In 2011, the Twin Rivers school district in central California faced a tough situation. The district, never wealthy, was hit hard by the housing crisis of the early 2000s and the state government’s own financial meltdown. By the 2010s, schools were cutting not only extracurricular activities but even some of the basics, like heat. One day in winter, a student posted a picture of a classroom thermostat reading 44 degrees Fahrenheit.
Such were the circumstances when the Twin Rivers board was approached by a company named “Education Funding Partners.” EFP offered a tantalizing new way to help solve the district’s financial problems, using what it called “the power of business to transform public education.” Acting as broker, the firm promised that it could bring the district as much as $500,000 in private money per year. And, EFP stressed, its services would cost nothing. “EFP is paid solely out of corporate contributions,” the pitch explained, “essentially providing a free service to districts.”
To gain this free bounty, the board didn’t actually have to do anything. It needed only to understand something: that the schools were already holding an asset more lucrative than any bake sale. That asset, simply stated, was their students, who by the very nature of compulsory education were a captive audience. If the schools could seize their attention for the purpose of educating them, why not sell off a bit of it for the sake of improving the educational experience? Specifically, EFP was proposing that Twin Rivers allow corporate advertising within the schools. Moreover, EFP explained, it would bundle students from Twin Rivers with those in other school districts around the nation so as to appeal to bigger brands—the Fortune 500 companies—with deeper pockets.
If EFP was promising the district free money, its pitch to corporate advertisers was no less seductive: “Open the schoolhouse doors,” it said, promising “authentic access and deep engagement with audiences in the school environment.” Advertisers have long coveted direct access to the young, who are impressionable and easier to influence. Establishing a warm association with Coca-Cola or McDonald’s at an early age can yield payoffs that last a lifetime—or, in the lingo, “drive purchase decisions and build brand awareness.” That in essence is what EFP offered its clients: “an unparalleled system for engagement in the K–12 market”—a chance to mold the consumers of the future.
Twin Rivers soon began to see the light. “We need to be innovative about the assets we have and learn how to bring in more revenue,” said a spokeswoman. In other parts of the country, the prospect of opening schools to commercial advertising had prompted public debate. Not so in Twin Rivers, where the administrators seemed to regard signing the deal, which they did in 2012, as a matter of duty. “In these challenging economic times,” said the chief business officer, “our students are counting on us to find ways to make our resources stretch further than ever before.” EFP, for its part, promised all messaging would be “responsible” and “educational.” With that, the school doors were thrown open.
Twin Rivers is only one of the many school districts in the United States—mostly in poor or middle-class areas—that have begun to rely on selling access to their students as an essential revenue source. Some schools plaster ads across student lockers and hallway floors. One board in Florida cut a deal to put the McDonald’s logo on its report cards (good grades qualified you for a free Happy Meal). In recent years, many have installed large screens in their hallways that pair school announcements with commercials. “Take your school to the digital age” is the motto of one screen provider: “everyone benefits.”
What is perhaps most shocking about the introduction of advertising into public schools is just how uncontroversial and indeed logical it has seemed to those involved. The deals are seen as a win-win, yielding money that it would be almost irresponsible to refuse. Yet things were not always this way. There was once a time when, whether by convention or technological limitation, many parts of life—home, school, and social interaction among them—were sanctuaries, sheltered from advertising and commerce. Over the last century, however, we have come to accept a very different way of being, whereby nearly every bit of our lives is commercially exploited to the extent it can be. As adults, we are hardly ever unreachable; seldom away from a screen of some kind; rarely not being solicited or sold to. From this perspective, the school administrators are merely giving students a lesson in reality, exposing them to what is, after all, the norm for adults. But where did the norm come from? And how normal is it?
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.
Who exactly are the attention merchants? As an industry, they are relatively new. Their lineage can be traced to the nineteenth century, when in New York City the first newspapers fully dependent on advertising were created; and Paris, where a dazzling new kind of commercial art first seized the eyes of the person in the street. But the full potential of the business model by which attention is converted into revenue would not be fully understood until the early twentieth century, when the power of mass attention was discovered not by any commercial entity but by British war propagandists. The disastrous consequences of propaganda in two world wars would taint the subsequent use of such methods by government, at least in the West. Industry, however, took note of what captive attention could accomplish, and since that time has treated it as a precious resource, paying ever larger premiums for it.
If the attention merchants were once primitive, one-man operations, the game of harvesting human attention and reselling it to advertisers has become a major part of our economy. I use the crop metaphor because attention has been widely recognized as a commodity, like wheat, pork bellies, or crude oil. Existing industries have long depended on it to drive sales. And the new industries of the twentieth century turned it into a form of currency they could mint. Beginning with radio, each new medium would attain its commercial viability through the resale of what attention it could capture in exchange for its “free” content.
As we shall see, the winning strategy from the beginning has been to seek out time and spaces previously walled off from commercial exploitation, gathering up chunks and then slivers of our un-harvested awareness. Within living memory it was thought that families would never tolerate the intrusion of broadcasting in the home. An earlier generation would find it astonishing that, without payment or even much outcry, our networks of family, friends, and associates have been recruited via social media to help sell us things. Now, however, most of us carry devices on our bodies that constantly find ways to commercialize the smallest particles of our time and attention. Thus, bit by bit, what was once shocking became normal, until the shape of our lives yielded further and further to the logic of commerce—but gradually enough that we should now find nothing strange about it.
This book shares with my previous one, The Master Switch, the basic objective of making apparent the influence of economic ambition and power on how we experience our lives. As in that book, I’d like to pose at the outset the cynic’s eternal question: What difference does the rise of the Attention Merchants make to me? Why should I care? Quite simply because this industry, whose very business is the influence of consciousness, can and will radically shape how our lives are lived.
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. Who has not sat down to read an email, only to end up on a long flight of ad-laden clickbaited fancy, and emerge, shaking his or her head, wondering where the hours went?
While allowing that many of us are perpetually distracted, spend too much time on social media or watching television, and consequently consume more advertising than could ever serve our own useful purposes, the cynic may still ask: But isn’t it simply our choice to live this way? Of course it is—it is we who have voluntarily, or somewhat voluntarily, entered into this grand bargain with the attentional industry, and we enjoy the benefits. But it is essential that we fully understand the deal. Certainly some of our daily attentional barters—for news, good entertainment, or useful services—are good deals. But others are not. The real purpose of this book is less to persuade you one way or the other, but to get you to see the terms plainly, and, seeing them plainly, demand bargains that reflect the life you want to live.
For the history also reveals that we are hardly powerless in our dealings with the attention merchants. Individually, we have the power to ignore, tune out, and unplug. At certain times over the last century, the industry has asked too much and offered too little in return, or even been seen to violate the public’s trust outright. At such moments, the bargain of the attention merchants is beset with a certain “disenchantment,” which, if popular grievance is great enough, can sometimes turn into a full-fledged “revolt.” During those revolts—of which there have been several over the last century—the attention merchants and their partners in the advertising industry have been obliged to present a new deal, revise the terms of the arrangement. We may, in fact, be living in such a time today, at least in those segments of the population committed to cord-cutting, ad-avoiding, or unplugging. We are certainly at an appropriate time to think seriously about what it might mean to reclaim our collective consciousness.
Ultimately, it is not our nation or culture but the very nature of our lives that is at stake. 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 goal of what follows is to help us understand more clearly how the deal went down and what it means for all of us.