The Attention Merchants review – how the web is being debased for profit
Tim Wu is an expert on concentrations of power. An author, activist and lawyer, he is most famous for coining the phrase "net neutrality" - the idea that the oligopoly that owns our internet infrastructure shouldn't charge differently for different kinds of data. In his new book, he targets another kind of corporate domination: the industry that monopolises our attention.
According to Wu, this industry emerged from the first world war. In 1914 Germany could mobilise 4.5 million men; the best Britain could do was 700,000. To build a bigger army, the British government embarked on the first systematic propaganda campaign in history. It printed 50 million big, colourful recruitment posters and plastered them on shops, houses, buses and trams throughout the country. It staged rallies and parades. It filled vans with film projectors and screened patriotic films in towns across Britain. And it worked: stirred by this unprecedented experiment in state-sponsored persuasion, millions of young men marched off to gruesome, pointless deaths in a gruesome, pointless war.
Continue reading...