Attention mercantilism has survived four predicted deaths and re-emerged stronger

Evidence

We are speaking, after all, of an industry left for dead at least four separate times over the past hundred years. Again and again, it has seemed as if the party was over, that consumers had fled once and for all, and yet the attention merchants have always found a way to overgrow the bright new machines that seemed to be hacking through the old-growth foliage. The 1960s, the very zenith of anticommercialism, remarkably left the attention merchants stronger than they’d ever been. The World Wide Web, designed by research scientists, was supposed to strike a fatal blow against commercialism in communications, but these things have a logic of their own: Advertising always becomes less annoying and intrusive, and people rediscover their taste for “free” stuff. In this long view, it is hard to imagine that a business with such a marvelously simple premise—capture people’s attention in exchange for a little fun and then resell it to firms sponsoring the amusement—might simply wither away. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1134

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the arc of the whole book’s argument about the attention industry’s resilience, and to wider histories of moral panics against new media that commercial interests absorb.