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.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 411