Quotes from Tim Wu

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.

What Lippmann took from the war—as he explained in his 1922 classic Public Opinion—was the gap between the true complexity of the world and the narratives the public uses to understand it—the rough "stereotypes" (a word he coined in his book). When it came to the war, he believed that the "consent" of the governed had been, in his phrase, "manufactured.

We can usefully think of the mass-produced poster as an early screen—though a static version, to be sure—the phenomenon now so ubiquitous in our lives. The

the lasting power of attentional habits is never to be underestimated

From the beginning, Microsoft had proven the mantra that good artists copy but great artists steal. Its first operating system (MS-DOS) was actually a clone of CP/M, another operating system.* Microsoft Windows was a rip-off of the Apple Macintosh operating system; Microsoft Word and Excel were copies of Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3, respectively.

It's the same old story," he would say, years later; "the inventor gets the experience, and the capitalist gets the invention.

like late Rome, the Bell system now existed as an eastern and a western empire—Verizon and AT&T (whose

we see that the enlightened monopolist can occasionally prove a delusional paranoid.

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

We have already remarked how who we are can be defined, at least in part, by what we attend to - how much more so this is when what we attend to is determined less by our volition and more by ambience.

The story of Daniel Lord and the Legion of Decency goes to a central contention of this book: in the United States, it is industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech.

Without exception, the brave new technologies of the twentieth century—free use of which was originally encouraged, for the sake of further invention and individual expression—eventually evolved into privately controlled industrial behemoths, the "old media" giants of the twenty-first, through which the flow and nature of content would be strictly controlled for reasons of commerce.

As a character in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, set in 1876, remarks, "Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is.

the mogul makes the medium: the imprint of the personality inevitably informs it, often no less than the technology underlying it. Turner

granted him a broad and unspecified authority. In his sunny way, Creel would take that authority and run with it, going to extremes that must be described as alarming. In 1917, the United States remained intensely divided over

Broadcasters are also selling a product-their audiences.

The owner of an iPod or iPad is in a fundamentally different position: his machine may have far more computational power than a PC of a decade ago, but it is designed for consumption, not creation. Or,

while television is supposed to be free, it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.

if everything is entrusted to a single mind, its inevitable subjective distortions will distort, if not altogether disable, the innovation process.

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.

talking about the habit of constantly checking for updates on email/FB/Twitter, etc.) The check-in would eventually become a widespread attentional habit; ..... No other has compelled so many minds with such regularity - regularity that has the feel of a compulsion, of a mental itch constantly in need of being scratched.

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.

If we want to define how "open" any industry is, we should start with a number: the cost of entry. By this we simply mean the monetary cost of getting into the business with a reasonable shot at reaching customers. Is it in the neighborhood of $100? $10,000? Or more like $1 billion? Whatever the magnitude, that number, most definitively, is what determines whether an industry is open or closed.

A man need merely light the filaments of his receiving set and the world's greatest artists will perform for him,