The CPI grew to 150,000 staff within a year covering every public interface

Evidence

Within a year of its founding, Creel’s committee had twenty domestic subdivisions, and reported staff of 150,000; it may have been the fastest-growing government bureaucracy in world history. It did more of everything, faster, channeling the age’s spirit of mass production. The committee produced more posters, speeches, pamphlets, press releases than any other entity. “In addition to newspapers and magazines, county fairs, movies, classrooms, post office walls, churches, synagogues, union halls—virtually every physical interface with the public—was a venue for a CPI message.” The argument for war was made “overwhelmingly powerful by dint of sheer volume, repetition, and ubiquity.” In the burgeoning battle for human attention, Creel’s approach was the equivalent of carpet-bombing. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 157

Categorization

• SEED: An essay angle: the CPI’s ‘carpet-bombing’ totality as an early prototype for modern attention saturation across every channel at once.