The Attention Merchants

One of the Best Books of the YearThe San Francisco Chronicle * The Philadelphia Inquirer * Vox * The Globe and Mail (Toronto)“Vigorous, entertaining…. Wu describes how the rise of electronic media established human attention as perhaps the world’s most valuable commodity.” —The Boston Globe“The Attention Merchants is a book of our time, touching on an emerging strain of anxiety about the information age…. A bracing intellectual tour de force.” —The San Francisco Chronicle“Comprehensive and conscientious, readers are bound to stumble on ideas and episodes of media history that they knew little about. [Wu] writes with elegance and clarity, giving readers the pleasing sensation of walking into a stupendously well-organized closet.” —The New York Times   “A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention…. We’ve become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves.” —The New Republic   “The book is studded with sharp illustrations of those who have tried to stop the encroachment of advertising on our lives, and usually failed…. Wu dramatizes this push and pull to great effect.” —The New York Times Book Review“An engaging history of the attention economy…. [Wu] wants to show us how our current conditions arose.” —The Washington Post “Dazzling…. [Wu] could hardly have chosen a better time to publish a history of attention-grabbing…. He traces a sustained march of marketers further into our lives.” —The Financial Times   “ [An] erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history of one of humanity’s core undertakings—getting other people to care about stuff that matters to you.” —Boing Boing “Engaging and informative…. [Wu’s] account … is a must-read.” —The Washington Times

Tim Wu is a policy advocate and professor at Columbia Law School. In 2006, Scientific American named him one of fifty leaders in science and technology; in 2013, National Law Journal included him among “America’s 100 Most Influential Lawyers”; and in 2014 and 2015, he was named to the “Politico 50.” He won the Lowell Thomas Gold medal for travel journalism and is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.