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Introduction
As 2021 draws to a close, ad-supported technology companies look set to have a worse decade than they enjoyed in the 2010’s. Google is facing antitrust action all over the world, and many users are switching to privacy-focused options like DuckDuckGo. Facebook felt compelled to rebrand in October (now known as “Meta”) to convince everyone its future is in the metaverse rather than in social networking. This week, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey resigned to focus on blockchain-based fintech. Like Zuckerberg, Dorsey also announced a rebranding effort with the ~$87 billion market cap Square changing its corporate name to “Block,” illustrating the firm’s commitment to building a blockchain technology-powered future. The anecdotal consensus insists that many of the most talented engineers around the world have heeded the handwringing over society’s best talent working on improving advertising performance; the best engineers apparently want to work for Elon Musk and other entrepreneurs taking on renewable energy, space, AI/ML and additive manufacturing or on Web 3.0 (a decentralized, trustless and permissionless web). There are many reasons for this fall from favor for ad-centric incumbents, but a key driver is popular disenchantment with the societal impact of these businesses.
However, this isn’t the first time that resentment against ad-supported business models led to mass pushback. In The Attention Merchants, legal scholar, author and government official Tim Wu surveys the history of the “attention harvesting” industry. These business models depend on the attraction and reselling of human attention – rounding up crowds to sell to advertisers who want to in turn sell them goods and services. According to Wu, there have been periodic pushbacks since the rise of attention harvesting in the nineteenth century, although none have succeeded in completely doing away with the practice.
The Eternal Allure of Cheap and Free
Wu traces the beginning of successful mass attention harvesting to the publication of the New York Sun newspaper in the 1830’s. Its founder, Benjamin Day, wanted to generate demand for his printing business. At the time, New York newspapers were either formal political organs or published dry, ad-free content for a commercial / elite audience and charged several cents per issue. Breaking away from this traditional business model, Day decided to charge a penny, less than the cost of production, and to make up the difference with advertising revenue. He printed sensationalist articles that drew mass attention and achieved rapid commercial success. Competitors eventually copied his model, and the resulting newspaper landscape of low quality, ad-supported journalism was born.
We would like to pause here to reflect on the state of anglophone journalism. Many commentators repeat a “ready-made” narrative about the press having degraded into toxic click-bait journalism that exacerbates political and social divides to the detriment of the public. Those who take this position often bemoan the passing of a golden age of journalism when stoic writers and broadcasters sought to bring Americans the objective truth.
We humbly posit that this is mostly a fiction that has become a truism via repetition by journalists themselves and via the human tendency to view the past with rose-colored glasses. In our view, the incentive structures most journalists operate within – shaped by institutional ownership and by business models - have produced similar quality work since the days of the New York Sun in the 1830’s. The façade of detached objectivity convinced much of the public for a few decades in the middle of the twentieth century, but was largely just that – a façade built on rhetoric rather than substance. To the extent many journalists sought to bring the public as objective a view of reality as possible or heroically risked their life or career to get to important truths, they were notable as exceptions to the rule.
Print journalism was thus where modern attention harvesting was born, but the author goes on to entertainingly trace the rise and fall of latter Attention Merchants. Poster advertising came next and was quickly followed by text advertising for fraudulent “patent medicines” such as the infamous snake oil in the late nineteenth century and many “cure-all” health products that were to follow. Advertising practices were refined for selling these products that would be impossible to sell without ads. For quality products however, conventional wisdom long held that advertising was ineffective or at least difficult to measure the efficacy of, and that it was undignified. The individual proprietor’s reputation and the quality of the good or service should speak for themselves. Wu cites the incredible results of war time propaganda at getting citizens of the USA and UK to voluntarily serve in World War I as the critical moment that changed this perception. Hundreds of thousands of young recruits continued to sign up for the hell of trench warfare, encouraged by attention-grabbing propaganda (in the original sense of the term) like the famous poster below.
American business was so impressed by the results that it recruited “ad men” with patent medicine industry and war propaganda experience to hawk respectable products. Wu details how radio, tv and ultimately, internet media would go on to follow a similar pattern: starting off with idealistic aims before conceding to business models that harvested eyeballs for these eager advertisers (YOU, as the user / listener / follower, ARE the product). This process was often cyclical, with initially enthusiastic consumers getting fed up and tuning out or advocating for regulatory pressure on incumbent industry players. Attention Merchants would reformulate their strategies to tie free entertainment or internet tools to less obvious or annoying advertising. Wu also points out other key features of this process; most notably, the greater the centralization of attention to a few information sources or common rituals like primetime or the Super Bowl, the greater the degree of common awareness, common identity and sometimes, conformity.
Confronting Attention Harvesting in Our Own Time
The Attention Merchants insists that the most important question isn’t how our attention is harvested, but rather when and where it is harvested. Individuals have the ability to set or re-assert limits, whether by opting out or via the law. At Citizen Scholar, we think that five years after the publication of this book, momentum is building for a solution to the issue.
We’re not totally comfortable with the term “screen addiction”, but the phenomenon certainly has the qualities of a powerful vice. It’s possible for otherwise high-functioning people to feel both grateful for and encumbered by their smartphone, computer and tv. Many impulsively open Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Gmail, Outlook, iMessage, Slack or GroupMe and many other “Attention Merchants” several times a day and can get lost, contributing to wasted time and sometimes even mental health issues. Telling people to just not participate often seems as useful as telling others to just stop drinking.
Even more frightening is the paradox that, in an age of supposed individuality enabled by social networks and open access to fragmented information, we’re simultaneously less ourselves and more enthralled by media. Sadly, we wonder how many will one day regret having so much of their life defined by information hawked by human or algorithmic Attention Merchants.
We at Citizen Scholar think that solutions to these issues are more likely to come from changes in social norms rather than laws. Regrettably, many politicians seem more interested in capturing and wielding the power of Attention Merchant platforms under the guise of regulating the veracity and propriety of speech; even if they fail, they know that campaign donations from Attention Merchants will stream in for years in order to soften the blow.
Instead, there are already signs that trend-setting segments of society are starting to push back and set limits. Infamously, Mark Zuckerberg had to clarify comments about him restricting his kids from using screens. It’s easy to envision a future where it’s considered “high-class” to be unplugged for large portions of the day or week – where allowing one’s attention to be excessively harvested is frowned upon like other vices associated with a lack of judgement or self-control.
Contemporary Attention Merchants’ business models also seem to be under pressure. The book contains a sad story of the initial enthusiasm of internet blogs losing internet mindshare to professionalized publications with hired staffs and to social networks, both optimized for selling people advertisers’ agendas. If the VC industry, Startup Twitter and many other thought leaders are to be believed, this “Web 2.0” paradigm is now giving way to “Web 3.0” (although Elon doesn’t seem to be on board):
Web 3.0 is still in the early idealistic stage dominated by a vanguard of builders and visionaries. Currently, the people building infrastructure and applications for the “new” internet profess commitment to privacy and user ownership. We’ll eagerly watch and hope for the best. In the interim, we’ll face the current unpleasant reality by working on unplugging more from today’s Attention Merchants. As always, let us know your thoughts!
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
Discussion #17: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, by Tim Wu