicine outfit that specialized in nerve tonics and other nostrums.9 As he later explained, “The greatest advertising men of my day were schooled in the medicine field. It is sometimes hard to measure just what advertising does. Not so in a medicine. Advertising must do all.”