Cable’s growth was driven by commercial opportunity, not cultural zeitgeist

Evidence

Technology always embodies ideology, and the ideology in question was one of difference, recognition, and individuality. But commerce bows to none, taking its opportunities wherever they may lie. The logic of cable ultimately did not flow from the zeitgeist but rather from the opportunity it created for a host of upstarts to feast on the attentional harvest once the manna of the networks alone. And once all those newcomers began to contest what had been the broad middle, it began to fall apart, not at once, but from this point onward. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 620

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘commerce bows to none’ claim echoes the pattern seen in earlier chapters where advertising infrastructure, not audience desire, drove media evolution.
• DEEPTHINKING: The thesis that technology embodies ideology but commerce ignores ideology entirely — a tension worth sitting with about whose agency shapes media systems.