The Attention Merchants

Tim Wu

Atlantic Books, £20

Review by Iain Macwhirter

A GROUP of friends, family, or co-workers sit at a table looking, not at each other, but at tiny, hand-held TV screens. It's one of the defining images of the age. Tim Wu thinks we need to rage against the little machines, liberate our minds from the tyranny of what he calls the “fourth screen”, after films, TV and the computer.

Wu is a game-keeper turned poacher who used to work for Google, still advises tech firms and governments, but has decided that we are all frittering our lives away to the attention merchants who are stealing our very human essence. “If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state, as well as the narcosis of consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply”.

He calls for a “human reclamation project” a digital version of reclaiming a natural landscape through rewilding. We need to carve out blocks of time free from the robotic checking of email, Twitter, Instagram or Buzzfeed. “Digital sabbaths” would clear our minds and allow space for the finer things of life, like religious contemplation.

Heavy stuff. However, the rather odd thing about this entertaining and informative book is that it doesn't entirely support the Wu manifesto. The Attention Merchants is really a history of advertising, but it is also a history of public resistance to advertising and, in the age of the internet, about the difficulty the attention merchants face in capturing and marketing our attention.

Wu traces the evolution of advertising from the earliest forms of state propaganda, such as Lord Kitchener's Your Country Needs You recruiting posters. They were everywhere. You couldn't take your eyes off them and no alternative view was permitted. Josef Goebbels built very consciously on the success of British wartime propaganda to bolster the totalitarian Nazi state in the 1930s. His techniques, Wu observes, were then adopted by the American advertising companies which dominated the 1950s.

The mass media – when it really was mass – was a playground for the attention merchants. Peak attention came with terrestrial television, when half the nation would be stuck in front of the box consuming the same adverts insinuated into popular shows like I Love Lucy. That's why serials were called soaps.

However, attention is a two-way street. People don't generally like advertising any more than they like propaganda: they put up with it. And attention seeking can be counterproductive. Whether it is snake oil or Soviet propaganda, people react violently against products and ideas when they ultimately learn they are being sold a lie.

Wu engagingly charts rebellion against television advertising, beginning in the late 1950s with books like Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders, which exposed the sly psychological techniques that were being used to sell stuff. The counter culture of the 1960s, as Wu tells it, was in large part a reaction to the excessive commercialisation of mass culture. Though ironically LSD guru Timothy Leary's “turn on, tune in, drop out” was itself one of the best advertising copy lines of the 60s.

Advertising fought back by adopting many counter-cultural themes: “I'd like to buy the world a coke”. “The United Colours of Benetton”. But adverts never fully regained their grip on the national consciousness as remotes and video recorders allowed viewers to filter them out. When the internet (the “third screen”) came along, it looked as if the attention merchants had met their Waterloo. Internet companies such as Google and Apple professed to loathe advertising, even though the latter was rather adept at using it, as in the famous 1984 Big Brother advert for the Mackintosh.

Wu shows how early internet behemoths like AOL tried to adapt the internet to advertising, but lost out to free sites such as Google and Facebook that consciously avoided littering their pages with ads. Some of the biggest names, such as Buzzfeed, Twitter and even Facebook have struggled to this day to sell the attention they have attracted to their sites. Indeed, they have had to resort to less scrupulous methods by harvesting our personal data and selling it on. As Tim Cook of Apple pointed out: “If you aren't paying for the product, you are the product”.

But we are arguably in the middle of the greatest revolt against the attention seekers in the history of advertising. Ad blockers are wiping the net clean of adverts (and destroying many newspapers' online sites that relied on commercial advertising). Streaming services like Netflix, as Wu shows, are replacing terrestrial by producing multi-season epics like House of Cards that have no spot advertising at all. The infiltration of advertising in the search rankings of Google has become a scandal, as is the mining and marketing of personal information by Facebook. Regulation is coming.

I finished this book feeling much more positive about the future than I expected to feel. I wholly subscribe to Tim Wu's call to attention. Yes, we spend too much time flicking through our smart phones. But these almost magical devices allow us to send letters, download music, watch TV and films, take pictures, follow news, connect with friends, navigate maps and many other things. It's hardly surprising we haven't quite mastered the off switch. But thanks to books like this, we're getting there.