To gain this free bounty, the board didn't actually have to do anything. It needed only to understand something: that the schools were already holding an asset more lucrative than any bake sale. That asset, simply stated, was their students, who by the very nature of compulsory education were a captive audience. If the schools could seize their attention for the purpose of educating them, why not sell off a bit of it for the sake of improving the educational experience?

Twin Rivers soon began to see the light. "We need to be innovative about the assets we have and learn how to bring in more revenue," said a spokeswoman. In other parts of the country, the prospect of opening schools to commercial advertising had prompted public debate. Not so in Twin Rivers, where the administrators seemed to regard signing the deal, which they did in 2012, as a matter of duty. "In these challenging economic times," said the chief business officer, "our students are counting on us to find ways to make our resources stretch further than ever before."

What is perhaps most shocking about the introduction of advertising into public schools is just how uncontroversial and indeed logical it has seemed to those involved. The deals are seen as a win-win, yielding money that it would be almost irresponsible to refuse. Yet things were not always this way. There was once a time when, whether by convention or technological limitation, many parts of life—home, school, and social interaction among them—were sanctuaries, sheltered from advertising and commerce. Over the last century, however, we have come to accept a very different way of being, whereby nearly every bit of our lives is commercially exploited to the extent it can be.

This book explains how our current state of affairs came to be. It is the consequence of the dramatic and impressive rise of an industry that barely existed a century ago: the Attention Merchants. Since its inception, the attention industry, in its many forms, has asked and gained more and more of our waking moments, albeit always, in exchange for new conveniences and diversions, creating a grand bargain that has transformed our lives. In the process, as a society and individually, we have accepted a life experience that is in all of its dimensions—economic, political, social, any way you can think of—mediated as never before in human history. And if each bargain in isolation seems a win-win, in their grand totality they have come to exert a more ambiguous though profound influence on how we live.

Their lineage can be traced to the nineteenth century, when in New York City the first newspapers fully dependent on advertising were created; and Paris, where a dazzling new kind of commercial art first seized the eyes of the person in the street. But the full potential of the business model by which attention is converted into revenue would not be fully understood until the early twentieth century, when the power of mass attention was discovered not by any commercial entity but by British war propagandists. The disastrous consequences of propaganda in two world wars would taint the subsequent use of such methods by government, at least in the West. Industry, however, took note of what captive attention could accomplish, and since that time has treated it as a precious resource, paying ever larger premiums for it.

As we shall see, the winning strategy from the beginning has been to seek out time and spaces previously walled off from commercial exploitation, gathering up chunks and then slivers of our un-harvested awareness. Within living memory it was thought that families would never tolerate the intrusion of broadcasting in the home. An earlier generation would find it astonishing that, without payment or even much outcry, our networks of family, friends, and associates have been recruited via social media to help sell us things. Now, however, most of us carry devices on our bodies that constantly find ways to commercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention. Thus, bit by bit, what was once shocking became normal, until the shape of our lives yielded further and further to the logic of commerce—but gradually enough that we should now find nothing strange about it.

For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, there arose the first means for harvesting attention on a mass scale and directing it for commercial effect, thanks to what is now familiar to us in many forms under the name of advertising. At its inception it was as transformative as the cotton gin.

For advertising was the conversion engine that, with astonishing efficiency, turned the cash crop of attention into an industrial commodity. As such, attention could be not only used but resold, and this is where our story begins.

Day's idea was not to offer such a notice board but rather to sell his readers' attention en bloc to more substantial advertisers. But for such undifferentiated attention to be valuable to anyone, he would have to amass a giant readership. That would mean making the New York Sun alluring to the broadest segment of society—by any means necessary.

The New York Sun first appeared on September 3, 1833: all text and in smaller format than the broadsheets, to save on costs. Day did it all—he was "proprietor, publisher, editor, chief pressman, and mailing clerk." For the paper's first issue, he took the unusual step of filling it with advertisements from businesses he had never solicited. You might say that he ran advertisements, in effect, to try and find advertisers. Such could also be understood from his statement on the front page: "The object of this paper," he wrote, "is to lay before the public, at a price within the means of every one, ALL THE NEWS OF THE DAY, and at the same time afford an advantageous medium for advertising." His plan for delivering on the promise of such a broad readership was to feature stories from which no one could look away.

"MELANCHOLY SUICIDE—a Mr. Fred A. Hall…put an end to his life on Sunday last by taking laudanum," read the first headline in the very first issue. Young Mr. Hall, the story revealed, was about to be shipped off to Indonesia by his father to end a romance. Unable to bear the separation, he took his life. "He was about twenty-four years of age, of engaging manners and amiable disposition, and one whose loss, even under less affecting circumstances, would have been deeply lamented."

On its first day, the New York Sun reportedly sold about three hundred copies. It was a start, but still a money-loser; to get it off the ground Day would have to do much better. He continued to find his best stories at New York's police court, with its "dismal parade of drunkards and wife beaters, con men and petty thieves, prostitutes and their johns." Copying a British publication, therefore, he hired a man called George Wisner (for $4 a week) just to cover the court, creating quite possibly "the first full-time news reporter in U.S. history."

Unlike other papers, the Sun also offered detailed coverage of New York's slave trade, including stories of captured runaways (despite having abolished slavery in 1827, New York still honored the property rights of slave state residents) and of the misery of slave marriages sundered by the auction block. Though otherwise apolitical and nonpartisan, the New York Sun, mainly owing to Wisner, took a consistent principled stand in favor of abolition. "We believe the day is not far distant," the Sun said, "when the clanking of slavery's chains will be heard no more—and Americans stand before the world practicing, as well as preaching, the glorious doctrine that all men are created free and equal."

At some magical moment during that first year, it happened: the lift generated by paid advertising exceeded the gravity of costs. And at that point, like the Wrights' aeroplane, the New York Sun took flight, and the world was never really the same again.

Large numbers of people taking in daily news gave rise to what Jürgen Habermas has called a "public sphere"4—a more quotidian term for this effect is "public opinion," but by whatever name, it was a new phenomenon, and one dependent on the nascent but growing attention industry.

When not chronicling death in its many forms, Bennett loved to gain attention for his paper by hurling insults and starting fights. Once he managed in a single issue to insult seven rival papers and their editors. He was perhaps the media’s first bona fide “troll.”

Bennett’s blend of murder and highfalutin beatdown was evidently worth a penny to many, and in less than a year, The Herald claimed a circulation of seven thousand, drawing roughly even with the Sun. The race was on to see which paper—and which kind of appeal—would harvest the most attention in New York.

In the ensuing contest we can observe a very basic and perhaps eternal dynamic of the attention industries. We’ve already seen the attention merchant’s basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. But a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our “automatic” attention as opposed to our “controlled” attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience’s baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant—just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed.

Certainly they were like human beings, for their wings had now disappeared, and their attitude in walking was both erect and dignified….They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-coloured hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs. We scientifically denominated them as Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat; and they are doubtless innocent and happy creatures, notwithstanding that some of their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.

The depiction of the moon, and one with life on it (not just life, but unicorns and flying man-bats with insistent libidos), was, apparently, widely accepted, in part thanks to the scientific style of the correspondent, the pretense that the story was reprinted from a respectable Edinburgh journal, and the impossibility of replicating with the naked eye the findings of the world’s largest telescope. The series was, understandably, a sensation, and the initial runs of the newspaper sold out, with crowds surrounding its offices, hungrily awaiting the next installment. When the dust settled, the New York Sun, founded just two years prior, had driven its circulation to a very precise-sounding 19,360, sailing past not only the other New York dailies but even the London dailies founded decades earlier, to take its place as the most widely read newspaper in the world.

But our capacity to ignore is limited by another fact: we are always paying attention to something. If we think of attention as a resource, or even a kind of currency, we must allow that it is always, necessarily, being “spent.” There is no saving it for later. The question is always, what shall I pay attention to? Our brains answer this question with varying degrees of volition, from “shhh—I'm reading this” to letting our minds wander in the direction of whatever might draw it in, whether in the corner of our screen or along some road we are walking. That is where the attention merchant makes his opportunity. But to succeed he must motivate us to withdraw our attention from where it is and surrender it to something else. It needn't be a thoughtful calculation.

But there is more to the posters' allure. Significantly, they catch the viewer on his way somewhere, the “in between” moments of the day that are in the interstices of our more purposeful mental engagements. That is, times when one might be bored, waiting for a streetcar, or simply strolling around, looking for something to catch the eye. The attentional habit of gazing at the world with nothing better to do has doubtless been a human practice since the species emerged. But its exploitation for commercial purposes is relatively new.

What used to be thought of as the “reptilian core” of our brains—let's now simply speak of those neural circuits governing behavior that seems reflexive, like flinching at a loud noise—should not be underestimated where the harvesting of attention is concerned; for once you recognize the triggers, you begin to see them everywhere: the flashing signs employed by vendors, those bouncing icons on your computer screen, the little pictures of cats or sexy women attached to Internet links. All of these stimuli set off neural responses that cause us to engage, whether we mean to or not. Flipping through a book of classic posters is instructive, for it is almost a catalogue of attention triggers. Motion, color, critters of every kind, sexualized men and women, babies and monsters seem to work best on us. It was the achievement of the late nineteenth century's poster pioneers to recognize these responses and put them to profitable use—a lesson that neither advertisers nor their eventual imitators in government would ever forget.

At first the Parisian posters were welcome and admired. At the height of Jules Chéret's success, the Third Republic awarded him the Legion of Honor, France's highest civilian decoration. But he was prolific, and so were his imitators, resulting in an all-out “poster craze” that spread through Europe and the Americas. There were soon dozens of French poster artists, including those now more famous for fine art, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, whose can-can dancers sitting on the laps of customers are unmistakable. At the start of the twentieth century, however, perhaps with foresight, Chéret and other artists began to abandon the business, while Toulouse-Lautrec died from a combination of alcoholism and syphilis. Despite this loss of artistry, the poster craze continued, overspreading the city without limit.

Industries, unlike organisms, have no organic limits on their own growth; they are constantly in search of new markets, or of new ways to exploit old ones more effectively; as Karl Marx unsympathetically observed, they “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” Soon, the posters came to define Paris; by one contemporary account, the city was “hardly more than an immense wall of posters scattered from the chimneys down to sidewalks with clusters of squares of paper of all colors and formats, not to mention simple inscriptions.”

Eventually it was too much; the novelty was no more. Here for the first time, but certainly not the last, attention harvesting, taken too far, engendered a vehement social reaction; the proliferation of commercial art and its displacement of other things began to drive people crazy.

Let us pause here to remark a major recurrent dynamic that has shaped the course of attention industries: “the revolt.” Industries may have an inherent tendency to “nestle everywhere,” but when the commodity in question is access to people’s minds, the perpetual quest for growth ensures that forms of backlash, both major and minor, are all but inevitable. The minor version I shall refer to as the “disenchantment effect”; this describes what happens when a once entrancing means of harvesting attention starts to lose its charm. Our ability to ignore things is adaptive; with enough exposure it can make us indifferent to any stimulus, until, say, a poster that was once arresting becomes one we can see through as if it did not exist. It is because of this effect that the attention merchant’s approach is always trending in the direction of going too far, almost to the point, sometimes even reaching it, of causing shock.

But the revolts can also take another, more dramatic form that is central to our story. When audiences begin to believe that they are being ill-used—whether overloaded, fooled, tricked, or purposefully manipulated—the reaction can be severe and long-lasting enough to have serious commercial consequences and require a significant reinvention of approach. Almost like a financial bubble bursting, a mass public revolt can reconfigure the industry or inspire regulatory action. That is what happened in Paris, where the anti-poster movement began to lobby the city to impose restraints on where advertisements might be placed, to impose taxes on posters to limit their spread, and to ban billboards along the train tracks. Since it was France, the issue was always stated as an aesthetic concern, but as so often, behind aesthetic concerns there was something deeper at work. Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent. Perhaps that feeling of violation was what Ogilvy felt when he wrote that “when I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?”

Indeed as we shall see, behind such impassioned backlash is very often an awareness that the exploitation of human attention is in some deeper way the exploitation of our persons. Buffeted by constant intrusions, we sometimes reach the point of feeling we’ve had enough, and that feeling is ultimately one the attention industries cannot ignore. In Paris, the municipal authorities did indeed take aggressive action, restricting the placement of posters, which they came to view as a blight, a weed in need of containment. Those limits still exist and are perhaps one reason visitors continue to find the city beautiful.

Claude C. Hopkins was perhaps an unlikely figure to revolutionize the business of harvesting and using human attention, but that is what he did in the early twentieth century, when he became one of advertising’s greatest innovators. Still in its infancy, this new form of communication was, as we have said, the means by which attention could be converted into cash, for Hopkins was a particular master of the art of using attention to create demand for new products.

Hopkins was born in 1866 in a small town in Michigan. His mother was Scottish, his father a newspaperman from a long line of Freewill Baptist ministers. Claude was subject to a strict evangelical upbringing, by the lights of which, as he would write, “seemingly every joy in life was a sin.” When his father abruptly abandoned the family, Hopkins, aged ten, became the sole wage earner, laboring as a boy janitor, delivering papers, and selling silver polish.

Hopkins left home to seek his fortune, though by his own often unreliable account, he was not after wealth or fame, merely the freedom for what he loved most, which was hard work. “I have always been an addict to work,” he would recall. “I love work as other men love play. It is both my occupation and my recreation.” Indeed after working through a series of menial jobs, Hopkins was hired as a “scheme man” for a company selling carpet sweepers, as writers of early advertisements were known long before copywriting acquired the glamour of a David Ogilvy or Don Draper.

His early career as a preacher may seem an incongruous footnote to the one that would make his name, but it is in fact quite significant if considered in the larger history of attention capture. Before the nineteenth century, human attention was a largely untapped resource in relation to its eventual commercial and political applications. One reason was the lack of advertising such as we would recognize it today. Yes, there have always been commercial notices and signs; the Greeks and Romans used them to indicate wares for sale, as did merchants in China. Some of the graffiti covering the walls of Pompeii, preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius, turn out to be advertisements for erotic services. But as we shall see, there is a crucial difference between this sort of signage and the industrialized capture of attention.

Attention in our sense of it was not vital for commerce as it has become. In a manner that still holds for some professions, like medicine, or for small businesses, merchants typically relied on a good reputation or a network of custom to attract business. As for advertising, it “was thought to be the work of the vulgarian; it was also thought useless.” Nor did the State, with the occasional exception of particular kings and emperors—the first two Napoleons, for instance—find it useful to seek regular access to the public mind. Before the democratic age ushered in by the nineteenth century, most political powers had no need to influence the governed.

This is not to say that there were no regular claimants on human attention, only that commercial and political ones hadn’t yet arrived. When they did, however, they were met by one that had stood for centuries. With its combination of moral injunctions as well as daily and weekly rituals, organized religion had long taken human attention as its essential substrate. This is especially true of monotheisms, whose demands for a strict adherence to the one true God naturally promote an ideal of undivided attention. Among early Christians, for example, total attention to God implied ceaseless prayer. The early Church father Clement of Alexandria wrote of the “Perfect Christian” as one who “prays throughout his entire life, endeavoring by prayer to have fellowship with God.” Likewise the desert monastics of the fourth century took as their aim “to maintain there as near as possible a ceaseless vigil of prayer, punctuated only by the minimal interruption for food and sleep.”

Such an aspiration to monopolize the attention of believers was hardly abandoned after Christianity’s early days. Some 1700 years later, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, prescribed various means for keeping the mind attuned to God, such as the practice of thinking of him immediately upon waking, right before falling asleep, for at least an hour during the day, and before taking any important action. (This discipline shares some similarity with the Jewish practice of offering brachot, or blessings, at various routine moments, such as before eating or drinking, or more exceptional ones, as when thunder is heard, among other practices codified in the Mishnah in the third century CE.)

At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it. But over the twentieth century, organized religion, which had weathered the doubts raised by the Enlightenment, would prove vulnerable to other claims on and uses for attention. Despite the promise of eternal life, faith in the West declined and has continued to do so, never faster than in the twenty-first century. Offering new consolations and strange gods of their own, the commercial rivals for human attention must surely figure into this decline. Attention, after all, is ultimately a zero-sum game.

While spectators watched, Clark would reach into a sack, pluck out a fresh snake, asphyxiate it with ether, and plunge it into a pot of boiling water. As he did so, fatty remnants of the snake rose to the top, which Clark skimmed and, on the spot, mixed into an elixir. The resulting potion he called “Clark Stanley's Snake Oil Liniment” and sold to onlookers. The Snake Oil, Clark boasted, had the power to cure many ailments: it was “good for man and beast.”

Of Stanley's life we have only his own account, which he called The Life and Adventures of the American Cowboy, by Clark Stanley Better Known as the Rattlesnake King, a slim volume that functioned both as an autobiography and advertising brochure. By his account he was born in central Texas in the 1850s and hit the cattle trail at age fourteen. After more than a decade as a cowboy, he was invited one day to visit the Hopi Indians to witness their secret snake dance. Befriending the medicine man, who was impressed with Stanley's Colt revolver and “fancy shooting,” he was invited to live with the Indians and learn their secrets, including, most precious of all, “the secret of snake oil” that was entrusted to him alone.

Yet patent medicine's most important influence was not on medicine but on advertising. As the industry grew, its pressing advertising needs drew many of the nation's most creative and talented copywriters, who would come up with some of modern advertising's most important techniques. It was also through the sale of patent medicine that advertising first proved conclusively its real utility, as a kind of alchemy, an apparently magical means of transforming basically useless substances into commercial gold.

As he later explained, "The greatest advertising men of my day were schooled in the medicine field. It is sometimes hard to measure just what advertising does. Not so in a medicine. Advertising must do all."

Like the Parisian posters, patent medicine advertisers understood the importance of using startling images and evocative words to turn the head. The Snake Oil Liniment advertisements featured Clark Stanley's enigmatically captivating face framed between a cowboy hat and goatee; here was an early instance of the stylized visages that were typical of early branding and which persist in the likes of Aunt Jemima and the Quaker Oats Quaker man—surrogates, perhaps, for the humans whose reputation had been, in a preceding age of commerce, the cornerstone of trustworthiness.

But their secret was to be more than merely eye-catching: the medicine ads brazenly promised to make wishes come true.*1 And what more basic and seductive human wish than to be cured of one's infirmities? Clark Stanley described his snake oil as good for "rheumatism, neuralgia, sciatica, lame back, lumbago, contracted muscles, toothache, sprains, swellings, etc." Some patent medicines, like "The Elixir of Life" sold by a Dr. James W. Kidd, of Fort Wayne, Indiana, went so far as to promise immortality, deliverance from the greatest fear of all.

The power of promising cure, let alone eternal life, would have been only too familiar to Claude Hopkins, the former preacher. His copy for Dr. Shoop's, now over a century old, is worth reading carefully, as it follows a still familiar formula of anticipating doubts and the likelihood that the sufferer may have been let down many times before. One might even detect the influence of Matthew's Gospel, specifically the story of "a certain woman, which had an issue of blood twelve years, And had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse" (9:25-26). Hopkins may have had the parable in mind when he wrote Some sick one may say:-"But I've tried about all medicines, consulted many physicians, and spent a great deal of money.

A few more signal tricks rounded out the medicine advertising approach. Perhaps chief among these was the "secret ingredient." Every patent medicine needed something to set it apart from all the others making similar claims, some kind of mysterious element that was not and perhaps could not be fully explained. It fired the imagination, feeding hope where reason offered thin gruel. Carbolic smoke; swamp root; baobab fruit; and in the case of Clark Stanley's liniment, the secret was, of course, the magic of snake oil itself.

It is easy to ascribe the success of such hokum to the gullibility of another age, until we stop to reflect that the techniques successfully used to sell patent medicine are still routinely used today. The lotions and potions of our times inevitably promise youthfulness, health, or weight loss, thanks to exotic ingredients like antioxidants, amino acids, miracle fruits like the pomegranate and açaí berry, extracted ketones, or biofactors. There is scarcely a shampoo or lotion for sale that does not promise an extraordinary result owing to essence of coconut, or rosemary extracts, or another botanical. As devotees of technology we are, if anything, more susceptible to the supposed degree of difference afforded by some ingenious proprietary innovation, like the "air" in Nike's sports shoes, triple reverse osmosis in some brands of water, or the gold-plating of audio component cables. For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.

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."

Given the margins—Liquozone cost next to nothing to make—and the size of mailings, he did not need to persuade many that his product could relieve a host of ailments, both minor (like dandruff) as well as fatal (including malaria, anthrax, diphtheria, and cancer).

In 1900, Samuel Hopkins Adams, a crime reporter at the New York Sun, was yearning to make his mark. Approaching the age of thirty he had made for himself a perfectly fine middle-class life, but after nine years at the Sun he was growing restless. “Newspaper reporting is a good job for five years,” he would later write, “but after that a man should move along.”

By the turn of the century, the industry was generating annual revenues of $45–$90 million, approximately $1.3–$2.9 billion adjusted for inflation, in a nation of just 85 million. Despite its inherent fraudulency, however, it escaped scrutiny for a variety of reasons.

For one, there was no regulatory state of the kind we now take for granted-no FDA to test medicines before they were sold to the public. Efforts to charge sellers of potions with violating common law had largely failed: their promises were gratuitous, and quaffing a product was an assumption of risk by nineteenth-century legal standards. In addition, the press had long displayed little interest in offending an industry that was perhaps its greatest single source of advertising revenue.*2 That changed in 1905, when the editor of Collier's Weekly, one of the new muckraking magazines, commissioned Adams to investigate mischief in the patent medicine business.

Accusing the entire industry of fraud, Adams opened his story this way: GULLIBLE America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver stimulants; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud, exploited by the skillfulness of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade.

Liquozone, concluded Adams, is "a fraud which owes its continued existence to the laxity of our public health methods and the cynical tolerance of the national conscience." Even the name was a sham. "Liquid oxygen doesn't exist above a temperature of 229 degrees below zero," pointed out Adams. "One spoonful would freeze a man's tongue, teeth and throat to equal solidity before he ever had time to swallow." Douglas Smith was accused of creating an "ingenious system of pseudoscientific charlatanry." For his part, Hopkins had buttressed Liquozone's claims with dozens of endorsements by doctors. Adams rebutted each one, either on the merits or by showing the endorser did not exist or was in fact a veterinarian.

Naturally, Adams also commissioned a chemical assay, which showed that Liquozone was nothing more than highly diluted sulfuric acid with coloring added. Perhaps his most impressive, if inhumane, undertaking was to test Liquozone's curative claims on laboratory animals. Guinea pigs were infected with anthrax, half of them treated with Liquozone, the other half serving as the control group. Within twenty-four hours all of the guinea pigs, treated and untreated, were dead. When repeated with diphtheria and tuberculosis, the experiment produced similar results. The lab concluded that Liquozone not only "had absolutely no curative effect but did, when given in pure form, lower the resistance of the animals, so that they died a little earlier than those not treated."

Coming in a more trusting age, when such revelations had greater power to shock, Adams's article caused an astonishing outcry. A variety of actors, including various women's organizations, and a crusading physician named Harvey Washington Wiley, began to push for legislation, long stalled in Congress, to impose basic labeling rules for foods and medicines. In 1906, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle encouraged demands for industry reform generally, with its depiction of nauseating and immoral practices in the meat industry. By that time President Theodore Roosevelt had joined the campaign; he'd later give a speech praising Collier's Weekly for having "hit the patent medicine concerns very hard and greatly reduced the amount they spent in advertising." Roosevelt added his weight to the assault on Congress, and the Food and Drugs Act was finally passed that year, despite strong congressional reluctance amid fierce industry lobbying.

The regulation took a distinctly American form that has proven influential to this day. Rather than banning patent medicines or their advertising, it imposed a “truth in labeling” requirement that made “misbranding” illegal and also required that any “dangerous” ingredients be listed. As understood by the government, this criminalized any false claims about potential therapeutic benefits. These new laws, along with advances in legitimate medicine, marked the beginning of the collapse of the patent medicine industry. The end did not come all at once. But even more than legislation, the precipitating factor was the public disenchantment with industry advertising. Even those who dared violate the new law with false claims met with a stony public, desensitized to tricks that had once been so seductive and had already been pushed to the logical extreme by Hopkins. Once the bubble popped, the astonishing alchemy that had made worthless decoctions into precious elixirs could never work again. Thus did Snake Oil go from being a cure-all to a byword for fraud. The ultimate effect was eventually to drive nearly all producers out of business. After peaking in 1907, this once mighty American industry began a death spiral, finally to become a fringe business by the 1930s.

We can also see patent medicine as a victim of its own success. In some version, folk medicines had been around for centuries, and when their claims were more modest, and their advertising less importunate, they may have delivered some of what they promised at least by virtue of the placebo effect, which, as scientists have shown, can be quite significant. But the industry had caught the spirit of late nineteenth-century capitalism, and for patent medicine, this translated into too great a fraud, too much profit, too much damage to public health. And so the industry collapsed of its own weight. But the means that it had invented for converting attention into cash would live on in other forms, finding new uses in the hands of both government and other commercial ventures.

Clark Stanley, the Rattlesnake King, continued with Snake Oil for a time but eventually fell afoul of the new laws. A Rhode Island prosecutor, acting on behalf of the Bureau of Chemistry, indicted him for violating the Food and Drugs Act in 1916. The bureau tested a sample of Snake Oil and found it to contain “a light mineral oil (petroleum product) mixed with about 1 percent fatty oil (probably beef fat) capsicum, and possibly a trace of camphor and turpentine.” As the government charged, Snake Oil was “falsely and fraudulently…represented as a remedy for all pains and lameness…when, in truth and in fact, it was not.”

Foreseeing a much longer war than his colleagues did, one with heavy losses, Kitchener took the highly realistic view that Britain needed to do something it had never done before: raise a huge army of a million men at least. With conscription ruled out by tradition and policy, however, Kitchener had the idea to make a direct and personal appeal to the British public. And thus began the first state-run attention harvest, or what historians would later call the “first systematic propaganda campaign directed at the civilian population.”

In our times, the idea of a government-run mass recruiting campaign does not sound especially controversial. Recently, the Affordable Care Act was made workable by just such an effort. But in 1914 it was unprecedented, not just in Britain, but anywhere. “That the State should advertise itself was an idea which occurred to few before the war,” concluded an official British history, “and which, had it been brought before the notice of the general public, would have seemed to them repellent.”

Remember that, for much of human history, rulers did not feel any particular need for public attention, and, indeed, usually tried to avoid it. Apart from rituals such as triumphal entry into the lands of a new subject people, dating back to the Romans, and the Royal Progress, the jaunt first undertaken in medieval times to “show the sacred body of the prince,” kings and queens once depended on the mystique of inaccessibility as an expression of power.

Before the democratic age, only the Church, as discussed, systematically sought and used access to the mind of the people. In fact, the very word “propaganda” originally had a strictly ecclesiastical meaning of propagating the faith. As Mark Crispin Miller writes, “It was not until 1915 that governments first systematically deployed the entire range of modern media to rouse their population to fanatical assent.” The entry of the State into the game—with its vast resources and monopoly on force—would be spectacularly consequential.

Whether the trick was provoking a sense of duty or subtle fears of German invasion or simply presenting the image of the great man himself, the initial August appeal was extraordinarily successful. Within a month, an astonishing 30,000 men a day were signing up at recruitment offices. By October, over 750,000 had joined the British Army, creating, in two months, an infantry larger than America’s current active force. Lord Kitchener now had his army.

A special Parliamentary Recruiting Committee was created in the fall of 1914 to run a “permanent ‘information’ campaign”—an institutionalized effort to develop ways of keeping the recruitment emergency foremost in the minds of Britons. The campaign’s most useful tool turned out to be a French invention we have seen before, the giant illustrated advertisement. Beginning in the final months of 1914, the country was blanketed in government war posters, and by 1916, the recruitment authority would calculate that it had printed nearly 12.5 million of them. By the war’s end, it would print some 54 million.

In the words of one recruit, who doubtless spoke for many, “It was seeing the picture of Kitchener and his finger pointing at you—any position that you took up, the finger was always pointing to you.” Like all effective posters, this one proved nearly impossible to ignore.

Seeing the necessity to keep innovating, the government did have a few more inspired ideas. For example, it built a small fleet of specialized “cine-motor vans,” which were equipped to screen films conducive to enlistment on large walls around the country—the drive-in movie was thus born not of romance but existential threat. In 1918, on the fourth anniversary of the war, the government would distribute a special, sealed message from the prime minister to be read aloud at 9 p.m. sharp at more than four thousand cinemas, music halls, and theaters. By such means—at a time when “broadcast” still referred to a crop sowing technique—the prime minister reached an estimated 2.5 million people at once, an unheard of audience at the time.

Mainly, though, it was no single invention that marked the government’s effort so much as its massive scale and organization. In this, the British anticipated an insight that would be expressed by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul halfway through the twentieth century: to succeed, propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means and media available in his time—movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing in one century, social media in another, as the rise of ISIS attests. Where there is only sporadic or random effort—a planted newspaper article here, a poster or a radio program there, a few slogans sprayed on walls—this modern form of attention capture does not bear its once unimagined fruit.

Even the most successful and adaptive efforts to harvest attention can come up short. In fact, by the nature of the crop, most do. Ultimately the military would have to resort to conscription to meet its manpower needs. Still, Kitchener’s recruitment drive was almost certainly the most successful in history. Out of 5.5 million men of military age at the start of the war, about half had enlisted voluntarily by late September of 1915, this despite staggeringly high casualties in the early years. To heed the call was to accept a great chance of death or serious injury, a roughly 50/50 chance. That Lord Kitchener’s campaign managed to achieve by persuasion what other countries achieved by legal coercion was a lesson lost on no one. Just as the patent medicine advertisements had demonstrated that attention could be converted into cash, the first propaganda drives showed it was also convertible into other forms of value, like compliant service even unto death. The British example would come to be copied by others for the rest of the century: by governments in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Nazi Germany; and elsewhere, as we’ll see, by commercial actors. As the historians M. L. Sanders and Philip Taylor wrote, “The British Government was responsible for opening a Pandoran box which unleashed the weapon of propaganda upon the modern world.”

The very first country to try out the British propaganda techniques was not one synonymous with mind control, but rather the Land of the Free, which, in 1917, would abandon its neutrality to enter the war. Long before Americans began borrowing British television shows, they were borrowing propaganda techniques. However, like nearly every American imitation of a British original, the American version would be much bigger.

In 1917, the United States remained intensely divided over the merits of entering a war that had already claimed millions of lives and enormous resources, with no end in sight. To many it also seemed, essentially, a contest between European powers for European territory. And so many Americans, especially those of German or Irish descent, saw no particular reason for their country to take the side of the British. Wilson and Creel were both all too familiar with these objections. Indeed, Wilson had just won reelection on a neutrality platform, which Creel had explained and justified in a bestseller published during the campaign entitled Wilson and the Issues. There was no stronger case for staying out than the one these two men had made.

A “war-will”—a concept borrowed from nationalist writers, denoting a surrender of the individual to the greater will of the nation—was the new necessity. Creel wrote that this “war-will, the will-to-win, of a democracy depends on the degree to which each one of all the people of that democracy can concentrate and consecrate body and soul and spirit in the supreme effort of service and sacrifice.” If the language sounds familiar, it should. Benito Mussolini would later describe his own project as the creation of “an objective Will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society.” Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) would likewise glorify a collective will in spiritual terms. But for the time being, Creel was alone in hailing the fascist virtue of “weld[ing] the people of the United States into one white-hot mass instinct with fraternity, devotion, courage, and deathless determination.”

To be fair, Creel's nationalism and his conception of a "war-will" was a far cry from the more malevolent strain that would arise later. "In no degree was the Committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression," he insisted. "Its emphasis throughout was on the open and the positive." But if he was a second-rate fascist, as a propagandist he was of the first rank. For, as he averred, what he practiced was "Propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith.' " Following the British example, Creel sought a massive and totalizing seizure of the nation's attention.

Following the British example, Creel sought a massive and totalizing seizure of the nation’s attention. For this, a flood of government communication was necessary, for he understood that “to conduct as well as accommodate this torrent he needed to command every possible sluice, the broader the better.” Toward this end there was “no medium of appeal that we did not employ. The printed word, the spoken word, the motion picture, the telegraph, the cable, the wireless, the poster, the sign-board—all these were used in our campaign to make our own people and all other peoples understand the causes that compelled America to take arms.”

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.

Because Creel's committee kept meticulous records, we have some measure of how many people he reached. The U.S. government printed 75 million pamphlets and books (compare with USA Today, which has a subscription of 1.6 million). It introduced the “Four Minute Man” program, in which ordinary citizens were asked to give pro-war speeches, four minutes in length, at movie theaters while the reels were being changed. The more than 75,000 volunteers delivered a total of 755,190 speeches, reaching a very precisely estimated 134,454,514 people.

Under Creel, too, the American government joined forces with the movie business to screen some of the first American propaganda films. A special division of the committee produced features like Pershing's Crusaders and America's Answer to the Hun, both of which enjoyed solid ticket sales. Early on, Creel had made clear to the private film industry, just then in the midst of relocating to Hollywood, that any productions “prejudicial” to the war effort would be suppressed. After some prodding, the studios began to see both the patriotic and commercial potential of patriotic “hate” films, like Wolves of Kultur, which came out in fifteen episodes.

Finally, there was the American version of the giant Kitchener poster that had been so important to the British effort. Lacking a living personification of the cause, however, the Pictorial Arts Division substituted the allegorical Uncle Sam pointing his finger and declaring “I want YOU for the U.S. Army,” for what would surely be the most indelible instance of the recruitment genre. In another poster reading “Destroy This Mad Brute,” Germany appears as a giant crazed gorilla; this King Kong avant la lettre, clutches in one arm a beautiful woman naked to the waist—the ravaged Belgium—and in the other hand, a club emblazoned with the word Kultur. The appeal is right to the male amygdala, the brain's seat of violent emotions, shown in functional MRI to light up at such primal horrors.

Some 700,000 Americans volunteered for the armed forces, even though, unlike the British, the American army, from nearly the beginning, relied on conscription. Not all of Creel's success, however, is owing to its superb attention capture and effective messaging.

Walter Lippmann, a progressive journalist, co-founder of The New Republic, and a power within the Wilson administration, had been among those who pressured Wilson to take the nation to war. During the war he worked at the Creel Committee, and witnessed firsthand its power to whip the country into a fanatical assent. Despite his own initial support for the war, the ease with which the Creel Committee had succeeded turned him into something of a lifelong cynic.

What Lippmann took from the war—as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion—was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it—the rough "stereotypes" (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the "consent" of the governed had been, in his phrase, "manufactured." Hence, as he wrote, "It is no longer possible…to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify."

Any communication, Lippmann came to see, is potentially propagandistic, in the sense of propagating a view. For it presents one set of facts, or one perspective, fostering or weakening some "stereotype" held by the mind. It is fair to say, then, that any and all information that one consumes—pays attention to—will have some influence, even if just forcing a reaction. That idea, in turn, has a very radical implication, for it suggests that sometimes we overestimate our own capacity for truly independent thought. In most areas of life, we necessarily rely on others for the presentation of facts and ultimately choose between manufactured alternatives, whether it is our evaluation of a product or a political proposition. And if that is true, in the battle for our attention, there is a particular importance in who gets there first or most often. The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.

All this, in Lippmann's view, helped explain why the British and American governments were able, with such surprising speed, to create a "war-will." They presented a simple, black-and-white stereotype by which to understand the war, used every resource of the state to thoroughly propagate that view, and then prevented any dissenting analysis from reaching anyone with a sympathetic stereotype as to what the war was about. That "public opinion" had been so easy to manufacture left Lippmann an abiding pessimist about democracy's dependence on it.

Lippmann's orientation was shared by prominent progressives in the American judiciary, who, witnessing the rough treatment of dissenters like Debs, began to think twice about what had been done in the name of progressivism. Among the first to express himself was the famed lower-court jurist Judge Learned Hand, who'd been among the few during the war to squash an indictment under the Espionage Act. After the War, as prosecutors continued to arrest and jail socialists and anarchists for their views, the most prominent progressives on the Supreme Court, Justices Holmes and Louis Brandeis, underwent a transformation. In a series of dissents and concurrences, renowned for their eloquence, the two outlined the case for stronger speech protections in the Constitution. Justice Brandeis, as if in apology for the Court's behavior during the war, would in 1927 write a memorable paean to the value of liberty of speech in his famous concurring opinion in Whitney v. California: Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary.

Yet others had nearly the opposite reaction, responding to propaganda's dramatic success not with dismay but enthusiasm, in the sense of glimpsing a grand opportunity. Among them was the young, Vienna-born Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud. Residing in the United States, and just twenty-four at the start of the war, he was making his living as a journalist turned press agent. To create publicity for his clients, Bernays was already employing his uncle's idea of a human nature driven by unconscious desires. (According to legend, Sigmund Freud gave him his General Lectures in exchange for a box of cigars.) During the war Bernays worked, like many journalists, on the Creel Committee, and like Lippmann, he emerged with a sense of the futility of democracy. But unlike Lippmann, Bernays drew from the experience a belief in the necessity of enlightened manipulation. Otherwise, he wrote, the public "could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so that they had to be guided from above." As he saw it, "the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."

With the government campaigns as proof-of-concept for what a mass advertising campaign might achieve, corporate America soon caught Bernays's enthusiasm. There was something about the British and American use of advertising for official purposes that cleansed the practice of its tainted reputation. Applied to a high common purpose it could no longer be deemed a mere prop of charlatanry. "Advertising has earned its credentials," concluded Printer's Ink, the advertising trade magazine, "as an important implement of war."

Erich Ludendorff, a lead German general during the attack on Belgium, reflected that “before the enemy propaganda we were like a rabbit before a snake.” Another German war veteran, while in prison, wrote a tract admiring British propaganda as “marvelous,” praising its simple presentation of “negative and positive notions of love and hatred, right and wrong, truth and falsehood,” thereby allowing “no half-measures which might have given rise to some doubt.” The fan was Adolf Hitler, and given his chance, he thought he could do even better.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, from 1918 to 1920, with advertising redeemed in the public eye and private consumption once again rising, American and European business began to spend wildly on advertising, doubling industry revenue in just two years. By 1930, that spending had increased by a factor of ten; and in the process a truly international industry was born, as the profits and powers derived from using access to the public mind became clear, once and for all.

The new confidence of the industry was captured in a 1923 manifesto entitled Scientific Advertising. “The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science,” it boasted. “It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analyzed until they are well understood. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law.” Nothing, in advertising, was now left to chance: “Every course is charted. The compass of accurate knowledge directs the shortest, safest, cheapest course to any destination.”

Scale and accumulated expertise are what set the new firms apart from their predecessors. Just as the industrial revolution had transformed manufacture, and Ford's assembly lines pursued a never-ending quest for more efficient methods of mass production, so, too, did the new firms transform the casually intuitive and improvisational approach that had once been advertising into a machine for mass attention capture. Their campaigns were unending and exhaustive, like the British and American propaganda campaigns, which to some extent had solved the already recognized problem of disenchantment. As soon as one approach stopped working, a new one would be launched, in the ideal case stabilizing sales indefinitely.

Consider Claude Hopkins's campaign for a new invention called orange juice, which presented it as an elixir for infants. A doting mother is pictured seated with a rosy-cheeked newborn, a posture for nursing, but this mother is feeding her baby with a spoon. “Orange juice is regularly prescribed for the diet of tiny babies because physicians know its purity and food value.” In another advertisement, a “DR. WILEY” says “Oranges…Are Better Than Medicine.” The consumer is informed that “practically every well-known physician advises orange juice for the diet of little children—even tiny babies.” Later, with the discovery of “Vital Amine C” (what we now call vitamin C), orange juice would acquire its magic ingredient, and a daily glass would become necessary for everyone's good health. “You need orange juice every day.” … The similarities with patent medicine advertising run deep, for the link between orange juice and the health of infants was based on nothing and ultimately proved to be highly dubious. Today the American Academy of Pediatrics strongly cautions against feeding babies orange juice, because it “could risk having juice replace breast milk or infant formula in the diet,” resulting in malnutrition; in addition, “excessive juice consumption may be associated with diarrhea, flatulence, abdominal distention, and tooth decay.” These side effects may have been unknown in the 1920s, but so was any proof of a supposed health benefit. While not as dangerous, orange juice was no more an elixir than Liquozone had been.

As consumerism grew, it also became possible to sell products solving problems that were hardly recognized as such, let alone matters of life and death. Demand was engineered by showing not so much that the product would solve the problem but that the problem existed at all. Bringing subconscious anxieties to the fore was the inspired brilliance behind the great campaigns for mouthwash and toothpaste, two products largely unknown before the 1920s.

“Halitosis—Makes you Unpopular” was the headline of Listerine's campaign. Originally a disinfectant, invented for medical usage on the battlefield, the brown liquid had also been marketed as a floor cleaner. But in the 1920s, under new management, the manufacturer presented it as a cure for a devastating problem countless Americans were unwittingly afflicted with. “No matter how charming you may be or how fond of you your friends are, you cannot expect them to put up with halitosis (unpleasant breath) forever. They may be nice to you—but it is an effort.” … The ominously clinical-sounding “halitosis” was a largely unheard of word when Listerine introduced it. But they rightly gauged the human psyche and the tenor of the times by stirring fears about a problem everyone encounters in others from time to time without comment. Directing this kind of scrutiny to it can't help but make one wonder about one's own breath (as you yourself may now be doing). The campaign was a masterpiece of demand engineering, and between 1922 and 1929, the Listerine company's annual earnings rose from $115,000 to over $8 million.

The omnipotent buying public carries in its mind only a dim conception of the part played in its daily life by this enormous new pseudoscience, advertising. How did that tube of Pepsodent toothpaste, for instance, reach your bathroom shelf?…It got there, obviously, because somehow Lord & Thomas had at least made you suspect that of all toothpastes Pepsodent is the one most imperative to your health and happiness. You may not remember but somewhere you read that you had a film on your teeth and that gritty Pepsodent was the thing which would polish that film away.

It is right to pause here to acknowledge that the psychological premises of these and other advertisements may owe something to Sigmund Freud, who was coincidentally at the height of his productivity and whose books, especially The Interpretation of Dreams and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, were widely available in translation. Indeed, it is often argued that Freud's elucidation of the unconscious must have driven the new techniques of advertising over the 1910s and 1920s. This is a central contention, for instance, of the 2002 documentary series The Century of the Self, which gives great credit to Freud's nephew Edward Bernays of the Creel Committee for introducing appeals to the unconscious mind to product marketing.

"Whenever one of us goes to the theatre or picks a necktie, we are responding to definite laws," wrote Stanley B. Resor, president of New York's J. Walter Thompson and perhaps the most influential proponent of behavioral science. "For every type of decision—for every sale in retail stores—basic laws govern the actions of people in great masses." Resor was serious enough about the discipline to hire John B. Watson, the famous author of the 1913 Behaviorist Manifesto. Watson was more ethologist than psychologist, more concerned with hardwired human traits and conditioned responses than the Freudians, who were more interested in the individual psyche and its personal experience. For Watson, unlike Freud, mental states and moods were irrelevant. "The time seems to have come," he said, "when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness." Instead, he pursued a unitary theory of animal response, for the behaviorist "recognizes no dividing line between man and brute."

Watson believed that humans, like other animals, could be conditioned to respond in predictable ways, and his most famous experiments were conducted on human infants. In the one on "Little Albert," a human version of Pavlov's experiments on dogs, Watson induced a phobia of rats in an eleven-month-old. He did so by striking a metal bar with a hammer behind the baby's head every time a white rat was shown to him. After seven weeks of conditioning, the child, initially friendly to the rodent, began to fear it, bursting into tears at the sight of it. The child, in fact, began to fear anything white and furry—Watson bragged that "now he fears even Santa Claus."

At J. Walter Thompson, Watson was, in some sense, given a chance to perform his experiments on a larger population. As he maintained, "To make your consumer react, it is only necessary to confront him with either fundamental or conditioned emotional stimuli." Soon Resor made Watson an "ambassador-at-large" and an account executive. When not advising on campaigns, he traveled America and the globe to sell executives on scientific advertising, and on his firm, which possessed all the tools necessary to control the minds of the public. As he said it plainly in one speech: "Since the time the serpent in the Garden of Eden influenced Eve and Eve in turn persuaded Adam, the world has tried to find out ways and means of controlling human behavior. In advertising, we call the process selling."

We have said that creating demand for new products was the first great goal of the early advertising industry. Otherwise, as Resor once explained, "the achievements of American mass production would fall of their own weight." The second great objective realized in the 1920s was the engineering of reputation, also known as branding. … Brands hardly existed before mass production; in a prior age, it was the reputation of the individual merchant that did the work, much as it still does today for doctors, accountants, and other professionals. But by the 1920s, advertisers came to understand that a reputation, once necessarily earned, could now be manufactured like a war-will or any consumer good. And so over the early part of the century, American and European firms invested millions to create associations with names that previously had no broad connotations, names like "Cadillac," "Kraft," "Lucky Strike," "Heinz," "Coca-Cola," and so on. The fact that all of these remain familiar and enjoy enviable sales nearly a hundred years on shows how that initial investment, if properly husbanded, can pay dividends indefinitely.

MacManus's alternative was an advertising of iconography. He built up his brands to be trusted, even revered. He sought not so much to persuade customers but to convert them; to create a lasting loyalty. In his hands, the Cadillac meant something, and its drivers were meant to identify with their vehicles.

During this period it also struck businessmen, as if all at once, that if America was becoming a consumer society, most of this new purchasing of household goods was being done by the lady of the house. “In the purchase of things for personal use,” declared one authority in 1921, “men do very little on their own initiative.” Companies, run mostly by men, therefore, came to see cracking the code of the female consumer as the key to commerce. As an advertisement in Printer’s Ink put it, “The proper study of mankind is man…but the proper study of markets is women.” To men of industry, however, the promised land was mostly a terra incognita. Hence, advertising’s third major development was a great new effort to appeal to women—through what would later be called “targeted” advertisements.

A famous early advertisement for Woodbury soap, crafted by a woman named Helen Lansdowne, typified the new approach. When she was given the account, the product had long been sold by patent medicine principles. Its advertisements had a branding visage, consisting of the mustachioed Dr. John Woodbury, the dermatologist who invented it in 1877. The face, which was also stamped into each bar, was accompanied by the slogan “a pure antiseptic toilet soap—for the skin, scalp, and complexion.” Some versions tried for the softer touch with the tag line “Women should be beautiful.” But the grim Dr. Woodbury still loomed large, producing a rather creepy dissonance. … Lansdowne went in an entirely different direction. In her advertisement, a dashing clean-shaven man in white tie is pictured with his arm wrapped around a beautiful woman, whose hand he holds. His cheek rests against her temple; he appears enthralled, while she stares pointedly at the viewer, her skin aglow. … “A Skin you love to touch,” reads the copy. “You, too, can have the charm of a radiant, velvety skin.”

The ineffectiveness of the old Woodbury’s advertisements reflected a clueless dependence on a series of broad stereotypes for advertising to women. “Women as a whole are more suggestible than men,” declared the contemporary textbook Advertising, Its Principles and Practice. “They are more easily influenced by their emotions.” Robert E. Ramsay, the author of Effective Direct Advertising, wrote that “women are more responsive to appeals made by illustration and by use of color than men are.” Whatever the validity of such claims, they didn’t exactly have women figured out.

What is really most notable about this marriage of word and image is that, unlike the traditional ads, which offer a cure for a problem—new snake oil in old bottles—Lansdowne's advertisement holds out the promise of a better life. It sells the reader on herself, a new self, better than the old. Here was an innovatively oblique way of pushing the product by connecting it to the consumer's deepest yearning to be beautiful and desired.

Demand engineering, too, found itself refitted for women consumers, as the “whisper” or “scare” campaigns, which warned of a social disgrace or judgment, from which the product at hand offered deliverance. Consider J. Walter Thompson’s 1922 advertisement for P&G’s laundry detergent targeting mothers. The copy reads, “If little Molly should be in an accident, what would the neighbors think of those ‘clean’ underclothes? Molly’s underclothes are supposedly clean, but actually they are gray and untidy.” Targeting the unwed, Listerine would retrofit its wildly successful “halitosis” campaign. In the “poor Edna” series, it is Edna’s stale breath, which of course no friend would tell her about, that has left her lovelorn, or in the enduring expression coined for the campaign, “often a bridesmaid but never a bride.”

And sometimes the power of the suffragette movement itself was harnessed to sell to women. Imagine a floor cleaner with a feminist agenda; that is precisely what Old Dutch Cleanser claimed to be: a “Champion of Women’s Rights,” among which it included “freedom from household drudgery” and “the right to a clean home and the leisure to enjoy it.” By similar logic, an advertisement for Shredded Wheat argued that the cereal was a “Declaration of Independence” from cooking. Here, then, in the Women’s Editorial Department, we witness the birth of a nexus between products and the individual, one that serves advertisers to this day. Going far beyond the question of usefulness or even quality as a matter of brand development, advertisers began to imbue products with traits and associations that consumers could identify with.

The Women’s Editorial Department at J. Walter Thompson was also responsible for pioneering a final technique that made its way into all advertising by the end of the 1920s. Both Helen Lansdowne and Stanley Resor believed that women were in particular likely to notice and imitate the behavior of the rich, high-born, and famous. And so, over the 1920s, they took a rarely used practice—the paid endorsement—and turned it into a mainstay for women’s products, from which it later spread to all products. Resor explained the strategy this way at an executive meeting. “The desire to emulate is stronger in women than in men,” he said. “Lombroso, the celebrated psychologist, explains it in terms of woman’s ability to excite her imagination with external objects. It enables her to become princess or movie queen by using the cold cream or toilet soap they recommended.”

Advertisers themselves had, in limited ways, been using celebrity endorsements—as early as the nineteenth century, Pears' soap billed itself as the choice of the royal family. But the testimonials for patent medicines from renowned "doctors" as well as grateful patients had queered the practice of testimonials for the most part. And so it took a bit of daring for J. Walter Thompson Company, at Lansdowne's direction, to resurrect it for Pond's cold cream, originally marketed not as a beauty product but as a spot remover.

Through its variously "scientific" techniques like demand engineering, branding, or targeting, the advertising industry had become an increasingly efficient engine for converting attention into revenue. It did so by beginning its now familiar practice of giving consumers, particularly women, a constantly receding ideal to strive after. Perhaps social practice had always done so, but now new strategies of attention capture were doing so in the service of commerce, an infinitely more insatiable and unyielding force than social convention.

Ultimately despite the role that many of the "Lady Persuaders" also played in the women's rights movement, their work at J. Walter Thompson tended mainly to reinforce the condescending biases and stereotypes they had once been at pains as activists to undo. Frances Maule, once in advertising, opined that whether they knew it or not, women usually suffered from a sense of "unimportance, insignificance, [and] inadequacy." Successful advertisements for soap or cold cream worked by promising a remedy for such emotions, so that by buying the product a woman might achieve that " 'grand and glorious feeling' which we are seeking all the time." The president of the advertising trade association described the effect more cynically: "It is an illusion, of course…still it is a means to that end and its proper use [is] a very desirable practice."

In 1925, the elder Hill died, leaving the American Tobacco Company entirely in the hands of George Washington, who was determined to make Lucky Strike, his pet brand, America’s leading cigarette, and to spend as much as necessary to do it. Whatever the merits of the product, his money was good, and he believed in the power of advertising. By 1931 he would be spending nearly $20 million per year on it, up from $400,000 in 1925; it was at the time an unprecedented outlay, and possibly the most spent on advertising a single product up until that time.

In 1917, the brand had gotten its start with an idea conceived by Hopkins. “It’s toasted” was the slogan, the “secret” step supposedly yielding a better flavor. In the mid-1920s, Lasker built on the concept with a campaign borrowing from patent medicine’s playbook: the brand was presented as a health tonic—specifically, a cure for the problem of sore throats caused by most cigarettes. With a new claim that toasting “removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation,” including “harmful corrosive acids,” the Lucky Strike slogan became: “Your throat protection—against irritation—against cough.” There was even a secret process involved: “the ‘TOASTING’ process includes the use of the Ultra Violet Ray…heat purifies and so ‘TOASTING’—that extra, secret process—removes harmful irritants that cause throat irritation and coughing.” To drive home the hygienic benefit, Lasker ran a “precious voice” campaign, with testimonials from opera stars and other singers.

The American Tobacco Company sent doctors free cartons of Luckies in exchange for a vague nod that they might be less abrasive than other brands. Whether or not the doctors knew what they were agreeing to, Lord & Thomas went ahead with ads that portrayed them as, in effect, touting the health benefits of smoking Lucky Strikes. One advertisement features a doctor in a white coat holding up a packet, with the copy: “20,679 physicians say ‘LUCKIES are less irritating’…Your throat protection.”

In the late 1920s, it was still taboo for women to smoke in public; in some cities, including, for a brief while, New York, it was even against the law. But to the monomaniacal Hill, the idea was sheer commercial opportunity. “It will be,” he told Bernays, “like opening a new gold mine right in our front yard.”

Bernays sought to overthrow the taboo against women smoking outside the home by framing it as an abridgement of their freedom. Relying on some back-of-the-envelope Freudian analysis, including the idea of cigarettes as phallic objects and a source of oral satisfaction, he presented smokes as vital to a fuller life. And he hired a group of attractive women to march in the 1929 New York City Easter Day Parade, brandishing their Lucky Strikes, or “torches of freedom.” He had paid Ruth Hale, a prominent feminist, to sign the letter inviting the women to the march. “Light another torch of freedom! Fight another sex taboo!” it thundered.

The historical record is somewhat muddled as to the real effect of the stunt, precisely because of Bernays’s natural tendency to take credit as the mysterious puppet master behind the scenes. Perhaps seduced by an irresistible story, many have accepted his version of events, in which the “Torches of Freedom” parade marks a kind of social turning point. No less astute a critic of propaganda than Noam Chomsky allows that Bernays’s “major coup, the one that really propelled him into fame in the late 1920s, was getting women to smoke.”

It is of course impossible to assign—or deny—definitive credit for something as complex as a change in social norms. Suffice it to say that contemporary reporting of the “Torches of Freedom” event was relatively thin. The New York Times buried its account of the protest halfway through its story on the presumably more urgent subject, the Easter Parade itself: “About a dozen young women strolled back and forth [on Fifth Avenue] while the parade was at its peak, ostentatiously smoking their cigarettes….One of the group explained that the cigarettes were ‘torches of freedom’ lighting the way to the day when women would smoke on the street as casually as men.” The Washington Post would not mention the demonstration until 1991, by which time the event had gathered significance by reason of the story’s propagation; in the end, Bernays’s signal triumph may have been the particularly good job he did capturing the attention of historians.

At roughly the same time that the boss called in Bernays, Lasker was also tasked with engineering greater demand among women for Lucky Strike. This was the beginning of the “Reach for a Lucky” campaign. Far cruder and more conventional than Bernays’s effort, it also likely sold more cigarettes to women than all the torches of Easter. Lasker started from advertising’s most tried and true premise, borrowed from patent medicine: cigarettes needed to be a cure for something—if not sore throats, then what? Noticing that women often expressed concern about their weight, he came up with the idea of selling Lucky Strike as a remedy for excess weight, a diet aid. The original slogan “Reach for a Lucky instead of a Bon-Bon” soon became “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” and would long be remembered simply as “Reach for a Lucky.”

In a typical ad, a glamorous flapper is puckering up, blowing smoke perhaps, with her eyes shut tight; the copy reads, “To keep a slender figure, no one can deny…Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.” A number of others invoke “The Shadow which pursues us all”; in these, a matronly silhouette ominously frames the profile of a lithe young woman. For good measure, Lasker added Hopkins’s coda to nearly all these ads: “It’s toasted.”

Lasker may never have been at J. Walter Thompson, much less the Women's Department, but his imitation of their approach worked wonders. Sales of Luckies exploded, increasing by 8.3 billion units in 1928 alone. As other brands followed suit, rates of smoking among women tripled from the 1920s to the mid-1930s.

In this way, George Washington Hill got what he wanted. By the end of the decade, Lucky Strike had overtaken Camel as the nation's leading cigarette for no evident reason than its advertising spending. To succeed, propaganda must be total. But along the way, the campaign crossed some lines, resorting to the sort of dangerous misrepresentations that had made patent medicines so successful.

No longer peddling primitive space ads in penny papers, the advertising executive was now deftly marrying word and image across the spectrum of print media on behalf of burgeoning giants of manufacture and service, wielding the power of life and death over consumer products. As the 1920s closed, advertising had grown itself from a dubious activity and negligible industry into a major part of the economy. American companies went from spending an estimated $700 million in 1914 to almost $30 billion a year by 1929, then about 3 percent of gross domestic product. Advertising was now as big as many of the industries it served.

With its acquired wealth and grandeur, the industry began to see itself differently, in a way more attuned with its origins, which its cloak of science had served to conceal. No, not the origins in patent medicine, redolent of swindle and charlatanism—that lineage advertising was glad to have disowned, even if it would never disown the methods. Rather, it was now that advertising began to see itself in the image of the original propaganda body, the Church; its work as a mission; and its masters as capitalism's new priestly class. The agencies were educating the masses, doing a sort of missionary work on behalf of the great new companies fulfilling the broadest needs and deepest desires of the nation. President Coolidge captured the new image in a 1926 speech: "Advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade. It is a great power that has been entrusted to your keeping which charges you with the high responsibility of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world. It is all part of the greater work of regeneration and redemption of mankind."

In The Man Nobody Knows, a 1925 bestseller by adman Bruce Barton, himself the son of a Methodist preacher, Jesus Christ is depicted, not ironically but with earnest reverence, as an early advertising man and small-business owner, managing his team of disciples who “mastered public attention” and came up with winning slogans such as “the meek shall inherit the earth.” Barton reached even deeper when he wrote that “advertising” was a force “as old as the world…‘Let there be light’ constitutes its charter.

The possibilities of electronic media and the Internet still lay in the future. Thanks to the rise of advertising, the world seemed cluttered with come-ons, but these were still confined to newspapers, magazines, posters, billboards, and leaflets. And yet unbeknownst to most of those making the most grandiose claims for advertising, some of its best days were already behind it.

When, in 1932, Claude Hopkins died of heart failure, at the age of sixty-six, The New York Times described him as “the man who had written $100 million worth of copy.” Despite his success, however, when Hopkins was near death, he claimed with his peculiar piety that “money means nothing to me, save that my Scotch instinct rebels at waste.” He had also ended his autobiography on a strange note: “The happiest are those who live closest to nature, an essential to advertising success.” It was an odd sentiment from one foremost in the effort to replace nature with advertising.

Consumers make their blunder-ing way, so many Alices in the Wonderland of salesman-ship; they buy not what they freely want, but what they are made to want. In the office of the advertising agency, human psychology is an open book. There is no strand or chord of it upon which the advertiser has not learned to play….But there is just a chance that the gentlemen who run this unparalleled side show may be putting on the acts a little too fast; just a chance that the superlatives have almost reached the limits of registering on the brain; that the sheer multiplicity of brand names dizzies the spectator instead of seducing him….In that hope this book has been written, but its authors have not deluded themselves with the belief that the triumph of science is inevitable.

Both encapsulating and amplifying an emergent disenchantment with the high-handedness of advertising, Your Money’s Worth would become a bestseller, known in its time as the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the consumer movement, and, along with the Depression, it sparked another major revolt—another period of consumer resistance. The authors knew their success owed in part to a perspective that was, in their words, “in no sense revolutionary.” Chase and Schlink were no critics of the free market, private property, or any other defining feature of American capitalism. Indeed, it was in the defense of the market’s integrity that they attacked advertising, which, with its misleading and deceptive claims, and manufactured demand for relatively needless products, was distorting the economy to the nation’s detriment. In the wake of the book’s success, in 1929 the authors founded Consumers’ Research Incorporated, which aimed to be the world’s first scientific consumer product testing service. The new organization produced a confidential newsletter—the Consumers’ Research General Bulletin—which supplied its subscribers with secret reviews of products and product claims, based on rigorous testing.

Some of the most intense new critics of advertising were internal. In 1928, Theodore MacManus, who had so famously branded Cadillac, Dodge, and Chrysler, decided he’d had it. Writing in The Atlantic, he denounced both his own industry and the whole of modern civilization: “Advertising has gone amuck,” he wrote, “in that it has mistaken the surface silliness for the sane solid substance of an averagely decent human nature.”

James Rorty, another former copywriter, who wrote Our Master’s Voice: Advertising (1934), in which he described the job’s effect on the soul. The adman, he wrote, “inevitably empties himself of human qualities. His daily traffic in half-truths and outright deceptions is subtly and cumulatively degrading. No man can give his days to barbarous frivolity and live. And ad-men don’t live.

Advertising had not come so far so fast to take these attacks lying down. The International Advertising Association pronounced Your Money’s Worth a work of “communist propaganda.” The purpose of the consumer movement, another critic charged, was “to overthrow capitalists, but to have the overthrowing done by an army of embattled consumers and housewives rather than by the traditional revolutionary agent—Marx’s proletariat.”

Information cannot be acted upon without attention and thus attention capture and information are essential to a functioning market economy, or indeed any competitive process, like an election (unknown candidates do not win). So as a technology for gaining access to the human mind, advertising can therefore serve a vital function, making markets, elections, and everything that depends on informed choice operate better, by telling us what we need to know about our choices, ideally in an objective fashion.

As economist Edward Chamberlin, in his 1933 work The Theory of Monopolistic Competition, alleged, the creation of strong brand loyalties, having little to do with intrinsic value, was a calculated effort to foster irrational attachments by which a brand might survive competition from other brands that were as good or better.

The most effective brand advertising, after all, does not try to convince you to make a choice, but rather to convince you that there is no choice—that Coca-Cola is the cola, that Camel is your cigarette, or that Harley-Davidson is the only motorcycle one would consider. It can succeed if it manages to make the brand part of your identity: One might feel the same loyalty to Miller the beer as a resident of Wisconsin feels to the state. True brand advertising is therefore an effort not so much to persuade as to convert. At its most successful, it creates a product cult, whose loyalists cannot be influenced by mere information: companies like Apple, Hermès, and Porsche are among those that have achieved this kind of immunity to competition, at least among their true believers.

The harms of advertising are aptly attested by the Lucky Strike campaign of the late 1920s and '30s. The massive amounts spent on cigarette advertising had spurred demand for a dangerous product and deterred switching between brands, while also preventing cheaper newcomers from making much headway. The result was an oligopoly of branded cigarettes—Camels, Lucky Strike, and so on—that has lasted for decades, and, of course, no few cancerous lungs.

Unfortunately, the commission's actual power over deceptive advertising, legally ambiguous at best, was definitively quashed by a skeptical Supreme Court in 1931, just as Lucky's campaign was firing on all cylinders. Consequently, Hill and Lasker were back to their old tricks, if somewhat more cautious, now peddling their claim more by implication than outright assertion. A new version of the ad from later in the 1930s shows a slender and beautiful woman on the edge of a diving board, surrounded by a plumper silhouette. “IS THIS YOU FIVE YEARS FROM NOW?” it asks. “When tempted to over-indulge, Reach for a Lucky instead.”

As originally conceived, the so-called Tugwell Bill was very tough indeed. It combined the concepts of false labeling and false advertising, designating as the latter anything that was clearly untrue, or that, by “ambiguity or inference,” created a false impression. The law also barred advertisements from purporting that a product could cure any of a long list of diseases. Products falsely labeled or advertised would be subject to seizure by the Department of Agriculture; their promoters subject to criminal prosecution.

Such strong medicine would have effectively outlawed many of the techniques that the advertising industry had adopted over the 1910s and 1920s. Though the softer brand advertising would have been unaffected, much of reason-why advertising's arsenal, the entire patent medicine approach included, would have been finished. If Hill and Lasker had persisted with the Lucky Strike campaign as it stood, they might both have landed in prison. And many of today's most familiar infomercials claiming the miraculous benefits of this or that would be illegal.

Unlike patent medicines, however, the advertising industry, though bloodied, was more than equipped to defend itself; and its side was joined by the fledgling pharmaceutical industry, already practiced in government relations, and determined to protect what it called the “sacred right of self-medication.” Rexford Tugwell became the target of claims that he was a communist agent trying to import socialism: “The world knows that he has visited Russia and has found its institutions acceptable,” charged one industry flack, and now “he believes that packaging and advertising constitutes economic waste that should be prevented.” Advertising also cleverly enlisted newspapers to its cause, even issuing threats to pull most of its business were the bill to pass; as the historian Inger L. Stole points out, the American media almost entirely declined to cover the controversy. Sensing their very viability was at stake, the newspapers, food producers, and drug manufacturers formed a tight phalanx with the advertising industry, doing everything they could, even funding front groups, until they were sure the Tugwell Bill would go down in flames.

In 1938, a far weaker law was passed; the Federal Trade Commission regained its powers to oversee advertising through a ban on “unfair or deceptive acts or practices,” which referred only to factually untrue statements, not the potential inferences targeted by Tugwell. The new law reflected “a five-year effort to render such protections painless for business interests”; and many at the time argued, like Milton Handler, a law professor at Columbia, that it did not go far enough: “While the [new law] represents a sincere attempt to stem the avalanche of false and misleading advertising, it is no more than a first, and unfortunately, inadequate step in that direction. Unless buttressed by clarifying amendments broadening its prohibitions and implementing it with effective sanctions, it will not effect an abiding solution of the vexing problem of false and misleading advertising.”

In Depression-era America, advertising’s pitches were falling on deaf ears, or at least, on the ears of people now lacking the means to buy all those items great and sundry on which they had frittered away so much money just a few years before.

Something had to change, and it would. But few in late 1930s advertising could have predicted it would be an explosion in the supply of usable attention. This happened thanks to two new inventions, the first one whose potential most doubted and the second whose potential they could scarcely imagine. A whole new attention economy would soon be born, and advertising would cling to it for dear life.

Some economists contest the idea that demand can be created by advertising, despite the empirical evidence. Whether “wants” can be created may just depend on how you define them. One might be said to be born wanting “beautiful things,” and advertising merely identifies for you what is beautiful. Or one can more easily say that advertising shapes or creates demand.

The first thirty years of the twentieth century demonstrated that attention could be harvested on a mass scale and converted into unprecedented levels of commerce and military might. It is therefore remarkable that this effort—which seemed at the time so pervasive, to the point of inflaming critics and whole movements—was, in retrospect, so circumscribed in time and place. To see where and when attention was being harvested, one had only to see where advertising (or propaganda, its noncommercial twin) was to be found. For however inescapable and multifarious it may have seemed at the time, advertising before 1930 was confined to the oldest of media, those from the nineteenth century or earlier—newspapers, magazines, billboards—and the oldest of the major communication networks, the mail system. It had as yet no purchase on the new media of the twentieth century, which were only beginning to transform the lives of those who heard and watched them—the movies, radio, and soon, television. Furthermore, there remained a divide between the highly commercialized public sphere and the traditional private one. A newspaper or leaflet might be brought inside, but otherwise the family home was shielded from the commercial bombardment to which one was subjected in public.

As global advertising crashed in the 1930s, along with the rest of the economy, the industry was in existential crisis, and desperate to renew itself. With advertising's usefulness now in question, the old channels of attention could no longer generate enough revenue to keep the advertising business viable. So it began to search for others, and its search led it into what turned out to be human attention's mother lode. By means of new technologies, advertising and its master, commerce, would enter what had been for millennia our attention's main sanctuary—the home.

Unlike our toothpastes, Pepsodent didn't contain fluoride or appropriate cleaning agents. Its vaunted "clean" feeling was produced by an abrasive ingredient that was, according to one Columbia University chemist who tested it, "hard and sharp enough to cut glass." Furthermore, he found that "Mucin placque [technical term for the 'film'] cannot be digested from teeth by any advertised use of 'Pepsodent.' " Another problem was that Pepsodent's initial success had lured in competitors, so that there were more than one hundred brands of toothpaste on the market by the late 1920s.

Some were admittedly even worse: Tartaroff, for example, which claimed to turn teeth "into gems of pearl-like beauty," in fact whitened them by burning off enamel with hydrochloric acid.

At the time, companies with designs on radio's audiences stalked them indirectly, by sponsoring content. Gillette, for example, underwrote a lecture series on the "history of the beard." Most, however, sponsored a musical act like La Palina Hour, named after La Palina cigars, or the Clicquot Club Eskimos, a banjo ensemble presented by a popular ginger ale (the "Eskimos" played their banjos in full parkas before their studio audiences).

When Amos 'n' Andy had come on, Templin noticed something peculiar at this friend's house: the entire family stopped what it was doing to gather around the radio and listen intently for the show's entire duration. Radio, he rightly concluded, could not only capture attention, it could do so inside the customer's home. It could cause a whole family to ignore one another and listen in rapt silence. … We have spoken of the mind's impressive ability to shut the door to the outside world; but while Amos 'n' Andy was on, people were apparently glad to fling it wide open. The rapt attention was different from what the musical acts had. Templin recognized that this was an astonishing power, if it could only be harnessed.

His idea was to take the Amos 'n' Andy show to the NBC radio network, with Pepsodent as sponsor. Kenneth Smith, now head of Pepsodent, and the other executives seemed to like the idea, perhaps because it seemed connected to the old tradition of advertising toothpaste in print using stylized black men with shiny white teeth. (In fact, it was around this time that an English company launched the Darkie brand, with a smiling black man as its logo.)

The conventional wisdom, wrote the magazine, was that “people won’t listen to talk on the radio. They’d rather talk themselves.” … Informed that the show was a “daily blackface act,” then President H. C. Cox said, “Do you mean to tell me that you believe an act can go on a network at the same time every day in the week, five days in succession?” The answer was yes. “I think you should go back to Chicago,” said Cox. “It’s very plain to see that you know nothing about radio.”

Ultimately, however, after nine months of wrangling, NBC agreed to take the order, for an enormous sum, over $1 million, and introduce its first sponsored serial program—indeed probably the first network “show” that wasn’t musical or educational. It agreed to sell thirteen weeks at 7 p.m. on its farm team Blue network, which, given Pepsodent’s dire financial straits, was effectively a bet on Pepsodent itself. “Never in the history of radio,” said one commentator, “had there been such an order as that.”

Adding what seems now a further coat of racism, the music director chose “The Perfect Song,” the theme from The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith’s 1915 hit film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan.

Despite high hopes, listenership was low and there was little noticeable effect on sales. Realizing he had nothing to lose, however, Templin doubled his bet, spending one of Pepsodent’s last millions on the program. … By the end of 1929, Amos ’n’ Andy had become a craze, and the first bona fide hit serial in broadcast history—and the first show people refused to miss, arranging their time around it. No less a cultural arbiter than The New Yorker was now remarking both the show’s quality and the phenomenon: “Amos ’n’ Andy have gone beyond all control. The radio has never had a more amusing feature, nor one that has created so much havoc.”

By the end of 1929, Amos ’n’ Andy had become a craze, and the first bona fide hit serial in broadcast history—and the first show people refused to miss, arranging their time around it.

The audiences, astounding at the time, are still impressive by today's standards. While measurements were crude in those days, by 1931, Amos 'n' Andy is believed to have attracted some 40 million listeners each and every evening—with some episodes reaching 50 million—this out of a population that was then 122 million. It was a result unprecedented for any entertainment product, the equivalent of having today's Super Bowl audiences each and every evening—and with just one advertiser.

In our fragmented age, it is only a few times a year when even a quarter of the entire nation listens to or watches anything at once. But during the height of the Amos 'n' Andy craze, that happened every day, and consequently the 7 p.m. time slot, according to contemporary reports, began to influence the schedule of everything. Hotels, restaurants, and movie theaters would broadcast the show for their patrons. Fearing displacement, movie theaters advertised the installation of radios to broadcast Amos 'n' Andy at 7 p.m., before the newsreels and features.

We have yet to ask an obvious question: Just what, exactly, was so enrapturing about Amos 'n' Andy? It was not necessarily the patter and gags. Despite The New Yorker's enthusiasm, another early critic panned the show's national debut in the New York Sun: "Their lines are not good and there is no pretense of whatever to carry out the illusion of comedy. It is a straight dialogue between two common-place 'darkies' and is without even the saving asset of a well thought-out situation…on first acquaintance they hardly attract a second glance." Indeed, there were other regional radio minstrel shows in the 1920s, not much funnier, and none reached an audience anything close to that of Amos 'n' Andy.

It seems that what gripped so much attention, what kept millions coming back, were the show's elaborate and suspenseful plot lines. The New Yorker again: "For Amos 'n' Andy…have finally mastered the trick of creating suspense. With half a dozen plots running through their sketches, they hold the dramatic tension in a way to arouse the admiration of Professor Baker." In particular, much of the show turned on the romance between the earnest Amos and Ruby Taylor, whom he'd met in Chicago. Later, the focus was on the engagement of know-it-all Andy and the bossy divorcée Madam Queen. Nowadays we might say that Amos 'n' Andy resembled a soap opera—but as we shall see, it was really soap operas that copied Amos 'n' Andy.

Subsequent commentators would remark the obvious appeal of reinforcing stereotypes that justified the second-class social status of blacks. (The NAACP did register complaints, but these had no effect on NBC at the time.) As one historian, Erik Barnouw, wrote in 1966, "In retrospect it is easy…to see the stories and Amos 'n' Andy as part of the ghetto system. All of it was more readily accepted and maintained if one could hold onto this: 'they' were lovely people, essentially happy people, ignorant and somewhat shiftless and lazy in a lovable, quaint way, not fitting in with higher levels of enterprise, better off where they were."

First, while NBC might have originally considered itself a way to demonstrate the excellence of RCA's radios, after Amos 'n' Andy it was now clearly and irresistibly in the business of selling the attention of enormous audiences to those who could pay for and use it. The broadcaster thus definitively became an attention merchant, in the model pioneered by Benjamin Day at the New York Sun. Some ironies would be papered over: never mind that a sponsor had had to beg to buy the airtime (at a premium) in order to show NBC just how much attention radio could theoretically capture and sell the next time; the attention was now and ever after the broadcaster's product to develop and to resell to the highest bidder. Needless to say, there would never be a backward glance to the days when the network existed to sell the hardware!

And so the epic battle for the attention of America's white Protestant majority would be waged and won thanks to the chance discovery of its fascination with the perceived hilariousness of blacks and Jews.

The proof was in the pudding, in the sense that the show did save Pepsodent toothpaste, at least for a while. Sales increased more than twofold between 1929 and 1930. Emboldened, Templin doubled down on his bet, sponsoring in 1931 The Rise of the Goldbergs, another fifteen-minute serial, this one about a Jewish family living in the Bronx.

Third, and perhaps most momentous: here also began a race for the conquest of time and space that continues to this day. Amos 'n' Andy demonstrated that an industry could, in effect, wholly "own" a part of the day—in this case, seven p.m., every day, across the land. And it could do so in spaces once inviolable, inconceivable. For with this show, selling had definitively breached the barrier between public and private space. What the agents of commerce could long do "out there" they could now also do "in here," and no one was grumbling, at least not yet.

Having planted the flag in the evening hours, broadcasters would proceed to colonize other parts of the day laden with attention as yet un-reaped. Soon they would find success with daytime soap operas, targeting women at home with little to do, thanks to all the modern conveniences they had been sold. Using the basic serial template of Amos 'n' Andy, soap opera plots centered on family relationships among the white middle class, the target consumer. Early soap operas were thus even more natural selling tools than minstrel shows were. As one contemporary boasted, "The transition from commercial announcements to the story can be practically painless, and a great deal of actual selling can be done in the story itself."

The methods used in daytime radio were more overt than those of prime time. The most respected and trusted characters would testify during the show about the merits of, say, Pillsbury's new cake mixes. In one episode of the soap opera Today's Children, for example, the trusted housewife character, "traditional but open to modern ideas," visits Pillsbury's kitchen. She exclaims, "The thing that impressed me so much was the orderliness of the kitchen—jest like my kitchen." Of Pillsbury she said, "They're always makin' and testin' new recipes…they served this cake at luncheon—never have put anythin' in my mouth so delicious…I got the recipe."

As Irna Phillips, inventor of the first radio soap operas, explained: "sincerity, honesty, genuineness—true values. If the woman listener is made conscious of these standards in the story itself, how little effort it would take to make her conscious of these same standards with the product advertising." In Fortune magazine, Phillips revealed her own recipe for engaging female listeners. "You appeal to," she said, "(1) the instinct for self-preservation, (2) sex, (3) the family instinct, or (4) all three together if you can manage."

The invention of "Prime time"—the attentional habit of turning on the radio (later, the television) at the designated hour each and every evening of the year—was a momentous cultural as well as commercial innovation at a point when the two categories were drifting steadily closer. For it transformed not only the industries equipped to capture attention, but also the lives of those whose attention was now there for the taking. We have already remarked how who we are can be defined, at least in part, by what we attend to—how much more so this is when what we attend to is determined less by our volition and more by ambience. When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly—of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, "My experience is what I agree to attend to."

With the establishment of prime time, daytime, and other new zones of attention, we see in effect another feature of the modern self emerge. Insofar as we are influenced, even formed, to some degree, by whatever we pay attention to, the novel fact of an entire population listening to the same show at the same time every day could not help but create a new degree of shared awareness, even shared identity. Prime time was (and to a lesser degree remains) a massive ritual of collective attention, a force drawing people together.

The family had decided to advertise on the new medium, whereupon Paley devised the idea of “La Palina girl,” a glamorous and sultry singer who was depicted as the only female guest at an all-male gathering of smokers, whom she would amuse with her wisecracks and song. While producing the show, Paley fell in love with La Palina girl—the miraculous sensation of coming up with a hit. While no Amos ’n’ Andy, his show did drive sales of the family cigars from 400,000 to one million a day—making it “one of radio’s earliest spectacular achievements.”

The network had long been available to NBC and its boss, David Sarnoff, but it was so tiny (sixteen part-time, low-wattage stations) and NBC so powerful that Sarnoff had written it off as worth neither buying nor destroying. Columbia was an outsider with a limited following, and concerning its first programming, a reviewer in Radio Broadcast was brutal. “Probably not a dozen people in the country, beside ourselves, heard it. No one not paid to do so, as we are, could have survived it.”

But Paley was easy to underestimate, as he soon showed. In the late 1920s, the business worked this way: network shows were produced either by the networks themselves—so-called public interest, or “sustaining” shows—or by other businesses that “sponsored” a show, the way Pepsodent sponsored Amos ’n’ Andy. The broadcast schedule at most affiliated stations was therefore a combination of these sustaining programs, for which they paid the network a licensing fee, and the sponsored shows, plus whatever fare the local station itself might put on. NBC and CBS lost money producing the sustaining shows, but the idea was to make up the difference with the substantial advertising proceeds from the sponsored shows, of which a small portion went to the affiliates.

In 1928, Paley made a bold offer to the nation’s many independent radio stations. The CBS network would provide any of them all of its sustaining content for free—on the sole condition that they agree to carry the sponsored content as well, for which they would, moreover, receive a handsome check. In short, Paley was offering a full slate of programming, and paying stations to take it—an apparent win-win deal, considering they were often desperate to fill their hours anyhow.

Paley never understood the technical side of radio well, but he understood from the beginning the very particular and unusual business of being an attention merchant. By that time, there were large new industries, like film, in the relatively straightforward business of selling content. Broadcasting, however, was still in a nebulous state, somewhere between a public service and a business. Officially, radio stations were trustees of the public airwaves and were required, by federal law, to conduct their broadcasting “in the public interest.” Accordingly, some stations were noncommercial, and the commercial stations were required to broadcast some programs that were public minded. Nonetheless Paley understood that radio was quickly becoming a business, that amassing a giant audience was key, and that broadcasting would become enormously profitable by growing the network and by offering skillful programming. Yet before any of this would work, he would first need to sell advertisers on the possibilities of broadcasting itself.

Over the 1920s and 1930s, CBS produced a series of pamphlets emphasizing the power of broadcasting to reach into the minds of its listeners. One entitled You Do What You’re Told argued that since people tended to obey human voices, radio advertising would be more compelling than existing print forms. Radio, according to the pamphlet, “presents the living voice of authority,” giving it the “supple power to move people and mold them, to enlist them and command them.”

“Here you have the advertiser’s ideal—the family group in its moments of relaxation awaiting your message,” said CBS. "Nothing equal to this has ever been dreamed of by the advertising man." It is, as we shall see, one thing to sell access to the minds, quite another to predict reliably the audience’s frame of mind; and by dictating the moment of infiltration, radio claimed to do just that. At the time and place of CBS’s choosing, the audience would be "at leisure and their minds receptive."

As historian David Halberstam put it, "He was not a man of entertainment, he was instead a poet of technology, he understood and loved the instruments themselves, genuinely loved touching them, loved the smell and language of the lab." One might add, he loved the game of war and of building empire.

Perhaps because of his empire’s stake in selling the hardware, he never seemed either to fully grasp or appreciate NBC’s true mission as an attention merchant. Perhaps he simply didn’t like the association with advertising and its hucksters. "We’re the pipes," Sarnoff liked to tell his associates, sounding like an industrialist of a previous generation. His success in broadcasting, though considerable, was never premised on catering to audiences, but rather on domination pursued by overwhelming force, lobbying for helpful laws or imposing tough technical standards on affiliates, with the ultimate aim of burying or buying his competitors.

Sarnoff, schooled in a Minsk yeshiva to be a Talmudic scholar, was brought to America a penniless immigrant; he grew into a gruff and domineering self-made man. "There was no mistaking what David Sarnoff wanted," said longtime NBC executive David Adams. "There was no bullshit." Paley, by contrast, had acquired position, together with polish, as a birthright.

Paley, meanwhile, loved to flatter and mingle with stars of both Hollywood and CBS. A natural programmer, he had a knack for guessing which entertainers had the ineffable charm to hook an audience, not just once but to make them tune in compulsively. "There were other men who were good businessmen," writes Halberstam, "and others who were deft salesmen, but the feel for talent, that was something else, and it was essential in so public and volatile a profession as broadcasting." Paley's ear was good enough to notice talent from the briefest exposure, so he was always ahead of everyone else. "He could, in 1931, go on a shipboard cruise and by chance hear the records of a then unknown singer and know instantly that the singer was big, very big, and send back a cable telling his subordinates to sign Bing Crosby immediately."

Unlike his rival or early broadcasting's other important figures, Paley, as mentioned, had no feel for technology, whose future he could barely see into the following week. He never, for instance, understood the potential of FM radio, seeing it merely as a threat to AM. And when it came to television, his myopia would prove prodigious. Seeing the early screens, he assumed they would remain too small to attract home consumers. By the mid-1930s, with television already showing serious potential in Europe, Paley shook his head and succeeded in personally lobbying the FCC to slow it down or block it. Frank Stanton, longtime CBS executive, explained that "Bill did not want television, for he thought it would hurt radio." At the time, Paley "didn't see any profit in TV at all."

By the early 1930s Paley's CBS had reached profitability, and was in a position to take a real run at NBC's dominance. He had earlier hired Edward Bernays, author of Propaganda, as an adviser. Bernays suggested that CBS distinguish itself from NBC by emphasizing the superior quality of its programming—the theory of the "Tiffany Network" was thus born—and in that way exploit Sarnoff's weakness in matters of taste.

Programming—the blending of various forms of content to maximize audiences and thereby the value of what networks could sell to advertisers—turned out to be as much an art as a science. The radio networks had originally seen themselves more like carriers of whatever the commercial sponsors wished to present, but Paley took a more active role as the master mixologist, trying to optimize the lineup.

Finding H. G. Wells's novel ill-suited to a traditional performance, Welles and his producer, the actor John Houseman, presented it as a series of dramatized news bulletins, describing an ongoing alien invasion of the United States. It famously caused some panic among listeners who missed the show's disclaimers.*5 Paley's programming was, of course, not all so elevated.

Seeing that comedians went over well on radio, Paley found Jack Benny, who became "Your Canada Dry Humorist," and also signed the couple George Burns and Gracie Allen. For the female listener (daytime radio), CBS aired a show named The Voice of Experience, essentially an advice program, sponsored by Kreml medicinal products. When soap operas became a hit on NBC, CBS profitably programmed half a dozen of its own, including Just Plain Bill and Big Sister, each with a sponsor like Wonder Bread or Rinso laundry soap.

Knowing how to keep the pot simmering without boiling over in public protest, Paley proactively set limits on CBS's advertising; among them, he cut its share of airtime to 10 percent and banned commercials considered offensive. At the risk of giving him too much credit, one could say that such policies not only kept critics at bay but also showed a shrewd awareness of the attention merchant's eternal dilemma: too little advertising and the business can't grow; too much and the listener grows resentful and tunes out.

Bernays also convinced Paley that nothing would burnish the CBS brand so much as building its reputation for news coverage. The old propagandist's instinct was shrewd indeed. For news would give Paley license to brag to Congress how diligently CBS was covering public affairs, while at the same time having news coverage made it clear that the network had the power to favor or ignore individual politicians, making CBS a political force to be reckoned with. Ultimately CBS created what was the nation's first broadcast news service to compete credibly with print. Radio news had never really been more than a gesture before the mid-1930s; but on the recommendation of Bernays, Paley hired Ed Klauber, former city editor at The New York Times, giving him all the resources he asked for. Klauber set high standards and made radio news, and the CBS brand in particular, respected. CBS also became the first network to hire its own reporters-hundreds of them. Paley's commitment revealed either blind luck or prescience, for as the 1930s wore on, and Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini came to power, the news, always a money loser, would suddenly begin drawing millions of listeners.*6 Meanwhile, with its head start and double-barreled broadcasting, NBC would remain ascendant for most of the 1930s.

If Paley, with his easy living, was still able to keep up, it was because of a certain imprecision in the measurement of radio audiences, which was somewhat like guesswork. Unfortunately for him there would soon be a new way of keeping score.

Late in 1936, an MIT professor named Robert Elder presented a new invention at a conference held in the ballroom of the Yale Club of New York. He called it the “Audimeter” and claimed that it could scientifically measure human attention, something no one had done before. The crude prototype had two rolls of paper in a reel-to-reel arrangement and was attached to a radio. When the radio was on, a stylus scratched a line onto the slowly turning scroll, indicating over time which stations the radio had been tuned to, and for how long.

At this moment the penetration of broadcasts was a matter of guesswork, and relative standing of competitors in radio was a matter of little solid evidence. In the absence of even remotely scientific metrics, listeners were sometimes canvassed by phone during the evening hours or asked on air to mail in a postcard to receive some small gift—all this to get some idea of how many had heard the commercials. The success of shows like Amos ’n’ Andy and its effect on the sales of Pepsodent toothpaste made some difference, of course. It was something else, however, to prove that these were no fluke but something worth paying for.

Among those listening in the ballroom was one man for whom the presentation was nothing short of electrifying. Arthur Charles Nielsen, grandfather of today’s data geeks, then ran a market research company that had created the “Nielsen Drug Index” and the “Nielsen Food Index.” Favoring direct reporting, he hated any kind of data collection in which “human elements” might influence results. Consequently, he had a low opinion of the various, early means of measuring radio audiences, like the Hooper Ratings, dominant over the 1930s, that depended on telephone polling. He wanted harder metrics: “If you can put a number on it,” Nielsen was said to say, “then you know something.”

Nielsen bought out Elder and his partner, Louis Woodruff, and six years later he had developed a working prototype of his own "black box"; once installed in the home of a family (who were paid for their trouble), it would measure exactly what they were tuning in to. One by one, Nielson sent out his black boxes (which came to be called "people meters"), each one like a nerve ending into the body public, slowly creating a vast network that would tell him just how Americans were spending their evening hours. Thus were modern ratings born, becoming in the words of one expert "a feedback mechanism to the industry the same way that the human nervous system is to the human body." If the United States would now have a nervous system collecting information on the apportionment of attention, Nielsen would be its brain.

Murrow's broadcasts revealed the medium's matchless power of immediacy. Giving his listeners a visceral, emotional sense of being there, it was as if he had created a means of teleportation. Every broadcast he began with "This…is London" and then simply described what he had seen that day.

The journalistic approach, while objective, was not neutral. The war was not a subject that he thought deserved a balanced presentation of both sides. His aim was to convey the experience of the British, and he insisted on knowing it firsthand; while most reporters retreated to bunkers during Nazi bombardments, Murrow, despite the obvious peril, stood on the roof to capture the sounds and feeling of London under attack.

By then Berlin was getting its own back from the Allies. But for years it had been under a different kind of bombardment, one entirely invisible from the ground or the air, and even more relentless. The assault was perpetrated by a demagogue whose mesmerizing oratory had been propagated in measures beyond any the world had seen, capturing more human attention than NBC or CBS could dream of, and indeed holding it captive. And so did this demagogue seize his own nation before his mad attempt to seize all the rest.

By the 1940s, the critics, who remained unappeased, briefly took over the Federal Communications Commission and published a report (known as the Blue Book) that condemned the commercialization of radio and demanded that stations failing to serve the public interest have their licenses revoked.

Print news did not welcome the competition and used various means to attack radio newscasting throughout the early 1920s. In 1933, Paley brokered a treaty with the major newspapers and wire services (the Biltmore Agreement) that limited radio news to certain times to ensure radio did not compete with morning and evening newspapers.

As the orchestra faded, there was a crackling silence, and then a voice announced, “Now speaks the Führer!” Then came another voice, the voice, intimately familiar to every German. On this day, Adolf Hitler announced the reintroduction of military conscription, and with it the rebuilding of a standing German army. His words reached an estimated 70 percent of German households, some 56 million people, more than any fireside chat had reached, almost certainly the largest broadcast audience to that point in human history.

Its reach and power had caused Minister Joseph Goebbels to declare German radio the “towering herald of National Socialism,” a force equal to creating a nation with “one public opinion.” His broadcast chief bragged that “with the radio we have destroyed the spirit of rebellion.” By means of this attention infrastructure, one man could at will reach the minds of the entire nation, whether they cared to hear him or not. As architect Albert Speer said at his war crimes trial, the Third Reich was the first dictatorship “which made the complete use of all technical means for domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and loudspeaker, 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.”

The Reichsfunk-Gesellschaft, with the rest of the ministry's apparatus, was designed to smelt an entire people into a single mass consciousness. Other governments—fascist, communist, democratic—had also experimented with efforts to form, in Creel's expression, this “white hot mass.” And after the war, both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China would conduct vigorously biased and sustained programs of state broadcasting, ultimately reaching more people. But the Third Reich remains unrivaled in its reach into daily life and its power of coercion.

Hitler’s entire approach to propaganda might be understood as a reaction to the rationalism for which German thinkers were known. Instead, he had an alarmingly intuitive understanding of how to appeal to a mass audience and to the reptilian core. In Mein Kampf, he asks, “To whom has propaganda to appeal? To the scientific intelligentsia, or to the less educated masses? It has to appeal forever and only to the masses!” The strong leader, by “understanding the great masses’ world of ideas and feelings, finds, by a correct psychological form, the way to the attention, and further to the heart, of the great masses.” Propaganda must “be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the perception of the least intelligent….Therefore its spiritual level has to be screwed the lower, the greater the mass of people which one wants to attract.”

It can also be understood as a reflection of his time working for the advertising industry. In the early 1910s, while living in Vienna, Hitler made money as a freelancer, drawing advertising posters for products like hair tonic, soap, and "Teddy Antiperspirant foot powder." In Mein Kampf he suggests that propaganda need be like advertising, and seek first to attract attention: "A poster's art lies in the designer's ability to catch the masses' attention by outline and color," he writes.

Hitler also intuited a few other basic truths about how we process information: since everything can be ignored, imprinting information in the memory requires a constant repetition of simple ideas. "The great masses' receptive ability is only very limited, their understanding is small, but their forgetfulness is great. As a consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda has to limit itself only to a very few points and to use them like slogans until even the very last man is able to imagine what is intended by such a word." Nuance was nonsense; complexity was a risk: "As soon as one sacrifices this basic principle and tries to become versatile, the effect will fritter away, as the masses are neither able to digest the material offered nor to retain it."

Finally, Hitler understood the demagogue's most essential principle: to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion. And far less welcome: what the audience most wants is an excuse to experience fully the powerful feelings already lurking within them but which their better selves might lead them to suppress.

Hitler was the little known, second speaker in the evening's lineup, which had attracted a crowd of about one hundred (still more than the organizers had expected). The lengthy opening speech hadn't gotten much of a rise. Then it was Hitler's turn. He had not yet perfected his art, but this would, nevertheless, be a break-out performance—the first time a group of any size had been exposed to his intense, emotionally charged style, punctuated by unwavering certainty and unremitting bile. Hitler later wrote, "I spoke for thirty minutes, and what formerly I had felt in my mind, without knowing it somehow, was now proved by reality. I could speak."

Over the next few years, Hitler would give hundreds of similar speeches, perfecting his performance method. Over time, he developed a winning and invariant structure. He always stood in the same, upright, and serious way, and made the same gestures. His speeches began with a long silence, broken by a soft, almost intimate tone of great personal pain and vulnerability, in which he described his difficult upbringing, service in the war, and despair at Germany's defeat. In a bridge section, he would, with rising fury, begin to assign blame, and denounce all that was wrong in the present. In an incredibly intense finish, he bellowed a flood of unrestrained hatred for Jews, plans for renewed greatness, and, finally, one more great call for German unity.

It was during the Munich years, too, that Hitler first began to conclude his speeches by leading his audiences in a rousing and angry chant. A confidant from those years, Ernst Hanfstaengl, had gone to Harvard, and been impressed with the fight songs used at football games. With Hanfstaengl's guidance, "Fight, Harvard, Fight" thus became "Sieg…Heil! Sieg…Heil! Sieg…Heil!…Heil Hitler!"

Even without being Nazis, most of us know the experience of being part of a crowd wild with excitement, and have an intuitive sense that the way our minds process information might change under such circumstances, even to the point that we might come to do something or begin to believe something different. If to pay attention is to open the mind to information, to do so in an animated crowd is to fling the doors wide open. To be exposed to any information is to be influenced, but in crowds the possibilities go well beyond everyday experience. Gustave Le Bon, the first theorist of crowd psychology, held that it is loss of individual responsibility that makes the individual in the crowd more malleable. Freud would say that the superego was supplanted by the will of the crowd, as unconscious wishes rise to the surface and are shared.

Among the most famous American examples is the reaction to William Jennings Bryan's “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1896. A thirty-six-year-old former Nebraska congressman, with no following going into the convention, Bryan managed to win the nomination by delivering a plea for pegging the dollar to silver as well as gold in order to increase the monetary supply and broaden economic opportunity.

So persuasive was Bryan's performance that the crowd carried him aloft on their shoulders before nominating him. And yet it seems obvious that if the same speech were delivered tonight in your living room you might not even remain awake through the end. In fact, Bryan himself had delivered much the same speech in Nebraska the week before, drawing little attention, never mind acclaim.

Another contemporary put it this way: "Hitler responds to the vibration of the human heart with the delicacy of a seismograph…enabling him, with a certainty with which no conscious gift could endow him, to act as a loudspeaker proclaiming the most secret desires, the least permissible instincts, the sufferings and personal revolts of a whole nation."

Alfons Heck would remember attending a Nazi rally as a boy in the 1930s. He was not particularly partial to or interested in Hitler; yet at the conclusion of the führer's speech the boy was transformed: "From that moment on, I belonged to Adolf Hitler body and soul." The rally Heck attended, one of those held annually at Nuremberg, boosted Hitler's oratorical effects with various other elements—lights, giant swastika banners, and marching men—to create what Albert Speer called "total theatre."

It was in 1933, soon after his appointment as chancellor of Germany, that Hitler began to engineer the institutions for his conquest of German minds through the new Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, run by his loyal lieutenant Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, then just thirty-six years old.

It was in 1933, soon after his appointment as chancellor of Germany, that Hitler began to engineer the institutions for his conquest of German minds through the new Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, run by his loyal lieutenant Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels, then just thirty-six years old. Goebbels, if anything, would exceed Hitler in understanding how to capture attention on a mass scale and what to do with it.

Under previous dictatorships, the limits of mass attention had been defined by the size of a physical venue—so that the triumphal parade or mass rally was the outer bound. Using radio and film, however, the ministry saw how such physical limits might be dissolved, making it possible to hold the intimate joint attention of millions.

In August 1933, Goebbels gave a speech outlining his priorities. "The radio," he said, "is the most influential and important intermediary between a spiritual movement and the nation, between the idea and the people." As such, it had to be the center of the Nazi project: "A government that has determined to bring a nation together so that it is once more a center of power in the scales of great world events has not only the right, but the duty, to subordinate all aspects of the nation to its goals, or at least ensure that they are supportive. That is also true for the radio. The more significant something is in influencing the will of the broad masses, the greater its responsibility to the future of the nation."

As in other areas of propaganda, Britain was arguably the pioneer: in the 1920s, the BBC was by far the most advanced state-owned radio system in the world, and by 1924, it would first begin broadcasting speeches by King George V—long before the stammering George VI would have to rally the nation to challenge the Third Reich.

Like the Soviets, the German ministry took over every detail of programming, with sole discretion over the content. As chief programmer, Goebbels determined that the right formula for forging the people's community (Volksgemeinschaft) was not unrelenting speeches but, rather, light musical entertainment punctuated by political material in place of advertising, and the occasional big event—a speech by Hitler or Goebbels, termed a "national moment." He learned, as the Western attention merchants had learned, that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. And in this way, exposure to the central themes of the National Socialist Party became part of the daily diet of nearly every German.

The democratic state…evolved a technique of advertising and of high pressure salesmanship, a flamboyant journalism, a radio and a cinema that stamped the same stereotypes on millions of brains…the most damning blow the dictatorships have struck at democracy has been the compliment they have paid us in taking over and perfecting our most prized techniques of persuasion and our underlying contempt for the credulity of the masses.” In short, the Third Reich had grasped the lessons of 1910s propaganda and 1920s advertising and put them to its own use.

Easily within the means of the average worker, the radio was marketed extensively; so that by 1942 Germany had increased its radio audience from 4.5 to over 16 million households. The Nazi state matched Britain and America in radio penetration, giving the leadership the sort of intimate access to homes that Amos 'n' Andy enjoyed.

Radio can be ignored or turned off; one might even choose to listen to foreign stations. The Propaganda Ministry's answer to such problems was to outfit a small army called the Funkwarte, the Radio Guard, party loyalists assigned to every neighborhood or apartment block to make sure that the radio was being listened to.

The German Radio Division saved its greatest efforts for the “national moments,” (Stunden der Nation), like the one at the beginning of this chapter, for which the entire nation suspended activity and the Radio Guard herded all the people into listening rooms. The resemblance to congregating for a religious service was no accident but a conscious mimicry of the “total experience of worship in a church.”

The most direct and obvious way authoritarians abridge freedom is to limit or discourage or ban outright certain options—NO CHOCOLATE, for instance. The State might ban alcohol, for example, as the United States once did and a number of Muslim nations still do; likewise it might outlaw certain political parties or bar certain individuals from seeking office. But such methods are blunt and intrusive, as well as imperfect, which is true of any restriction requiring enforcement. It is therefore more effective for the State to intervene before options are seen to exist. This creates less friction with the State but requires a larger effort: total attention control.

Freedom might be said to describe not only the size of our “option set” but also our awareness of what options there are. That awareness has two degrees. One is conceptual: if you don’t know about a thing, like chocolate ice cream, you can hardly ask for it, much less feel oppressed by the want of it. The second degree of awareness comes after we know about things conceptually and can begin to contemplate them as real choices. I may be aware that man has gone into space but the idea that I might choose to go there myself, while conceivable, is only a notion until I find out that Virgin Galactic has started scheduling flights.

When done well, and on behalf of a worthwhile product, advertising can, in this way, advance human freedom, by showing that choices exist and making them seem real. But advertising can also obscure choices, or (as we have seen) present false ones (e.g., “Use this product or suffer the embarrassing consequences”). Nonetheless the advertiser, unless a monopolist, usually remains within the realm of persuasion among a background of choice. True propaganda, by contrast, aims to obliterate that marketplace and the choices as such, by making them seem unthinkable or nonexistent.

With total attention control, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry was able to sell a new faith, one vested not in the power of choice but in the glory of something greater and of giving oneself over to it. “There are two ways to make a revolution,” Goebbels wrote in 1933. “One can fire at the opponent with machine guns until he recognizes the superiority of those who have the machine guns. That is the simplest way. One can also transform a nation through a revolution of the spirit, not destroying the opponent, but winning him over.” This he meant not in the sense of winning an argument, but actually displacing individual thought and all its conflicting impulses.

In the immediate aftermath, it was as if three completely different lessons were drawn, one by the Soviet Union (which controlled East Germany), another by West Germany, and a third by the former Allies, including the United States.

After the war, the Soviets would repay the compliment: Stalin and the rest of the Politburo concluded that Soviet propaganda needed to operate at a greater scale, for the Germans had shown what it meant to be truly pervasive. Radio broadcasting, which had been used during the war to mobilize the population, was continued and supplemented with television. The Soviets would never fully match the degree of organizational skill of the Nazis, or the spiritual cultivation—such perhaps are the limits of Marx's materialism.

West Germany, chastened by the disgrace of the Nazi state, went to the opposite extreme. The Allied occupiers rebuilding the shattered nation were determined that it should never come under the same sort of attentional control that had made ascendant Nazism possible. They therefore reconstituted the broadcast infrastructure so as to make it notably ill-suited for government or corporate propaganda. Both radio and television were decentralized, the network broken up into independent, nonprofit regional broadcasters. To preserve its independence, broadcast would be funded by licensing fees paid by every household and institution, including municipalities; the undue influence engendered by financial reliance on commercial advertising (as in the U.S.) or State grants (as in the U.K.) was thus avoided.

But if official propaganda fell into ignominy, there was no such effect on its commercial cousin, advertising. Indeed government's discontinuation of wartime media messaging, in a sense, left the field more open for business interests, who, just as they had immediately following the previous world war, filled the vacuum. After the war, commercial broadcasters would enjoy both the powers of centralized control and the perennial lure of advertising revenues.

And in 1950, Mr. Nielsen’s new ratings made it official: the National Broadcasting Company ruled the new medium, with exclusive ownership of the five top-rated shows … On Tuesdays at 8 p.m., 61.6 percent of the 10 million families with a television were tuned to Texaco Star Theater.

Given TV's novelty and limited offerings, early audiences were not fickle channel surfers. Contemporary accounts suggest something much more like the deeply immersive experience of motion pictures. Indeed, the lights were usually turned off for viewing, and there was little or no conversation. One only got up to change the channel. "We ate our suppers in silence, spilling food, gaping in awe," said one woman in 1950. "We thought nothing of sitting in the darkness for hours at a stretch without exchanging a word except 'who's going to answer that confounded telephone?' " We have, to this point, treated all attention paid as more or less the same, which is a reasonable way to broach a complex subject.

We have, to this point, treated all attention paid as more or less the same, which is a reasonable way to broach a complex subject. And it is all the same, insofar as everything that captures it enters our mind the same way. But of course there are differences in quality of attention; watching an airplane fly overhead is not as involving as being engrossed in a film. We might half listen to a professor babble, but our ears prick up at the sound of a marriage proposal. The most basic dividing line is likely between transitory and sustained attention, the former quick, superficial, and often involuntarily provoked; the latter, deep, long-lasting, and voluntary. What matters for present purposes is that selling us things relies mainly on the former—on which the attention merchant thrives—but our happiness depends on balancing the two.

As the immersive power of the movie screen was brought into the home, some could already see that it might be a force for greatness or nothingness. “It is also almost like a giant eye on life itself,” wrote the novelist Calder Willingham, “and can easily become the vehicle for masterpieces of a magnitude and power never achieved before in the arts, given the artists to create them and the audience to support them. For this very reason, it would also become the worst cultural opiate in history, buy and corrupt all talent, and completely degrade the sensibility of the country. Everything depends on the use to which television is put.”

Though dominant in ratings, NBC still clearly suffered from the same weakness in programming that had limited it in radio, mainly because of Sarnoff’s indifference to content. When Paley and his team of programmers launched their attack, the strategy would be one that had worked before, that of promoting CBS as the higher-quality alternative—the Tiffany Network—purveyor of the best of the best.

When, in 1952, Reader's Digest published a report linking, for the first time, cigarettes and cancer, the ensuing media sensation somehow never reached the Camel News Caravan.

NBC's lackadaisical approach was epitomized by the Camel News Caravan, its television news show. The fifteen-minute Caravan was hosted by a former actor, John Cameron Swayze, and consisted mainly of his reading out headlines and playing newsreels designed for movie theaters, until delivering his signature sign-off, "That's the story folks," almost the same one used by Porky Pig. The show was not only superficial but also subject to onerous censorship and direction by Camel's owner, the R. J. Reynolds Company. The sponsors preferred upbeat news, and mandated coverage of football (for men) and fashion (for women). They also set out a surprisingly detailed speech code that barred any display of competing brands, pipes, cigars, not to mention "no-smoking signs" as well as actual, living camels. When, in 1952, Reader's Digest published a report linking, for the first time, cigarettes and cancer, the ensuing media sensation somehow never reached the Camel News Caravan. As one writer put it, "What Camel wanted, Camel got…because they paid so much."

See It Now became deservedly famous in the history of journalism for a series of episodes broadcast in 1954, wherein Murrow decided to challenge American senator Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare—his ceaseless investigations of alleged communists in the U.S. government and other institutions. It was widely and correctly taken as an act of bravery, for McCarthy was vindictive and indeed would try to destroy CBS. But Murrow succeeded in exposing him as a witch-hunter and a bully, and this was partly owing to the power of the medium: the same screen that made Murrow appear serene and dependable made McCarthy, with his strange and craven mannerisms, look like a monster.

There is another dimension to this story that has become clearer with time. McCarthy was basically a typical twentieth-century government propagandist; like Creel, Mussolini, or Goebbels, he used the looming foreign threat to inflame hatred for marginal groups (communists mainly, but also gays) for the sake of amassing power. By exposing him, Murrow and CBS demonstrated not only courage but also the power of the private sector and, in particular, the attention industries, to defeat official propaganda. That had never happened before.

In 1953, the show attracted an astonishing average 71.3 percent of audiences, and as an average for an entire season, that figure remains unsurpassed.

What attracted audiences—sometimes over 50 million—to the show was, as everyone agrees, Lucille Ball herself. The show revolved around serial failure: Lucy's desperate wish for a career in show business; she would do anything, no matter how ridiculous, to get her foot in the door. Invariably, for one reason or another, her plots would fall apart. But if her schemes failed, Ball's performance succeeded brilliantly as spectacle. The medium was made for personalities.

Ed Sullivan, whose show (originally entitled The Toast of the Town) had a shaky start. On first viewing it, even the unerring Paley insisted that Sullivan be temporary. (His evident "anti-talent" would inspire the classic remark that "Ed does nothing, but he does it better than anyone else on television.") But Sullivan's talent wasn't his presence on camera; rather, as with Paley, it was his connections and an eye for the talent of others, and his show gradually took off until it became the most watched on Sunday evenings by a broad margin.

But this time, however, Sarnoff wasn't content to lose gracefully. In 1953, he would appoint his own star programmer, giving him license to wage total war. As David Halberstam would later write, never had there been a "competition…so fierce…with weapons so inane."

We can credit these years, the mid-1950s, with the achievement of “peak attention.” By that, I mean something quite specific. A historic anomaly, unprecedented and eventually to dissolve, this was the moment when more regular attention was paid to the same set of messages at the same time than ever before or since. The phenomenon resulted from a confluence of the prime-time ritual, the novelty of television, and industry concentration—all combining to create within the Free World the routinely massive audiences previously possible only in fascist and communist regimes. Peak attention would continue through the 1970s, with CBS, NBC, and eventually ABC taking turns at winning the big prize of nearly 60 or 70 million viewers at a time. Nevertheless, the peak of peak attention can be assigned an exact date: Sunday, September 9, 1956, when Elvis Presley made his first appearance on television, on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show. Its 82.6 percent share of viewers (out of a U.S. population roughly half of today’s) has never been equaled or bettered.

With a great many Americans, sometimes even a majority, watching the same programs, exposed to the same information, every day—or if not exactly the same, the same theme with slight variations—a kind of convergence was inevitable. Sitting in silence, everyone would “receive the same impulses and impressions, find themselves focused on the same centers of interest, experience the same feelings, have generally the same order of reactions or ideas, participate in the same myths—and all this at the same time.” That there were three channels to choose from hardly mattered.

What was missing was the exaltation of the rally, the thrill of losing oneself in the common experience for as we all watched from our separate living rooms, it was as if we sat in isolation booths, unable to exchange any responses about what we were all going through together. Everybody was engaged in the same act at the same time, but we were doing it alone. What a bizarre situation! 12 The 1950s would be remembered as a decade of conformity, and while the reasons may be many and complex, one cannot exclude the most salient: the historically anomalous scale of attention capture effected by television, together with the homogeneity of the stuff created to do the capturing.

The 1950s would be remembered as a decade of conformity, and while the reasons may be many and complex, one cannot exclude the most salient: the historically anomalous scale of attention capture effected by television, together with the homogeneity of the stuff created to do the capturing. This was, of course, not enforced viewing; there were, as mentioned, three channels, and no facist “Television Guard”—though given the primacy of the ratings champions, most Americans were indeed watching the same shows and the same advertisements most of the time.

Was this propaganda? Certainly, it wasn’t experienced that way, and that difference does matter. After all, watching television was voluntary (even if everyone made the same choice); the medium was run not by the State, but private companies, whose goals were commercial, not political. Some of course have contended that shows like I Love Lucy did have an underlying social agenda or at least ideology. What must be remembered, however, is that Lucy and the other attractions were merely the bait; the effort to persuade came in a different form: a form new to the world, known as the “television commercial.”

"The customer is not a moron, she's your wife," wrote David Ogilvy in 1955, expressing, in the vernacular of the times, a buoyant new mentality among American advertising executives. Having nearly collapsed over the 1930s, advertising now found itself, much as it did after World War I, the prime beneficiary of a new medium and a postwar return of consumer spending. Ultimately, the 1950s, if not as individually enriching as the 1920s had been, would be the industry's golden age, as advertising spending quadrupled from 1950 through 1960, from $1.3 billion to $6 billion, or approximately from $11.5 billion to $54 billion in present value.

Dichter was just as blunt about the purpose of advertising. It was never merely to inform but existed to “manipulate human motivations and desires and develop a need for goods with which the public has at one time been unfamiliar—perhaps even un-desirous of purchasing.” His research was conducted through intense, psychotherapy-like sessions with consumers—usually housewives—sometimes several together, which he was the first to call a “focus group.” His analysis rarely failed to uncover deep associations, sexual or otherwise, explaining why consumers bought the things they did.

In response, Dichter did not really answer the questions. Instead, he wrote, “Tell me how a man drives, and I will tell you what kind of man he is.” The Plymouth was available as both a convertible and a sedan. After interviewing car buyers, he theorized that men regarded a convertible as a symbolic mistress, offering adventure, excitement, and romance, even if they were more likely to buy a sedan, which “reminded them of the comfort and familiarity of their wives.” He therefore recommended both more advertising for convertibles and prominent showroom placement. This, he advised, would fire the male imagination, drawing in the male car buyer, so that he might yet marry the sedan.

The ultimate success of prime-time television at attention capture, as measured in Nielsen ratings and the effects of TV advertising, would shape every subsequent contest in the market for attention; all future claimants would have to mold themselves as an alternative to TV, with profound consequences for those in the new technologies, the attention economy, and necessarily for most Americans. For television was now, as it still in many ways remains, attention’s 800-pound gorilla. With the clearest and most engaging access to the public mind, it could exercise the greatest influence and therefore command the lion’s share of advertising revenue.

As though awakening at last to the real challenge of programming, Sarnoff put the job in the hands of a former advertising executive named Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, then president of NBC. In Weaver, Paley for the first time faced an opponent with a talent as great as his own, and in some ways deeper. Unlike Sarnoff, Weaver understood the business of both attracting and selling attention. He had cut his teeth in radio at the agency Young & Rubicam, producer of many leading radio shows over the 1930s, and had later moved to the American Tobacco Company to help George Washington Hill sell Lucky Strike. Like Paley, he was a cultural omnivore, comfortable with the highest of the high and lowest of the low, and he had an uncanny gut instinct for what would work and what wouldn’t. While still subject to the General’s ultimate command, Weaver turned the war into a fair fight.

The success of the spectacular—a one-time event—also had the unintended benefit of making NBC think differently about sports, and in particular, big football games, which were also annual events. And so NBC decided to invest heavily in promoting its broadcast of the 1958 National Football League championship game. As luck would have it, professional football turned out to be a good match for television, and the contest between the Baltimore Colts and New York Giants, decided in sudden-death overtime, was proclaimed "the greatest game ever played." Attracting 45 million viewers, it established the precedent and template for what would persist as another great attention ritual: the Super Bowl.

The magazine format, in fact, only worked because television was uncompetitive enough that the networks could, effectively, raise their prices in tandem—force the viewers to watch more advertising for the same, or even less, entertainment. It is a testament to the market power over their audiences that CBS and NBC had achieved by the 1950s—there was no serious alternative with less advertising, so viewers put up with the intrusion.

In the summer of 1955, at the height of Weaver's challenge, Paley threw down what would be his great trump card—a quiz show named The $64,000 Question. The concept was not original—Louis G. Cowan, the creator, had pioneered the quiz format for radio—but the prize money was unprecedented and impossible to ignore. Like Amos 'n' Andy, the show owed its existence to a desperate advertiser—Revlon—looking for something to set them apart and willing to try anything. So they agreed to the massive cash payout—more than half a million in today's dollars.

Within weeks of its debut, the show knocked I Love Lucy out of first place. Such a sudden and staggering seizure of the public mind warrants closer examination. The opening shot panned the audience of ordinary-looking people, and then zoomed in on one face. Over a drum roll, the announcer said, "Our brush salesman from the Bronx, Wilton Jay Singer, who answered his $8,000 question. He's back to tell us whether he'll take his $8,000 or try for $16,000. On his march to the $64,000 question!"

The producers carefully chose likable protagonists as contestants: like Gino, a cobbler from the Bronx, who happened to know everything about opera; Gloria, a twelve-year-old African American, who was a prodigious speller (she would take home $32,000); or Dr. Joyce Brothers, an attractive blond psychologist who knew everything about the sport of boxing. All were sympathetic people, who explained their deliberations carefully and quickly became stars in their own right, thanks to television's remarkable power to confer celebrity with unprecedented speed.

But Paley's big-money contest triggered even more brutal ratings competition, which became all-consuming and desperate. NBC immediately copied the concept several times over, most notably with Twenty One, which pitted two contestants against each other. Sponsored by a relaunched patent medicine (Geritol: "America's number one tonic for tired blood!"), Twenty One put even more prize money at stake. But its ratings climb against CBS didn't happen until Charles Van Doren—a handsome, deep-voiced, and patrician English instructor at Columbia—showed up to challenge the reigning champion, Herb Stempel of the Bronx. Stempel had a big nose, thick glasses, and an abrasive manner. The producer would later say, "You want the viewer to react emotionally to a contestant. Whether he reacts favorably or negatively is really not that important….Viewers would watch him [Stempel] and pray for his opponent to win."

Like The $64,000 Question, Twenty One made theatrical displays of its integrity, such as storing its questions in a local bank vault to ensure their secrecy, putting its contestant in a sealed glass booth, where he could hear no one but the host. In the final showdowns, the suspense of Van Doren's drawn-out deliberation before answering questions drove audiences wild. He finally knocked out Stempel, going home a rich man, with $129,000, and enough celebrity to appear on the cover of Time as "Quiz Champ Van Doren."

The quiz show war typifies what had become of attention industries by the late 1950s: competition had taken on an intensity and anxiousness not seen since the penny papers of the 1830s. It must have made one yearn for the relative gentleness of the old radio days, with their mushy ratings, limited advertising, and smaller revenues for broadcasters and advertising firms. A show did not need to prove itself definitively so much as contribute generally to the network's lineup and make the affiliates happy. It was a lower-pressure environment, like a school where every child is average.

That greater intensity came in part from the disappearance of doubts as to advertising's power to drive sales, making audience attention more valuable. While scientific proof of the conversion of attention into sales may have been lacking, the examples of successful campaigns were too numerous to be ignored. Reeves's commercials for Anacin ("Fast, fast, fast relief") correlated with a 200 percent increase in sales over eighteen months. A new brand named Crest stormed the toothpaste battlements with a special ingredient, "fluoride," and a happy boy crying, "Look, Mom! No cavities!" It became the market leader in just four years' time. Television and print ads of the Marlboro Man, as we've seen, turned an obscure woman's cigarette into one of the market leaders in less than a year, and Revlon was widely thought to be saved by The $64,000 Question. Of course, it is possible that Crest was just making great toothpaste, or that Marlboro just happened to take off. Certainly, for every successful advertising campaign there were plenty of others that seemed to have no impact. Nonetheless, the number of notable successes was sufficient to set off a feeding frenzy.

With the potential dollar value of television's attention harvest becoming so obvious, any pretenses to a higher purpose that broadcasting once had were eroding quickly. Now it was clear, as an economist put it, that “programs are scheduled interruptions of marketing bulletins.” The trend was exacerbated by another increased quantification. The networks began to consider audience attention their “inventory,” which was sold using metrics like “gross rating points” or GRP, a formula that estimated the likelihood of people seeing the advertising at least once (the cumulative audience), and the frequency with which the advertising played. On popular prime-time television, all but the highest commercial bidders—America's largest corporations—were priced out of each time slot.

Moreover, as compared with radio or print, there was on television a larger disparity in profit between the “winner” and “loser” of each time slot. Even the cheapest television programs cost far more to make than a radio show, meaning some ratings minimum was needed just to cover costs. The ratings winner, was able, moreover, to charge a premium for its advertising slots. This made the pressure to win even more intense, and also meant that content could not linger to evolve, as it might on radio or in a magazine—it had to pull in its audience or face cancellation.

Much of the broadcast schedule was simply too valuable to be left to chance. Experimenting with a few stations and high ideals might have their place when sponsorships were the norm, when nothing could be accurately measured, and all was a matter of feel, but now, by the late 1950s, every moment of what was called prime time had both fixed costs and a revenue potential to be met or brutally aspired to.

What we learn about Paley from this period is, in fact, slightly ambiguous. The most straightforward theory is that, in the end, his competitive instincts ruled. The game of television was audience aggregation, and so that is the game he played to win. He was, therefore, a merchant of attention in the most undiluted sense, not unlike Benjamin Day of the New York Sun, who gave audiences exactly what he could tell they wanted. Unlike others, Paley had no real designs to manipulate or enlighten, unless that might improve ratings. His only aim was to harvest as much of his product as he could, in as pure a form as he could, for sale to the highest bidder. As David Halberstam suggested, he “was totally without sentiment: he knew what was good and would sell, what was bad and would sell, and what was good and would not sell, and he never confused one with another.”

Incapable, or helpless: countless media scholars have pointed out that, as the 1950s progressed, this approach ceded ever more programming control to Arthur Nielsen. Whether they saw it or not, what Paley and Weaver—programming geniuses both—had ultimately wrought was a system for capturing more attention than ever commercially amassed before. Once that system existed, the logic of capitalism, though not decency, dictated it could be used for only one purpose: to make as much money as could be made. That the substrate for this process was the conscious hours of millions of Americans was hardly CBS’s or NBC’s problem. In a free society, you are free to do things that aren’t good for you, whether it be smoke, drink sugary drinks, or watch game shows. Thanks to the erosion of the public interest model, broadcasters were free to air what suited them.

As David Halberstam writes, “Whereas at the turn of the century, only an occasional door-to-door salesman visited the American home, by the middle of the century a ceaseless stream of the most subtle electronic impulses created by the nation’s most richly rewarded hucksters was beamed into this new marketplace, relentlessly selling not just the American dream but an endless series of material products through whose purchase that dream might be more quickly achieved.” In this way, for the first time, to be at home and awake was, for most Americans, to be sold something.

Later in 1958, Murrow would deliver his lament for what he felt had befallen television over the decade. Its deep embrace of advertising had resulted in a kind of self-imposed (and sometimes sponsor-imposed) censorship: anything too downbeat, dark, or challenging was being systematically suppressed, for fear of contradicting the upbeat and optimistic commercial messages of television's sponsors. And so while radio, at its best, had forced Americans to confront the horrors of Europe, television was acting as a buffer. "Television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW, PAY LATER, for surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive."

In the mid-1930s, for instance, Zenith seriously tested whether it could transmit thoughts to its listeners via radio waves. “On these programs,” it said of its telepathy experiments, “the listeners will be taken where no living person has ever been.”

In the late 1950s, the Commander caught a whiff of discontent brewing among television consumers, an annoyance at having to sit through the new commercial breaks that now interrupted nearly every program since NBC had first introduced them in the mid-1950s. So he ordered Zenith's engineers to devise a way to give people more control over what their televisions were doing—in particular, the power to “tune out annoying commercials.” He wanted, we would say, an ad-blocker.

Within a year, McDonald's engineers had come up with various answers to his challenge. Zenith put the most promising one into development, and soon started advertising its new Flash-Matic, mainly in print: “Just think! Without budging from your easy chair you can turn your new Zenith Flash-Matic set on, off, or change channels. You can even shut off annoying commercials while the picture remains on the screen.” The Flash-Matic shot visible light at four photo cells, one in each corner of the screen. It was shaped like a revolver, perhaps inspired by the popularity of the western. The idea, according to the inventor, Eugene Polley, was to let the viewer “shoot-out” the ads.

Likewise, no one ever bought a TV merely to keep up with the latest shampoos or tobacco products, much less to be persuaded to buy them. But the terms of the attention merchants’ contract with the public, which once had seemed so easy and appealing—“free” entertainment in exchange for a moment of your consideration—seemed suddenly to have been revised, and not in the viewers’ favor. Pitches were proliferating, and the programs themselves, their narrative logic, seemed more and more contorted to fit the pitches. The sense of being commerce’s dupe was setting in.

Packard's accusations did not have the visceral effect that exposing the exaggerations and outright lies of patent medicine advertising had had earlier in the twentieth century. To accept his claims of designs on our unconscious desires and use of hidden or subliminal messages to turn citizens into slavish consumers required a measure of sophistication, not to mention an awareness of the unconscious.

Viewers of television had conditioned themselves to believe that their choices were still their own, whatever commercials might be telling them to do. Having been given cause to think otherwise must have induced a shock of recognition. For as Ellul wrote of propaganda, those most susceptible to it are often those most confident in their skills of detecting it and therefore think themselves immune to its effects.

Ultimately, in Packard's view, the only real defense was to cultivate mental privacy through the avoidance of advertising. "It is this right to privacy in our minds—privacy to be either rational or irrational," wrote Packard, "that I believe we must strive to protect."

Taking the notebook, Hilgemeier confronted the show's producers, who immediately offered him $500 to keep quiet. He declined and was offered $1,500, which he took, but then decided he wanted $5,000. When refused, he spilled the beans. Dotto was fixed, he told the New York Daily News, its winning contestants coached and supplied with answers. Both the casting and the competitive drama were as scripted as a soap opera. It seems rather obvious when you watch the old recordings: on the Dotto episode in question, the attractive reigning champion Marie Winn defeats her dour, overweight opponent with all the theatricality of a professional wrestling match. If the shows were so reliably suspenseful, and the winners always so appealing, surely there was a reason. In fact, even the amounts won were predetermined, budgeted in advance. The truth came out, and Dotto was canceled that summer.

Friedan wanted to know why women had returned to being housewives after making gains in independence earlier in the century. She concluded that "the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief customers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the underused, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives."

To their respective followings both men sitting in the ornate oak-paneled restaurant were "gurus," a word just come into currency in the West. McLuhan was a scholar of the media from the University of Toronto who'd become famous thanks to his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was full of intriguing pronouncements somehow both bold and enigmatic at once (example: "The 'content' of any medium is always another medium"). He was referred to, variously, as the "Guru of the Boob Tube" and the "Oracle of the Electronic Age."

Among other things, Leary and his followers were deeply committed to what might fairly be termed an attentional revolution. They wanted the public to block out the messages of the mainstream media and other institutions, which they saw as little more than tools of mass manipulation. Instead the Federation was setting forth on an inward voyage, with a bit of help: to reconfigure the public mind and its priorities, Leary believed in the great potential of taking psychedelic drugs—like LSD—still legal then.

McLuhan was fairly sympathetic to Leary's project. For McLuhan saw the media as having become "extensions of man"—as much a part of us as our skin. To take control of one's media consumption was therefore a form of self-determination, a seizing of one's own destiny. And so after hearing Leary out, he finally gave him some counterintuitive advice: "You call yourself a philosopher, a reformer," said McLuhan. "But the key to your work is advertising." If Leary truly wanted to wean great numbers from the pernicious effects of the existing media, he needed first to reach those people by the media's most pernicious means. Most of all, he needed some kind of a catchy line, and to show him how it was done, McLuhan composed a jingle for him then and there, based on an old Pepsi ad: "Lysergic acid hits the spot / Forty billion neurons, that's a lot."

Taking McLuhan's advice seriously, he made a list of the most revolutionary American slogans: "Give me Liberty or Give Me Death" came to him first, and then "A Nation Cannot Exist Half Slave and Half Free," "The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself," and finally "Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco" (the latter had been used over the 1940s and 1950s, replacing "Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet").

Most would take Leary's words as a call to pay attention to where your attention is paid; mind what you open your mind for. If this was not America's first call to attentional revolt—Packard and Lippmann had each issued his own, as we've seen—Leary's proposed a far broader compass of things to ignore, not only messages from television and government but college, work, parents, as well as other sources of authority. He called for a complete attentional revolution.

Marcuse believed that he was witnessing a "Great Refusal"-a term he first coined in the 1950s to describe "the protest against unnecessary repression, the struggle for the ultimate form of freedom-'to live without anxiety.' " Like Leary-whom he may have inspired in part-Marcuse tended to believe that liberation could not be achieved from within the system, but required its fundamental reconstruction.

It was a far more ambitious aim than anything hoped for even by Karl Marx and his followers, who simply sought liberation from an unfair economic system. Marcuse envisioned an end to all forms of repression, whether social, economic, or technological—a sort of return to the Garden of Eden.

“Intellectual freedom,” he surmised in 1964, “would mean the restoration of individual thought now absorbed by mass communication and indoctrination” and also the “abolition of ‘public opinion’ along with its makers.”

The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search,” Leary said, “for therein is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning.” This was the ultimate sense of his great exhortation, as he would explain in one speech: “The message of God never changes. It may be expressed to you in six simple words: turn on, tune in, drop out.”

Leary forecast that enormous resistance would meet those trying to take his advice. “The directors of the TV studio do not want you to live a religious life. They will apply every pressure (including prison) to keep you in their game. Your own mind, which has been corrupted and neurologically damaged by years of education in fake-prop TV-studio games, will also keep you trapped in the game.” He was right in seeing that American commerce, and the attention industries in particular, would view what Leary advocated as a mortal threat. But he seems not to have anticipated that just as he had appropriated the tools of advertising for the promotion of his cause, the side of the advertisers might just as easily appropriate his cause for their purposes.

Coke had succeeded by identifying itself with everything wholesome and all-American, drawing on the deep American self-regard and desire to belong—and somehow making it feel that to drink something else might be vaguely treasonous. At Christmas, it even associated itself with Santa Claus, and in fact the company helped cement the modern image of Santa Claus in the public consciousness as a rotund bearded man with a broad belt, clad in Coca-Cola's red and white.

As the trailing brand, Pepsi was willing, early on, to try innovative promotional techniques, like catering to the disenfranchised. Coca-Cola advertised itself as the all-American drink, but by this it meant the white American drink, and so Pepsi in the 1940s briefly experimented with niche marketing by creating an all-black marketing department, known as the "negro-markets" department.

Over the 1950s, Pepsi depended entirely on identifying itself not as healthful, or even better tasting, but the cheaper cola, occupying the market niche that generic colas hold today. Its most successful jingle, the one McLuhan borrowed for Leary's psychedelic venture, had gone like this: "Pepsi-Cola hits the spot; 12 full ounces, that's a lot." Truth in advertising: Pepsi was sold in a 12-ounce bottle for 5 cents, the price of 6.5 ounces of Coke. By 1957, when Pottasch joined the company, despite all its efforts Pepsi was being outsold by a factor of nearly six to one, giving a classic demonstration of the power of brand to undermine the concept of choice—but without anyone feeling they had sacrificed any freedoms. They were just choosing Coke, that's all.

Pottasch had begun to persuade his management that selling Pepsi as a cheaper alternative was not, in the long run, a winning strategy. But what else could Pepsi be? Like Leary, Marcuse, and others, Pottasch noticed that there was something going on with the young people, who were listening to different types of music and dressing differently than their parents, and—while this was still the early 1960s—giving some signs of rebellion against the consumer culture constructed over the 1950s. But if Leary or Marcuse sought to ride the swirling social movements to challenge the established social order, Pottasch thought he could employ it to sell Pepsi Cola.

“We made a decision,” he later recalled, “to stop talking about the product, and start talking about the user.” He thus conceived of marketing Pepsi without reference to its inherent qualities, focusing instead on an image of the people who bought it, or who should be buying it. They were the people of the moment: the young, the rebellious, those who (to borrow a later slogan) “think different.” They would be known, in Pottasch’s new formula, as “the Pepsi Generation.”

But clearly, this campaign had nothing to do with the traditional hard sell, with the product, and what it might do for you, front and center. Pepsi’s advertisements and their imitators were in some sense just an even softer version of the soft sell, which pictured an ideal and associated it with the product. Into this category one might put both the “Arrow Man,” a dashing figure who wore Arrow shirts in the 1920s, and the Marlboro Man, solitary smoker of the Great Plains. But no one who smoked Marlboros wanted or expected to become a wrangler. The Pepsi difference was to suggest that consuming the product somehow made you into what you wanted to be.

But Pepsi had greater success with the “Live–Give” campaign, playing on more appealing countercultural values, like a return to natural, simple pleasures and living in peace. Here was consumption coaxed with an anti-consumerist ethos; it was Pepsi selling the counterculture to mainstream America, as Leary and others had only aspired to do.

What Pepsi pictured (or co-opted) was essentially Marcuse’s imagined earthly paradise—unrepressed joy, activity, and love, a life altogether free of anxiety or oppression. There are no technologies, only Frisbees and flowers; love, both familial and romantic, is experienced without hindrance or implied hierarchies. In essence, Pepsi advertised liberation.

There's little question that the revolt of the 1960s did lead part of a generation away from the attention merchants of the 1950s. But industry calibrated an effective response and perhaps ultimately read the public mood more accurately than any guru. For they had detected the essence of the spirit of liberation: for most people it was not an end of desire (as in some Buddhist sense), or a wish for solitary withdrawal (in a monastic sense), or even, as Leary had hoped, a spiritual longing equal to motivating an inward turn. Rather, after decades of relative conformity and one of ultimate conformity, what had been uncorked was powerful individual desires and the will to express them. Above all, most simply wanted to feel more like an individual. And that was a desire industry could cater to, just like any other.

The most confident among the advertisers knew that the 1960s would not extinguish consumerism, for a simple reason: desire's most natural endpoint is consumption, and advertisers, after honing their art for half a century, knew how to convert all manner of desire into demand for products. And young people's desires were no exception. In fact, as one advertising executive, John Adams, put it in 1971, "They [the hippies] are in the peak acquisitive years, and their relative affluence enables them to consume goods and services at a rate unheard of for their age level."

Marcuse, who was the kind of idealist given to unrelenting pessimism, predicted in 1964 that the promise of liberation would be used for further repression. "Liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination," he argued, for "free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves" and "free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear." This is where an intellectual loses his guruship: leading his followers toward a conceptual bridge too far. If the people wanted liberation, and if Pepsi was selling it, most people seemed to think, why not just buy it from them?

Of course, to succeed at selling a new snake oil, albeit one with a spiritual flavor, advertisers would still need one thing—access to the public mind. That they would have it points to the main reason why the hoped-for attentional revolution of the 1960s and 1970s ultimately failed. It was nothing to do with the message, which was, in fact, powerfully delivered and readily embraced. Rather, the failure was owing to one often unremarked fact: over the 1960s and 1970s, most people simply did not stop watching television.

The public was, the activist-adman Jerry Mander wrote, “as they had been for years, sitting home in their living rooms, staring at blue light, their minds filled with TV images. One movement became the same as the next one; one media action merged with the fictional program that followed; one revolutionary line was erased by the next commercial, leading to a new level of withdrawal, unconcern, and stasis. In the end, the sixties were revealed as the flash of light before the bulb goes out.”

Consider that, over the 1960s, the countercultural Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Doors would all reach their largest audiences by appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show. Ultimately, the habit of prime time proved more powerful than the forces arrayed against it. With their access to the public mind mostly intact, the industries of attention had the opportunity not just to survive but to prosper.

While there had always been those who viewed broadcast television as irredeemable, more moderate elements believed that the medium was essentially neutral; if it had become nothing but an attention harvester, it might yet be reimagined and reprogrammed to serve somewhat loftier goals. Essentially they believed in the potential ascribed to TV early on by those like Murrow, who had said, “This instrument can teach, it can illuminate; yes, and even it can inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends.”

“I got into television,” Fred Rogers once told CNN, “because I hated it so.” A soft-spoken aspiring minister who favored cardigans, Rogers had the idea, radical in its time, that children’s television ought to be good for children. He had worked at NBC in the early 1950s, and then moved to Pittsburgh to work on a local public show named The Children’s Corner, which briefly ran on the network.

Children, of course, have less control over their attention than adults, but when they do pay attention, they open their minds more fully to the messages presented. By the early 1950s advertisers had come to understand the commercial potential of reaching children by television.

Fred Rogers had fundamentally different ideas as to what the goals of children's television should be. But he could find no lasting place for his ideas in 1950s American commercial television. Instead he got his break in Canada, where the State-run Canadian Broadcasting Company invited him to present Misterogers for northern children. On his new show, Rogers invited children into an imaginary world populated mainly by puppets, who spoke to children as friends. When in 1964 Rogers returned to the United States, he relaunched the show in Pittsburgh as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. And so began his new routine: changing his shoes as he came in the door, symbolizing the passage into a different world. Rogers's approach to his audience was highly innovative. He addressed ordinary, even mundane challenges, but ones likely to face his young viewers, like a fear of haircuts or monsters, or a quarrel between siblings.

Sesame Street, public television's second great success, was a self-conscious effort to "master the addictive qualities of television and do something good with them." The show's creators appealed to children by mimicking commercial television's tricks for gaining attention, with techniques like breaking news (narrated by Kermit the Frog), sponsors ("Today is sponsored by the letter E"), and "commercial breaks" featuring favorites like Ernie and Bert. Author Malcolm Gladwell summed it up this way: "Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them."

If we examine CBS, in particular, we see that top shows of the 1960s were "rural" shows like The Beverly Hillbillies (about a backwoods family living in Beverly Hills), Green Acres (urban socialites take up "farm living"), and Hee Haw (a country music variety show). Innocuous, comforting entertainment, to be sure, and still capable of bringing tens of millions to prime time, each and every night, but hardly in sync with countercultural viewers. As ratings began dropping, the whole enterprise began to sag. Commercial television was surviving the late 1960s on sheer inertia—the lasting power of attentional habits is never to be underestimated—and the fact that the backlash, such as it was, was mainly in the younger demographics, and had not reached the whole population.

Buoyed by their success with children, over the late 1960s public broadcasters began to reach directly for countercultural audiences with shows like the Public Broadcasting Laboratory, a magazine program produced by Fred Friendly. It debuted with a drama featuring blacks in "white-face," and among PBL's productions was Inside North Vietnam, a fairly sympathetic portrayal of the country under American air attack. Another ambitious effort was The Great American Dream Machine, an antiestablishment, anti-consumerist variety show, if such a thing could exist. "We're trying to show what a great country this could be," said the producers, "if we got rid of the false values sold to us by hucksters and con men who have contempt for the public."

The debut of NPR's new flagship, All Things Considered, ran an hour and twenty-eight minutes, beginning with live coverage of Vietnam protests before turning to a lighter segment on small-town barber shops in “this age of unshorn locks, with shagginess transformed into a lifestyle.” Over time, NPR would gain audiences even larger than public television's, proving the older broadcast platform yet had real life in it.

By the late 1960s, CBS had already canceled its last prime-time game shows and launched 60 Minutes, an obvious bid to resurrect See It Now. Now the show would prove that bracing investigative journalism could, in fact, garner top ratings.

A Charlie Brown Christmas proved once again the counterintuitive truth that anti-commercialism could yield great commercial success; and so it did, earning high ratings for CBS and excellent exposure for its sponsor, Coca-Cola.

CBS was already the largest network, but the men took seriously what McLuhan called the “dinosaur effect”—the premise that they might be at their largest size right before extinction. … The two immediately set about a thorough purge, redirecting the network toward the young, liberated, and socially conscious.

Within just two years, commercial television—still by far the heavyweight champion of attention capture—had seen its own revolution of sorts. CBS canceled nearly every show about the rural/urban divide and characters that were “fish out of water.” As Life magazine wrote in 1971, “Slain were every single one of the hillbillies and their imitative relatives.” Also on the block: the once dominant Ed Sullivan Show. Now came a whole new kind of program, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (about an unmarried urban career woman), All in the Family (centered on the experiences of a working-class bigot living in Queens, New York), and MAS*H (an antiwar comedy about a field hospital during the Korean War, with regular appearances by blood and death).

By 1974, the network had retaken nine of the top-ten-rated programs, and television itself had successfully made itself “relevant,” saving it from a slow sapping of its energies, as its first and most faithful viewership began to age and die. … At the same time, Silverman’s success also perhaps showed the challenge and limits of reforming the medium according to Murrow’s vision; for ultimately the business model remained the resale of human attention, and that reality was encoded in the very nature of all the programs. As Paley had first discovered, sometimes you could make the sale with panache; but if not, it still had to be done. Jerry Mander writes, the reformers believed “that television could communicate their message as well as any other….Intent on changing other people’s minds, they did not consider that television might change those who used it.”

Even a show as beloved and hilariously subversive as MASH can be understood to exemplify what Marcuse described as the kind of opposition that actually perpetuates the status quo. … At the same time, MASH kept tens of millions of Americans, would-be counterculturals among them, faithfully tuned to commercial television during prime time. If the contest really was, as Leary and others proposed, for the minds of the people, it was lost when America renewed its contract with the attention merchants. The broadcasters had adjusted the terms: now it was free, relevant entertainment in exchange for attention. But in the end, everyone would remain easily accessible to advertisers.

The best and clearest exemplar was New York's Wells, Rich, Greene, founded in 1966 by thirty-eight-year-old Mary Wells, its president and guiding force. Everything about the agency was timely, including Wells's announcement at its founding that "we are terribly aware of the current sounds and fears and smells and attitudes. We are the agency of today."

For its slogan, Mary Wells chose one perhaps equally suited to a yoga studio: "love power." The idea, apparently, was to reach consumers with friendliness, and make them love the product; it was a 180-degree turn from Claude Hopkins's idea of scaring people into buying things.

The firm infused the same rebellious themes into nearly all of its work. Wells herself instructed the staff to come up with ideas this way: “Consider what you can't do, then do it.” Indeed, doing it the unconventional way became reflexive. When, for instance, Philip Morris gave them the account for Benson & Hedges—an old British brand whose main distinction was its length (100 mm)—Wells came up with a strange set of advertisements that focused on the disadvantages of a longer cigarette—being caught in doors, under car hoods, and so on, with the tagline “Benson & Hedges 100's must taste pretty good; look what people put up with to smoke them.”

What was the secret to how the attention industries cheated death yet again, even when the whole zeitgeist of the late 1960s and '70s was seemingly against them? The success may finally be put down to the saving logic of capitalism. For what makes capitalism so powerful is its resilience and adaptability. The game is never lost, only awaiting the next spin of the wheel. As a mode of production, capitalism is a perfect chameleon; it has no disabling convictions but profit and so can cater to any desire, even those inimical to it. In The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank theorizes that “in the sixties…hip became central to the way American capitalism understood itself and explained itself to the public.” And so even “disgust with the falseness, shoddiness, and everyday oppressions of consumer society could be enlisted to drive the ever-accelerating wheels of consumption.”

It would, however, be unfair to claim in a broad sense that the commercial attention industries “won” the 1960s from their noncommercial antagonists, whether public broadcasters, spiritual seekers, those espousing liberation à la Marcuse, or merely those yearning for a simpler life. For clearly those ideas would leave their lasting mark. Individualism became the dominant American ethos, even of capitalism itself. But in a narrower sense, commerce did win: the counterculture’s call for the revitalization of spirituality and social consciousness inspired very few to make a permanent break even from television, the great portal to all that was wrong with society. To the contrary, by the early 1970s, television viewing had increased to an average of six hours per day per household.

Many were the hopes that would be chewed up and spit out again, Timothy Leary’s among them. By the early 1970s, his dream of a religious awakening under the influence of psychedelics lay in ruins when he was imprisoned on drug charges following the criminalization of LSD. And so by that point, the main public exponents of his ideas—albeit in modified form—were companies like Pepsi, Pond’s, and the makers of the grapefruit beverage Squirt, whose slogan was “Turn on to flavor, tune in to sparkle, and drop out of the cola rut.”

In 1971, they got another pillar of the establishment, the New York agency McCann Erickson (slogan: "Truth well told"), to express Coke's own version of liberation and love in what would be the brand's most enduring campaign. McCann identified the sweetest and most generous aspirations of the era with the buying of Coca-Cola. The result: a canticle to consumption, to fellowship as commerce-and the best damn commercial of the 1970s: * Marcuse had a particularly arcane term for this dynamic by which a putative form of liberation nonetheless manages to perpetuate existing power structures and prop up "the system."

Marcuse had a particularly arcane term for this dynamic by which a putative form of liberation nonetheless manages to perpetuate existing power structures and prop up “the system.” He called it “repressive desublimation.”

Robbin's models were based on observations of the Chicago School of Sociology, which aimed to understand American communities like ecosystems. Neighborhoods, the sociologists thought, could be seen as super-organisms with lives of their own apart from those of the individuals living in them; they would mature and grow or shrink and disappear over time, like a rainforest.

At the height of a progressive movement to acknowledge and empower neglected groups—African Americans most prominently—Robbin worked on what he called “cluster analysis,” by which one could understand more precisely what kind of people lived in any neighborhood based on the “principle that residents living near each other are likely to have similar demographic, socio-economic and lifestyle characteristics.”

In the early 1970s, however, perhaps succumbing to boredom, or academic disillusionment, Robbin decided there might be a way to commercialize his work. So he founded Claritas (Latin for “clarity”). A one-man start-up, Claritas was arguably the first firm to exploit the new social science that Robbin and other practitioners called “geodemography.” The basic notion was that approaches developed to predict urban crime could also help advertisers improve the marketing of their products.

Working with public census data, and the relatively new Zone Improvement Plan (ZIP) codes created by the Post Office, Robbin would produce his great masterpiece by 1978. He called it the “Potential Ratings in ZIP Markets” system, or PRIZM. PRIZM sorted the entire U.S. population into forty subnations, or “clusters,” each with a set of exact geographical locations. With PRIZM, a new reality revealed itself to Robbin: there was no United States, but forty distinctive nations all calling the same continent home.

The notion of distinct social subsets within the borders of one country may seem obvious today. But at the time it gave the lie to an essential premise of marketing and advertising: that Americans were a single people whose demands could easily be served by one set of consumer products. Even those single-variable parameters that had earlier served the limited efforts at more specific targeting were obsolete. “Forget sex. Forget race, national origin, age, household composition, and wealth,” wrote business author Michael Weiss, describing PRIZM. “The characteristic that defines and separates Americans more than any other is the cluster.”

What defined these forty nations? Based on the census data, Robbin identified thirty-four factors that he determined accounted for 87 percent of the variation across the United States. These did include race, income, and the like, but not acting alone. Rather, such markers tended to aggregate and follow the same pattern in similar places. Robbin programmed his computers to profile tens of thousands of new zip codes, sorting the results into these clusters of like-minded areas, each of which he assigned an evocative name, like the “Bohemian Mix,” “Shotguns & Pickups,” or “Young Suburbia.”

As an early guide to the clusters prepared in the 1980s explains, those who lived in “Young Influential” neighborhoods were the “young, upwardly mobile singles and dual career couples”; mostly they were to be “found in the inner-ring suburb of major cities.” As to priorities: they “don’t care about good schools, because they don’t have children.” Rather, “they want a mall with a sushi bar, gourmet cookie shop, travel agency and a psychotherapy center.” They read books at twice the rate of the national average, and they tended to vote Republican. By contrast, Claritas found that those living in the “Bohemian Mix” areas, like New York’s Greenwich Village, were “an eclectic melange of never-married and divorced singles, young Turks and older professionals, blacks and whites” who held “benefit dances for the Sandinistas.” “Squash, racquetball and jogging” were among their typical pastimes.

The initial definition of the forty clusters obviously involved considerable subjectivity on Robbin’s part, but from the beginning he expected the clusters to evolve and grow more precise. In his vision of America, traditional demarcations, like state lines, didn’t have much meaning; to drive across the nation was to visit not places like Kansas or Iowa, but rather local chapters of clusters like “Shotguns & Pickups,” “Gold Coasts,” and so on. While some (like “Sharecroppers” or “Industrial”) were found in only certain regions, in general the same neighborhoods, as he saw it, repeated across the land, with any local variations being merely cosmetic.

To this point, with some experimental exceptions, the contest for human attention had been mostly approached as if everyone were roughly the same. But PRIZM revealed how the nation was actually a knowable mosaic of sensibilities and tastes—or even vulnerabilities and deepest desires. Here, at last, was a quantitative version of the shamanistic insight offered by Bernays and Dichter. For the advertising industry, it proposed a vast new horizon of targeted campaigns and additional billings. For the advertisers, it promised a more potent kind of messaging than the old scattershot method. Now, firms could not only tailor ads to their desired consumer but also fine-tune the product itself, so as to be more alluring to his or her specific attention. Here, too, was a way around the perennial attention industry problem of conditioned indifference; it is far more taxing to learn to ignore messages that seem to speak to you specifically.

And so, with the launch of Claritas, the liberating politics of recognition would attain its commercial correlative. Born of a wish for greater empathy and greater understanding of people from all backgrounds, the new system industrialized the project of finding out as much as possible about each and every one of us, not out of regard for anyone’s dignity, but so as to know precisely what would catch our attention and make us want things we never knew we wanted.

Into the late 1980s, a dozen cable networks launched, each targeted not at the middle, like CBS and NBC, but at some demographic fragment.

Bravo launched in 1980, explicitly targeting lovers of the arts, assumed by its backers to be mostly women (but later to include gay men, when the appeal to two groups would be dubbed “dualcasting”). Two years on came BET, Black Entertainment Television, targeting blacks; and the Playboy Channel, targeting not only playboys but all straight men … The network did make an effort to reach women as well, with shows like Dr. Yes: The Hyannis Affair, which was described as “a sort of topless Dynasty” following “the idle rich, with time on their hands and sex on their minds.”

“Audience fragmentation” was the industry term for what the new cable networks were molding themselves to, and it was of a piece with the idea of appealing to clusters through PRIZM. Of course it was never entirely clear whether “fragment” was being used more as a verb or a noun: Were the networks reacting to fragmented audiences, or were they in fact fragmenting them? In retrospect, they were doing both.

This had happened at a time of relatively homogeneous national sensibilities following the great collective effort of winning the Second World War. But as we've seen, broadcasters used their monopoly over the most powerful attention capture technology yet invented to mold that relative sameness into a single, national consumer mass, unified in schedule, attentional habits, and information diet. At the time, nothing could have been better for their business or American business generally.

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.

In 1986 the Fox Broadcasting Company suddenly appeared on televisions across America, its unstated mission to serve the un-served, at least in terms of entertainment. Its owner was an Australian newspaper magnate, Rupert Murdoch; its chairman and CEO, Barry Diller, a self-styled programming revolutionary himself. Out came a show conceived to be the “anti–Cosby Show” (in response to the hugely popular NBC sitcom starring Bill Cosby as a prosperous physician and occasionally befuddled father). Married…with Children was the chronicle of Al Bundy, an unhappy salesman of women’s shoes; his lazy, lubricious, and self-indulgent wife, Peggy; their promiscuous and blazingly stupid daughter, Kelly; and their alienated, sarcastic son, Bud.

In each case, whether broadcast or cable, Murdoch and Diller chased audiences believed, one way or another, to have fallen through the cracks, who had somehow disdained, or been disdained by, the mainstream. Not every new program worked, needless to say: Babes, a sitcom about three overweight sisters sharing an apartment, didn’t last long, nor did Get a Life, about a thirty-year-old paperboy who moves back in with his parents. But hits like The Simpsons, together with the Fox News Channel, with its steady rise of market share, more than made up for the duds.

The idealists of the 1960s and 1970s envisioned a thoughtful public who knew what they wanted, and would judiciously select programs that precisely matched their preferences. The ordinary viewer, who formerly had his tastes dictated to him, would now be elevated by democratically inspired offerings. The leading visionaries of cable Ralph Lee Smith (author of The Wired Nation) and Fred Friendly both foresaw a new age of true media democracy, when one's attention was truly his own.

The profusion of channels and ubiquity of the remote control, followed up by the VCR and its fast-forward function, also meant that, for the first time, television commercials were well and truly avoidable by means easier than the old expedient of getting up and going to the kitchen. As New York magazine announced: “1985 is the age of zapping—channel switching on remote controls or fast-forwarding through commercials.” For advertisers, this provoked a minor crisis, as their business and rates had long hinged on the fundamental precept of unavoidability. “Conventional wisdom in the advertising industry holds that a certain amount of irritation helps make advertising effective,” wrote Rena Bartos of the J. Walter Thompson agency in 1981. “But the erosion of advertising credibility,” she warned, may “be undermining consumers’ trust in brand name advertised products.” Consequently, over the 1980s, the major advertising firms (after introducing fifteen-second commercials) began to suggest, not for the first or last time, that advertising would henceforth need to be more entertaining and engaging—something that people wanted to watch.

Pepsi changed its slogan to "The choice of a new generation" and paid Michael Jackson an unprecedented $5 million to dance with children to a song set awkwardly to his "Billie Jean" (lyrics: "You're the Pepsi Generation / guzzle down and taste the thrill of the day / And feel the Pepsi way").

Print advertising has always been less unpopular than television or radio; for it is more under the control of the reader who can avert the eyes. It can also be beautiful. Some of it became much harder to ignore during the 1980s, like a Calvin Klein campaign starring a fifteen-year-old Brooke Shields, or another picturing two men and a woman sleeping in their (Calvin Klein) underwear after a threesome. And on television, viewers (other than parents) might be less disposed to zap Shields posing provocatively in her Calvin Klein jeans and intoning, “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing.”

Fortunately for the advertising industry, it remained impossible to accurately measure whether people were watching commercials or not, saving the enterprise from a true and full accounting.

In retrospect, the word “remote control” was ultimately a misnomer. What it finally did was to empower the more impulsive circuits of the brain in their conflict with the executive faculties, the parts with which we think we control ourselves and act rationally. It did this by making it almost effortless, practically nonvolitional, to redirect our attention—the brain had only to send one simple command to the finger in response to a cascade of involuntary cues. In fact, in the course of sustained channel surfing, the voluntary aspect of attention control may disappear entirely. The channel surfer is then in a mental state not unlike that of a newborn or a reptile. Having thus surrendered, the mind is simply jumping about and following whatever grabs it.

All this leads to a highly counterintuitive point: technologies designed to increase our control over our attention will sometimes have the very opposite effect. They open us up to a stream of instinctive selections, and tiny rewards, the sum of which may be no reward at all. And despite the complaints of the advertising industry, a state of distracted wandering was not really a bad one for the attention merchants; it was far better than being ignored.

This is ultimately where the Great Refusal had led, not to a bang but a whimper. Faced with a new abundance of choice and a friction-less system of choosing, we individuals, in our natural weak-mindedness, could not resist frittering away our attention, which once had been harvested from us so ceremoniously. And the choices would continue to proliferate. As they did, and the attention merchants’ work grew more challenging, the strategies for getting the job done would grow only more various and desperate.

From the 1970s through the 1990s, despite various challenges and adaptations, television and its associated rituals would remain the primary, indisputably dominant harvester of human attention in the Western world. Few but a handful of futurists could see that a new claimant to attention was looming, all the while quietly gathering strength; fewer still could have imagined this force challenging the most powerful attention combine ever invented. For a long while, the third screen would not really even be in the game. It idled as one of those hobbyist novelties that had yet to find its commercial application, rather as radio did in its early days. But once it had developed its own ways of capturing our attention, the computer would hook us for good. As one might expect of a truly disruptive technology, those methods would be nothing one expected, and quite a different proposition from those of broadcasting or other media. The ambiguity of what the computer was for would remain a disadvantage for years longer than broadcasting had taken to prove itself. But that was perhaps because it could, potentially, do just about anything. That very plasticity would let it take audiences from television in ways other technologies could not.

In 1971, a thirty-year-old computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson, working in the outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts, took on an interesting assignment. Working at the government contractors Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), near Fresh Pond, he was asked, roughly, to find something that might make the newly operational Internet useful to people.

The Internet's lack of utility was, in fact, a serious danger to its future throughout the 1970s, a very precarious moment in its history. Fortunately, as a government project, it didn't actually have to make any money (had it been required to, there would have been no Internet). But eventually the Internet would have to prove of some use to someone, or face defunding.

Tomlinson, a classic tinkerer in the style of the early programmers, fooled around with a few ideas, with the help of two early computers in his office; even though right next to each other, they were connected through the early Internet. His main idea was to build some means by which his machines could send files to each other (a predecessor to what became known as the File Transfer Protocol). But as he tinkered, Tomlinson began to think not just about the machines but about the people using them. People could be awfully hard to reach by telephone, he mused. That's when he had a clever idea: why not modify his file transfer program to send messages? There was no grand vision; when asked later why he came up with email, he answered, "Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea."

Tomlinson's final clever little hack was to use the @ sign to distinguish emails arriving from remote computers, so the format was "Tomlinson@remotemachine" (the .com and the like would be invented later). The choice was happenstance: as Tomlinson later told the Smithsonian, he'd been looking around for something to use when he noticed the @, poised above "P" on his Model 33 teletype terminal. "I was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn't used much…I could have used an equal sign, but that wouldn't have made much sense." That the @ key was even on the computer keyboard was itself rather by happenstance, too. Its origins are obscure (one theory suggests it is an "a" placed within an "e" and an abbreviation for "each at"); it was sometimes used in commerce to designate the price at which each unit was being sold.

Stated differently, Lukasik was arguably the first to develop that little habit that consumes the attention of so many of us—the “check-in”—the impulse triggered by the intrusive thought that whatever else one is doing: “I need to check my email.” The check-in would eventually become a widespread attentional habit; it would go on to power AOL, Facebook, Twitter, and various other future attention merchants built around various technologies and business models. No other has compelled so many minds with such regularity—regularity that has the feel of a compulsion, of a mental itch constantly in need of being scratched.

We have already met John Watson, the psychologist-turned-advertising-executive, who pioneered the idea that humans are essentially like any other animals, reacting predictably to external stimuli. Over the 1930s, a more famous scientist, B. F. Skinner, would take the idea further. He regarded free will to be an illusion and argued that our behavior is a fabric of responses to past stimuli, in particular the rewards or punishments that any behavior attracts. Understood this way, all animal behavior developed through a learning process he called "operant conditioning," whereby some actions are reinforced by positive consequences (rewards), others discouraged by negative ones (punishments). To demonstrate what he meant, he built the so-called Skinner Box or "operant conditioning chamber," wherein he subjected animals to various consequences and observed their conditioning. For instance, by giving a pigeon a food pellet whenever it pecked at a button, Skinner conditioned the pigeon to peck the button so as to be fed. He also showed that pigeons could be conditioned to do things like turn in a circle (by reinforcing left turns), or even play competitive Ping-Pong.* According to Skinner, we, too, in most aspects of our lives, are like pigeons pecking at a button to receive little snacks.

According to Skinner, we, too, in most aspects of our lives, are like pigeons pecking at a button to receive little snacks. And this, according to the cognitive scientist Tom Stafford, explains the check-in impulse behind email and other online technologies. Unlike a food pellet, email isn’t always rewarding; in fact, it is often annoying (though with fewer people and less spam, it was surely more rewarding back in the 1970s). Once upon a time, there could be no new email for days at a time (few of us have that problem now). Much of what we get is uninteresting or indeed difficult to deal with. But every so often we get a message we are very glad to have. That such “rewarding” email comes unpredictably does not dim its allure or keep us from looking for it. On the contrary: as Stafford points out, the most effective way of maintaining a behavior is not with a consistent, predictable reward, but rather with what is termed “variable reinforcement”—that is, rewards that vary in their frequency or magnitude.

In experiments pioneered by Skinner and repeated over the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists demonstrated (again using pigeons in boxes) the somewhat surprising truth that behavior consistently rewarded is in fact more prone to “extinction” than behavior inconsistently rewarded. While they may be initially slower to learn the connection between deed and consequence, pigeons rewarded after an inconsistent number of pecks kept at it. As psychologist David Myers comments, “Hope springs eternal.”

Think for a minute about activities that entrance their practitioners, like gambling, shopping, or fishing. They all, in fact, have variable and unknowable reward schedules. A slot machine that rewarded every pull or even every third would offer no thrill; and no one hunts cows for sport. But take away the certainty and the real fun begins. Likewise, Stafford argues, “checking email is a behavior that has variable interval reinforcement….Everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link.” It is enough to have had such an experience a few times to get you regularly fishing for it; constant checking is thus reinforced, “even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. You still check because you never know when the reward will come.”

By this understanding, the gradual introduction of email was arguably one of history’s greatest feats of mass Skinneresque conditioning. We might imagine those first offices wired in the 1970s and 1980s as so many Skinner Boxes, ourselves as the hungry pigeons. By the 1990s, we would all learned to peck, or check email, in hope of a reward. And once created, that habit would not only open us up to all sorts of commercial possibilities, including various other Internet applications depending on the almighty power of check-in to regularly collect human attention.

In May 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was thinking of a way to publicize the launch of a new line of advanced computers, the VAX T-series. DEC was based in Massachusetts, but Thuerk wanted to gain the attention of West Coast techies as well. So he decided to stage demonstrations in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. But how would he get people to come?

“I looked at sending out invitations and calling all of those people,” Thuerk would recall, “but it was too hard to reach them by phone and too expensive and slow to print out invitations and send them.” So, fully aware that he was “pushing the envelope,” he decided to send out the world’s first mass, unsolicited email blast. Using a directory of West Coast Internet users, he and his project manager laboriously typed 393 separate email addresses into a giant header that went on for several pages.

Unfortunately for Thuerk, the response was immediate and negative. The Pentagon wrote an email describing the blast as a “FLAGRANT VIOLATION” of federal policy. Thuerk got a call from a testy official at the Pentagon, who informed him that the Internet was for official government business only. Thuerk said someone “called me up and chewed me out. He made me promise never to do it again.”

The incident also prompted a philosophical discussion among early Internet designers as to whether advertising should be allowed on the network at all. The consensus was a clear "no." Yet as Mark Crispin, another early scientist who detested the DEC message and saw no place for advertising, wrote: "I shudder to think about it, but I can envision junk mail being sent to [regular] people…and no way it could be prevented or stopped. I guess the ultimate solution is the command in your mail reading subsystem which deletes an unwanted message."

As for Thuerk, for the rest of his life he seemed to take some pride in his small moment of notoriety; he told Computerworld in 2007 that he prefers to call himself "the father of e-marketing" and also made himself available for inspirational speeches. At one point, he argued that he shouldn't be blamed for the plague of spam. "You don't blame the Wright Brothers for every flying problem."

Thuerk was indeed history's first spammer, and as such also an ancestor to the troll, two consistently recurring characters in the new bottom-up, people-powered attention industries. The spammer and the troll have their differences, but they have this in common—they defy social conventions to harvest attention for their own purposes.

To give Thuerk his due, he did see, just as clearly as Benjamin Day or other pioneering attention merchants had, that there was value to all those eyeballs focused on the same thing. No one remarked it at the time, but the mind tended to fix on this new screen even more attentively than to television. Such a mind was therefore in the state most naturally primed for being sold something. But it would be another generation before the commercial potential of the computer would be manifest.

By 1972, Baer’s idea had become a product, the Magnavox Odyssey, a primitive home video console; it had no sound and ran on C batteries. Most of its graphics, such as they were, were produced by affixing a plastic decal to the television screen connected to it; players controlled a spot of light, and used it to bat around other lighted spots in stylized versions of tennis or hockey. Baer ultimately sold about 350,000 units.

Atari’s founder, Norman Bushnell, had seen the Odyessy and, like Baer, was enough of a tech geek to know that computers could, in fact, be great fun. He and other computer scientists with access to the mainframes had already been playing a game named SpaceWar! So Bushnell designed a cabinet, about the height of a man, configured somewhat like a phone booth (another obsolete receptacle); for a quarter, one could play the game inside like a pinball machine.

In 1977, Tomohiro Nishikado’s boss at the Tokyo firm Taito, a manufacturer of jukeboxes and arcade games, asked him to make a Japanese version of the American video game Breakout.* Earlier in his career Nishikado had done the same with Atari’s Pong, resulting in Elepong, which proved a modest success, making him the natural choice. Nishikado took the assignment, and for some reason decided to carry it out entirely alone. Working long hours, he made substantial changes to the original. The opponents now moved across and down the screen, dropping bombs on the player’s paddle, now transformed into a crude artillery unit, capable of firing back laser beams in response.

In an early prototype, the opponents were tanks and soldiers but Nishikado's supervisors rejected it. "You must not create the image of war," he was told, perhaps out of Japanese sensitivity about past imperial aggression. As it happened, Nishikado had around the same time been reading about the American hit film Star Wars. So he decided to name his game Space Monsters. In 1978, Taito released it in Japan as Supēsu Inbēdā—and in America as Space Invaders.

The themes of addiction and engrossment could be found in writing about video games from their debut. "It's like drugs," a Space Invaders distributor told The Washington Post in 1980. "They'll tell you: 'I got a $4-a-day habit.' " The first thing everyone noticed about Space Invaders was just how captivated its players were. It was a hard game—seemingly hopeless—yet something kept players coming back, trying to conquer it.

"What we are dealing with is a global addiction," the novelist Martin Amis would write in his own meditation on video games in 1982. "I mean, this might all turn out to be a bit of a problem. Let me adduce my own symptoms, withdrawals, dry outs, crack-ups, benders." Psychologists and other experts were perplexed and disturbed by the appeal of the games, especially to children. "Most of the kids who play them are too young for sex and drugs," a Dr. Robert Millman told The New York Times in 1981. He proceeded to compare playing video games to sniffing glue. "The games present a seductive world….[Young people want] to be totally absorbed in an activity where they are out on an edge and can't think of anything else. That's why they try everything from gambling to glue sniffing." Others seemed to think Space Invaders's success had to do with the recent national experience. "It's really Vietnam," wrote Ted Nelson, a magazine editor. "It's a body count war. You do it and you never ask why."

Video games also consumed something else, human attention, in a way that was both old and new at the same time. As in any real game—be it tennis, pinball, or blackjack—the fast-flowing stimuli constantly engage the visual cortex, which reacts automatically to movement. No intentional focus is required, which explains why children and adults with Attention Deficit Disorder find the action of video games as engrossing as anyone else. Unlike games in reality, however, video games are not constrained by the laws of physics, making possible a more incremental calibration of the challenges involved, duration, and related factors in the attempt to keep players coming back.

But there were big differences between the new games and other things we have discussed that get us to pay attention, whether it be listening to Amos ’n’ Andy, watching a sitcom, or reading email. For one, the business model: it was cash for an experience, rather like seeing a play or reading a book. The attention merchant model would not be contemplated until much later. Second, playing a game like Space Invaders was, as we’ve said, challenging—to the point of utter frustration. Most couldn’t last longer than a minute. The games, at this stage at least, aimed for something completely different. The early players of Space Invaders were captured not by the dazzling graphics and sounds of today’s narrative-based games, but by the urge to match their skills against the machine in the hope of finding, if only for a moment, that perfect balance between their abilities and the ghosts or space monsters chasing them. In this way, you might say they effected another form of operant conditioning.

Only a few games seem to have successfully achieved that balance. Some were simply too hard, others too easy, and those aren’t really the only variables anyhow. But the best could sustain excitement, or even induce a “flow state,” that form of contentment, of “optimal experience,” described by the cognitive scientist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, in which people feel “strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities.” It was more than enough to keep people coming back, in their billions, across the world, and parting with their hard-earned money for a chance at such transcendence.

Namco, another Japanese company, had set its sights on winning over girls and women. “Back then,” said Namco designer Toru Iwatani, the arcade “was a playground for boys. It was dirty and smelly. So we wanted to include female players, so it would become cleaner and brighter.” Iwatani, then twenty-five, was the creator of Gee Bee and its two sequels, Bomb Bee and Cutie Q; he was tasked with producing something suitable. As he describes it, “My aim was to come up with a game that had an endearing charm, was easy to play, involved lots of light-hearted fun, and that women and couples could enjoy.”

Pac-Man soon became an even more lasting and profitable hit than Space Invaders, as its appeal went beyond its demographic target. Some early video game critics were dismissive. Omni magazine decried “the latest craze,” which it called “a silly 'gooble or be goobled' game.” “Those cute little PacMen with their special nicknames, that dinky signature tune, the dot-munching Lemon that goes whackawhackawhackawhacka: the machine has an air of childish whimsicality,” wrote Amis. Nonetheless, 400,000 of the arcade cabinets were sold worldwide, grossing billions of quarters, 100-yen coins, and other denominations. Over its entire run, by one estimate, Pac-Man earned more than $2.5 billion by the 1990s.

In 1991, when Steve Case, just thirty-three years old, was promoted to CEO of AOL, there were four companies, all but one lost to history, that shared the goal of trying to get Americans to spend more leisure time within an abstraction known as an "online computer network." Their names were CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, and GEnie, and merely to state their mission is to make clear why theirs was no easy sell.

So if they were going to get people to sit in front of a computer screen and "dial-in" to networks (the commercial predecessors of the Internet), the online networking companies needed to do something to lure Americans away from television (as well as family, magazines, and other lesser draws). Over the 1990s each of our four companies tried something different. The story of what finally worked is in many ways the story of how networking and the Internet—and the third screen—would come to win for itself such an amazing share of the nation's and the world's attention. It's also the story of how a new breed of attention merchants came into being.

The market leader in 1991 was the oldest of the four firms, the solid and serious CompuServe, owned by H&R Block. Its subscribers, numbering roughly 600,000, were largely male, a mix of computer hobbyists and some businessmen. CompuServe took the way of substance over style, betting that pure data was what mattered to its customers, who seemed to appreciate the no-nonsense, text-only interface. Since it originally used idle time on commercial mainframes, CompuServe gave its users numerical identifications (example: “70014,2316”), and sold them on utility: “When you join CompuServe,” its ads promised, “your computer becomes a time-saving, money-making, life-enhancing tool.”

Prodigy was a fast-growing operation founded by the odd combination of Sears, CBS, and IBM. It styled itself as the visionary alternative, the kind of place where managers would say things like “The future is here.” Aiming for mainstream consumers, Prodigy was betting that, for most users, online would be a world of shopping and entertainment, and that whoever had the most and best of both to offer would win. It also foresaw the importance of being an attention merchant, by betting on online advertising as its business model.

Prodigy initially spent an enormous sum (about $650 million) to develop and advertise its network, and built a veritable virtual palace, at least by the standards of the early 1990s. Seeing the text-only approach as too dreary or intimidating, they created a primitive graphic user interface, making it as easy to use as possible. Then came more heavy investment, now in branded content from partnerships with CNN, expensive commissions of well-known columnists, paid interviews with movie stars and athletes, and even a full-time newsroom staffed 24/7 with human reporters in its White Plains, New York, headquarters. To draw in new users, it turned to advertising, and in particular to J. Walter Thompson, which developed the slogan “You gotta get this thing!”

Prodigy pushed ideas that wouldn't come to real fruition until at least a decade later. From its beginnings in 1989, it saw itself reselling the attention directed to computer screens. “IBM and Sears executives envisioned a new advertising medium,” wrote Wired in 1993, “that would assemble audiences for marketers much as niche TV channels do.” It believed that if its content was good enough and the service were cheap enough to attract a crowd, it would eventually attract enough eyeballs to resell for profit. “Visionaries at IBM and Sears figured they could sell advertising on every screen and tap a potential revenue stream far larger than the sum of the hourly fees charged by existing online services.” Like the penny press, Prodigy sought its mass audience by offering a low price—$9.95 a month, a money-loser unless advertising paid off. Unfortunately, unlike the New York Sun, revenue didn't meet expenses, and by the early 1990s Prodigy had lost hundreds of millions.

In case advertising didn't work out, Prodigy also envisioned another lucrative revenue stream, this one reflecting Sears's ownership. It saw itself becoming the world's dominant computer-based shopping network, something akin to an early Amazon. “We had a belief that goods will be sold electronically,” said the CEO, Ross Glatzer, “so why not establish dominance in the marketplace?” Unfortunately, the entire retail strategy was based on a faulty premise: that online retailers would naturally be able to charge more than brick-and-mortar stores. It didn't help that, given the state of computer graphics in 1992, one only had a rough idea of what one was paying a markup for.

AOL's software did make it easy for users to get in touch with, and in that way effectively entertain, one another. Its designers were dedicated to making AOL a happy, friendly place—and as such perhaps something of a cure for loneliness. As one employee, Randy Dean, later put it, “We wanted [our users] to have these little epiphanies, out there by themselves typing on their computer, that they were part of something bigger, that technology did not have to be a cold place, that there was comfort out there.” Just as television had initially presented itself as bringing family together, AOL would allow those living in modernity's increasing isolation to reach out.

Among the sources of such comfort would be AOL's infamous chat rooms. Chat rooms had actually been invented by CompuServe in the 1980s (under that '70s handle "CB simulator"), but AOL allowed the creation of "private rooms," which anyone could open, hosting up to twenty-three total strangers. By 1997, they would claim to have nineteen thousand different rooms. One key to this success: AOL had female users—not many, but enough to create a completely different atmosphere than the average CompuServe chat room, which might be, for example, a group of dudes conversing in medieval English. CompuServe may have had much the same setup, but being distinctly and persistently inhabited by hard-core computer users and other breeds of geek and nerd, they just didn't know how to get the party going, not one the general public would care to join anyway.

There's a popular folk theory, apparently of Freudian inspiration, that the driver of any technological advance is either sex or warfare. However exaggerated, like a broken clock, this theory is occasionally right. It was in the case of AOL, where users flocked for, if not sex exactly, then potential titillation, and who knows what might follow—much the same proffer that draws college students to frat parties. In any case, chat rooms catering to seekers of anonymous sexual titillation and flirtation were by far the most numerous and popular, so much so that over the mid-1990s, AOL became fairly synonymous with cybersex, anonymous virtual sexual encounters conducted entirely by typed messages.

Unsurprisingly, having so many sex-charged ones gave the service something of a seedy reputation. In a 1995 headline, the Philadelphia Inquirer called the service "A Tawdry Back Alley, Just Off the Information Superhighway." Perhaps just as unsurprising, that reputation hardly slowed AOL's growth and probably enhanced it, especially when the content of some chats was revealed in congressional committee, managing to scandalize members.

For almost all of its history, AOL's most important feature was email; even more subscribers used it than visited the chat rooms. We have already seen how email was able to induce a Skinneresque check-in habit even among the first scientists to use it. Perceiving straightaway email's habit-forming properties, Steve Case and his team applied themselves to encouraging the addiction among subscribers. For one thing, users could send an unlimited number of emails. Prodigy, by contrast, having been slow to offer email, foolishly decided to charge users who sent more than thirty per month. At AOL, email was sent early and often. In fact, the whole user interface centered on the application. Immediately after logging on, one heard a pleasant male voice saying: "You've got mail." With that appeared a whimsical picture of a postbox stuffed with letters, a virtual cornucopia of potential rewards in human connection.

But the networks had also uncorked something that they did not themselves fully understand—the effect that in later jargon would be called “social.” The strategy of using people to gain the attention of other people was in retrospect inspired, even if arrived at more or less by accident.

As the new craze for social hit all the networks, Prodigy, with its fixed business model and regimented corporate culture, reacted more with alarm than excitement. It began to panic at the overuse of its email system, especially when an internal survey revealed that just 5 percent of members were sending over 3.5 million email messages. And so the overlords decided to levy surcharges on “email hogs”—those who sent more than thirty per month.

It would prove part of a pattern of misapprehension. Later, when its chat rooms took off, Prodigy became concerned that the wild, unpoliced forums might discourage advertisers and damage the company’s “family friendly” image. They therefore decided to ban profanity and other offensive speech, as well as any chats that reflected negatively on Prodigy’s owners or advertisers. Later, it banned flame wars (those extended bouts of troll against troll) among members. Eventually, postings even mentioning another member by name were forbidden. By then, every message was being examined for potential infractions. And so Prodigy wound up creating something more akin to the Camel News Caravan of the 1950s or today’s Chinese Internet than anything we would recognize as the free and open web.

Prodigy's censorship, as well as its stubborn adherence to the ad-based model, helped AOL gain enough momentum to come from behind and overtake both Prodigy and CompuServe. By 1995, AOL would boast over four million subscribers. Slow and steady CompuServe had ridden the boom to just four million, while Prodigy was at two million and dropping. By 1997, when AOL cemented its dominance by buying CompuServe, which had effectively thrown in the towel, its usership rose to nearly 12 million.

AOL had, over the 1990s, decisively proven that the surest allure of the new computer networks was social—the prospect of interacting with other people. The point is more profound than it may at first appear. The discovery that traditional content was not the only basis for capturing attention, that our friends and acquaintances (or at least representations of them)—to say nothing of the attractive strangers we might hope to meet—that they, too, might have the same potential was nothing less than revolutionary. Of course it seems obvious in retrospect: however much of our attention we may devote to television, most of us pay at least as much, if not more, to friends, family, and co-workers, particularly if all our various means of communicating with them (texts, phone calls, etc.) are taken into account.

Ultimately it also suggests how incomplete the conquest of human attention was from the 1910s through 1960s, even after television had entered the home. For, though it had breached the private sphere, the domain of the interpersonal remained inviolate. In retrospect it was virgin territory for attention merchants, though before the home computer one couldn't conceive how this attention might be commercialized. Certainly no one had ever considered the possibility of advertising messages over the telephone—before one placed a call, for instance—not that the telephone was in need of a business model. And so, as AOL finally turned to the reselling of attention, it brought the commercial model of the attention merchant to one of the last spaces thought sacred—our personal relationships.

By 1996 it was charging $19.95 a month for twenty hours, and then $2.95 an hour after that. But it faced price competition from both Microsoft and other "bare-bones" Internet services that were offering "all you can eat" for $19.95 a month or even less. At the end of 1996, AOL switched to unlimited time for $19.95. That brought in millions of new users but also crashes, busy signals, and an investigation by New York State's attorney general accusing AOL of offering a service it could not provide. Its revenue growth trimmed, AOL began a mildly desperate search for alternatives.

Most important for the board, Pittman brought with him the business mind-set of the New York media industries. At the time, in its search for revenue alternatives, AOL thought it could perhaps sell books, or offer its own brand of telephone services.*5 But on first look Pittman noticed that AOL had millions of customers staring at screens, and instantly concluded that its financial future was as an attention merchant. No matter that AOL had distinguished itself in the early 1990s as “ad-free” (in contrast to Prodigy). After years of building the AOL brand and attracting millions of customers, it was now time to “leverage the asset,” or, in Pittman's alternative terminology, time to “harvest.”

When they refused to rewrite code to run ads, Berlow asked, “Who do I have to fuck to get you people to do your jobs?” Even CEO Steve Case, while no programmer, was geek enough to dislike the new advertising. When reviewing a healthy deal with Sprint to run a banner ad, he balked. “What really bothers me,” he said, “is the ads are in a place where members will see them.” Berlow asked his CEO with admirable candor: “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

Nonetheless, despite resistance, over the late 1990s Pittman and Berlow managed to transform AOL's business model; from a standing start, they brought it to nearly $2 billion in annual advertising revenue (one third of AOL's total) by 2000. But if that revenue growth was staggering, it was carefully planned to seem that way, the result of an internal scheme named “Project Confidence” whose principal goal was to validate the theory that the real value of AOL lay in advertising potential. We have noted that the path of the attention merchants is risky, for it can call for compromises in quality and ethics. AOL, over a five-year period, would demonstrate that fact in a manner rarely equaled over such a short span.

On later, closer inspection (some of it performed by federal law enforcement), much of AOL's new advertising money was coming in based on methods that were unorthodox and unsustainable. It didn't begin that way: in the early days, Berlow and Pittman tried the traditional sales approach. As the biggest "interactive" firm they figured they might land the whales of advertising: companies like Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, General Motors. But there were no takers. Ad buyers at major brands can be conservative, and tend to favor established channels with well-worn metrics. And to be fair, there was at the time absolutely no empirical evidence that Internet advertising worked. As Michael Wolff wrote in the 1990s, "No products have disappeared off America's supermarket shelves because of the Internet…no commercial fads have been created, and no buying habits have shifted." AOL was well known, but it lacked the data that advertisers had grown to crave, and on the basis of which it made buys with the established attention merchants, like television networks and newspapers. Even with access to millions of minds, AOL advertising seemed to most big brands like throwing money into the vortex.

Perhaps his gambler's instinct picked up a tell. When negotiating with a company named Music Boulevard, at the last minute he tore up the price sheet and doubled AOL's asking rate from $8 million to $16 million. Shockingly, Music Boulevard was still prepared to do the deal. So Berlow upped it again, to $18 million plus a cut of profits. No problem.

The problem with this approach is that it depended on the unusual—indeed insane—conditions of that moment in time. It also sometimes left the partner companies so cash-strapped that they quickly began collapsing (though their generally weak business models were surely a contributing factor, too). Music Boulevard, for example, was gone by 1999; HomeGrocer toppled by 2001. With the level of rents being asked, the walled garden turned out to be fairly poisonous for its resident saplings.

Years before Facebook or Google undertook a similar mission, AOL's business team also began coming up with ways to cash in on the "big data" they had collected: that is, the addresses, phone numbers, and credit card numbers of millions of users. The walled garden, by its nature, was already giving companies direct access to users and some of their information; now AOL also began allowing them, for instance, to insert ads into emails (making the service, in effect, a spammer of its own users). But there were more audacious plans still. AOL sold its users' mailing addresses to direct mail companies. It was going to sell the phone numbers to telemarketers as well, shamelessly describing these maneuvers in its terms of service as a membership benefit. Alas, an inadvertent leak of the plan prompted a user revolt and the telemarketing part was abandoned.

Finally, when these methods failed to produce enough revenue to meet the aggressive targets set by Pittman, the business group would resort to "special deals." For example, money owed AOL for other reasons might somehow be accounted as "advertising revenue." Sometimes, pre-booked advertising contracts were recorded twice, even though the revenues would have already been booked. In a pinch, AOL might also take a "barter" deal from a dot-com start-up, counting the barter—usually worthless web services—as revenue. As a last resort, it would just find ways to pay companies to place ads. While the methods of accounting fraud are myriad, AOL seemed to find ways to practice most of them. We know all of this because the Securities and Exchange Commission would eventually charge the firm with knowingly executing a scheme "to artificially and materially inflate the company's reported online advertising revenue." But by then most of the earlier executives had already taken their money and run.

Prodigy did no better. As it continued to shed users and cash, by the late 1990s the original owners had given up and sold out for $200 million to a group of executives funded in part by the Mexican telecom authority, Telmex. The company was later sold to AT&T, where, after a short-lived effort to co-brand it with Yahoo!, it was never to be heard from again. Yet the original management was onto something, for all of the ideas that Prodigy pioneered would eventually come to fruition in other places. Its reliance on advertising was not only copied by AOL but most of the Internet's most successful companies. Paying professionals to make content that was accessed online would look less foolish by the mid-2010s, the age of Netflix. Finally, online shopping also turned out to be a source of decent revenue. Prodigy's masters didn't have the wrong ideas, but they blew it anyway.

In this, its pay-for-play content, AOL was setting up a system that would be the exact opposite of the Net Neutrality that prevailed on the Internet. That, in the long term, set up another reason for AOL's downfall, for the walled garden ultimately was a weaker offering than the full variety offered on the Internet.

The first great harvester of human attention, it must never be forgotten, was religion. The impulse to idolize has not faded in our secular age, only gone seeking after strange gods. The very expression “celebrity worship” may seem a figurative exaggeration; but insofar as intensity and duration of attention can separate devotion from other motivations, it would be hard to argue that what we have seen in our culture is anything less than an apotheosis. Still, in our predominantly monotheistic sense of religion, the idea of describing our intense regard for people who are famous as being essentially religious may ring false. But if we would remember that the ancient version of celebrity was a hero, and that the line between heroes and deities was never absolute, who could dispute that our attention industries have enabled the creation of a new pantheon?

In 1972, the magazine publisher Time-Life Inc. was facing serious trouble. Its legendary founder, Henry Luce, was dead, and one of its two flagships, Life magazine, was in terminal decline, having hemorrhaged some $47 million since 1969. Like nearly anything mainstream or conventional, it had suffered during the 1960s, becoming "irrelevant" to youth; it was now on course toward that form of extinction peculiar to the attention economy, not dying but being forgotten. Life's essential levity, its tendency to gloss over unpleasant details, fit the 1950s perfectly, but by the 1970s it read like propaganda to the furrowed brows concerned with civil rights, the Vietnam War, and the remaking of American culture.

Major public figures—statesmen, business leaders, generals, and the royalty of the worlds of art, entertainment, and sport—were the staples. … And for years, Time would faithfully detail what the president had done that week, no matter how trivial or insignificant. … The relentless focus on personalities was a different way to do news, but Luce played down his innovation: "TIME didn't start this emphasis on stories about people," he insisted. "The Bible did."

The news, he believed, could and should be told through stories about people—the day's most interesting and famous personalities. "People just aren't interesting in the mass," Luce once explained. "It's only individuals who are exciting." And so he launched his new venture based on celebrity, by which he would profit immensely. This is not to say that he had any interest in the merely famous, or what we today might call the "famous for being famous." The important personalities to his mind were men of great power or other significant achievement.

While it may seem obvious now, in the 1970s it was daring to part with even a pretense of newsworthiness and devote a magazine to nothing more than famous people and their lives. He named his idea the "People of the Week." … A lot of American magazines had gotten away from the personality story; they'd become more issue-oriented. We intended to reverse that idea with People.

Now, in truth, Heiskell's idea was not quite the innovation he would claim. Celebrity magazines long pre-existed People; gossip and scandal rags about Broadway stars and society swells had been around since before Luce established Time. More recently the National Enquirer had occupied the niche once filled by publications with names like Confidential or Hush-Hush and cover lines like "We tell the facts and name the names" or "Uncensored and off the record." But these had been coarse, down-market operations, devoted to exposing salacious stories with little regard for the truth. People's real innovation was as an upgrade of this format for a mainstream audience.

To run the new magazine with a measure of respectability, Time-Life chose Stolley, an in-house editor and established journalist. He'd made his reputation covering the civil rights movement for Life in the 1950s, and was also famous for having persuaded Abraham Zapruder, who'd inadvertently filmed the assassination of John F. Kennedy, to sell his film to Time-Life for $150,000. But all that was now ancient history, and if Stolley had any qualms about the new venture he never showed them. In fact he apparently took to it with relish. "People never sounded downscale when he talked about it," said a colleague. "If they thought People was garbage, Stolley would just say, 'Well, that's your opinion.' " The test issue, developed before Stolley's appointment, tended to confirm an intention to copy the Enquirer.

The test issue, developed before Stolley's appointment, tended to confirm an intention to copy the Enquirer. On the cover was perennial gossip fodder: the marriage of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both best known in the 1970s for their notoriously stormy relationship. To focus groups, as well as Time-Life's board, the effort seemed to be aiming rather low. It “exuded a sleazy, tabloid quality, with its rough photographs and its typewriter type…there was even a picture of the Chiquita banana girl, with her breasts bared.” At a managing editor's lunch, the words most frequently used were “sleazy” and “cheap.” Stolley would later allow that it “looked like a whorehouse magazine.”

Nearly a year later, on March 4, 1974, People finally arrived on newsstands. From the press release: “This week Time Inc. takes its co-founder's [Henry Luce's] thought a large step forward by bringing out PEOPLE, a new magazine based on the old journalistic precept that names make news.” Indeed, under Stolley's influence, the new People looked like Time, with its glossy paper, conventional fonts, and modest-sized headlines. The first cover was graced with a strikingly beautiful photograph of Mia Farrow, holding a string of pearls in her mouth; that year she would star as Daisy Buchanan in the film version of The Great Gatsby. As to what was inside, however, that was little different from the old gossip rags.

With $40 million sunk into it by Time-Life, the new People was one of the largest investments in magazine history. Stolley was unabashed explaining the concept, “There is nothing abstract about the name. People is what we are all about.” The critical class, however, did not appreciate the beauty of that simplicity. William Safire, for instance, then a new columnist for The New York Times, wrote an essay entitled “Who Needs People?,” describing the magazine as an “insult to the American mass audience.”

The strength of these feelings is one reason why our celebrity culture is so frequently linked with older traditions of worship. For that ecstatic possibility of transcending the ordinary and glimpsing the infinite hardly originates in the twentieth century, but is a universal longing reflected in almost every spiritual tradition. The historian Karen Armstrong describes it as an “essential craving” of all humanity to be connected with the “extraordinary”: “It touches us within, lifts us momentarily beyond ourselves, so that we seem to inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and feel in touch with the deeper currents of life.” Such transcendence of the mundane condition has since ancient times been identified with heroes, demigods, and saints, humans who occupy a somewhat exalted position yet also remain accessible, allowing us some taste of another realm. At one time, this was also true of royalty (and in a few places it still is).

What is particular to modernity, then, is not the existence of such individuals but rather the idea of constructing an industry based on the demand for feeling some communion with them, on our willingness to idolize them (literally)—an industry that monetizes their capacity to capture our rapt attention.

In 1956, two psychologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, would conclude that television's representation of celebrities was carefully constructed to create an "illusion of intimacy"—to make viewers believe that they actually were developing a relationship with the famous people on TV. Certain techniques particular to variety but also the chat shows produced this effect: recourse to small talk, the use of first names, and close-ups, among others, acted to close the gap between the audience and the guests, engendering the sense in the viewer of being "part of a circle of friends." The two coined the term "para-social interaction" to describe this "intimacy at a distance."

Richard Stolley could not fail to notice: “We found out that people in the news were quite willing to talk to us about themselves. They’d talk about lots of personal things—their sex lives, their families, their religion. They’d talk about things that a few years earlier wouldn’t even be brought up.” Perhaps it was the glossy paper or the fact that Time-Life, not the National Enquirer, was the publisher. Whatever the case, People found that celebrities were now increasingly willing to discuss the very sorts of things about themselves and their families that all people, the famous most of all, had once jealously guarded. All you really had to do was ask.

What was becoming evident was something that now seems virtually axiomatic: celebrities were becoming attention merchants in their own right. Fame, they were discovering, was not merely the by-product of what they did; it was their professional capital. And while endorsements were in vogue during the 1920s, during the 1970s celebrities began leveraging their drawing power as never before. Now was the time of Polaroid’s pathbreaking campaign engineered by the daring firm of Doyle Dale Bernbach. The camera maker, then a cutting-edge tech company, did a series of spots with stars including James Garner, Candice Bergen, Alan Alda, the Muppets, and perhaps most famously, the great Shakespearean actor Sir Laurence Olivier. Two years later, ad agency Ted Bates would open the door for athlete endorsements when it tapped Buffalo Bills star running back O. J. Simpson for Hertz Rent-a-Car.

People was important in and of itself, but also for what it spawned, directly and indirectly. Profits drew imitators, as they inevitably do; in 1977, even the New York Times Company could not resist launching Us Weekly, a close copy of People. Other media, like television, followed naturally, yielding shows like Entertainment Tonight. But the greater influence was more subtle and less measurable: on whatever platform was to be invented, celebrity would become the attention merchant's go-to bait, offering a lure infinitely more dependable than any more artfully developed content. While not the beginning of celebrity or celebrity culture, People was nevertheless a turning point in both, the start of the "celebrification" of the entire mainstream, including, as we shall see, the lives of many with no reasonable basis for expecting to become famous. Some would experience this as fulfilling the promise of a better life through technology, others as the logical extreme of a race to the bottom begun by the penny papers in the nineteenth century.

On their date Ebert took Winfrey to a place called Hamburger Hamlet and gave her some unsolicited advice. Having begun to do so himself, he suggested she leave the networks and take charge of her media destiny. Winfrey wouldn't continue to date Ebert but she did take his advice, achieving a degree of independence that defied nearly all the existing strictures of the attention industries. She decided to take ownership of her show and sell it directly to television stations, becoming, in effect, a competitor to NBC, CBS, and other networks. She was the beneficiary of a federal rule enacted in 1972—part of a progressive backlash against broadcasters that President Richard Nixon found agreeable—designed to weaken their control over television.

The bet would pay off. Debuting in 1986, her show relied on an emotional, confessional style that was now what viewers wanted, combined with the lure of her own irresistible persona. She tacked toward respectability, shrewdly toning down the most lurid and shocking elements of AM Chicago, and thereby gained an even larger audience, rather as CBS made radio respectable in the 1930s, and as People had gentrified gossip journalism. Spectacle was now couched in principle, too. As one critic observed, she "cast her professional choices, persona, and style as moral ones" and "practiced a form of public 'moral accountability' with her audience." Like People, too, she recognized that everyone loved to unburden herself, given the right conditions.

Few would have bet on Oprah Winfrey's swift rise to host of the most popular talk show on TV. In a field dominated by white males, she is a black female of ample bulk….What she lacks in journalistic toughness, however, she makes up for in plainspoken curiosity, robust humor and, above all, empathy. Guests with sad stories to tell are apt to rouse a tear in Oprah's eye….They, in turn, often find themselves revealing things they would not imagine telling anyone, much less a national TV audience. It is the talk show as a group therapy session.

Even now the scale of Winfrey's ambitions was clear. She told Spy magazine, "I knew I'd be a millionaire by the time I turned 32." The Spy reporter could not believe his luck: "She told me this in the first hour I spent with her. By the second hour she had added, puffing up with purpose, 'I certainly intend to be the richest black woman in America. I intend to be a mogul.' " Her evident ambition invited some fairly sharp jabs in the early days. A New York Times Magazine cover piece entitled "The Importance of Being Oprah" took a dim view of her program, suggesting it was popular because it made white viewers feel better about themselves. It further derided her viewers as, in effect, losers, those "lonely and uninstructed" who "draw sustenance from her, from the flickering presence in their living rooms they call a friend."

What made her audiences love her so? She is a clear and fluent interlocutor with a talent for connecting with her guests, but it goes beyond that. Fans say they "trust her," find her "sincere" and "open," and respect her overcoming a challenging childhood (she freely revealed a past scarred by episodes of drug use and other behavior). "Oprah is a sweetheart, a good person, who treats people with love and respect, despite her wealth and power," wrote one fan.

Howard Stern, originally a radio personality, began his own television show in the 1990s and gained a national audience with a show centered on offensive and taboo topics. With radio, television, and bestselling books as platforms, he described himself as "The King of All Media." Meanwhile, the tabloid format (described by some as "freak shows") was popular enough to sustain not just Rivera but also a former politician named Jerry Springer, whose show centered on topics like incest and whose specialty was creating dramatic on-show confrontations between his guests. Others, like the Ricki Lake show, the Jenny Jones show, and Sally Jessy Raphael, all, in the words of one critic, relied on "the low risk strategy of class voyeurism."

But apart from all her undeniable talents and abilities and charms, Winfrey also offered something unique in daytime television: food for the hungers traditionally fed by organized religion and spirituality. Her shows were a daily dose of redemptive confession or suffering, a vision of justice, and the promise of salvation in this life.

The promotion of the Oprah Winfrey show didn't shy away from describing its spiritual objectives: it was created “to transform people's lives, to make viewers see themselves differently, and to bring happiness and a sense of fulfillment into every home.” At times Winfrey described her work as a religious mission: “I am the instrument of God. I am his messenger. My show is my ministry.”

Oprah's teachings, as a rule, hewed to a generally Christian view of existence, emphasizing love for the distressed, human weakness, life as a struggle, the value of confessing sin, and an ongoing effort to achieve redemption. She also emphasized ideas with twentieth-century origins, like the importance of self-esteem and self-respect, of positive thinking, and of treating oneself well. “Live your best life” was one of the show's mottos.

Advertising was indeed Winfrey's main revenue source, and when she sold her audiences she was delivering not mere eyeballs but minds whose buying decisions had been conditioned by her unusually strong influence, which eventually "exceed[ed] that of any other celebrity—perhaps in history," according to Craig Garthwaite of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. It did not happen overnight, however. As one biographer writes, Winfrey was an enthusiastic shopper, and "for years she had shared her spending orgies with her viewers—her towels, her pajamas, her cashmere sweaters, her diamond earrings." As time went on, her enthusiasm would morph into quasi-endorsements of particular products, her magical touch performing little miracles for small companies. To take one minor example, there was the firm named LightWedge, maker of a reading light; when Oprah said on air, "I need to get one of those," the little company booked $90,000 in sales in a single afternoon.

This, the "Oprah effect," would always have its most dramatic influence in markets with relatively little advertising and marketing, like book publishing. In 1996, Winfrey launched what she called "the biggest book club in the world." She would announce her selection and then give her viewers a month to read it. In the meanwhile, her producers would film the author at home and produce other B-roll footage for the eventual show about the book, featuring discussion, sometimes with an expert. Her first choice was The Deep End of the Ocean, by Jacquelyn Mitchard. Far from a dud, it had previously sold 68,000 copies; after its selection, however, it would sell four million. Within its first year, her book club had accounted for nearly 12 million volumes sold, making Oprah beloved of the publishing industry for her magic ability to turn modestly successful novels into bestsellers.

Given such power, a less sophisticated attention merchant might have simply sought to sell endorsements outright (as subsequent corporatized personalities like the 2010s reality TV star Kim Kardashian have done). But whether out of ethical considerations, or an astute sense of preserving her credibility capital, or both, Winfrey never accepted payment for on-air endorsements. By never selling out explicitly as another flogger of products, she remained unpredictable, her power only growing as a result.

Scattershot at first, by the late 1990s her endorsements had become systematized in several ways. First, she produced a program called "Oprah's Favorite Things"; for this annual event, the entire show was devoted to promotion of the products she liked most, some of which were given out to the excited studio audience. Combining the ecstasy of a religious revival meeting with the acquisitive intensity of Black Friday, the episode featured screaming, often crying men and women from the audience receiving their swag. As on a 1950s game show, ordinary people were suddenly showered with prizes. It typically started with pairs of boots, books, popcorn, digital cameras, and the like, before leading up to big-ticket items. Oprah, like a beneficent goddess of abundance, presided over it all, blessing her flock with one deliverance of riches after another.

Winfrey also began to turn parts of her episodes into de facto infomercials. For example, on one episode, Winfrey abruptly gave her audience 276 brand-new Pontiac G6s, worth $28,000 each. When asked about it in a rare moment of press access, she said, "It was not a stunt, and I resent the word stunt." Just as astonished as the audience were the pundits of advertising and marketing. Thirty-second spots on the show retailed for about $70,000, yet Oprah had spent about half an entire show on Pontiac, including a taped visit to their factory.

Oprah widened her brand and attention harvest with the launch of O, The Oprah Magazine, named for her, of course, and with a flattering photo of her on the cover of every issue. The magazine, which surged to a circulation of over two million, had roughly the same demographic target as the show, women over fifty. Here was more attentional real estate, carefully balancing free endorsements with paid advertisements. It showed what an elixir first-order celebrity had become; clearly it had the power to reanimate even fading media sectors like consumer magazines.

It never fully escaped notice that Winfrey's advertisers were those whose products often, if not invariably, enjoyed her on-air or in-print blessing as well. Over the mid-2000s, for example, Dove soap was the subject of major segments featuring its various products and their merits. True, the ostensible topic was the brand's new advertising campaign, which promoted "real beauty" by featuring ordinary women as models. The messaging was a good fit with Winfrey's goal of encouraging self-esteem. It's also true, however, that Dove spent $16.4 million for commercial spots on the syndicated TV show and another $32.8 million on print ads in O.

A reporter for Advertising Age who asked whether ad buys were helpful for gaining endorsements, described Oprah's answers as "a tad vague." Indeed they were: "Editorial and creative decisions drive mentions and product inclusions on the show. If a brand gets mentioned, it is as often serendipity as it is business. When we do partner with brands, it is usually because we have an editorial direction we're pursuing." In other words, advertising usually didn't matter, but it didn't not matter either.

In 2006, Winfrey repeatedly featured a book called The Secret, together with its author and associated gurus, on her show. The book describes the law and its applications, for instance, in financial matters: “The only reason any person does not have enough money,” it explains, “is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts.”

In the early 2000s, Winfrey became an advocate in a spiritual doctrine called “the Law of Attraction,” an idea actually dating from nineteenth-century mind cure practice and with roots in other traditions. The law posits that one's thoughts have the power to shape reality, and by the right sort of rumination, one can draw desired things, like money or love, into one's life. Here is how Oprah explained it on her website: “The energy you put into the world—both good and bad—is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day.”

Winfrey's endorsement of The Secret and other spiritual practices drew criticism from the religious mainstream. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote that “Oprah has become a high priestess and icon of the psychologization of American society….Her substitution of spirituality for biblical Christianity, her promotion of forgiveness without atonement, and her references to a god 'without labels' puts her at the epicenter of a seismic cultural earthquake.” Perhaps not an earthquake: Oprah was not so far from the therapeutic deism that had long been the American religion. But her attentional reach made her a substantial danger to traditional faith—even perhaps to the nonreligious as well.

Perhaps Winfrey's most consequential endorsement would be the one she made during the Democratic primaries in 2007, when she backed first-term senator Barack Obama against the presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. Campaigning with Obama in Iowa, New Hampshire, and other important states, Winfrey may have been responsible, according to one analysis, for between 420,000 and 1.6 million votes. If so, it is possible that Winfrey's support won Obama the nomination, and consequently, the presidency.

But even Winfrey was not immune to larger industry trends, and launching into an era of cable's decline would not prove easy. Many could either not find the network amidst the hundreds of channels on offering, or did not care to bother; in its first year, the network lost as much as $330 million. Winfrey used various means to try to recapture the lightning she once held in a bottle—most successfully, an interview of Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, who confessed to using performance-enhancing drugs. But these were one-off events and the audiences did not stay. She also made a go of her old show's religious aspiration with an ecumenical series named Belief, a program that would have qualified as public interest programming by the old metrics. While never quite losing her celebrity or strong reputation, she could no longer quite be considered the nation's Attention Merchant-in-Chief.

By 2015, OWN had reverted to the basic logic of cable programming, which has always demanded catering to a niche audience. It repositioned itself primarily as a competitor to BET, Black Entertainment Television, finding success with soap operas like The Haves and Have Nots and If Loving You Is Wrong. But in any event, Winfrey's own fade as a celebrity attention merchant might be taken as irrelevant given the spiritual survival of the model she created. For her one-woman show gave rise to successors like Ellen DeGeneres, Dr. Phil, Rachael Ray, and other celebrity-attention-product-endorsers faithfully following the Winfrey path.

In short, over the 1980s MTV was in the enviable position of selling advertisements off the attention captured from what were, essentially, advertisements in another form. Its costs were therefore limited to things like rent, paying its executives, and the young people, the "VJs," who introduced the videos. The latter were cheap, too—salary was less than $30,000 a year, but there were perks like doing cocaine with rock stars during the MTV New Year's special and other experiences beyond price. The combined effect of these favorable conditions meant that MTV defied the usual laws of gravity operative in most media businesses. By the mid-1980s, it was easily the most profitable of all the new cable networks.

MTV's executive programmers thought hard into the 1990s about what they could try without incurring the sort of brutal content overhead that had made life so precarious for other media and which stockholders would not abide anyway. … Eventually the network began running a low-budget game show named Remote Control; with questions based on MTV trivia, it was “an excuse to do jokes.”

One day, looking at their audience data, a young executive named Van Toffler had a different idea. He had noticed something striking: an overlap between MTV's core audiences and viewers of daytime soap operas. Maybe MTV should start running soap operas. Serial dramas, if not traditionally the hippest kind of show, had since the 1930s been solid bets; and they tended to build long-term audience loyalties.

Freston consulted Fred Silverman (whose programming had revived CBS in the early 1970s), and he suggested hiring Mary-Ellis Bunim. Over the previous decade, she had run one of the great legacy soaps, As the World Turns, a never-ending story of family drama and romance that had been running for some thirty years. Since its 1956 debut on CBS, it had been sponsored by the same soap company, Procter & Gamble, for which it had been created by Irna Phillips herself, the inventor of the genre.

But when Bunim and Murray presented their budget, MTV's executives balked. As Murray recalled, they said, “We get our music videos for free, and now we're going to spend $300,000 for half an hour of television?” Apparently Freston and MTV had not completely thought through the idea of new formats; virtually any of them would require actually spending money on content.

Undaunted, Bunim and Murray regrouped. Looking for new inspiration, they got their heads out of the 1930s and found what they were looking for in perhaps an even unlikelier place: early 1970s public television, and more specifically, the documentary format. They starting thinking hard about a PBS show from the period called An American Family.

An American Family, filmed in 1971, was an innovative, twelve-part documentary created when PBS was at the height of its countercultural ambitions. For seven months, the producers followed the fairly typical upper-middle-class family of Pat and Bill Loud, who lived in Santa Barbara, California, with their five children. Intending to capture the intergenerational friction of the time, the creator Craig Gilbert opened the show with these words: “The Louds are neither average nor typical, no family is. They are not the American Family, they are simply an American Family.”

Among the documentary’s most prominent defenders was the anthropologist Margaret Mead. “It may be as important for our time,” she said on public television, “as were the invention of drama and the novel for earlier generations: a new way to help people understand themselves.”

When it ran in 1973, An American Family had attracted large audiences—gigantic by public television standards—and also provoked a national discussion. Gilbert’s frame was essentially critical; he portrayed the Louds, particularly the father, Bill, as being obsessed with material success at the cost of family itself. They became “a symbol of disintegration and purposelessness in American life.” As such, the show was generally regarded as a serious documentary achievement, with one critic allowing that “never was there greater realism on television except in the murders of Oswald and Robert Kennedy.” It is difficult to describe the extent of its resonance; as Esquire contended, “I doubt if in the history of the tube there has been so much talk about anything.” Many wondered about what social scientists call the Hawthorne effect, the extent the very act of observation and filming had influenced what happened; and thus, there were those who thought the show exploitative and misleading—including, eventually, the family themselves.

For MTV the price was right. Each of the cast members was paid a mere $1,400 for living several months of their lives on camera and creating enough raw footage for thirteen episodes. While it was never expressed this way, it became clear, over time, that the “talent” was actually being paid in attention, as opposed to cash; and so in this way a new format, not yet known as reality television, managed to preserve MTV’s existing business model.

But Freston had other ideas. As the ratings came in, he began to realize that he might have found his dreamed-of hedge against a coming video crash; and so MTV commissioned a second season, set in Los Angeles. It attracted much larger audiences than its predecessor, and so there naturally followed a third season and a fourth. Over time the show and its format became the cornerstone of the new MTV, freeing it from its parlous dependence on music videos.

As early as season two, there were subtle changes made to the format of The Real World, carrying it further in spirit from An American Family. The first season had put more faith in the concept of simply filming young people struggling for a break; the characters, if callow, are likable and thoughtful. At times the show plays like an edited college seminar, albeit with some romance thrown in. But by contemporary standards it is very talky and somewhat short on action.

Bunim and Murray, having discovered the potential of naturally ridiculous people, would go on to produce The Simple Life, centered on a dim-witted heiress named Paris Hilton making her way on a farm, a revival of the "rural" motif that Fred Silverman had thrown overboard in the 1970s.

The show was a hit in Sweden, and when Parsons sold it elsewhere it was renamed Survivor. In the United States, its viewership grew and grew, just as the hit game shows of the 1950s had. When the first season's final episode in 2000 managed to attract 50 million viewers, matching some of the larger audiences in television history, it was clear that the new mode of content—by this time widely described as "reality television"—was literally ready for prime time.

What was the draw? In some ways the appeal of the new reality shows was no mystery. Like soap operas and other serial dramas, they had had story lines and plots that only seemed spontaneous. These largely involved interpersonal relationships and conflict, as well as memorable (if broadly drawn) characters, like “Snooki” and “The Situation” from Jersey Shore or any of the “housewives” from The Real Housewives. All those elements were arguably as old as Amos ’n’ Andy. At the same time, game-show-inspired reality programs like Survivor depended on the classic drama of a sports match: the game had rules, the outcome was uncertain, there would be winners and losers, and meanwhile there was plenty of suspense and elbows thrown.

Since An American Family, it had been a consistent and predictable consequence of reality television that cast members became famous, if only fleetingly. It was not star power of the sort one could pack up and sell elsewhere; it was the sort of celebrity Charles Van Doren had enjoyed before he was disgraced. But it was enough to pull viewers in and also to compensate the players. Indeed, as we’ve said, performers in these low-budget affairs were largely paid in attention.

“This series,” Lance Loud later said, “was the fulfillment of the middle-class dream that you can become famous for being just who you are.” It wasn’t Gilbert’s intent, but the unexpected effect was to make the Louds famous for a brief time. Pat Loud would publish her autobiography, and the five children would perform as a rock band on The Dick Cavett Show, à la the Partridge Family. Bill Loud would pose in his bathrobe for Esquire, and Lance in his birthday suit for Screw magazine. And yet by the 1980s, the Louds’ name would scarcely ring a bell; the exception was Lance, who would achieve immortality as a gay icon.

In a limited way, “ordinary Joe” species of celebrity had existed before—game show champions of the 1950s being the clearest antecedent. But the emergence of an entire program genre “celebrifying” ordinary people, and soon to dominate television, was something new. As such, it marked the beginning of a subtle but significant change in the very nature of celebrity. If once it comprised heroes, demigods, kings, and saints, and then later icons of the screen or sports, by the 1990s celebrity was becoming something that could happen to anyone. Thus it became a worthwhile, reasonable goal for the great generality. This, ultimately, may account for the genre’s lasting appeal.

But the attention that celebrities had previously captured had some more or less objective basis in their attainment, appearance, wealth, or talent. Reality television inverted the process, industrializing the manufacture of celebrity for the pure sake of attention capture.

Indeed, over the next decade, there would be almost three hundred new reality shows trying almost every conceivable permutation of attention capture tricks, including talent shows (American Idol), launching your successful start-up (Shark Tank); pathology voyeurism, formerly known as freak shows (Hoarders); variations on a theme of The Real World (Jersey Shore, group living featuring the Italian American “Guido” subculture), celebrity family life (The Osbournes, showing the ordinary domesticity of former Black Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne); women marrying for money, men for trophy (Million Dollar Matchmaker); making it yourself—a better life through real estate (The Million Dollar Listing). And then there were the truly bizarre experiments, for instance, a match-making game show on which the contestant chooses a husband from among twenty men wearing masks—the kicker: it’s called Mr. Personality and hosted by the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The shows were so cheap to produce, no idea was deemed too ridiculous to try.

Yet what the Kardashians must be given credit for is breaking the curse of ephemeral reality fame; for close to a decade they have sustained a multimillion-dollar empire. The family demonstrated a reality TV version of synergy—should audiences grow tired of the tedious antics of one family member, another quickly jumped in to provide a new hot mess, like lipstick-wearing tag-team wrestlers. Meanwhile, over the 2010s the Kardashians’ earnings increased at a pace to make a banker jealous. The family made $65 million collectively in 2010, while Kim’s individual earnings had reached $28 million by 2014 and $52.5 million by 2015.

The urge for what's next seems to be insatiable, and for that reason the Kardashians and the world of television in all likelihood have cause to worry. It is simply not conceivable that the future of commercial television, whatever it may turn out to be, can indefinitely sustain attention for any particular format, particularly one with as much market share and overdevelopment as reality TV. No matter how desirable the financial calculus, no attention capture strategy has been able to stay ahead of the disenchantment effect indefinitely. Eventually, even the goose that lays the golden egg gets old and dies.

Nevertheless, reality had been a momentous discovery, even if something of a misnomer. For what viewers were flocking to was both real and not real, a distortion for the sake of spectacle, calibrated to harvest the most attention at the lowest price possible. It was, however, real enough to be believed—not literally perhaps, but in the way scripted drama is believed—and, by the new millennium, to have a whole nation of viewers content, in effect, to watch versions of themselves with vicarious delight.

The networks would claim audiences of more than 800 million worldwide, but who could blame one for thinking it television's last hurrah? For in that epochal year, there was no denying that mass attention seemed to have migrated irresistibly to a new medium that had lately evolved into a form we would now recognize and yet was plainly still only in the infancy of its possibilities. The BBC had declared 1999 "the year of the Net," and CNN.com invited users to "uncork the bubbly, boot up the computer, and usher in the new era in an appropriately futuristic way."

By 2000, the consensus was that the "old media"—the industries that had captured the preponderance of human attention over the last century—were basically doomed. They could try as they might to delay the future, but ultimately the new would replace the old as it always had. The legacy attention merchants and their collaborators in advertising were, by this understanding, on a path to extinction. "It's our country. It's our media now. It's our time and attention," wrote Jeff Jarvis, prominent booster of the new media. "Sorry if we, the people, disappoint you. But does it occur to you that you disappointed us?"

In 1996, Microsoft was at the height of its powers, the technology sector's most intimidating behemoth, brutally efficient and plainly bent on the conquest of all that surrounded it. Its billions in profits based on sales of its ubiquitous, if unloved, Windows and Office, the graphical operating system of most computers on earth, had made it the most valuable company in the world. If anyone had made a fortune by cornering the market for nuts and bolts and sticking to it, it was Microsoft. It was a surprise, therefore, when on January 3, 1996, its chief executive, Bill Gates, wearing his large, dark-framed glasses that were not yet a hipster affectation but still the sign of the true nerd, posted an essay on Microsoft's website, with a counterintuitive title: "Content Is King."

At the time of that coronation, Internet "content" consisted mainly of homemade web pages with flashing words and the text forums where geeks discussed the pluses and minuses of object-oriented programming languages. Nevertheless, Gates prophesied an explosion of new creativity that would dominate the Internet's future. "Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting," he wrote, adding, "The television revolution that began half a century ago spawned a number of industries…but the long-term winners were those who used the medium to deliver information and entertainment."

If people are to be expected to put up with turning on a computer to read a screen, they must be rewarded with deep and extremely up-to-date information that they can explore at will. They need to have audio, and possibly video. They need an opportunity for personal involvement that goes far beyond that offered through the letters-to-the-editor pages of print magazines.

It was not for want of effort or resources. Microsoft opened an entire new complex in Redmond, California, at some distance from its main offices, which it staffed with "content people" specially imported from New York and Los Angeles. The team was comprised of "black-clad creative types," reported The New York Times, tasked with "building a new, chic kind of media business." In reality, the new hires were given an impossible task: that of inventing both a new platform and an entirely new form of content—one that was not television, film, or a computer game but instead "interactive" and that capitalized on "convergence" via a new portal named "MSN 2.0." That was the name of the interface being preinstalled on every new Windows machine and designed to make the Internet feel more like a television.

In effect, Microsoft treated the Internet as if it were merely a new channel on which it could broadcast content, as if what had been invented was an extension of cable television. But the impulse was not altogether misguided, for someone was going to make money selling all of the attention the Internet was capturing. It just wasn’t going to be Microsoft. The most successful contestant would be the one that truly understood the new platform and how it would be used.

By the late 1990s, as Microsoft's content initiative faded, word was spreading about a new company named Google, whose specialty was search. Search became a major application as the Internet got more populated, fast becoming wild and woolly, too vast to tune in to like a TV channel. There were a number of search engines running—Lycos, Magellan, AltaVista, Excite, Yahoo!, which originally launched as an Internet directory, to name a few. But it was soon clear that Google did search better than anyone else; its inventors were smart, its algorithm was wicked, and its code was tight. With a simple search box placed on a white page, it was both elegant and technically a quantum leap over what was then available. But all who followed the company knew it had one massive and potentially fatal problem. Google was more like an academic project than a firm, and as it gained in popularity, it was burning through cash at a terrifying rate, with nary a business model in sight.

It is a fascinating moment to contemplate. Tech's hottest firm stood at a fork in the road, pondering its future and, being an unusually deliberative company, tried to think through the consequences of each choice. Thanks to the growth of search, Google was capturing bushels of attention, but how to capitalize on that? As we've seen, there have always been two ways of converting attention into cash. The older is to charge admission, as to the spectacle, on the model of the opera or HBO or a book; for Google this would mean licensing or selling access to a premium product. The second is to resell the attention gained, that being the model of the attention merchant.

It didn't take a genius to see that the safest and most immediate revenue stream for a firm with Google's potential to harvest attention was in advertising. And that way it went. "Every day, millions upon millions of people lean forward into their computer screens," John Battelle, cofounder of Wired, would write in 2005, "and pour their wants, fears, and intentions into the simple colors and brilliant white background of Google.com." If radio had promised a "relaxed" audience, here was something better: people who really wanted something and ready to tell exactly what—"intentional traffic," in the jargon. Google could serve up minds to advertisers in this particularly valuable mental state—open, desirous, and impressionable.

It retrospect, it was a no-brainer. But the firm's principal founder, Larry Page, was unusually sensitive to the corrupting potential of advertising. Before Google had come to its fork in the road, he had strenuously insisted in a piece coauthored with Brin that "advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers." As an engineer and scientist, Page had wanted to build a clean, pure tool, free of commerce's distortions. His aversion, moreover, was not purely academic: he had seen what an advertising-driven search engine looked like, peddled by a man whom both Brin and Page found distasteful—a character, now mainly forgotten, who was for a while Google's greatest rival. His name was Bill Gross.

Gross also founded FreePC, which, while it lasted, gave people low-end Compaq computers in exchange for detailed personal information and the right to monitor their Internet surfing and buying habits. His NetZero was a “free” Internet service that depended on ads and similar tracking practices, at least until its collapse.

Among Gross's most exercised critics were Brin and Page, who found his methods repulsive. In their seminal 1998 paper describing Google's search algorithm, the two graduate students blasted the paid search model for creating a problem not easy to detect. “Search engine bias is particularly insidious,” they wrote. “It is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines.” Mixed incentives were the enemy, and that is precisely what being in the pay of advertisers produced. For this reason, search, the men believed, should be transparent and dispassionate.

Google's unspoken motto has always been “We do it better”; its founding culture a radical meritocracy, where brilliant code and ingenious system design count above all. The early Page had no patience for less technical sides of the business, including things like marketing, administration, even raising or making money. Not that he thought he was above all that; rather, he believed, with some reason, that companies often wasted most of their time and energy on such mundane matters, at the expense of the true goal.*2 That, of course, was inventing and building beautiful, perfect tools that were outrageously better than those that came before. … However they could express this ideal they did. Why not have a campus where the food is both delicious and free, so you didn't waste time in line at the cash register? Why not give away gigabits of free storage to users? Scan the world's books? Drive trucks mounted with cameras through the streets everywhere and create a pictorial map? But nothing should be Googley-er than the flagship itself: and so Google search had to be not merely better than the rest but a thousand times better than those ugly and slow stepsisters, like Yahoo! and GoTo. The terms of Google's self-styled triumph were indeed aesthetic. Where Google was fast, unadorned, and untouchable—Shining! Incorruptible!—it saw its rivals as essentially “sucky”—slow, festooned with advertising, and, ultimately, venal.

To the purist, few things are smellier than advertising, and once you step in it, there is no easy way to fully wipe it off. Yet the time had come when Google had to show it could make money somehow. As pure as they were, Page and Brin also admired efficacy. Neither much respected idealists who never got anything done, the high-minded academics and programmers whose eyes and ideas never saw daylight. Google had come too far to founder on its own ideals.

Print advertisements can be as beautiful as editorial content—for instance, the lavishly produced ads in Vogue; some can usefully connect a unique buyer and seller—as with classified listings in the newspaper. And some viewers of the Super Bowl tune in mainly for the commercial spots, which are famously the industry's most innovative and witty. Could Google invent some web version of desirable advertising?

The attention merchant had always tried to reach as broad an audience as possible, bombarding them with as many ads as they'd stand before going into total revolt. Such had been the strategy in television since Pat Weaver first introduced the commercial break: cram fourteen to sixteen minutes of ad time into every hour, along with a further three to seven minutes of other forms of branding, eating up roughly one third of the broadcast; the content was devised essentially to cue up the ads, with a little cliffhanger before each one.

An annoying ad today might make you try Anacin tomorrow. But Google had something different: access to people who were plainly expressing a commercial intent: when someone types in “drug rehab,” “male pattern baldness,” or “find a mortgage,” there’s little doubt what’s on their mind. The new system would therefore show relevant advertisements only at those moments, and—quite radically—stay out of your way otherwise. In short, Google took the decision to leave a lot of attention on the table; the theory was that advertisers would value surgical strikes at least as much as carpet bombing.

A further brilliant stroke was to assign each ad a “quality score,” based on how often it was actually clicked on. Google insisted on running only ads that, in addition to being relevant, people had actually liked.

Among the various reasons for the dot-com crash was the fact that, over the late 1990s, AOL and everyone else had trouble proving that online ads necessarily did anything at all (hence AOL’s need to fabricate revenue). But with Google’s direct proof of clicks and tracking of customers, advertisers could finally see a direct link between their ads and eventual purchases. The beauty, once again, was that Google users were advertised to at a moment often very close to purchase. There was no need to prove the search engine could build brands—instead, it found users who were like travelers coming out of an airport, in a hurry, looking for a taxi, and there was the advertisement—“click.”

So unintrusive was AdWords that some people didn't even realize that Google was ad-supported: it just seemed to be there for the taking like manna from the heavens. Google had, in fact, laid bare what had originally been so miraculous about the attention merchant model—getting something truly desirable at no apparent cost.

Ironically, it was contempt for advertising (on the part of the founders and the chief engineers) that would ultimately pave the way to the company's unrivaled success as an attention merchant. The key was in renegotiating the terms under which the public was asked to tolerate ads. For as Google became a part of everyday life over the 2000s—its name becoming a synonym for search—it presented what seemed by the standards of the day a very reasonable tradeoff, which few would ever question, and which caused no degradation, to judge by earnings growth. So unintrusive was AdWords that some people didn't even realize that Google was ad-supported: it just seemed to be there for the taking like manna from the heavens. Google had, in fact, laid bare what had originally been so miraculous about the attention merchant model—getting something truly desirable at no apparent cost. For what really seemed like nothing, the public got the best search ever designed and, in time, other goodies as well, like free email with unlimited storage, peerless maps, the world's libraries, and even research devoted to exciting innovations like self-driving cars. Of course, there was, as there always is, a quid pro quo: in its ripest state, the buying public was exposed to sales pitches; which might prove useful but then again might not. Google also began to collect a lot of information about a lot of people.

While the safeguards in AdWords would keep Google's core product uncompromised for the time being, corporate life is long, and shareholder demand for growth unremitting. In Wall Street's view, even the most robust advertising revenues always have room for improvement. In time, this reality would put pressure on the original bargain that Google struck with the public. Even if AdWords was a paradigm shift, it was still advertising, and Google, however ingenious, was still an attention merchant. It would, henceforth, always be serving two masters, beauty and the beast.

Actually, there were two other ways to go, neither of them seriously considered. One would have been to rely on donations or patronage, a course later pursued by other publicly spirited projects like Wikipedia. The other was even more radical, and might have been contemplated by men like Google's founders in an earlier time before the heady seductions of the dot-com boom. They might have made Google a truly public project, like email or the Internet itself.

As Google's first CEO, Page once fired all of Google's managers, reasoning that they were not only useless, but interfered with engineering, what with all their meetings, planning sessions, and so on. He genuinely believed that engineers, like a flock of birds, were self-organizing creatures without need of oversight, and that, left to their own, they would produce miracles.

In the FTC’s view, the paid-for search results were a form of advertisement that was not clearly labeled as such, and therefore illegally deceptive.

Google and a few other West Coast companies had demonstrated that web advertising wasn't just hype: there was real money to be made reselling attention captured by the Internet. But Google had effectively put AdWords on the remote control; there remained a lot more attention to be harvested the old-fashioned way. That much was clear from the simple fact that by the early 2000s, the average white-collar worker had a screen on his desk with a fairly high-speed connection to the Internet. Designed, theoretically, to create a more productive work environment, this setup, by the law of unintended consequences, also created ripe new opportunities to harvest attention.

Hundreds of millions of bored office workers sit in front of computers forwarding emails, blogging, IMing, and playing….These distracted corporate employees have accidentally created the Bored at Work Network (BWN)—a huge people-powered network with even greater reach than traditional networks like CNN, ABC, or the BBC.

What was this new form of confessional? It was, the author Rebecca Mead explained, "a new kind of Web site that is known as a 'weblog,' or 'blog.' " As she explained, "Having a blog is rather like publishing your own, on-line version of Reader's Digest, with daily updates"; yet with a conversational element: "other people who have blogs—they are known as bloggers—read your blog, and if they like it they blog your blog on their own blog."

One would have thought that the traditional news media—newspapers and magazines—were in the best natural position to capture the attention lavished on all those connected screens at work and at home. After all, such media were originally designed for such slivers of attention, the little breaks that people take during their day. But newspapers were particularly slow and resentful about adapting their content to the web; they fretted about unreliable Internet reporting, erosion of revenues from print, and other typical concerns of an incumbent business being disrupted. Their hidebound attitude did not excite new users of the web.

“Social tools remove older obstacles to public expression, and thus remove the bottlenecks that characterized mass media. The result is the mass amateurization of efforts previously reserved for media professionals.”

It was technically obscure, impenetrable, populated by geeks and wizards, loners, misfits”; but it “became a place where people could talk to other people without constraint. Without filters or censorship or official sanction—and perhaps most significantly, without advertising….The attraction was in speech, however mediated. In people talking, however slowly. And mostly, the attraction lay in the kinds of things they were saying. Never in history had so many had the chance to know what so many others were thinking on such a wide range of subjects.”

“When blogs came along, they became the way we could have a Web presence that enabled us to react, respond, and provoke.” Already by that period, the web offered a way to create and project a public version of the self, a path toward Marcuse’s liberation and the transcendence of hierarchy that the old media world imposed. As Weinberger writes, “My blog was me. My blog was the Web equivalent of my body. Being-on-the-Web was turning out to be even more important and more fun than we’d thought it would be….We thought we were participating in a revolution. And we were somewhat right.”

In this golden age of “conversational content” or “user-generated media,” a following of some kind suddenly seemed within reach of just about anyone with something to say. It was as if some vault in which the public’s attention was kept had been blown open and the looters were taking what they could. A blog about ex-boyfriends; reflections on Brideshead Revisited, vintage Honda motorcycles—all had their constituency. And thanks to search, it wasn’t that hard to match one’s interests with a new world of content. Some of the more prominent new bloggers were current or former journalists, trained to write freely and quickly. Technologists started their own blogs, too, unreadable to the general public. Philosophers, economists, scientists, and other experts emerged from their ivory towers to address one another and motivated laymen in a manner far more recondite than might ever be found in the mainstream media. Some would blog essentially for themselves and those nearest to them, to keep track of their travels, or as a kind of family journal. They sometimes called themselves “escribitionists” before “blogger” became the word.

Consequently, audiences were fragmented to a degree that made cable television look like the days of The Ed Sullivan Show. The regular follower of, say, the blogger Andrew Sullivan would have to be interested in a pro-war gay conservative viewpoint that also advocated for Catholicism, marijuana, beards, beagles, and same-sex marriage. Readers of Boing Boing or Slashdot were people whose truest affiliation was to a neo-geek mentality that celebrated eccentricity and arcane obsessions. Such groups were nothing like the clear demographic categories of old, or even the relatively precise PRIZM clusters. In fact, bloggers sometimes claimed they were creating a-geographical communities, aggregations purely by common interest and passion. And since bloggers had, at least initially, no expectation of making money, there was no temptation to compromise their standards or temper their opinions.

That anyone could start one was not the only radical feature of the blog. The form also popularized the idea of “sharing” as a means of drawing attention to things. This represented a real break with earlier models of attention harvesting, whose ideal of centralized authority was somewhere between the Third Reich’s enforced listening and the nationwide audiences of I Love Lucy: everyone gathering to listen to a single voice reaching the entire nation. Sharing was still primitive, amounting mostly to the trading of links, but it was already proving a powerful alternative means for information to spread, more in the manner of gossip or a conversation than a broadcast. It was another step toward what we now experience as the “social” proliferation of information and opinion.

Wikipedia, the user-created encyclopedia with no central editor, became a surprising triumph over the early 2000s, drawing on the labor mainly of obsessive young men interested in making relatively anonymous contributions to a larger project. But unlike Google and others, when Wikipedia came to its own fork in the road, gaining enough traffic to rival or exceed that of nearly any other site, save the search engines, it chose the other path; deciding to remain free of advertising, it effectively forsook billions in potential revenue. The founder, Jimmy Wales, officially explained the decision as follows: “I think of Wikipedia as I do a library or a school—and commercial advertising is not right in that space….Maximizing revenue is not our goal.”

Within a year, the company reported that it was serving 100 million daily video views and accepting uploads of some 65,000 new videos. Thus YouTube became the Internet’s first successful challenge to what television offered.

Let us now take account of what was happening economically. The attention merchants had developed a business model based on directing the public mind toward commercial, well-packaged media products on television. But as the web grew in popularity, people started to pay more attention to one another instead, with no money changing hands. Bloggers did not, at first anyway, advertise, just as friends in the course of conversation do not usually plan to resell the attention they've gained by shilling for a product. … The ones suffering for this happy state of affairs were those industries that had spent the past century devising how best to get people to look at them and listen, to enjoy their diversion and tolerate a word from their sponsors.

In that way the early web was exactly like the 1960s counterculture: it encouraged both a Great Refusal of what had always been handed down from on high, and asked people to spend more time with each other. It asserted that money need not be involved in attentional barter, and that everyone had an inherent potential to be a creator. In the early days at some companies, like Google, the link was more explicit, with much of the company retreating to the Burning Man festival every year and management espousing the value of putting in place a practical, pragmatic implementation of the counterculture's ideas.

As in the 1960s, this great turning away was the cause of no little consternation, if not degrees of panic, in the old attention industries. As the columnist-writer Dave Barry put it, "We can no longer compel people to pay attention. We used to be able to say, there's this really important story in Poland. You should read this. Now people say, I just look up what I'm interested in on the Internet."

Lawrence Lessig, the darkest of the bunch, would turn out to be the one asking the most pertinent question: how long can this last? For even in the golden age of the user-driven web, there was reason to wonder whether the noncommercial model could persist. Bloggers and other creators of content were not Renaissance aristocrats; they faced the material constraints of most individuals or small-scale enterprises—most still needed to make a living, and as things progressed and improved, and expectations rose, it took ever more work to keep a blog up to date and engaging. A few would make a decent living, some through advertisings, others through newspaper acquisition. But for most, the effort would remain a hobby, and a time-consuming one at that. Burnout and attrition were perhaps inevitable.

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.

The micro-fragmentation represented by blogging audiences caused panic to some thinkers like Noam Chomsky and Cass Sunstein. Chomsky argued that blogs lacked the power to constrain powerful actors. “There’s plenty to criticize about the mass media, but they are the source of regular information about a wide range of topics. You can’t duplicate that on blogs.” Natasha Lennard, “Noam Chomsky, the Salon Interview: Governments Are Power Systems, Trying to Sustain Power,” Salon, December 29, 2013. Sunstein, at the height of blogging’s popularity, wrote a rare academic attack on the choices made possible by technologies like cable or the Internet. He argued that blogs and other technologies were dividing the country into informational factions who pay attention only to what they care to hear. “In a Democracy,” wrote Sunstein, “people do not live in echo chambers or information cocoons. They see and hear a wide range of topics and ideas.” This vision of democracy, says Sunstein, “raise[s] serious doubts about certain uses of new technologies, above all the Internet, about the astonishing growth in the power to choose—to screen in and to screen out.” Cass Sunstein, Republic.com 2.0 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). Both he and Chomsky preferred an environment where the nation regularly tuned in, together, to something like NBC or CBS or perhaps a public broadcaster.

Thank you for your quick response to my inquiry about my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes. Although I commend you for your prompt customer service, I disagree with the claim that my personal iD was inappropriate slang. After consulting Webster’s Dictionary, I discovered that “sweatshop” is in fact part of standard English, and not slang. The word means: “a shop or factory in which workers are employed for long hours at low wages and under unhealthy conditions” and its origin dates from 1892. So my personal iD does meet the criteria detailed in your first email. Your web site advertises that the NIKE iD program is “about freedom to choose and freedom to express who you are.” I share Nike’s love of freedom and personal expression. The site also says that “If you want it done right…build it yourself.” I was thrilled to be able to build my own shoes, and my personal iD was offered as a small token of appreciation for the sweatshop workers poised to help me realize my vision. I hope that you will value my freedom of expression and reconsider your decision to reject my order.

Amused, Peretti sent a copy of the email chain to twelve or so friends, including one who posted it on his personal website. Within a week, Peretti’s exchange had been shared by people far and wide; first thousands and within a few weeks, millions. Along the way, it was picked up by mainstream media outlets around the world. To use a phrase that did not exist in 2001, the email “went viral.”

Popular email chains have been around nearly as long as email itself, but back in 2001 words like “viral,” “Internet meme,” and “clickbait” were as yet unknown. What Peretti naively experienced was an early version of what would become a pervasive means of harvesting attention in the early twenty-first century. Peretti, who has a curious, scientific mind, started to consider the phenomenon carefully and systematically. “I looked at stories like the Nike shoe story, and there were actually plenty of other ones. Someone did something, it went big for a while, but then that’s where the story ends.” Having done it once, by accident, he wanted to see if he could make it happen at will. He wanted to see if he could understand what it took to make something “go viral.” For he realized that his weird experience had a deeper significance; it marked a change, made possible by the Internet, in how attention might be captured, and from whom.

It turned out he was not alone; there were others who shared his fascination with creating zany stuff that might, almost magically, erupt across the Internet. He got to know a man who called himself “Ze Frank,” a sort of self-styled web-jester. Ze Frank’s own road to Damascus had involved a web-based birthday invitation in which he featured, performing funny dance moves; it had earned millions of hits and won him a Webby Award. Peretti also met Cory Arcangel, a conceptual artist who, among other things, had made art that required him to hack Nintendo’s Super Mario Brothers. Then there was a social scientist, Duncan Watts, who tried to understand media contagion with mathematical models. In these guys, Peretti found a posse.

“For the artist, a work can be celebrated even if the only people who like it are a small group of curators and collectors,” he wrote. “For the contagious media designer, all that matters is how other people see the work. If people don’t share the work with their friends, it is a failure regardless of the opinion of the creator, critics, or other elites.”

Peretti may not have been able to create anything while at Eyebeam on the scale of his Nike experience, but he would author a twenty-three-point manifesto that he called “Notes on Contagious Media,” expounding just what distinguished that variety from others. Some of it was obvious: “Contagious media is the kind of media you immediately want to share with all your friends. This requires that you take pleasure in consuming the media but also pleasure in the social process of passing it on.” Some more theoretical: “Contagious media is a form of pop conceptual art” in which “the idea is the machine that makes the art (LeWitt, 1967) and the idea is interesting to ordinary people.” For that reason, “a contagious media project should represent the simplest form of an idea. Fancy design or extraneous content made media less contagious. Anything inessential constituted a ‘payload’ that the contagion must drag along as it spreads. The bigger the payload, the more slowly the entire project spreads.”

On May 10, 2005, just two days after the contagious media contest, The Huffington Post, an online aggregator of news, blogs, and other content, debuted to widespread mainstream coverage. The first issue featured blog posts by Huffington herself and, as planned, various famous people: the renowned historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; the actor John Cusack; Larry David, producer of Seinfeld; the husband-and-wife acting pair Julia Louis-Dreyfus (also of Seinfeld) and Brad Hall, jointly posting on the issue of gun violence.

Some credited the idea, but in media it's not the thought that counts; critics were harsher and louder. And no one came in for more abuse than the partner who'd lent her name. "Celebs to the Slaughter," wrote LA Weekly: "Judging from Monday's horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has undergone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself….Her blog is such a bomb that it's the movie equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven's Gate rolled into one."

Peretti, Lerer, and Huffington were each masters of attention capture, and their collaboration proved more than the sum of its parts. … Soon the Huffington Post was inviting not just celebrities to contribute but students, politicos, activists, book authors—just about anyone except the professional reporter or normal freelancer who expected to be paid. It was a degree of openness more akin to the early days of the web and blogosphere than any older model of media. Minimal costs, maximum traffic, and irresistible content above all—that was the formula.

While its financials have never been fully public, there is good reason to believe it has never turned a solid profit. For one thing, advertisers categorized The Huffington Post as political commentary, and generally, the big-brand advertisers, the Fortune 500, despite the numbers weren't willing to put their names on HuffPo's pages.

The Huffington Post wasn't making money, but it was nonetheless sucking attention from everything else—especially journalists—on the web. That's probably why The Washington Post's executive editor slammed it and similar sites as "parasites living off journalism produced by others."

Over the 2000s, none of the pure, content-driven attention merchants were lucrative. This was, in part, because advertisers realized with so many attention merchants in competition, they didn't necessarily need to "underwrite" the media industry in the manner that they had for newspapers, radio, or television. … Fundamentally they "don't want to pay for creation of content."

AOL, seeking its own resurrection,*2 and having noticed the gap between The Huffington Post's traffic and its advertising rates, bought the site in 2011 for $315 million and began throwing money at it in an effort to make the site more respectable. This bearing upwind, a variant on CBS's "Tiffany" strategy from the 1930s, would, it was hoped, attract a higher class of advertiser. With more money, The Huffington Post was now able to hire seasoned reporters who were given full freedom and resources to write on what they wanted. The strategy yielded a Pulitzer Prize for The Huffington Post's David Wood, a war correspondent who'd cut his teeth at Time in the 1970s and had also worked at the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, and other papers. So the HuffPost gained some dignity, but because it was expensive still failed to create large profits. Yet by 2015, it was attracting more attention than ever, and management was still saying things like "We could make it profitable right now if we wanted it to be." Perhaps the site was by its nature never really meant to be a business exactly, but instead just a giant vacuum sucking up human attention.

Perez Hilton was not the only wildly popular fictive persona made possible by the anonymity of the web. In 2006 the best-known face on YouTube was Lonelygirl15, a cute but awkward teenage girl whose first video was entitled "First Blog / Dorkiness Prevails." Speaking to the camera, her chin on one raised knee, she plaintively intones, "Hi guys…this is my video blog…um….I'm such a dork…" It was only later revealed that Lonelygirl15 was in fact a paid actress. Her show was scripted, based on her producers' guess of what an amateur video blogger might look like. Their success in getting the right effect would lead to more business for the production company EQAL, which, having proved it could aggregate a boatload of attention, would be commissioned to produce more content, including an original web series for CBS. As for Jessica Rose, the actress hired for the hoax, she would be cast in a web TV series called Sorority Forever, as well as the cable series Greek. An Anaheim Ducks fan, she would also begin blogging for the National Hockey League. Every bit of attention helps.

The success of The Huffington Post and of Lonelygirl15 and the celebrity gossip sites was something of an early sign that even by the end of its first decade, the amateur phase of the web was already coming to an end. Wikipedia reached its peak of 51,000 active editors in 2007, and from that point onward began to shed contributors; by 2013 it would lose more than 20,000, never having expanded beyond its committed core of young men with time on their hands. Across the web, one sensed a general waning of enthusiasm, as if the air were escaping from the balloon.

It was no different among the original amateur bloggers, whose creative energy once seemed inexhaustible. A common story line emerged: after posting away for some time, many began to notice that their pronouncements were reaching far fewer souls than they'd thought, perhaps based on an imperfect understanding of the web itself. Even trying to get more seemed hopeless: "If you do everything people tell you to do," one blogger lamented, "you can get up to about 100 visitors a day, but then it's like you hit an invisible wall."

[Clay Shirky's] analysis showed that the blogosphere wasn't a smooth ball where everyone had an equal voice. Rather, it was dominated by a handful of sites that pulled enormous numbers, followed by a looooo­ooooo­ng tail of sites with a few followers. The old pernicious topology had reasserted itself. We should have known that it would, and it took a while for the miserable fact to sink in.

Not that it was all wine and roses for the bloggers who did persist and claw their way up to being full-blooded attention merchants. Like the New York newspapers of the 1830s, they would find themselves in ever more intense competition, in which the lurid and titillating and exaggerated typically prevailed. For every serious and earnest political blog, there was always an alternative prepared to throw red meat before fire-breathing partisans, or else go the full tabloid route. Wonkette, for instance, became the Perez Hilton of Beltway gossip, gaining enormous attention by showcasing Jessica Cutler, a congressional staffer who blogged about steamy details of her affairs with various government officials.

As if tabloid journalism weren't challenge enough, the amateur bloggers also now faced professional competition of several kinds. A British journalist living in New York named Nick Denton launched a carefully curated blog named Gizmodo, covering gadgets and technology, and another named Gawker, co-launched with Elizabeth Spiers, which disseminated media gossip (Wonkette was also part of what would become the Gawker group). The political blogs also professionalized: the Daily Kos, a one-man left-leaning Talking Points Memo, hired staff to run more ambitious coverage. Major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, assigned experienced journalists to blog full-time, leveraging all of the authority and prestige of the old media to go after the new audience. Whatever power lay in what Yochai Benkler had called the "wealth of networks," the old media's trick of paying people still had some power as well. More work for the journalists, perhaps, but it did stem the flow of attention away from legacy media.

In 2008, Wired magazine offered the following advice to those interested in launching a blog: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug….The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths….Scroll down Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and you'll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.

By the end of the decade, the truly amateur blogger or videographer was something of a rarity, an eccentric hanging on from a different age. Most everyone else was either blogging as part of his job, writing for some professional blog, or had long since hung up his guns. Even Lawrence Lessig, the prophet of a free culture, retired his blog, claiming a degree of exhaustion.

In the guise of bringing people together, these networks would wire the most invasive attention capture apparatus yet invented into millions upon millions of lives. What were the terms for that arrangement? As with any user agreement, it was in the provider's interest that one click "accept" quickly, and not wade into the fine print.

In 2004, with the Internet revolution already in its adolescence, Harvard University's computer services began work on what it described as an "electronic facebook." The term "facebook" traditionally referred to a physical booklet produced at American universities to promote socialization in the way that "Hi, My Name Is" stickers do at events; the pages consisted of rows upon rows of head shots with the corresponding name, and perhaps the class and residence underneath.

But a nineteen-year-old undergraduate named Mark Zuckerberg—a gifted programmer in full possession of all the arrogance of youth, who loved nothing more than to hack out code overnight—felt compelled to show he could do the job better and faster. Zuckerberg had already accomplished a number of complicated computer projects with his friends. "We were just building stuff," he said later, " 'cause we thought it was cool." Unfortunately, his last little effort, hacking the student picture database while under the influence, had landed him on academic probation. … I'm a little intoxicated, not gonna lie. So what if it's not even 10 pm and it's a Tuesday night? What? The Kirkland dormitory facebook is open on my desktop and some of these people have pretty horrendous facebook pics. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive….Let the hacking begin. … With that he created Facemash, a Harvard-only version of the rating site "Hot or Not." In Zuckerberg's adaptation, two undergraduate women's photos appeared, and the user selected the more attractive. Zuckerberg showed a certain flair for gaining attention, but after complaints, he went before the school's Administration Board charged with breaching security, infringing the photograph copyrights, and violating individual privacy. He was let off with a warning.

So it took some nerve when Zuckerberg, now calling himself the "Founder, Master and Commander, Enemy of the State," gathered his code posse to throw together a site named "Thefacebook." He announced the undertaking with his usual confidence or presumption, depending on your view. "Everyone's been talking a lot about a universal face book within Harvard," Zuckerberg said. "I think it's kind of silly that it would take the University a couple of years to get around to it. I can do it better than they can, and I can do it in a week."

In business, invention is often said to be overrated as compared with execution. Perhaps the best proof of this idea yet to be offered by the twenty-first century is the success of Facebook, a business with an exceedingly low ratio of invention to success. There is no lightbulb, or telephone, let alone a truly ingenious algorithm in the company's history. And yet no firm, save Google, has harvested as much attention from the Internet, or commercialized it as effectively. As with Google, that attention would be a by-product of the needs, desires, and efforts of its users. But where Google prevailed by offering the best search, Facebook reached the top thanks to stable code and "network effect": the phenomenon by which a system of connections grows in value with the number of its users. Zuckerberg understood this from the start.

In its primitive way, AOL had proven decisively that the surest means of getting people to spend more time with their computers was to promise some kind of social experience. Since the 1980s, the geeks and nerds had embraced the online world as a safe space in which to socialize; AOL's signal achievement was proving that with a much wider range of social milieus, a great many other types could be lured online as well to visit "cyberspace."

As that name suggests, over most of the 1990s, going online still had an element of science fiction or fantasy to it. Unlike our day of always-on Internet, back then one "jacked in" or perhaps passed through the back of the family wardrobe, and under a made-up name entered an entirely different kind of world populated by strangers, one where none of the usual rules applied. "Imagine," said the cyber-pioneer John Perry Barlow, "discovering a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions…where only children feel completely at home, where the physics is that of thought rather than things, and where everyone is as virtual as the shadows in Plato's cave."

The troll abuses the terms of the attention agreement, by violating the decorum of what is meant to be quasi-conversation with outrageous and intemperate comments—expressing opinions not necessarily sincerely held but said for the purpose of provoking an emotional response. Most people aren't trolls, but it doesn't take many. One academic study found that trolling "correlated positively with sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism….[of] all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to trolling behavior."

AOL was an environment guaranteed to attract trolls, given its anonymity and sizable audience. In chat rooms and forums, mischief makers polluted perfectly pleasant interactions with impunity, eventually rendering the whole site noxious in one way or another to all other visitors. … It was as if the entire thing were designed to vindicate Freud's view that repression of violent or sexual impulses was necessary to a functioning society. There was far more to the decline than just the trolls, but as AOL shed users to the point of collapse, it left in its wake enormous opportunities for anyone who could offer some kind of online place to express social desires and needs without the troll menace. The fall of online's once mighty oak gave a series of Internet acorns their chance to grow into something quite different in the same niche. A big, proven horde of online attention was up for grabs.

Rather than drop you in a Hobbesian world of antisocial maniacs, Friendster made you a profile and sought to re-create online your actual social world—the people you really knew, friends, co-workers, family, and the like—while providing one place to deal with all of them. Like so many successful tech companies, it was marketing a form of human augmentation, in this case of social capacities.

Facebook’s rise in the face of this existing competition was something remarkable to behold. Over the course of 2004, it leapfrogged from campus to campus, landing everywhere with a splash. It arrived with better, more stable software, but that wasn’t the key to its success. Still enrolled at Harvard, Zuckerberg and his team had an on-the-ground feel for the college social environment and its vectors, and thus a deep intuition of what could make his site seem rewarding and essential to his target audience. It didn’t hurt that it was based at Harvard, an object of some fascination on other campuses. The student newspapers welcoming Thefacebook give the best sense of how well it managed to encapsulate what users were looking for—namely, an affirmation of their social significance.

These early reports touch upon the effect that would always represent Facebook's apologia pro vita sua: it was bringing people together. In truth, however, what Facebook was offering users was not a fuller and more ordered "social" life but something even more alluring: an augmented representation of themselves. Not as they were, exactly, but at their contrived best, with hundreds of friends (before success became equated with thousands) and others still in queue awaiting "approval." It is useful to recall what limited functionality the site had when it started tempting thousands of students to spend hours playing with it. There were no messages, no pokes—no forms of social interaction but the invitation to be friends. Apart from stalking others on the network, there was nothing to do there except refine one's own profile, reconsider one's photograph, and marvel at one's own numerically and geographically determined social cachet. The profile was really the attentional bait, the pool into which untold undergraduate Narcissi were staring while they ditched class.

Of course, all of the networking sites had profiles and friends. What was Facebook doing that Friendster, Google, and MySpace were not? Nothing technical, to be sure; rather, it unmistakably defined itself as the place to be. The key to this was its campus origins. While the others obliged users to find their cohort in the great mass of undifferentiated humanity, Facebook re-created an existing and relatively bounded social reality of colleges, within and among which actual connections already existed. Everyone at Harvard knew at least someone on several of the campuses across which Facebook's network was proliferating. The original university facebook goal of facilitating socialization was thus served by this thing that was student made, a fact that only lent it more social credibility. So Facebook was actually providing not something new but an enhanced representation of an existing social reality. The networks, so-called, were there already: Facebook simply made them visible, graphically manifest, and easier to keep track of.

Many have theorized that this difference was only significant insofar as it pertained to the potential for hooking up; that Facebook's success came from revealing the universe of people it might be practical to sleep with. Was that the case? It's complicated. There can be no doubt that Facebook gained in its early days owing to potential for erotic encounter, particularly at a moment when volume was prized over quality of connection by many users. No student newspaper failed to mention dates arranged on the site; yet Facebook was always coy on this point, maintaining a plausible deniability, and never marketed itself as a dating site. Rather, it replicated the ambiguity of college life itself, with its collisions more like Brownian motion than traditional romantic pursuit. Everyone knew that joining a certain club or even attending college would eventually lead to opportunities; making it too explicit would only ruin the effect.

Zuckerberg, like Google's founders, understood advertising's potential to degrade his product; he had the technologist's wariness of advertising and its tendency to ruin websites. As with Larry Page, so with Mark Zuckerberg, the Holy Grail was advertising that people actually wanted to see; Facebook figured that nanotargeting could make that happen. Until then, Zuckerberg would remain manifestly averse to anything that might interrupt the experience of his users. When, early on, Sprite offered $1 million to turn the site green for a day, he didn't even consider it. As he once put it: "I don't hate all advertising. I just hate advertising that stinks."

In what was at the time a shocking collapse, MySpace and Friendster emptied like a bar at last call, and it was as if the Internet migrated en masse to Facebook. The social media critic danah boyd described it as a form of "White Flight."12*3 As The Huffington Post wrote, by 2008 "MySpace lost over forty million unique visitors per month, lost both co-founders, laid off the vast majority of its staff and more generally, has diminished to a cluttered afterthought of the power it once was."

The credible claim to being a social necessity was, in retrospect, the most important thing that Facebook achieved; its rivals would never come close to matching it. As Zuckerberg said in 2009, "Think about what people are doing on Facebook today. They're keeping up with their friends and family, but they're also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand. They're connecting with the audience that they want to connect to. It's almost a disadvantage if you're not on it now." It was not merely a matter of utility but a different way of being in the world that Facebook was able to offer and also to cultivate. The idea of the self as brand did not originate with Zuckerberg, but would certainly gain currency with the Facebook generation, who would be known for not remaining in one job too long and for thinking of themselves and their experience unironically as products to be marketed, professionally and even socially. As celebrities had become, the ordinary individual was now more of a business proposition.

The sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argued that Facebook and other social media had formed a substitute for “gossip, people-curiosity and small talk,” which, she wrote, were “the human version of social grooming in primates: an activity that is essential to forging bonds, affirming relationships, displaying bonds, and asserting and learning about hierarchies and alliances.” Significantly, she wrote, “Social grooming should be seen as both a bonding activity and a competitive activity: it is a means to improve one’s reputation and status as well as access to resources and social and practical solidarity.”

On the positive side, it did know more about everyone in the world than anyone else (“big data” in the vernacular of the 2010s), allowing advertisers to nanotarget at an unprecedented level. Facebook ran side ads that allowed an advertiser to home in on his quarry with criteria like location, gender, age, schools attended, stated interests, and more. Thus, the advertiser of vintage 1970s speakers could target men between fifty and sixty-five living in suburban New Jersey who listed an interest in the Kinks and Led Zeppelin.

During the 2010s, Facebook found a few answers to this problem. First, it invested heavily in developing metrics to convince advertisers that its advertisements were valuable even though people weren’t clicking on them. A well-funded “Measurement and Insights” Department endeavored to prove that Facebook was creating brand awareness, even without conscious notice of ads, let alone clicks. Its head, Brad Smallwood, would tell advertisers that “99 percent of sales generated from online branding ad campaigns were from people that saw but did not interact with ads,” claiming to prove “that it is the delivery of the marketing message to the right consumer, not the click, that creates real value for brand advertisers.” In this way, Facebook left much of the hard selling to Google, or The Huffington Post, while itself posing as heir to the MacManus tradition of branding.

Well, Facebook gave you access to your “friends.” And now, much of the energy formerly devoted to blogs or other online projects was now channeled into upgrading one’s Facebook profile and, with it, the value of Facebook itself. In this way, the public became like renters willingly making extensive improvements to their landlord’s property, even as they were made to look at advertisements. Facebook’s ultimate success lay in this deeply ingenious scheme of attention arbitrage, by which it created a virtual attention plantation.

At the same time, more and more people began to complain that being on the site made them unhappy. It should have been no surprise, given what we know about human nature and the way Facebook was first conceived to play on the social dynamics of anxious adolescents, but watching the highlight reels of other people’s lives was bound to make you feel inadequate. Others found Facebook (like email) a compulsion in that same Skinneresque manner—usually disappointing, but rewarding occasionally enough to keep you hooked. A variety of studies—none entirely conclusive, to be sure—associated depressive symptoms with Facebook usage, one finding that “compared to browsing the Internet, Facebook is judged as less meaningful, less useful, and more of a waste of time, which then leads to a decrease in mood.”

Facebook had supposedly replaced cyberspace with something more “real,” but what it created in fact was just another realm of unreality, one that, on account of looking real, was more misleading. Here was a place where friends always congratulated and celebrated; where couples did little but eat at nice restaurants, go on vacation, or announce engagements or newborns; and where children never cried or needed diaper changes or hit each other. On Facebook, all happy families were alike; the others may have each been unhappy in their own way, but they were not on Facebook. Of course, all human communication is slightly inauthentic, but in person or even on the telephone there are limits to our dissimulations. The sugared-cookie-cutter self-styling enabled by Facebook made America seem a Lake Wobegon online. In retrospect, the 1950s looked dark and angst-ridden by comparison.

Well, not traditionally famous, in the manner of a Hollywood celebrity or the Queen of England. They were studiously seeking something else, which Sorgatz called “microfame” and others called “Internet famous.” Through their blogs, start-ups, cultivation of journalists, and endless rounds of parties, New York’s tech people pursued this goal with a kind of grim determination. In this, the scene was just different from the one back West, where glory belonged solely to those who wrote the best algorithm. There, people wanted to be rich. Here, everyone wanted to be Internet famous.

“When we say ‘microfamous,’ our inclination is to imagine a smaller form of celebrity, a lower life-form striving to become a mammal—the macrofamous or suprafamous, perhaps,” Sorgatz wrote with his accustomed wit. “But microfame is its own distinct species of celebrity, one in which both the subject and the ‘fans’ participate directly in the celebrity’s creation. Microfame extends beyond a creator’s body of work to include a community that leaves comments, publishes reaction videos, sends e-mails, and builds Internet reputations with links.”

As Sorgatz explained, “Microfame is practically a science. It is attainable like running a marathon or acing the LSAT. All you need is a road map.” He recommended, among other things, “oversharing,” “self-publishing,” and one tip that Sorgatz may himself have followed: “separat[ing] yourself from the cacophony by being a little weird. Scratch that—really weird.”

Meanwhile, Sorgatz himself says that he was most certainly not seeking microfame (“Oh dear God no.”). Yet having become the apparent expert on the subject, he did gain a measure of it. As he recounts, “When social media started to embed itself into people’s lives, I somehow appeared sage, so people associated it with me—for better and worse.”

Even the ancien régime did recognize gradations, however, and these found expression in the Ulmer Scale, created in the 1980s by a reporter named James Ulmer; he named it after himself, perhaps in his own small bid at microimmortality. The scale was designed to measure the celebrity status of actors, for the express purpose of estimating their “bankability” (i.e., how much value they added to a production just by appearing in it). In practice the scale divided famous actors into an A-list, B-list, and C-list, not unlike a bond-rating service on Wall Street. Ulmer called it a movie star “racing form.”

In the early 2000s, the D-list entered common parlance as a loose category meant to cover a new kind of figure who was somehow famous but not in a way understood by existing metrics. As Gareth Palmer writes, those on the D-list occupied the “space between the unknown mass of ordinary people and the celebrity.” The D-listers had no bankability; their achievement, instead, was, as one writer put it, having “triumphed over obscurity.” The archetype was, of course, the reality television star, though it could include others like models, romantic partners of celebrities, or faded pop stars. To be D-listed was not necessarily flattering, for it seemed also to refer to those who didn’t know their place; whose efforts to become or remain famous were embarrassing and therefore worthy of broadcast for general amusement. Nonetheless, the very establishment of a D-list undeniably suggested that the line between famous and not was beginning to blur.

Of course, by the numbers, even the achievement of microfame was a rarity. But perhaps the odds were beside the point. As Mark Zuckerberg said of Facebook users, “They’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand.” Indeed, with Facebook and Twitter, everyone could now have a brand, and derive a little of the excitement and attention that went with traditional celebrity—perhaps even find a way to resell a bit of that attention. It portended a future a bit different than Andy Warhol had predicted, for in this future “everyone will be famous to fifteen people,” as the technologist David Weinberger quipped. Nonetheless, as Rex Sorgatz argued, “It feels like a step toward equality. You can become Facebook friends with the microfamous; you can start IM sessions with them. You can love them and hate them at much closer proximity.” And so just as American democracy promised that any child could grow up to become president, and American capitalism promised that through hard work anyone could become rich, the attention economy threw up its own mirage for the discontented masses: fame for everyone.

That was the utopian version. In actuality, fame, or the hunger for it, would become something of a pandemic, swallowing up more and more people and leaving them with the scars of chronic attention-whoredom. Ironically, though few of the traditional rewards of fame were forthcoming, more of the costs were.

As the first decade of the new century rolled on, something was happening in the streets of America. More and more men and women, most in suits, could be seen compulsively pulling out a device with a tiny screen and craning their necks to stare at it. At that point, there would begin the familiar exercise of rolling a little dial before urgently typing away with both thumbs. In those years, this distinctive habit marked one as part of either the corporate class or the federal government. To everyone else, it looked self-important and faintly ridiculous. Few realized they were beholding an image of their future selves.

While no marketing expert—indeed, he had an engineer’s hostility to marketing’s influence—Lazaridis nonetheless sensed that his product’s name lacked pizzazz. He considered, for a while, calling it the “PocketLink” but at the last moment decided to consult some branding experts from California. After some analysis, in a way that might have done Ernest Dichter proud, the experts opined that the letter B conveyed reliability, and the device’s little keyboard looked like a strawberry. Out of that came the “BlackBerry.” Thus rechristened, the device finally began to feel some wind in its sails.

By 2015, the fourth screen would be in the hands of virtually everyone, seizing nearly three of the average American's waking hours. And so it would become the undisputed new frontier of attention harvesting in the twenty-first century, the attention merchants' manifest destiny.

Now a new device appeared capable of harvesting the attention that had been, as it were, left on the table, rather in the way fracking would later recover great reserves of oil once considered wholly inaccessible.

As so often happens in tech industries, Research in Motion started the game but did not master it. That job would be left to the world's two mightiest computing empires, which by the 2010s had clued in to the potential for far broader adoption of what the BlackBerry represented. With their nearly unlimited reserves of engineering and design talent, Apple and Google would go on to create iPhones and Androids, respectively, and thoroughly clobber the Canadians at their own game, offering a much more appealing user interface.

There would soon follow not just an attentional habit but a new social norm, that of never parting from one's device; of standing and staring at it, as if paralyzed, as the world goes by; of not looking up in the presence of others, except when the urge to take a picture erupts at the strangest moment—autre tech, autre moeurs: it is probably the thing a visitor from a previous century would find the weirdest.

Their new iPhone app did two things. First, it enhanced the device's camera with a series of attractive filters that could be applied to photos, creating some immediate utility. Its second innovation, ultimately more influential, was to create a photo-centered social network—a sort of Twitter built on images. On Twitter, one shared a message; a photo was optional. Instagram made the photo mandatory and the message optional.

While Facebook was also a place for posting photos, and at some level presenting oneself as one would like to be seen, Instagram allowed for a seamless and more continuous visual narrative. In this way, active Instagrammers “created an Instagram life,” telling their own stories, or at least a stylized and idealized version of it, in images. If the average Facebook post showed a group of friends or a family in good times (perhaps posing with the dog, or holding up drinks at a party), Instagram’s photos would generally be more dramatic, glamorous, and often edgier, for the simple reason that they were posted with the calculated intent to seize attention and to elicit a reaction.

Like the early blogs, a good Instagram feed was labor-intensive. When she quit, Socality Barbie noted “the insane lengths many of us go to create the perfect Instagram life.” A “fashion” Instagrammer named Amanda Miller who offered an online guide to gaining followers confesses that “getting to 18.5k followers was A LOT of work.” In addition to composing and shooting photos, the feed demands interacting with strangers to make them feel engaged or heard, the way a politician or other public figure might—the way a real celebrity doesn’t have to do. As Miller writes, “Engagement: This is the hardest part because it takes something money can’t buy, and that is TIME. It takes A LOT OF TIME.”

James Franco, a C-list actor under the old metrics, and himself a self-confessed “Instagram addict,” would speak to its broad acceptance: “It’s what the movie studios want for their products, it’s what professional writers want for their work, it’s what newspapers want—hell, it’s what everyone wants: attention. Attention is power.”

In a major attention-capture stunt, Kim Kardashian famously used Instagram in 2014 to send out a picture of her nearly naked backside in an attempt to “break the Internet.” It may not quite have done that, but it paid off in attention earned; it must have, because Kardashian’s management, normally so efficient about getting paid, negotiated no other compensation. It was further evidence of attention’s having become an accepted form of currency.

Like all attention harvesters, Instagram has not stirred any new yearning within us, merely acted upon one already there, and facilitated its gratification to an unimaginable extent. Therein lies the real problem.

In April 2012, a mere eighteen months after its debut, Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion. The high-flying start-up's founders had cashed out without ever having devised a business model. No matter: by November the following year, the first ad feed would run in Instagram, following Facebook principles of limited targeting. The acquisition would prove astute. In April 2012 Instagram had 30 million users, but by the fall of 2015 it had 400 million, more than Twitter.

The once highly ordered attention economy had seemingly devolved into a chaotic mutual admiration society, full of enterprising Narcissi, surely an arrangement of affairs without real precedent in human history.

BuzzFeed billed itself as the “first true social news organization,” which meant it was designed for a post-Facebook and post-Twitter world, where news gained currency by being shared on social networks, through newsfeeds, Twitter feeds, and the like. It was also designed to be read on the now ubiquitous mobile platforms; by 2015, 60 percent of its traffic was via phones and other wireless devices (including 21 percent from Snapchat)—the key to success was now getting people to share stuff socially from mobile.

It was a time when a random picture of a grumpy-looking cat (Grumpy Cat) posted on the online bulletin board Reddit made a viable career for its owners; when a ridiculous dance video like “Gangnam Style” amassed more than 2.4 billion online views (while the 2014 World Cup, the most watched event in human history, reached about 1 billion).

Much of what they discovered validated Peretti's original theories—particularly about the necessity of stimulating "pleasure in the social process of passing" something along and of ensuring that the contagion "represent[s] the simplest form of an idea." But the "pleasure" of sharing did not necessarily mean that viewing the content had been pleasurable. The urge to share was activated by a spectrum of "high-arousal" emotions, like awe, outrage, and anxiety.

Naked plays for attention always draw scorn, and as BuzzFeed's fortunes rose in the 2010s, it was no exception. As Ben Cohen, founder of the journalism site The Daily Banter, wrote: "I loathe BuzzFeed and pretty much everything they do….It could well trump Fox News as the single biggest threat to journalism ever created." When BuzzFeed presented the Egyptian democratic revolution as a series of GIFs from the film Jurassic Park, Cohen fulminated: "To say this is childish, puerile bullshit would be a massive understatement….Doing funny GIF posts about cats and hangovers is one thing, but reducing a highly complex political crisis into 2 second moving screen shots of a children's dinosaur movie is something completely different. If BuzzFeed really is the future of journalism, we're completely and utterly fucked."

Not that BuzzFeed was terribly profitable. It lost money for most of its early years, only began to turn a profit in 2013, and never exceeded $10 million (while hardly a fair comparison, Apple's iTunes store alone, also in the content business, and not considered highly profitable, has been estimated to clear $1 billion in profit per year). Its fortunes reflected the still-low price of digital ads; BuzzFeed's annual ad revenues of roughly $100 million were still far less than, say, People magazine (about $1 billion).

Comcast’s investment in BuzzFeed was at last a consummation of the union between the old and the new media such as Microsoft and AOL–Time Warner had once contemplated, though now involving far less money than in those headier days. For comparison’s sake, though, it is worth remarking that The Washington Post, with its forty-seven Pulitzer Prizes, was purchased by Amazon for $250 million in 2013—old media valuations clearly weren’t what they used to be, either. And yet even if BuzzFeed had attracted real dollars, the deal with Comcast nonetheless seemed to diminish the new media in some way. Blogging and other forces that Jeff Jarvis and others had predicted were going to demolish the establishment had eventually yielded to BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed was then bought by old media for what amounted to chump change. So much for all of that.

Once a commons that fostered the amateur eccentric in every area of interest, the web, by 2015, was thoroughly overrun by commercial junk, much of it directed at the very basest human impulses of voyeurism and titillation. To be sure, there were exceptions, like Wikipedia, a healthy nonprofit; Reddit, still a haven for some of the spirit of the old Internet; small magazines like Verge, Vox, Quartz, and the Awl; even some efforts to reboot blogging, like the Medium. Likewise, faced with an existential crisis of relevancy, traditional news media, so long allergic to the Internet, dramatically improved their online content over the decade. But these bright spots were engulfed by the vast areas of darkness, the lands of the cajoling listicles and the celebrity nonstories, engineered for no purpose but to keep a public mindlessly clicking and sharing away, spreading the accompanying ads like a bad cold. As the clicks added up, what was most depressing perhaps was that all this was for the sake of amassing no great fortune, but in fact relatively paltry commercial gains, rounding errors in the larger scheme of commerce. The idealists had hoped the web would be different, and it certainly was for a time, but over the long term it would become something of a 99-cent store, if not an outright cesspool. As with the demolition of Penn Station, a great architectural feat had been defaced for little in return. But as so often in the history of attention merchants, when competition mounts, the unseemliness soars and the stakes plummet.

And that was just the content; the advertising, meanwhile, was epically worse. By the mid-2010s the average reader on news sites like the Boston Globe’s boston.com would be subjected to extraordinary surveillance methods, with only the barest degree of consent. Such operations would be invisible to the user, except for the delays and solicitations they triggered. Online tracking technologies evolved to a point that would have made a Soviet-era spy blush. Arrival at NYPost.com would trigger up to twenty or more urgent “tracking” messages to online ad agencies, or “ad networks,” advising them of any available intelligence on the user, in addition to specifying what stories they were reading. Attention merchants had always been ravenous for attention, but now they were gobbling up personal data as well. Perhaps the oversharing on social media had simply lowered the standard of privacy. Perhaps the Internet, with its potential to capture every turn of our attention, made this inevitable. Whatever the case, several commercial entities were now compiling ever more detailed dossiers on every man, woman, and child. It is a more thoroughly invasive effort than any NSA data collection ever disclosed—and one of even more dubious utility.

The automation of customized advertising was intended, in theory, to present you with things more likely to seize your attention and make you click. It must be seen as a continuation of the search we have described for advertising’s Holy Grail: pitches so aptly keyed to one’s interests that they would be as welcome as morning sunshine. The idealists foresaw a day when ad platforms would be like a loyal valet who detected his master’s needs before he was aware of them, who suggested a new pair of shoes as a reasonably priced replacement for those you hadn’t noticed were wearing out. Perhaps he would remind you of your mother-in-law’s birthday while offering to send an appropriate gift at a one-day discount.

But the gap between this theory and its execution was wide enough to march Kitchener’s Army through it. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had once said that the ideal was to “get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Unfortunately, by the mid-2010s, that line was being crossed constantly. While promising to be “helpful” or “thoughtful,” what was delivered was often experienced as “intrusive” and worse. Some ads seemed more like stalkers than valets: if, say, you’d been looking at a pair of shoes on Amazon, an ad for just those shoes would begin following you around the web, prodding you to take another look at them. What was meant to be “relevant” to your wishes and interests turned out to be more of a studied exploitation of one’s weaknesses. The overweight were presented with diet aids; the gadget-obsessed plied with the latest doodads; gamblers encouraged to bet; and so on. One man, after receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, found himself followed everywhere with “insensitive and tasteless” ads for funeral services. The theoretical idea that customers might welcome or enjoy such solicitations increasingly seemed like a bad joke.

To make matters worse, the technology of behavioral advertising added layers of complexity to the code of any website, causing the system to slow or freeze, and sometimes preventing the page from loading altogether. According to a New York Times study in 2015, despite the fact that every other technology had improved, some websites were now taking five seconds or more to load; and the situation was even worse on mobile phones, with their slower connections. Videos had a way of popping up and starting to play unbidden; and the user looking for the stop button would find it was the tiniest of all, and often oddly located. And something of a ruse as well: if you missed hitting it directly, yet another website would open, with yet more ads.

In nearly every possible way, ad tech was terrible for consumers and, to compound the pity of it all, not particularly lucrative for advertisers either. As the programmer Marco Arment lamented in 2015, “In the last few years…web ad quality and tolerability have plummeted, and annoyance, abuse, misdirection, and tracking have skyrocketed. Publishers don’t have an easy job trying to stay in business today, but that simply doesn’t justify the rampant abuse, privacy invasion, sleaziness, and creepiness that many of them are forcing upon their readers.” Even the tech people managed to draw a short straw, for all of this mischief took a surprising amount of programming talent to accomplish. “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” commented scientist Jeff Hammerbacher. “That sucks.”

In this game of trackers and profile builders, as in so many others, Google and Facebook, de facto diarchs of the online attention merchants, reigned supreme. By design, both firms had acquired the best data on just about every consumer on earth, as well as possessing the best tools for collecting more of it, which by the 2010s both were prepared to exploit as far as possible. Never mind that each had originally been hesitant even to allow advertising to pollute its pages or interfere with the user experience. That was then. Since those years of initial hand-wringing, as investors and Wall Street demanded their quarterly increases in revenue, there was little choice but to turn up the heat, intensifying the reach of ads while hoping that their respective market positions were secure enough to prevent too many users from bolting. The essential bind of the attention merchant began tightening even on those Faustian geniuses who thought they had beaten the Devil.

YouTube, now a Google subsidiary, offers perhaps the starkest example of the change. Once entirely ad-free, by the mid-2010s many of its videos required users to watch a fifteen or thirty-second commercial to see a few minutes of content, making television's terms look almost respectful by comparison. That priceless impression of getting great stuff for free, the attention merchant's most essential magic trick, was losing its charm. As with any bit of legerdemain, once the actual workings are revealed, the strings made visible, it becomes ugly and obvious, drained of its power to enchant.

For in its totality the web seemed to be bobbing in the crosscurrents of an aggressive egotism and neurasthenic passivity. Thus trapped, it was suddenly vulnerable to capture by anyone with a promise of something different or better.

The world was slow to turn on the web, still after all the fountain of the new. Whether for reasons of politics or politesse, the web would suffer a lot of ruin before many critics, who'd fallen in love with its openness, would admit that things had gone awry. Even so, by the mid-2010s, more and more ordinary users had their own impression of the emperor's new clothes.

Netflix was thus something of a town scrap dealer, at the bottom of the content food chain. … Rather than putting it through the pilot process, the usual way to test a TV show's prospects, Netflix was willing to pay for two thirteen-episode seasons up front. Last but not least, Sarandos offered a pile of money: a reported $100 million, or as much as would be ordinarily invested in an expensive feature blockbuster.

Though he'd never directed a TV series before, Fincher would be given enormous creative control. Rather than putting it through the pilot process, the usual way to test a TV show's prospects, Netflix was willing to pay for two thirteen-episode seasons up front. Last but not least, Sarandos offered a pile of money: a reported $100 million, or as much as would be ordinarily invested in an expensive feature blockbuster.

Consider that in 2011, all commercial Internet content was driven by advertising. Sure, there were different types: programmatic advertising, native advertising, Google AdWords, YouTube prerolls, Facebook ads, and Twitter's sponsored tweets. But behind everything was the same old model: that of the attention merchant. Not since television in the 1950s had any medium become so quickly dominated by it.

From the beginning of its streaming venture, the firm had taken the bold and seemingly foolhardy decision to forgo advertising altogether. It rejected the attention merchant model, despite the obvious revenue potential. There was, perhaps, something natural to that decision, given that its DVD service was not ad-driven but by subscription. Still, the call was not inevitable. When asked to explain the company's aversion to advertising, Reed Hastings, Netflix's CEO, described it as part of a strategy of putting the viewer “in control of the experience.” Therefore, he said, “It's fundamental to that control orientation that we don't cram advertisements down people's throats.”

In business, there is always potential to gain something by zigging while everyone else is zagging. With everyone else—including its closest rival, Hulu, a joint venture of other media companies—reliant on advertising, Netflix could distinguish itself by offering a different kind of experience. But there was something more; in a sense, Netflix rediscovered a lost trove of human attention; not the splintered and fleeting kind being plundered by the web and cable TV, but deeper, sustained attention. It was a rich vein indeed, filled with an evident hunger for more engaging, immersive content.

The logical opposite of web or channel surfing, binging does not involve idly flipping through stuff, but engaging so deeply with a program that one can watch hours and hours in one sitting; the experience goes far beyond that of watching a feature-length film, instead competing with experiences like attending a performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle. House of Cards was thirteen hours long, yet Netflix reported that thousands of viewers consumed it in one gulp over the weekend of its release.

A Netflix poll of TV streamers found that 61 percent defined their viewing style as binge watching, which meant two to six episodes at a sitting. Grant McCracken, a cultural anthropologist paid by Netflix to investigate (and promote) the habit, reported that “TV viewers are no longer zoning out as a way to forget about their day, they are tuning in, on their own schedule, to a different world. Getting immersed in multiple episodes or even multiple seasons of a show over a few weeks is a new kind of escapism that is especially welcomed today.”

Netflix's success was a token of something unexpected despite having roots in the early 2000s. Television, the idiot box, the dreaded “unity machine,” the reviled “boob tube,” was declared by the smart money to be dead meat in the twenty-first century, destined perhaps to survive out of sheer inertia serving the poor and elderly shut-ins but eventually to go the way of the typewriter or horse and buggy. Always ahead of everyone in being wrong, the futurist George Gilder had published a book in 1990 entitled Life After Television. By 2007, even Damon Lindelof, co-creator of the hit series Lost, was boldly ready to wrongly proclaim that “television is dying.”

Many of the cable networks suffered from disenchantment caused by the slow surrender to pointless spectacle and inane personality. At the same time, however, the purveyors of high-quality, commercial-free programs—not only Netflix but HBO even earlier, as well as other networks like A&E and Showtime—began suddenly to prosper and attract audiences that approached the size of those attending prime time at its peak. HBO’s wildly popular show The Sopranos had more than 18 million viewers per episode over the early 2000s; a decade on, the network’s Game of Thrones would begin to reach 20 million per episode.

Of course, certain segments of the population had never really left television at all. As faithful, regular, and predictable as the prime-time audiences of the 1950s were lovers of baseball, football, soccer, and other sports; in the United States and abroad, such broadcasts demonstrated an almost uncanny immunity to the laws governing other kinds of programming. Remember, Amos ’n’ Andy, with 40 million listeners in 1932, would lose its entire audience not long after. I Love Lucy, among the most successful sitcoms in history, petered out after six seasons. Yet no such fading away has been detected among sports viewers, who renew themselves in every generation. Perhaps it is because in sports there is no abuse of one’s attention, no jumping the shark. There may be long-term rises and declines in audiences, but overall, as ESPN’s John Skipper put it, they are “shockingly reliable.”

The diminuendo had even forced the traditional advertising industry to up its game over the decade’s first century. In the long years of prime time’s uncontested sovereignty, and before the remote control, viewers could be expected to sit through commercials or, at worst, go off to get a snack of something they were being shown. The remote had done some damage to that fixity, but now a veritable revolution was relocating real control and choice in the hand of the viewer—at first through DVRs and the effectively unbounded selection of digital channels, and then streaming. Faced with unprecedented competition, advertising, as in the 1980s, was forced to become more intrinsically entertaining in order to have any chance of being effective.

But by far the most important innovation was the immersive, commercial-free television to which addled audiences bombarded from all sides were now flocking. A few clever producers like Tom Fontana, creator of HBO's Oz, and later David Chase, who conceived The Sopranos, were not only themselves attracted to the idea of making more filmic television, with psychological texture, but intuited that some viewers would be looking for a fully formed alternative reality they might enter for a time, a natural response when the built attentional environment becomes inhospitably chaotic. Indeed, what we witness in the disenchanted TV viewer is a return of something older—the deep, high-quality attention of motion picture viewers, those engrossed in a good book, or early television audiences, completely lost in the presentation. This is and always was the durable advantage of film and television, before the former was carved up by chase scenes and the latter by commercial breaks.

After watching Game of Thrones for a mere 30 seconds, my brain begins to produce the alpha waves typically associated with hazy, receptive states of consciousness, which are also generated during the “light hypnotic” stage of suggestion therapy. At the same time, my neurological activity switches from the left hemisphere to the right—that is, from the seat of logical thought to the seat of emotion. Whenever this shift takes place, my body is flooded with the natural opiates known as endorphins, which explains why viewers have repeatedly told scientists that they feel relaxed as soon as they switch on the television, and also why this same sense of relaxation tends to dissolve immediately after the set is turned off.

Buffeted by websites designed to distract, who-wants-to-be-a-celebrity, and the rest, streamed television—the convergence Microsoft could not quite foresee—was suddenly and unexpectedly emerging as a haven in the digital pandemonium. Television—which once had shown such promise to improve the human condition, but which had been kidnapped by commercial interests virtually at birth and raised to be the greatest attention harvester of the twentieth century and still the attention merchant's favorite servant—was now repaying the attention it attracts in a way that put the viewer's experience first.

To make things not for grazing but for deep engagement required a new set of narrative strategies, though it was possible to make such television at various levels of quality and sophistication, depending on what the viewer sought. So it had been, too, with the new idiom's progenitors, feature film and even the Victorian novel. While House of Cards might have made binging mainstream, in the decade before, writers of shows were inventing what Vince Gilligan (of Breaking Bad) termed the “hyperserial.” Unlike the dramatic series of old, this kind made sense only to those who committed to every episode and indeed multiple seasons of viewing.

For television, this change was radical. Let us remember that back in the 1950s, early programs—variety shows mainly—lacked plots altogether. The first plotted shows were, in the language of programming, “episodic.” And so a viewer could tune in to any episode of I Love Lucy, or Gilligan’s Island, knowing that only the plot was (in the first case) breaking into show business or (in the second case) getting off the island; any particular episode was merely a freestanding enactment of that story line, the principal aim being to showcase the characters, who, oddly, never learned. At the end of every episode (or, in an exceptional case, every few) the show would reset to its eternal starting point, like a video game returning to its starting screen for a new player. … In a hyperserial, the plot, like that of a long film or novel, has more of the flow of life. Each installment has its consequences; characters might disappear or reappear; a larger story is actually told. The press of characters and incident can vary; some hyperserials, like some lives, are easier to drop in to than others. But like any good story they are nearly impossible to understand from the middle.

That good storytelling should have emerged as a priority is perhaps the most dramatic statement one could make about what was happening to television, although its appearance attests a potential that the medium always possessed. That expression of this potential was first undertaken by shows that had eliminated commercials gives some indication of what the attention merchants have to answer for. That it took so long made one wonder why we had put up with anything else for so many years.

The first uses of “binge watching,” “binge viewing,” and other variants date to the late 1990s on online user forums, perhaps for the X-Files. In 1996, a fan looking for VHS tapes of the show wrote: “There are three of us who all got hooked at the same time, so I’d predict that there’d be some MASSIVE binge watching right away! :-).” The phrase, however, only began to show up in mainstream sources in 2003; Emily Nussbaum, of The New York Times, wrote an article on the growing popularity of TV show DVDs. “DVD’s are perfect for fast-paced arc shows like ‘24,’ increasing the intensity of the action and introducing the sickly pleasures of binge-viewing.” But the word became widely used in 2013 after Netflix began releasing the full seasons at once, prompting the Oxford Dictionary to add it to the language and also short-list it as “Word of the Year” (the ultimate winner was “selfie”).

Cook proceeded to lay into the very foundation of the attention merchant's model, which, since the early 2000s, had become dominant on the web. "You might like these so-called free services, but we don't think they're worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for god knows what advertising purpose. And we think someday, customers will see this for what it is." There was reason to suppose so, since "[a] few years ago, users of Internet services began to realize that when an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product."

That phrase was, nearly verbatim, what critics had been saying about all advertising-supported media for decades. "In selling commercial time to advertisers to sell products," wrote Robin Anderson in the 1990s, "broadcasters are also selling a product—their audiences." Richard Serra, the artist and cultural critic, put it this way in 1973: "Television delivers people to an advertiser....It is the consumer who is consumed....You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer. He consumes you."

The web, in theory, belongs to everyone, so no one likes an 800-pound gorilla telling them what to do there. But while Apple could be constitutionally controlling to a fault, in this case the wish to control the experience of its iPhone and iPad was a popular one. For as Apple had noticed, thanks to out-of-control advertising the mobile web was burning through the data plans, the battery life, not to mention the attention that all rightly belonged to its users, and violating their privacy for good measure. As the owner of the platform, and a company with no qualms about throwing its weight around, Apple was in a position to do something about the mobile web. Few who weren't attention merchants had cause to complain.

When September arrived, and with it, Apple's new operating system, it was worse than the web publishers and advertisers could have imagined. Adblockers, overnight, became far and away the most popular of apps. Millions of copies were downloaded, turning what had been a trend into a torrent. By the end of the year, an estimated 100 to 200 million Americans were now using some kind of adblocker some of the time. Apple's plot, if such it was, had paid off masterfully.

The problem for the attention merchants is that once people get used to avoiding advertisements, it's hard to accept the terms of the old arrangement. The scales fall from one's eyes, and sitting there staring at product pitches doesn't make sense any longer. As Michael Wolff put it, "If people can avoid advertising, they do. And further: as soon as they do figure out how to circumvent advertising, they don't go back to it."

Apple's maneuvers can be understood as a policing of its platform, which depends on payment. Hence, it could be seen taking the moral high ground on behalf of users, while also damaging its greatest rival, Google, at its point of greatest vulnerability. The adblocking campaign was, in the lingo, a twofer.

As for Google, it was left fighting with one hand tied behind its back; for it was now being haunted by the choice it had made at that fork in the road in 2000, when it went the way of the attention merchant. Android is, of course, a competitor of the iPhone, and thus Google's prime channel for accessing the minds of mobile users, a must-win cohort. But being wedded to an advertising model, Google was in no position to follow Apple and make Android the best experience it possibly could be. For the company was in a bind of its own making, stuck serving two masters, trying to enact the attention merchant's eternal balancing act between advertisers and users, at a time when the latter were losing patience.

In 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had written that reliance on advertising would inevitably make it difficult to create the best possible product; in the late 2010s, in competition with Apple, they faced their own prophecy. Since the death of its founder, Steve Jobs, Apple had softened somewhat in its opposition to open platforms, and was able to use its enormous profits to build better products. Google had bested rivals like Yahoo!, who were hamstrung by their own excessive reliance on advertising, but over the late 2010s, in competition with Apple, Google got a taste of its own medicine.

It seems only natural that the closer a technology feels to being part of us, the more important that we trust it; the same goes for someone who is creating a virtual reality for you to inhabit. And so, in the coming decade, the attention merchants will need to tread very lightly as they come as close as one can to the human body. Nonetheless, adaptation is a remarkable thing, and if our history has shown anything, it is that what seems shocking to one generation is soon taken for granted by the next.

Whether Apple was truly serving its users and business model and only incidentally exploiting Google's Achilles' heel is a matter of debate. But there is no doubt that the sentiment of revolt against the shabbiness of the mobile web was coming from an even deeper and broader place. Writing in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan described the media as “technological extensions of man”; in the 2010s it had become more obvious than ever that technologies like the smartphone are not merely extensions but technological prosthetics, enhancements of our own capacities, which, by virtue of being constantly attached to us or present on our bodies, become a part of us.

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.

The most urgent question raised by this book does not, however, relate to the eternal debate over whether advertising is good, bad, or a necessary evil. The most pressing question in our times is not how the attention merchant should conduct business, but where and when. Our society has been woefully negligent about what in other contexts we would call the rules of zoning, the regulation of commercial activity where we live, figuratively and literally. It is a question that goes to the heart of how we value what used to be called our private lives.

Custom answered these questions in previous times, but just as technology has transcended its former limitations, we seem less moved by the imperatives of tradition. At one time, tradition set limits on where people could be intruded upon and when. Even with the necessary technology, it was not always so easy to reach people in their homes, let alone while walking or in a taxi. For the majority, religious practice used to define certain inviolable spaces and moments. Less formal norms, like the time reserved for family meals, exerted considerable force as well. In this world, privacy was the default, commercial intrusions the exception.

The past half century has been an age of unprecedented individualism, allowing us to live in all sorts of ways that were not possible before. The power we have been given to construct our attentional lives is an underappreciated example. Even while waiting for the dentist, we have the world at our finger tips: we can check mail, browse our favorite sites, play games, and watch movies, where once we had to content ourselves with a stack of old magazines. But with the new horizon of possibilities has also come the erosion of private life's perimeter. And so it is a bit of a paradox that in having so thoroughly individualized our attentional lives we should wind up being less ourselves and more in thrall to our various media and devices. Without express consent, most of us have passively opened ourselves up to the commercial exploitation of our attention just about anywhere and anytime.

What is called for might be termed a human reclamation project. For comparison, consider the sort of effort undertaken to reclaim some (other) natural resource, as when returning the land under an abandoned parking lot to wilderness. Over the coming century, the most vital human resource in need of conservation and protection is likely to be our own consciousness and mental space. In practice, a movement might begin with individuals making incremental changes, ones as simple as setting aside blocks of time, like the weekend, to be spent beyond the reach of the attention merchants. The first stirrings can be seen in the existing practices of “unplugging” or taking “digital Sabbaths.” The same impulse can lead also to reclaiming more physical sanctuaries, not only the writer’s backyard shed, but the classroom, the office, and the home, as well—any place where we mean to interact with one another or achieve something we know requires a serious level of concentration.

While the goals of reclaiming our time and attention are easy to praise, they can prove surprisingly difficult to achieve. Even for a weekend, it can be painful to resist deeply ingrained habits like checking email, Facebook, and other social media; browsing random news stories, let alone more titillating clickbait; or flopping onto the couch to channel surf for a few hours. The difficulty reflects years of conditioning and the attention merchants’ determination to maximize, by any means possible, the time spent with them. When engrossed in work, reading a book, or playing with children, we may as well be stealing by the attention merchants’ lights. They want—need—us to be constantly poking around for dibs and dabs of their entertainment, to be tuned to commercial breaks in their programming, or to be catching up with friends in a manner that can also serve some branding effort.

How often have you sat down with a plan, say, to write an email or buy one thing online, only to find yourself, hours later, wondering what happened? And what are the costs to a society of an entire population conditioned to spend so much of their waking lives not in concentration and focus but rather in fragmentary awareness and subject to constant interruption? In this respect our lives have become the very opposite of those cultivated by the monastics, whether in the East or the West, whose aim was precisely to reap the fruits of deep and concentrated attention. What an irony it is that the lamentably scattered state of mind arises not from our own lack of drive but rather from the imperatives of one peculiar kind of commercial enterprise that is not even particularly profitable much of the time. The rest of the private sector may well have as much cause for complaint as the individual and society. It would no doubt be shocking to reckon the macroeconomic price of all our time spent with the attention merchants, if only to alert us to the drag on our own productivity quotient, the economist’s measure of all our efforts.

At bottom, whether we acknowledge it or not, the attention merchants have come to play an important part in setting the course of our lives and consequently the future of the human race, insofar as that future will be nothing more than the running total of our individual mental states. Does that sound like exaggeration? It was William James, the fount of American Pragmatism, who, having lived and died before the flowering of the attention industry, held that our life experience would ultimately amount to whatever we had paid attention to. At stake, then, is something akin to how one's life is lived. That, if nothing else, ought to compel a greater scrutiny of the countless bargains to which we routinely submit, and, even more important, lead us to consider the necessity, at times, of not dealing at all.

The great William James understood how important is the ability to ignore, when in 1890, he wrote that attention “is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought” and that it “implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”

According to a recent Pew study, one fifth of the U.S. public do not affiliate with religion, increasing just over 15 percent from five years prior. The growth of these religiously unaffiliated Americans, known as the “nones,” likely results from generational displacement.

It appears, however, that the original fascination with snake oil followed from the arrival of the Chinese railroad workers in the 1800s, who had brought with them snake oil. The remedy was made from the oil of the Chinese water snake, which was rich in omega-3 acids and reduced inflammation of the joints. Eventually, the remedy would be shared with Americans, but with the lack of Chinese water snakes in the U.S., many wondered how they would be able to create their own version. Ultimately, Clark Stanley touted the healing power of the rattlesnake, without reference to the original Chinese snake oil.

Within a year of running the first ad for Liquozone, the company received over 1.5 million requests for a free bottle. While the average cost per request was only 18 cents, the average sale per request was 91 cents.

In fact, the six guinea pigs inoculated with diphtheria bacilli and treated with Liquozone died within seventy-two hours, whereas two out of three untreated guinea pigs remained alive after receiving the same amount of diphtheria culture.

It should be noted that the effort had some private actors as well. A group known as the "Order of the White Feather," for instance, organized women to shame un-enlisted men by presenting "slackers" with a white feather as a sign of cowardice.

The total number of volunteers enlisted in the army between August 1914 and the end of 1915 was higher than the total number of men enlisted by conscription in 1916 and 1917 combined.

George Creel, Rebel at Large: Recollections of Fifty Crowded Years (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1947), 158. In fact, Creel portrayed the purpose of the Committee on Public Information as one of information distribution, and rejected the notion of propaganda as used by the Germans, which "had come to be associated with lies and corruptions. Our effort was educational and informative only, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that only fair presentation of its facts was necessary."

26. When creator James Montgomery Flagg later presented a copy of the poster to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Flagg revealed that he had used himself as a model for the image of Uncle Sam to avoid paying a modeling fee. The real-life inspiration for Uncle Sam, however, is somewhat more ambiguous and still in dispute. One popular theory links the inspiration for the national symbol to Samuel Wilson, a meatpacker from Troy, New York, who during the War of 1812 supplied meat to the American troops. Complying with labeling requirements, Wilson marked each package with "E.A.-U.S.," which likely stood for Elbert Anderson Jr., Wilson's contractor, and United States. But local soldiers attributed the U.S. stamp as standing for "Uncle Sam" Wilson.

27. The case, Debs v. U.S., was one of three cases where the Court had upheld the Espionage Act convictions during the war that restricted free speech. In preparing his speech at Canton, Ohio, Debs had been careful to comply with the act and claimed to deliver a speech predominately for the purpose of "Socialism, its growth, and a prophecy of its ultimate success." Nonetheless, the Court identified parts of the speech, which sympathized and praised individuals convicted for obstructing the enlistment service, and concluded that one could construe such parts as encouragement to those present to act similarly. As such, the Court found that "one purpose of the speech, whether incidental or not…was to oppose not only war in general but this war, and that the opposition was so expressed that its natural and intended effect would be to obstruct recruiting."

7. Advertising history is full of the reinvention of things, and some of these approaches and techniques had technically been invented in the late nineteenth century, at least in some form. However, they reached full institutionalization in the 1920s.

Lord & Thomas would send along the cartons to various physicians in the mid-1920s, requesting a response to whether "Lucky Strike Cigarettes…are less irritating to sensitive and tender throat than other cigarettes." The survey responses were then used to verify their claim that the "toasting process" made Luckies "less irritating." However there was no substantive proof of the claim.

To further strengthen the credibility of the claim that the "toasting process" made Luckies "less irritating," as verified by the surveyed physicians, the advertisement claimed that "the figures quoted have been checked and certified to by LYBRAND, ROSS BROS AND MONTGOMERY. Accountants and Auditors."

Bernays procured these names from the editor of Vogue magazine and convinced the women that their participation in publicly smoking on Fifth Avenue would lead to the expansion of women’s rights.

"The total annual volume of advertising dropped from $3.4 billion in 1929 to $2.6 billion in 1930 and then to $2.3 billion a year later." Advertising expenditures bottomed out "at $1.3 billion in 1933, only 38% of the pre-Depression level."

For example, in 1920 Westinghouse, a leading manufacturer and seller of radio hardware, established KDKA in order to sell radio through programming. Westinghouse would later have shared ownership with General Electric (GE), another manufacturer and seller of radio hardware, and with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), a jointly owned subsidiary of Westinghouse and GE of NBC. It therefore is no surprise that Merlin H. Aylesworth, NBC's first president, believed that "the main purpose of broadcasting…[was] not to make money" but instead "to give the public such increasingly better programs that people will continue to buy and use radio sets and tubes. And that works to the advantage not only of the manufacturing companies whose money is invested in the National Broadcasting Company, but to all makers of radio equipment, and the general public as well."

Ultimately, a study in 1932 concluded that "the program sponsor should realize that the housewife in a majority of cases is the member of the family who has the most influence upon family purchases and is the one who spends the greatest amount of time in the home. She is, therefore, the member of the family most easily reached by radio broadcasts."

Dichter's theory of "food genders" became especially sought out by advertisers; Dichter claimed that consumers had a subconscious, psychological response to foods, which influenced how they made their purchasing decisions. For this reason, Dichter believed it was important for advertisers to classify various food products along gender lines to gain insight into why consumers prefer one product over another.

In fact, McDonald disliked commercials even during the radio era. He believed that radio commercials had too many “roars, grunts, squawks, yaps, burps, and a mixture of adenoidal and…honey-chile voices.” “McDonald v. the Adenoidal,” 66. For this reason, starting in 1940 McDonald and Zenith spent $75,000 a year, approximately $900,000 in today’s terms, to support WWZR, a radio station that only broadcast music, without any commercials.

Throughout the 1960s, Robbin developed programs for the Office of Economic Development. One such program includes “The Index of Susceptibility of Civil Disorder,” which predicted cities that would likely experience riots. Ultimately, the model achieved 87 percent accuracy.

Murdoch held conservative political opinions, leading to speculation that the news broadcast would offer a "conservative alternative to what he views as liberal bias among traditional news." However, Murdoch, at the time, claimed that he would not champion a conservative agenda because he believed "it's more important to be fair."

In 1970, the FCC adopted the Prime Time Access Rule, which was implemented during the 1971–1972 television season in order to increase the level of competition and diversity in programming. At the same time, the FCC adopted the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules, which prohibited broadcast network ownership of syndication arms. Consequently, existing syndication divisions had to be spun off as new, independent companies. As a result of this regime, Oprah had the choice either to sell rights to her show to the ABC network, which would then sell it into syndication and keep the profits, or to run her show as a "first-run" syndicate with King World Productions, an independent syndicator of television programming.

In fact, Oprah inspired a series of tabloid talk shows that would produce the noun “oprahization,” which is the “increased tendency for people to publicly describe their feelings and emotions and confess their past indiscretion.”