So there was a man named Benjamin Day who I call the first of the attention merchants,
the founder of the New York Sun, who was in his own way a business genius and an innovator.
He had this idea which was as opposed to selling a newspaper for six cents which was the normal
way of doing it, he would sell his newspaper for a penny and try and attract an enormous
audience and resell that audience to advertisers.
So the newspapers at the time, the six penny papers, they’re a little bit boring.
They covered politics and finance.
They didn’t have crime stories, that kind of thing.
And he introduced a sort of a far more interesting newspaper.
The very first issue was all about the suicide of a man who had been separated from his lover.
It had stories of death, mayhem, destruction, gossip and was sold at such a low price that
he managed to attract these enormous audiences which then were resold to advertisers.
Now the thing about that penny price is it was a money losing proposition unless you
sold enough and unless you reach enough advertisers to make it worth it.
So he pioneered this unusual business model which today is found in as many places as
Google, Facebook, Instagram, you know, it’s sort of taken over our lives.
So we are in a period where there’s something of a revolt going on against advertising.
There are a lot of people who consider themselves immune to ads or try and avoid all advertising.
There’s cord cutters and there’s a lot of people who use ad blocking technologies
to try and have themselves sort of in an ad free zone.
And it’s reached the point where it’s a little bit of a kind of a war, maybe a war
of attrition.
And I’ll say two things about that.
First in the history of advertising there have been similar moments.
It seems that about every 30 years or so there’s a kind of revolt.
Usually because things have gone too far in one way or another and I think in some ways
things have gone too far in the web.
That there is just too much, too intrusive, too much privacy invasion and people are starting
to say, you know, this is not what I bargained for.
Whatever deal we had I think you’re exceeding the terms.
I think that hopefully it will lead to a place where we strike some kind of new deal, some
kind of understanding is made.
You know the web lacks any kind of limits as to where advertising should or shouldn’t
go.
It’s not like newspapers or something where there’s, you know, you don’t have every
page of the newspaper completely covered in ads.
There’s kind of a bargain.
And I hope we reach that on the web.
Another thing that it will probably lead to however is also more and more efforts to use
advertising that is surreptitious, that gets under the radar, that you don’t really realize
is advertising.
You might even call it manipulation or nudges.
I think you’ll see this particularly with some of our devices or new technologies.
Let’s say you use Google Maps trying to find something, a place to eat.
How much of that decision is based on what’s nearby and the best, how much it is based
on who is paid at Google to sort of put the ad there.
I think as we move into an era where we increasingly rely on intelligent intermediaries defining
things for us or to be our guides in life the possibilities of surreptitious marketing
increase.
And I think that’s a direction that we’ll probably see, particularly with so much resistance
to advertising.
You know I think as a culture we’ve become obsessed with free stuff almost frankly quite
to our detriment.
You know it’s almost impossible for many people to consider using anything on the web
that isn’t free.
Somehow it’s like an outrage if you have to pay for it.
And there’s been a cost to that.
I think that when many people signed up for Facebook in the early days it just seemed
fun and free.
There was very few advertising or very little advertising.
But slowly we’ve come to understand that you’re paying in very different ways.
You’re paying with your data which you hand over.
You’re paying with your attention.
If you spend I don’t know how many minutes or even hours a day on Facebook you’re giving
over something of tremendous value.
And ultimately there’s several ways in which we’re paying.
First of all we are granting unprecedented levels of access to ourselves, to our portal
of judgment which ultimately has commercial influence or can influence our life in other
ways.
So we may without realizing it end up living lives that are a little different than we
might have wanted to buying more things than we expected to, voting for people we might
not have thought we would.
All these sorts of things.
We make ourselves open to influence, let’s just put it that way.
And the other cost is that ad supported mediums have a constant need to deliver a receptive
audience.
And since we are the audience we are increasingly programmed to be more receptive which means
open to distraction, ready to see something, constantly clicking and looking.
There’s an effect that I call the casino effect which I think comes to describe our
lives on the web where you sit down to write an email and then suddenly you notice four
hours have gone by.
You’re not quite sure what happened.
You do know you clicked on a bunch of stuff and you went here and you went there.
I think that is kind of becoming our lives and that’s a very attractive mental state
for advertisers because you’re constantly clicking, constantly refreshing, constantly
seeing new stuff.
Whether it’s good for us is an entirely different question.
And so I think we’re at risk of losing some of our ability to deeply focus, to get work
done, to have the kind of attention span you need to do more profound kinds of work.
And that I think is some of the cost of free.
So one of the inspirations for this book was the philosopher William James who is one of
the first psychologists writing in the nineteenth century.
And he had this one line that really struck me where he said roughly, you know, your life
experience is what you choose to direct your attention to.
And so at the end of your day is when it’s all said and done what your life was will
be the culmination of what you paid attention to.
You know and that’s in some very profound way true.
And it does suggest something interesting about our times.
We live in a time where our life experience moment to moment is more intermediated than
any other time in human history.
It’s almost like we live in a built environment of attention.
Most, I don’t know exactly how you count the hours but many of our hours are screen
as opposed to physical.
I mean the screen is physical but it’s some virtual thing.
And in some sense we live in a cocoon almost, a projection at this point.
You know we’re still here but in terms of what our attention is paid to a lot of it
is not here.
And so I think that whether that’s good or bad I’ll leave to one side but it certainly
makes it important that we understand the motives of those who are creating the cocoon
that you’re living in.
If we are living in kind of a simulated reality that’s where we are, virtual reality is
just the stronger version of it.
You better pretty profoundly trust who’s creating your reality for you and maybe have
some say in what that reality looks like.
And I worry and part of the reason I wrote this book is to examine those motivations.
And if it is fundamentally the motivation to gather you up for resale to something well
that might not actually be in your interest or sort of suddenly manipulate you in different
ways.
But even more profoundly than being sold to which is kind of annoying there is this issue
of living your own life, making decisions which are yours.
And I don’t care if you listen to the founders or John Stuart Mill or if you’re a religious
person but the importance of decisions that are truly ours is so fundamental, so profound
to a realized life that I think we need in this day and age there’s so much that we’re
exposed to is motivated by other ideas.
We need to be very careful about reserving time and space for ourselves and making decisions
which we can truly call our own in order to live a life you can truly call your own.