{"product_id":"the-attention-merchants-the-epic-scramble-to-get-inside-our-heads-9780385352017","title":"The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrom Tim Wu  author of the award-winning The Master Switch ( a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the term \"net neutralitya revelatory  ambitious and urgent account of how the capture and re-sale of human attention became the defining industry of our time.  Feeling attention challenged? Even assaulted? American business depends on it. In nearly every moment of our waking lives  we face a barrage of messaging  advertising enticements  branding  sponsored social media  and other efforts to harvest our attention. Few moments or spaces of our day remain uncultivated by the \"attention merchants \" contributing to the distracted  unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a centurys growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to the explosion of the mobile web; from AOL and the invention of email to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to celebrity power brands like Oprah Winfrey  Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump  the basic business model of \"attention merchants\" has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration  sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu describes the revolts that have risen against the relentless siege of our awareness  from the remote control to the creation of public broadcasting to Apples ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants are always growing new heads  even as their means of getting inside our heads are changing our very nature--cognitive  social  political and otherwise--in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.  A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attentionWeve become the consumers  the producers  and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves. Tom Vanderbilt  The New Republic  An erudite  energizing  outraging  funny and thorough historyA devastating critique of ad tech as it stands today  transforming \"dont be evil\" into the surveillance business model in just a few short years. It connects the dots between the sale of advertising inventory in schools to the bizarre ecosystem of trackers  analyzers and machine-learning models that allow the things you look at on the web to look back at youThis stuff is my daily beat  and I learned a lot from Attention Merchants. Cory Doctorow  BoingBoing  Illuminating. Jacob Weisberg  The New York Review of Books\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647561490485,"sku":"ByrdShop_0385352018","price":23.53,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780385352017.jpg?v=1781692860","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-attention-merchants-the-epic-scramble-to-get-inside-our-heads-9780385352017","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}