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.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 14