Your Undivided Attention - When Attention Went on Sale — with Tim Wu

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

An information system that relies on advertising was not born with the Internet. But social media platforms have taken it to an entirely new level, becoming a major force in how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us. Columbia law professor Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness, takes us through the birth of the eyeball-centric news model and ensuing boom of yellow journalism, to the backlash that rallied journalists and citizens around creating industry ethics and standards. Throughout the 20th century, radio, television, and even posters elicited excitement, hope, fear, skepticism and greed, and people worked together to create a patchwork of regulation and behavior that attempted to point those tools in the direction of good. The Internet has brought us to just such a crossroads again, but this time with global consequences that are truly life-and-death.

So you have troll wars, you have fake news, you have sort of the race to the bottom, all at the early days of the invention of the business model. That's Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants. It's a book about the invention of the attention economy when 19th century newspapers began the original race to the bottom of the brainstem. And yes, they circulated stories that were just as ridiculous as anything you'd find on today's social media. He wrote a six-part series about the moon

and what he'd found there, which surprising to our years, they had giant lakes, huge trees, and the great revelation, these man bats that flew around and had promiscuous sex. But what's striking about Tim's research is not just that these stories keep cropping up in print, on the radio, on television, and now online. What's really striking is the rare moments

when the race comes to a stop. There are moments when audiences wake up and say, enough. I think it usually stems from, some shock to the system that is so outlandish that there actually tend to be mass movements. And it's not that surprising given that what you have here is people's minds being fooled with. And I think when people suddenly realize that they've been fooled, they become very upset. With coronavirus, we stand at just such a crossroads. Today on the show, we'll see what happens when the public demands a change of course.

And what happens when the attention merchants continue with business as usual, which is the theme of Tim's second book, The Curse of Bigness, about antitrust in the New Gilded Age. I'm Tristan Harris. I'm Azaraskan, and this is your undivided attention. Starting with your book, The Attention Merchants, you essentially go through the history of the people who have commodified and learned how to find and acquire our attention. like oil drilling and mining. What can we learn going back, especially to the period of the penny press or yellow journalism, from them to today's issues with technology platforms? The book is slightly modeled, actually, after Upton Sinclair's oil in the sense that it takes

attention as this commodity whose value was not very well understood. It's notable that oil in its early manifestation was not understood to be valuable other than as a sort of health cure for certain diseases and some people put on their faces for cosmetic reasons. Similarly, I think we all agree attention has become pretty valuable. And I trace the origins of that to the invention of the ad-supported newspaper, the penny press, particular a man named Benjamin's son, in the 1830s, who had the idea ingenious in its time, now obvious to us, that he could sell his paper at a loss, penny,

but make the money up by cultivating a much larger audience and reselling his audience. So he was kind of the inventor of this idea you hear sometimes, that the audience is the product. What's so interesting is that as soon as a New York son started to make money, as soon as he got the business model going, the one that we're so familiar with right now, gather giant audience, resell it, as he started to attract competitors,

and immediately the contest went down, and otherwise it went to the most lurid, the most outrageous. Now, I should say that one of Benjamin's sons' great innovations is that he did make the news interesting. Prior to him, newspapers were expensive and excruciatingly boring. If you look at the old ones, they reprint political speeches in their entirety. They have comings and goings of ships, just terrible stuff. So he had things.

The first page of this first newspaper was all about a melancholy suicide, a man who killed himself because his father wanted to ship him off in Indonesia, but there was a woman he loved. You know, already you're interested. So another newspaper was run by a man named Gordon Bennett. And his idea was death. I think in one issue there was 14 stories of either historical death, current death. It was all death. And he, for example, pioneered the first in-person account of a murder victim, a prostitute

who had been hacked to death with an axe and lit on fire. So anyway, it went, you know, downhill. And the sun started realizing it was in competition, was losing subscribers. So, you know, what did they do? They commissioned a famous scientist who had the world's largest telescope to exclusively reveal what he'd found with his discoveries and he wrote a six-part series about the moon and what he'd found there which surprising to our years they had giant lakes huge trees and the great revelation these man bats that flew around and had promiscuous sex and the whole so you had the invention

of many things right at the very beginning is that where the meme those flying monkeys from the wizard of oz came from you know it could be could be they look a little bit like that at least the Yeah. They also, Gordon Bennett, that he had his other way of getting attention was to insult other newspaper editors. So he entered in these giant beef wars. He called them, it's actually a little bit like Bloomberg Trump. It was like, you're a fat, no good, useless, you know, waste of humanity.

So they had, they printed these battles with each other. That got people excited. Now, from there, I think it even gets worse. You have efforts to interfere with politics. And so, you know, journalism just runs pretty far down pretty quickly based on this attention model. And you know, you don't have to be any great genius to see the implications for our times. Right. You know, we found this new thing, found a new business model, and pretty soon the race went to the bottom. This is sort of the first time I think we see that newspapers, we think of them

being in the truth business, but actually they're in the attention business. The point that you're bringing to is once one newspaper discovers this business model, here's these other ones that are charging subscriptions, they can't do that anymore because one has just found a new magical price of a penny. And then that creates this new race. And I think that's kind of what you're pointing to about how we have to look at the race condition, not just here's this new business model. No, that's exactly right. Another, I think, important story from newspaper and journalism is they do recover. You know, there is this natural or built-in or historic examples of counter movements. People feel like things have gone too far. We've got to do something about it. And

journalists began to develop their own code of ethics in the early 20th century based on the idea that the 19th century had just been too full of abuses and the idea of just printing random stories as the truth was dangerous and you know these basic rules of journalism ethics which I think the most important are you don't print rumors you obviously don't print things that are completely false and you check with the opposing side to see if they have any comment or if they want to dispute what's being said those three principles journalists are so used to it. They don't even think about it. But they do a lot. Generally speaking, New York Times

is not running stories about life on the moon. By the way, I should say that story was never retracted. Really? In New York side, yeah, it's still out there. So there's still, the aliens are still out there on the moon. Maybe. The story was never retracted. In fact, it was decades before anyone thought it might not be true because how are you going to figure it out? You don't have another telescope. So what I'm interested in is what causes that swing back? Because here we are, we're in this world where it's sort of just yellow journalism. Anyone can print anything. we get the race to the bottom of the brainstem, conflict, everyone's yelling at everyone. And then why do we suddenly develop journalistic ethics?

Because I think through the history of your documentation of different movements in the attention merchants from colonizing radio to television, first we go too far into the commercialization process, the stakes were a lot higher than just we don't get as good of information as we used to. We actually get things like wars, or we get fascism, or we get these other bigger consequences. And so how do you see that? Yeah, I'll talk about a very small version. sort of a larger version. A small version is the famous quiz show scandals from the 50s. In the

1950s, televised quiz shows were invented. The quiz shows themselves were so evocative because, you know, the underdog would come back and win in this dramatic fashion. And, you know, the plots were incredible, exciting. You had the female plumber, which was sort of shocking at the time, or the young African-American boy who was a math genius or something like this, all these kind of interesting characters, but it turned out that the whole thing was as rigged as professional wrestling. That, in fact, the winner was predetermined, people were forced to throw the shows. And they had all these elaborate rituals to verify that there wasn't cheating on the show. That's what made it worse.

How interesting. Yeah, they had like, you know, these kind of extensive rituals where the, like, questions were pulled out of some secret box and locked in a safe or something. Right. But actually, the person's going to win got the questions earlier. So when they realized the whole thing was a hoax, I, I, it had a, I think, profound shock and it created a big change in how people thought television should be conducted. Walter Lipman wrote this famous column denouncing what television had become

and calling for public media. The Kennedy administration, when they came to power, made the creation of public broadcasting one of their priorities. The Ford Foundation got into it. So there's a story where basically civil society took the initiative to try to transform television. I mean, I don't know if they fully succeeded, but they did something. And in fact, you see in this cycle, there's always this moment of novelty and infatuation. People were infatuated with television, they loved it. And during that period, there's almost a blindness to some of the negative sides of these things. And I think the harshness of that shock that it was all a big lie is many people think a big thing that led to the idea of public television

and a different business model and a different code of ethics. And, you know, it didn't clean up TV right away. but I did think many people feel that led to the movement towards public broadcasting. Let me add another example I think is important. So the radio had a prolonged honeymoon where people thought it was going to cure all of our problems, change politics as we knew it. I'll paraphrase a quote, you know, the president will no longer be this distant figure, but in fact be in your very living room like your own father.

This is the beginning of fireside chats and FDR. Even before then. They just thought it would be great. And, yeah, the fireside chats. But then you had the experience of the totalitarian regimes beginning understand radio as what Goebbels called the spiritual weapon of fascism and totalitarianism.

And as a machine gun can mow down your opponents, the radio can convince them. You were required by law to listen to the main broadcasts of the Nazi leaders, like required. By German law. By German law. And in fact, on the ground, they rounded people up and moved them into

special rooms to listen. And it was illegal to listen to foreign radio stations. Later, that became punishable by death during the war. Wow. So, yeah, they took attention pretty seriously. Yeah. And, you know, the sustained use of the radio for propaganda in the 30s and through the Second World War, I think really had a pretty profound effect on people's feeling that this was a panacea for all of society's wrongs. You know, instead it became this terrible weapon of war. And I think that lesson, by the end of the war, you start to see government again, the FCC saying, well, we really need to be really careful about how radio is used. And from that comes the Fairness Doctrine, sort of regulatory measures. Which was in when?

That was when was the Fairness Doctrine. Fairness Doctrine begins, it kind of begins in the 40s. The Fairness Doctrine suggested that broadcasters, when they treated the subject of great controversy, had to do so in a, I'm hesitating. to use these words, but fair and balanced way because they were forced to sort of confront it in some more neutral fashion. That's the old sort of image of CBS and

Walter Cronkite. That's sort of the Fair and Miss Doctrine encapsulated. And so it was partially sort of an ethical duty. They also had a legal duty to allow people of response time if they'd been impugned on the radio. It made things like Rush Limbaugh impossible.

We sort of just have this unrelenting, and frankly Fox News. It tried to make media into this different kind of organ. And I think it was in reaction to this dangers of propaganda, dangers of disinformation, the idea that it could become a weapon that unites a whole population and drives them in directions that can be extraordinarily dangerous. So part of what we're getting at here is essentially pendulum swings back in power. So going too far in one direction, whether that was let's democratize radio and give it to everyone. And then you create World War II and enable Hitler. and then swinging back into journalism codes of ethics, a more public broadcasting, publicly interested radio system.

There's a few other examples of these swingbacks. You talk in your book, The Attention Merchants about television, the emergence of advertising, and then Zenith, the TV producer, having an interesting innovation to deal with the rise of advertising. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Sure, I do. Now, on to Zenith, yeah, there was a pretty strong reaction to radio advertising when it was introduced. Radio at first, there was an unofficial ban on advertising in the early business. days of radio. In fact, President Hoover, I guess he was then secretary, Herbert Hoover, gave a bunch of

speeches. He was like, how could we possibly take this scientific marvel-like radio and pollute it with a bunch of hot dog ads and shoe polish? It's like unthinkable. And people will never stand for the idea of being in their own living room and suddenly having advertiser inside their house. That's crazy. But things change. That's actually why at first you had sponsorships, you know, It would be like... As a route around the ban on advertising. Yes. So you'd have like the Duracel brass band or the Miller-Examo orchestra or something like that.

But eventually radio ads became common and television ads began as well. And the reaction, one of the reactions was Zenith, which was the Apple of their day, I guess, innovative device maker headed by an eccentric genius. And they came up with their ad killer, which we now call the remote. control. The early versions of it, it looked like a pistol. Like you're literally holding your remote control, pointing it at your TV. And it zapped out the annoying, and that was their heads. It like zapped out that annoying advertising. It's like the first Chrome extension ad blocker, but for your TV.

Exactly. Now, it didn't quite fast forward or something. I think it, original form kind of just turned the volume off, I think. They were pretty primitive, the early ones. It didn't always work. But they got better, obviously, and they became the remote controls we know now. Of course, that led in different attentional directions because that people just started, you know, changing, changing things. It's one of those things where you think if you give people control that they're going to be able to sort of, the idea was you sort of responsibly, you know, skip ads or who knows what, but instead it led to people sort of fragmenting their own attention and channel surfing. Yes, that's channel surfing is the term. Which actually seems to be the general principle. When you force the responsibility back

on the user, then the forces of attention are still pulling, and so you're not actually giving them a way out. It's a sort of like fungibility of responsibility. History is full of high hopes for giving people responsibility over their own decisions, and then sometimes not going exactly the way people might have hoped. Well, I think the thing you're pointing to, Aza, is just as we saw the rise of advertising permeate television, instead of saying, let's actually put some controls in the default infrastructure, suddenly we made it your responsibility, which was the remote control to zap the

ads. And so much like some of the problems that are there today, like there's disinformation, there's polarization, there's these problems, but let's ask you the individual to be more responsible. And we're seeing, you know, one, how good faith efforts to do that actually created a secondary problem of sort of the channel surfing thing. And also that it's just insufficient because only some people get the kind of personal responsibility tool, aka the remote control, although that did become a standard later. I also want to give one other example for listeners, which is Paris and the invasion of attention in Paris with a certain history of posters. Yes. I think of the poster as kind of an antecedent to the screen. The invention of the

poster was a big deal in the 19th century. It transformed the urban environment. You know, these big, colorful lithographic images were something new. And another one of these cycles, people were incredibly excited about them at the beginning, particularly in Paris, where they were first disseminated. You have all these famous artists who started doing them for a while. And then gradually people, French people, Parisians become disgusted. And there's a movement that targets the poster as the source of all kinds of problems. It's a little bit like now. People can't concentrate. They're out of control. They link it to prostitution and lowered morals and all kinds of stuff. And eventually they enact laws which restrict where posters can be. Those laws are still in

place in Paris. If you look carefully, you'll see they have special plaques that suggest posters can't be here. And it may have something to do with why Paris remains such a beautiful city. You may not notice it, but there's actually a limit on how much advertising there is in the city of Paris. And that was a public regulatory approach, as opposed to, like, figure some way out not to look at them. Because they could hand people a pair of glasses that you could individually have to put on, that would filter out all the posters, but then that puts the responsibility on the individual, Not that they had that technology in the day. Yeah.

And it does raise this question of, I mean, how much advertising do you need for the world to work? Right. Right. Facebook would argue you need quite a bit. I mean, you don't need none. It's helpful to learn about new stuff, you know, but think of even 10 years ago when Facebook and Google had a lot less advertising. It was like the world so bad back then.

You know, actually, I think it was pretty good. Overall, what I hear as a theme in your work is almost a question of like zoning laws for what is in commercial interest. versus what has to be maintained in the public interest. In the same way that we do with drilling in national parks, I'm reminded of E.O. Wilson, the sociobiologist, saying that, like, the best solution for how to deal with ecological crisis and the climate sort of situation is actually just to reserve, I think his book is called Half Earth,

that just half the Earth is just off limits for ocean mining, fishing, drilling, etc. And I think of kind of what your work is on the attention is very similar. It's like how much do we let commercial interests versus public interests? Where is that line? And, you know, we're sitting here in New York City. There's a park every few blocks. We get to live in a world where there's a park every 100 blocks. How much different would New York feel if there wasn't children's playgrounds or parks? It would feel like Kuala Lumpur, which is sort of unrelentingly city or other cities that you've been to where there's nothing like that. And, you know, frankly, I think it's worse. I think that's a very perceptive reading in my book. I am very drawn to zoning laws. I'm, I guess, less radical than some people who would perhaps want a total transcendence of advertising altogether or of commercial. There's parts of advertising I like, and even parts in commerce that I think are important to human thriving. But, yes, I don't think we zone carefully at all. I don't think we make the hard decision of just saying, okay, no, this entire area is a park.

And now I'm talking about our consciousness or our private lives. So one thing we've allowed, for example, is, you know, the home to be kind of invaded in ways that I think, you know, damaging to things like family and familial relationships. We've allowed friendships to become a little over commodified as well. You know, it said, I think people 40 years ago think, how weird that you have, oh, my friend went here and recommended this and a kind of commodification? I think that's a subtle thing, but I agree with you that it's important either for our representatives or for ourselves to try and zone our lives. And, you know, when we are buying or selling or doing things, that's a valid thing. I enjoy it as much as anyone. But to keep it in its place is, I think, important for a healthy society.

Well, if I think about, you know, the economic and attentional power of something like TV versus radio and, you know, you could say, oh, well, they were intruding on the home space. So there's a sort of level of new intimacy that's been granted to that attentional landscape. We've kind of reached into a new area of life that we didn't reach into before. You know, as we go from posters in Paris to radio to television, there's sort of an increase in the horizontal surface area. we're able to reach people at. And then I think of a sort of vertical level

where we're actually reaching more precisely, more legibly into the psychographics, the demographics, the precise targeting, the depth of emotional resonance that I can get into you. You know, can I actually reach directly into your fears and paranoia in the case of Cambridge Analytica? And I want to sort of map that as a trajectory because essentially what I'd love to ask you about

is what makes something like a Facebook or a Google, not just kind of the next evolution of TV radio as, oh, it's just a bigger block, of attention. There's something, I think, deeper and more nuanced and more scary about that kind of consolidated power. What would you say to that? Yes. In some ways, we are now switching channels from the attention merchants to the curse of bigness. We are in a time where we've sort of accepted the unrestricted, unregulated mining of the human consciousness, the harvesting of human attention. You know, we are the resource and I think it takes its toll. And I think there's a

particular concern that I have with the concentration of the power to do so in a smaller number of entities, one or two or three, monopolists or oligopolis or whatever word you want to do. And that comes from my concern that the monopolization of attention markets historically has been a extremely potent and powerful source of both political power and commercial power that is hard to hold accountable and essentially vests a small number of actors with a great number of the powers of government. And these powers haven't been exercised fully. Obviously, we've had totalitarian regimes which seized that power or the Soviet Union and used it to every extent possible. But we're building the mechanism for it when we allow the monopoly form to come to dominate attention markets.

we're creating the infrastructure for control of the masses. And I think that should be a concern to anyone with a knowledge of the history or a concern for democratic governance. People look at proposals saying we have to break up the big tech companies in response to problems like misinformation, polarization, addiction, mental health, isolation. And they say that's not going to solve the problem. So like, why should we do this break them up thing? But you're pointing to a more dangerous different thing, which is the pure consolidation of power into single entities creates this kind of temptation with the government to sort of want to be in bed with that power and to kind of commandeer it or to be in relationship to it. Why is the concentration of economic power just on its own, even if it was steel or railroads, linked to things like populism, extremism, or fascism? With the rise of concentrated power and monopoly across the economy, not just in tech, it also takes.

tends to lead to long-lasting inequality. And the reason is that the monopoly and oligopoly forms tends to aggregate profit towards itself as opposed to spread it out. And one of the things you saw in the 30s was an enormous suffering in the middle classes, which created this appetite for stronger leaders who were going to finally read the country back

to where it needed to go. And I don't think there's any doubt, you know, not just in the United States, but around the world, you're seeing an extraordinary rise of, populist, and much of it is actually anchored in kind of an anti-monopoly spirit or a sense of the wealthy or getting everything. And it's very familiar from the 1930s. To give you a few example, the German movement that led ultimately to the Third Reich was in many ways almost

an anti-globalization protest. And the most interesting thing I think about someone like Hitler and other leaders of the Third Reich is that they both catered to the populist anger, said they were going to sort of take on the global economy on their behalf, but also made friends and made friendly with the great monopolist. So they managed this balancing act. And I think you see it in our current times. Look at a country like Brazil, where you have this rise to power of authoritarian government again after decades. Now, you know, right now it's elected, but it could get worse. And a lot of that was premised on the idea that there's this huge economic crash. Brazil had given all too much to the monopolies. Everything was about global.

And again, the leadership is trying to do this thing where they both weirdly, like, promise the working classes, a new destiny, a return to greathood, a national salvation, but at the same time are also catering to and gaining support from monopolies in terms of, we'll keep the labor unions down, we'll create new markets for you to explore, and so forth. So that's the pattern I think we need to look out for. And, you know, this doesn't directly relate to the intentional economy, except in the following form, which is, I think that the more. monopolize the channels of communication are, the easier it is to access attention and control it, the greater the possibilities for using those channels as well for having a media or social media

that is friendly to government become compounded. And that's the kind of thing I'm worried about. And so, you know, when you hear about, you know, Warren wants to break a big tech or people want to prevent big tech from, you know, just having too much power, I think we have to think about the political concerns and not just the nitty-gritty of what would that do for competition and would that really help or make things better? It's a sort of more macro concern about concentrated power as an evil on itself, as a historic danger that we're talking about. It's almost like antitrust should be renamed anti-iniquality

or anti-populism or anti-fascism because essentially the concern about concentrated power is not even about the content of what the technology is doing, although there's a relationship there we can get into, but more just the way that poses dangers for, you know, geopolitical risk, World War III type scenarios. I'm not trying to fan the flames of fear,

but just that we've seen patterns that create those kinds of risks in the past. And I think, you know, it's antitrust and big tech and all of that sounds like kind of a boring policy conversation. I often think just per the kind of Frank Lunt's sort of view of the world of language, don't call it an estate tax, call it a death tax, because then people get riled up about it.

Like, let's not call it antitrust, let's call it a anti-fascist sort of move. How do we prevent these things and consolidated forms of power from getting too dangerous. Yes, I think that's right. I think the highest and best calling of antitrust, you know, it's an old word and probably a better one, would be anti-monopoly or private power control, something like that. And, you know, in some ways tech might be, I mean, people are aware of tech.

It's right in their faces. It seems to have a lot of power. I don't deny that. But some of the other industries, you know, can be just as bad pharma, broadband. You know, why do we accept a broadband monopoly? I think broadband does more to broadband and cell phones. which are both concentrated, you know, do more to take money from the middle classes than, I mean, you think about the fact the bills are, you know, double or triple what they are in other parts

of the world, and you think, and that in its way is a form of private taxation, you know, just allowing this huge part of the household budget to be hollowed out by broad. You need broadband to kind of be a citizen that is able to be productive, and you need a cell phone as well. And we've let those things, you know, become this massive part of the household budget. and they don't need to be at those prices. The margins are absurd as anybody who takes a careful look knows. I want to be careful with this next thought, but as you were talking about the way that Monopoly is sort of cozy up to government,

it did make me, once again, return to thinking about Facebook and their policy, which is to say, we will fact-check your advertisements unless you're part of the government. If you're a politician, it's all fair game. Yeah, I have been a critic of Facebook's advertising, advertising policy. And the worst version of it, the most terrifying version, is that at the margins, they see doing this as a way to stay in the good graces of government, particularly the current government. And, you know, there's a lot of other reasons, oh, we don't want to, but they've

never explained why they're in this game at all. I mean, this is one of the questions. Say more about that. Well, you know, one question. So Facebook runs political advertising, and as you said, allows it to be maliciously false so long as it's political advertising. If it's non-political, if it's like a pill that promises to make you lose 100 pounds, they won't run that because it's unless you can back it up. But they will let you run something that says, you know, Joe Biden paid Ukraine a billion dollars not to prosecute his son or something like that, some straight out lie, as long as it's political. And the worst version of it is the concern that, well, the federal government,

Grebman has a lot of ways of hurting Facebook. Facebook wants to get along with them, and on the margins, they're like, man, maybe we should just keep running these political ads, because they could get out of the business of political ads altogether. That's what Twitter's done. And Pinterest and Microsoft and LinkedIn and a whole set of the companies. Yeah. And in fact, one of the ways they defend themselves is by saying, oh, we're not doing this for

the money because, look, it makes such a tiny sliver of money compared to the rest of our revenue. Which I believe, I do believe that. some people might be more skeptical, but I believe that. Well, or rather it's saying from there, then it's not going to hurt them much to turn it off. Right, exactly. But there are some people who are skeptical. Oh, they really want the money.

But I don't think that's right. I think it is at the margin. You know, you have this kind of thing in yourself. It's like, well, maybe why make an extra enemy? Why not keep a friend? And that friend being the executive branch. Being the executive branch, being this particular White House, which relies on, like no other white house before it, on defamatory and deliberately militarily.

malicious lies in its advertising. You know, that is, for some reason, their go-to. And, yes, so, you know, not banning their favorite forms of advertising. And more generally, the whole idea, when you think about it, you have this one company and, you know, a bunch of people and their decisions about advertising rules can have such an effect on the presidency that everybody cares about. They're just these little, you know, private rules, no oversight, no public involvement, you know, has more effect than any legislation or anything else.

pretty crazy and scary. And the idea, if it's possible that even they feel any pressure to keep running political ads, I think, kind of outlines the cause for concern in a nutshell. There was 250 Facebook employees who wrote the letter to Mark Zuckerberg saying that they disagreed with this ad policy. And so far, Zuckerberg has not flipped his position and they're continuing to go down the route of unchecked political advertising that's friendly to the current administration, which is in a way, like, and cozying up in kind of an indirect way. What would you say maybe to those employees who are to maybe arm them up even better with an argument as to why this is so dangerous? I'd say more power to them.

I would say that employee movements right now, in my view, are one of the most important forces in trying to inculcate ethics in Silicon Valley. And I think they play a really important role. I think they are moving us towards this, I think an important idea that tech be more like. like a profession with its own ethics and, uh, which is what happened with journalism, as you said, which happened with journalism, happened, lawyering, a doctor. I mean, the fact is that the risk of state the obvious tech is incredibly powerful. It affects people's lives and, you know, almost as much as the practice of law or accounting or, you know, prescribing drugs. And those are all bodies, which, first of all, regulated, but also they have their own ethical codes about what

they will and won't do that are pretty important. And the development of that is really, to me, and one of the most important uplifting things I've seen in the last five years or so. Now, in terms of your question, how would I think to arm them with an argument? I mean, the big question, they want them to be subject to the same fact-checking. I think the idea of even running these ads

puts them constantly in the game being subject to potential political manipulation or even the appearance of such. Like, why do they always want, if they really want to be out of this, which I believe at times. I don't believe that Facebook has a favorite for president, or if they do, I don't think they're trying to do it.

But if they want to be believed in that, if they want to credibly say we are a neutral platform, why be in this game at all? It hurts the argument that they credibly don't want to be choosing favorites when they get themselves into the game at all. And they're always going to be pressured. You know, if you put yourself in that, you know, there's no part way.

if you're in the game, you're going to be constantly subject to political pressure. And if they really don't want to spend all their time in Washington, even in some ways I can add up if they don't want to be subject to potential regulatory regimes that are very negative that are used as threats to try to get what people want out of them, then they should get out of this game. We went through this swing in journalism from the kind of yellow journalism, race to the bottom of the brainstem, Penny Press, published salacious lies that can get us into wars. And then it took us wars and seeing where all that went wrong to flip,

into this new ethical code of conduct, regulated, and for the public good, the invention of even publicly interested institutions, media, institutions, public broadcast, public radio. If we're talking about that with technology today, how do we get to kind of a publicly interested internet again? If you think about Facebook as a new and unprecedented level of consolidated attentional power, because attention in this case is it controls identity, our self-concept, how we look and appear to other people, levels and degrees of social validation, the basic means of communication, how we catch up and know what our friend's lives are like, our political world, our election world, our

public sphere. I mean, it is controlling children's development with, take things like Instagram, which basically own all the hours of teenagers spending time during high school. When you own that many degrees of society, you've essentially like sold all of your public parks where kids grow up in to a private entity. So now Verizon's all running the parks. how do we create this new balance where we kind of, if we learn the lessons of what created a publicly interested journalism or a publicly interested in media, I feel like we need a publicly interested in humane internet again. Sounds like we need something like the Center for Humane Technology.

I might be tuning my own horn. I know I believe very strongly that it is time for a new generation of tech tools that start from a very different place. And, you know, this is partially your mission, but I'll just voice it. You know, why don't we have social media, which has as its only goal, trying to connect people in helpful ways? You know, it's only goal. It's not also trying to resell you to advertising. It's not also trying to get you stuck on for as long as possible. But it really is working just for you to try to improve your relationships with people who matter to you.

You know, often people say, oh, you know, don't go to a stock broker who works on commission. They'll just try and sell you a bunch of stuff. go with someone who you pay, who they try to figure out what actually is good for you. And, you know, that kind of thing in social media, either a paid model or a public model, you know, like the PBS or NPR, where they just start from a different position and when they're maximizing different stuff, seems to me really urgently needed in our time. I mean, that's where it all starts from. And, you know, that comes from social media is kind of obvious target. I also think our tools could be better designed to serve us, whether it's browsers. our phones, you know, you name it.

I'm suspicious of anything that has two masters that has like some kind of other goal. Just like that stockbroker is really... Are they looking up for your interest or are they looking up for their own? Yeah, exactly. When their business model is to look out for their own. Yeah, and I think we're kind of contaminated

with tools that aren't properly serving us. Yeah, that have ulterior motives. They have ulterior matters. Imagine if you had a chainsaw that, like, chopped down trees but also had like a little screen on the side and have you watch some ads. You wouldn't want that thing and chop your legs. leg off. And, you know, we've kind of accepted that for all kinds of tools that we use. And I just think

it's like that is the next frontier. And I've been waiting and hoping, you know, I don't know who it could be, whether PBS does it, some, you know, a lot of billionaires with a lot of things they want to do with their lives to improve the earth. Could be company, I don't know, I choose Apple because they consider themselves more privacy protective. They could start a low-cost social network. I don't know who it could be, but we need something, we need more generation of tools, we need more resources devoted to this cause. I think it's

urgent, frankly, not just for the future of tech, but the future of humanity and of civilization. Yeah. And that's my call, and I know it's your call too, to the next generation of tech people. You know, in terms of how we would actually get there, we'd like to just

leave people with, what would be a story between now and let's say two years from now, where we did it? the states regulated in such and such a way. We broke up these companies and specifically split up, you know, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram. However you would do it, because I think the way this also has happened in history with IBM, with AT&T, with Microsoft, how these trials were in some cases the remedy in and of themselves and led to, you know, if you think about the chokehold Microsoft had on being able to prevent the internet from flourishing with Internet Explorer 6, and then

letting that go led to the creation of Google and this sort of flourishing of the internet. I think telling that story, how would we do it in the next two years? Give people that optimistic vision. Give me five years. So I think it's a number of things. So one thing is, as you know, there's antitrust investigations ongoing of all the major tech platforms. And maybe it starts to be realized that, you know, as much as many people sort of enjoyed these buyouts, that allowing them to buy all their competitors, particularly Facebook and Google,

maybe wasn't so good for the health of the tech ecosystem, that in fact they just started to eat the whole ecosystem. There's so many projects that really never got where they could have been because they kind of got bought out and destroyed or bought out and nullified. And through the lawsuits that seek the disjorgement of some of the acquired properties, we sort of revitalize the Silicon Valley ecosystem in the first place and make it possible to compete in some of these areas that have long thought been sort of off limits for competition. So that's one set of things that happened. Another set of things, maybe federal government or states start passing stronger anti-surveillance laws, maybe motivated. by the sense that the news media has gotten out of control with its direct marketing to people. Feel that, you know, really this inculcate, we look back maybe at some of the elections during the Trump administration and say, like, how do we let, you know, so much bad news get to so many

people through targeted advertising? And why do we let people know so much by each other? So you have a new sort of generation of anti-surveillance laws that make targeted advertising less attractive as a business model. And we sort of wonder, well, why did we think that was such a great thing anyway. People can look by themselves. They don't need stuff following you around, and it didn't really seem to be that great even as an advertising model. It actually just had terrible journalistic and media consequences by giving people more of what they want in terms of news, and it wasn't even that good for selling products. So that goes out of fashion. And in that space, you have the rise of models that are either subscription-based or truly free, not advertising-based

on the public media. And that kind of shakes things up, and people all feel a little less angry all the time, a little less frantic, a little less driven by this sense that we're in this end of time's war. And maybe we mallow out a little bit more and return to this idea that small is beautiful and that tech becomes kind of fun again. I mean, it was someone who grew up in the tech industry and, you know, there was a time people wanted to invent cool tools that made people's lives better, not like little gimmicks to make you click on stuff. Right? And, you know, some of tech is still doing them. A lot of people in tech are like, what am I building here? isn't really what I signed up for.

And, yeah, I think tech itself kind of goes back to building gadgets and stuff that make people's lives better. It's never completely disappeared. But it's kind of become a side business with advertising as sort of the center and logistics of the center. And we look back at this decade, I think, in five years and go like, wow, we really let things go too far in the 2010s. Let's go back to what an earlier spirit was.

And that is my hope for the next five years. We ban the trade of human organs and obviously human slaves. It's not so radical to think of banning the trade of human behavior. When you think about the business model being not just the selling of our attention, but the selling of the change to our behavior's beliefs and biases. I agree. And those who write the history, people like me will look back and talk about how the Center for Humane Technology had this critical period

and others rose up at sort of called out what was going on. When I read the history, there is this. important role played by people like yourselves who sound the alarm. There's many examples, frankly, of advocates and concerned citizens who say, you know, something is going on here that isn't quite right. And, you know, even if the movement doesn't completely succeed, even marginal small changes that turn in something big can be really important. You know, I'm inspired sometimes by like the health food movement where in the 80s and 70s, it seemed like you're losing, you're fighting a losing war.

Right. You know, who cares about trans fats or all this is just complicated. People just want their burgers, fries, you know, get lost. And, you know, look at it now. It's like completely transformed things. So, you know, as they say, big things have small beginnings. Thank you so much, Tim, for joining us. And everyone should read your book, The Curse of Bigness and the Attention Merchants for more.

Thank you. Thanks for having me on. So imagine it's. five years from now, how did we make this transition to a kind of public and humane internet? States started to pass laws. We publicly woke up from a period of the kind of equivalent to the yellow journalism or yellow social media period that almost caused various wars due to disinformation threats. We created a new culture of responsibility, a new code of ethics for software engineers based on this tragedy. Yeah, the kids coming out of college no longer work at

the, they just refuse to work at the companies that are involved with this kind of economic. And then now universities across the country and across the world had ethics and computer science programs baked into the education and not allowing you to graduate until you had become certified as actually a practitioner of this. And we had regulation that actually reflected the need to protect the boundary non-manipulated spaces of our attentional lives. The ending of his book, The Attention Merchants, Tim has an epilogue called the Temenos, which is the name for the sacred, precinct, a part of our lives that is sacred. And I just love this frame because it's the notion that there's a part of our lives that we don't allow to be commercialized by the profane. How do we retain those places that we call safe and sacred? Tim often talks about his work as this is kind of a human reclamation project. How do we reclaim this space for a more publicly interested

and socially interested world of both economics and politics and obviously technology? You know, a kind of thing where that's already happening is the social media blackouts before elections. Right now it's advertising before elections, but you could imagine all of social media gets turned off, and it becomes that sacred space where you get to re-engage with the people around you. Often it could be hard to say, all right, we should have more time off, but come on, look at the realities of the world, like where are you going to find that time? But it's one of those, like, where are you anchoring against? imagine a world which didn't have any weekends and just really imagine what that would feel like you're working all the time there is no moment where you get to do nothing together with your family and your friends and that was normal and that was normal how hard it would then be to how ridiculous

it would feel to try to add two days a week imagine where you didn't do anything imagine the effect to GDP it'd be it'd be terrible but because we have weekends as a humane technology we accept them and we're super grateful for them. And it wouldn't be inconceivable to start to add more of those kinds of things as a technology to our lives. Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Our executive producer is Dan Kedmi and our associate producer is Natalie Jones. Nor al-Samurai helped with a fact-checking.

Original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday. And a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making games. podcast possible. A very special thanks to the generous lead supporters of our work at the Center for Humane Technology, including the Omidiar Network, the Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Evolve Foundation, Regney Mark Philanthofos, and Knight Foundation, among many others. Huge thanks from all of us.