Commercial attention harvesting overwhelmed the web from within, not from outside

Evidence

Far from being unstoppable, both the blogosphere and the amateur were in fact quite vulnerable, but not, as Lessig predicted, to the established powers, devouring their upstart progeny to prevent the inevitable future, as the Titan Kronos did. Instead, the commercial forces that would overgrow this paradise came from the web itself. Indeed, we can now see that there was nothing about the web’s code that would keep it open, free, and noncommercial, as its architects intended. Where attention is paid, the attention merchant lurks patiently to reap his due. Et in Arcadia ego. The fall of the web to this force was virtually preordained. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 923

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s structural claim (running throughout earlier chapters) that wherever attention gathers, merchants follow — the novel’s ‘Et in Arcadia ego’ mourns the pastoral. — connects to: Office computers with fast connections created a vast new attention harvest — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 897; Early web attention circulated person-to-person without commercial resale, undercutting attention merchants. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 919
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that open, noncommercial technological spaces fail not to external attack but to internal commercial gravity is a profound and reusable structural insight.