The U.S. Post Office was the first government-built platform for commercial attention harvesting.

Evidence

Hopkins took inspiration from the success of two former peddlers, Aaron Montgomery Ward and Richard Sears, whose mail-order catalogues (Montgomery Ward’s and Sears’s) built a thriving business on the back of a federally subsidized carrier. Thus did the U.S. Post Office first become a platform for commercial harvesting of attention. Hopkins began to post more than 400,000 pamphlets for Dr. Shoop’s every day, reaching millions with this pioneering effort at “direct mail” advertising, or what we now call “spam.” — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 99

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s attention-industry through-line: the state infrastructure (like later broadcast spectrum, internet) that platform businesses capture for advertising. — connects to: Mass-scale attention harvesting began with advertising in the 1890s-1920s — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24
• ADDENDUM: The postal-subsidy point parallels how built infrastructure (like trees in ‘Grafting & Growth’) becomes repurposed for unintended uses — the U.S. mail system as an unplanned advertising platform.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that a federally subsidized infrastructure designed for one purpose becomes the first substrate of spam — a recurring pattern where attention harvesting colonizes civic infrastructure — is a genuinely resonant historical claim.

Broader Connections

• Mass-scale attention harvesting began with advertising in the 1890s-1920s #corroborates (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24