The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

In a book that The New Republic described as, “A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention,” Wu shows how in nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising, sponsored social media and other efforts to harvest our attention. Wu, the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, coined the term “net neutrality.” He argues that this barrage is the result of more than a century’s growth in the industries that feed on human attention, offering free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu makes clear that attention merchants constantly find new means of getting inside our heads and are changing our very nature.