39 Quotes by Tim Wu

When we speak of living environments and their effects on us, then, we are often speaking too broadly – of the city, the countryside, and so on. Our most immediate environment is actually formed by what holds our attention from moment to moment, whether having received or taken it. As William James once put it, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.

It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life’s immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels.

The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected – rural dwellers or the urban poor – who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.

Sometimes the crowd is right; often it is wrong. It remains for science to read the balance.

For how we spend the brutally limited resource of our attention will determine those lives to a degree most of us may prefer not to think about. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. The.

Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is.

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.

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

It is shocking how little it has been necessary to defend the sheer reach of the attention merchant into the entirety of our lived experience. Formerly the state of technology imposed its own limits, but at a time when these limits have been effectively eliminated, it is for us to ask some fundamental questions: Do we draw any lines between the private and the commercial? If so, what times and spaces should we consider as too valuable, personal, or sacrosanct for the usual onslaught?