39 Quotes by Tim Wu

It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the West - one captured by the phrase ''homo distractus,'' a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. 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.

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.

That which is good or great makes itself known, no matter how loud the clamor of denial. That which deserves to live - lives.

When an online service is free, you're not the customer. You're the product.

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.

For most of human history, the proliferation of the individual likeness was the sole prerogative of the illustrious, whether it was he face of the emperor on a Roman coin or the face of Garbo on the silver screen. The commercialization of photography may have broadened access to portraiture somewhat, but apart from wanted posters, the image of most common people would never be widely propagated.

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.

Perhaps a century of the ascendant self, of the self's progressive liberation from any trammels not explicitly conceived to protect other selves, perhaps this progression, when wedded to the magic of technology serving not the state or even the corporation but the individual ego, perhaps it could reach no other logical endpoint, but the self as its own object of worship.