Showing results for "The Attention Merchants Tim Wu" in All Categories

You've seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don't know is that someone is responsible for all this...

The “groundbreaking, magisterial, alarming”(Financial Times) exposé of the unprecedented form of power called "surveillance capitalism," and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior The heady optimism of the Internet’s early days has turned dark. Surveillance...

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this "attention economy", we need to recognize the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to take back control.

Weaving insights from philosophy, neuroscience, and history into a rich narrative, The Shallows explains how the internet is rerouting our neural pathways, replacing the subtle mind of the book reader with the distracted mind of the screen watcher. A gripping story of human transformation played out against a backdrop of technological upheaval, The Shallows will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

Are we drowning in information, or simply being swept away by it? In The Age of Mess-Information, Victor Odasnac explores the chaotic collision of the internet, social media, mobile technology, and artificial intelligence—and how this has led to an overwhelming flood of information that is reshaping our society. Beyond misinformation and disinformation lies mess-information: a relentless barrage of narratives, truths, and lies that obscures clarity, erodes critical thinking, and leaves us questioning whether truth itself is even attainable. This thought-provoking book takes you on a ...

Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) argues humans can't fully grasp complex issues. We rely on simplified ideas (stereotypes) and media portrayals ("pseudo-environments") to form opinions.

Why has punditry overtaken news, with so many media outlets pushing partisan agendas instead of information? Comedian Stephen Colbert's catchword "truthiness" has captured something essential about our age: that people are more comfortable with ideas that feel true, even if the evidence for those beliefs is thin.

On the 40th anniversary of Neil Postman's prophetic book Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Scrolling Ourselves to Death gathers today's most incisive writers to think critically about the shaping power of contemporary technology. This book explores Postman's insights, connects them to the challenges facing Christians today, and turns difficult challenges into life-giving opportunities for the church. Stepping back from their screens, listeners will be equipped to live faithfully, and grow spiritually, in a "scrolling ourselves to death" world.

In this book, Arun Sundararajan, an expert on the sharing economy, explains the transition to what he describes as "crowd-based capitalism" - a new way of organizing economic activity that may supplant the traditional corporate-centered model. As peer-to-peer commercial exchange blurs the lines between the personal and the professional, how will the economy, government regulation, what it means to have a job, and our social fabric be affected?

Since its original publication in 1975, Animal Liberation has awakened millions of people to the existence of "speciesism"—our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals—inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them. Now, for the first time since its original publication, Singer returns to the major arguments and examples and brings us to the current moment.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Our ability to pay attention is collapsing. From the author of Chasing the Scream and Lost Connections comes a groundbreaking examination of why this is happening—and how to get our attention back. “The book the world needs in order to win the war on distraction...

In this audiobook, David Gunkel offers a provocative attempt to think about what has been previously regarded as unthinkable: whether and to what extent robots and other technological artifacts of our own making can and should have any claim to moral and legal standing.

“Irresistible is a fascinating and much needed exploration of one of the most troubling phenomena of modern times.” —Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times bestsellers David and Goliath and Outliers “One of the most mesmerizing and important books I’ve read in quite some...

Molly McPherson is a nationally recognized expert on crisis public relations management in the age of social media. She helps communicators create the right message, at the right time, and deliver it in the right place. From her years of crisis-management experience and mining news stories and tweets, Molly created frameworks to level up your confidence for communicating with ease in crucial crisis moments, so you can own the conversation.

“Stunning revelations…This is an account that long will be consulted by anyone trying to understand not just Iran but warfare in the 21st century…an important book.” –Tom Ricks, New York Times FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE INHERITANCE, A REVEALING AND NEWS-BREAKING ACCOUNT OF...

In a house designed for manipulation, paranoia, and power plays, sixteen strangers are cut off from the outside world—watched every second by cameras, judged by millions. Welcome to Big Brother. A show ahead of its time, it was once dismissed as fluff television. Now this voyeuristic reality show has quietly become a cultural juggernaut. But what are the costs of turning human lives into entertainment? What kind of psychological toll does it take to be put in isolation, under constant surveillance, in a perpetual state of suspicion?

There are giants among us, passing largely unnoticed, intent on carrying out a secret plan to enslave all humanity. They may not look like giants today, but their bloodlines extend all the way back to the Nephilim—the offspring of angels who mated with human women described in Genesis 6 when giants roamed the land. Gary Wayne, author of The Genesis 6 Conspiracy: How Secret Societies and the Descendants of Giants Plan to Enslave Humankind, details the role of modern-day Nephilim in Satan's plan to install the Antichrist at the End of Days.

The #1 New York Times Bestseller One of Barack Obama's Summer Reading List Picks From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and MSNBC and podcast host, a powerful wide-angle reckoning with how the assault from attention capitalism on our minds and our hearts has reordered our politics and...

This "compellingly hard-hitting" bestseller from a Pulitzer Prize finalist gives readers the complete untold story of the top-secret military base for the first time (New York Times). It is the most famous military installation in the world. And it doesn't exist. Located a mere seventy-five...

Can reading a book make you more rational? Can it help us understand why there is so much irrationality in the world? Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now (Bill Gates’s "new favorite book of all time”) answers all the questions here Today humanity is reaching new heights of...

Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2020 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country's hard-won democracy.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice · A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2025 · A People Best Book of November 2025 · An NPR Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2025 A revealing exploration of a quarter century of cultural stagnation, examining the commercial and...

The stuff of conspiracy theories makes for great, entertaining stories in movies, books, and television. And there is no shortage of subjects: from who really killed JFK to the truth behind 9/11. And then, there are subjects from alien invasions to the Moon landing was simulated - theories that are truly out of this world, which according to some, is flat. Many of these crazy concepts have jumped off the pages or screens to become so pervasive in our culture that thousands - even millions - subscribe to them as reality.

Who killed Jeffrey Epstein? Two journalists look for answers. A must-read for fans of the Netflix docuseries Filthy Rich. In A Convenient Death, investigative reporters Alana Goodman and Daniel Halper search for the truth of what really happened to Jeffrey Epstein. With access to Epstein's...

Working with New York Times bestselling author Kent Heckenlively, Alex Jones masterfully gives you the deeper discussion about such hot button topics as the truth behind the globalists plans for artificial intelligence (AI), the central bank digital currency, social credit scores, Big Tech tyranny, censorship, fifteen-minute cities, the unholy alliance between big business and big government, the military-intelligence-industrial complex—which is hell-bent on eternal war—and the all-out assault on free speech and the Second Amendment.

If you really want to know what’s happening in the world, this is the one book you must hear now. Alex Jones is the most censored man on the planet and you should ask yourself why that is. There is a powerful authoritarian takeover in process that is seeking to capture the entire human system and turn it into an artificial factory farm controlled system. We are in a war for the future of the world. In this book, you will hear from the world’s elites, from their own mouths, what they are planning for you and your families and you will learn what you can do to fight it.

A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed the "engineering of consent". During World War I, he was an integral part of the US Committee on Public Information, or CPI, a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise, and sell the war to the American people as one that would "Make the World Safe for Democracy".

"It's easy to understand why Brad Meltzer and many other authors love to have Scott Brick perform their work. His delivery is impassioned, impossible to ignore...impossible to turn off." —AudioFile From the New York Times bestselling authors of The Nazi Conspiracy and The Lincoln Conspiracy...

At the height of the Cold War, JFK risked committing the greatest crime in human history: starting a nuclear war. Horrified by the specter of nuclear annihilation, Kennedy gradually turned away from his long-held Cold Warrior beliefs and toward a policy of lasting peace. But to the military and intelligence agencies in the United States, who were committed to winning the Cold War at any cost, Kennedy's change of heart was a direct threat to their power and influence.

In December 2017 the famous porn star August Ames committed suicide in a park in the Conejo Valley. It happened a day after she’d been the victim of a pile-on, via Twitter, by fellow porn professionals - punishment for her tweeting something deemed homophobic. A month later, August’s husband, Kevin, connected with Jon Ronson to tell the story of how Twitter bullying killed his wife. What neither Kevin nor Ronson realized was that Ronson would soon hear rumors and secrets hinting at a very different story - something mysterious and unexpected and terrible.

PsyWar is when a government coordinates and directs deployment of propaganda, censorship, and psychological operations (psyops) tools in campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion. PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order exposes the history and tactics of modern psychological warfare on the American people and offers a way forward for citizens to resist totalitarian control.

An instant New York Times bestseller! “Informative, endlessly entertaining.”—BuzzFeed “Generation X’s definitive chronicler of culture.”—GQ From the author of But What If We’re Wrong comes an insightful, funny reckoning with a pivotal decade It was long ago, but not as long as it...

From the easily disproved to the wildly speculative, to straight-up hucksterism, Pseudoscience is a romp through much more than bad science—it’s a light-hearted look into why we insist on believing in things such as Big Foot, astrology, and the existence of aliens. Did you know, for example, that you can tell a person’s future by touching their butt? Rumpology. It’s a thing, but not really. Or that Stanley Kubrick made a fake moon landing film for the US government? Except he didn’t. Or that spontaneous human combustion is real? It ain’t, but it can be explained scientifically.

Chilling initiations. Big banks and money manipulations. Possible links to the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Adamses, and Bushes. Reviewing the evidence, documents, and connections, The Illuminati: The Secret Society That Hijacked the World by award-winning journalist and author Jim Marrs shines a light on the history, workings, continuing influence, and pernicious and hidden power of this secret order. Surveying experts, Marrs cuts through the wild speculation and the attempts to silence critical thinkers to tell the true story of this secret cabal.

From the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly bestselling author of The Real Anthony Fauci comes an explosive exposé of the cover-up behind the true origins of COVID-19.

Throughout the world, mental capacity is declining, especially among young people, while depression rates are rising dramatically. Meanwhile, one in forty men and women suffers from Alzheimer's, and the age of onset is falling rapidly. But the causes are not being eliminated, quite the opposite. Can this just be coincidence? The Indoctrinated Brain introduces a largely unknown, powerful neurobiological mechanism whose externally induced dysfunction underlies these catastrophic developments.