Quotes from Tim Wu

kings and queens once depended on the mystique of inaccessibility as an expression of power.

The most direct and obvious way authoritarians abridge freedom is to limit or discourage or ban outright certain options—NO CHOCOLATE, for instance. The

The reason such prototypes are sustainable, however briefly, and ultimately important is not their capacity to do what the technology is meant to do; rather, their value is in exposing a working model to more minds that might muse upon it and imagine a more evolved version. And

Besides striking it rich, Day accomplished something else, too. For even more than the business model, the long-term social consequences of a newspaper for the masses were profound. Large numbers of people taking in daily news gave rise to what Jürgen Habermas has called a "public sphere"—a more quotidian term for this effect is "public opinion," but by whatever name, it was a new phenomenon, and one dependent on the nascent but growing attention industry.

It is inconceivable," said Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce, at the first national radio conference in 1922, "that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.

We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It is in this context that Fred Friendly, onetime CBS News president, made it clear that before any question of free speech comes the question of "who controls the master switch.

The most basic dividing line is likely between transitory and sustained attention, the former quick, superficial, and often involuntarily provoked; the latter, deep, long-lasting, and voluntary. What matters for present purposes is that selling us things relies mainly on the former—on which the attention merchant thrives—but our happiness depends on balancing the two.

It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to. How

David Ogilvy once put it, "I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard.

We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It

One man, after receiving a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, found himself followed everywhere with "insensitive and tasteless" ads for funeral services. The theoretical idea that customers might welcome or enjoy such solicitations increasingly seemed like a bad joke.

a "wireless telephone," the ancestor of our mobile phone, of which, by 1916, Bell already had a working prototype.

In 1915, a federal district court finally ordered the tattered Trust be dissolved.30 The American film industry was, for the first time, an open industry.

the best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation. That is to say, the industry learned how to secure the enactment of seemingly innocuous and sensible regulations that nonetheless spelled doom for any rival. In

The rise of Hollywood and of the Zukor model is another definitive closing turn of the Cycle. In the course of a single decade, film went from one of the most open industries in the United States to one of the most controlled. The flip shows how abruptly industrial structure can change when the underlying commodity is information. For

When it came to the war, he believed that the "consent" of the governed had been, in his phrase, "manufactured." Hence, as he wrote, "It is no longer possible…to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.

Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically,

If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.

To close the loop entirely, AT&T set about designing its own radio sets, presenting President Coolidge with one of its handsomer models.11 In a final stroke, such as to this day inspires heated debate over network neutrality, AT&T's new radios were engineered to receive only AT&T broadcast frequencies—and, not surprisingly, only AT&T programming.*

An empire long united, must divide; an empire long divided, must unite. Thus it has ever been, and thus it will always be.

The Cycle is powered by disruptive innovations that upend once thriving industries, bankrupt the dominant powers, and change the world. Such innovations are exceedingly rare, but they are what makes the Cycle go.

choices may be the cornerstone of individual freedom but, as the history of humanity shows, the urge to surrender to something larger and to transcend the self can be just as urgent, if not more so. The greatest propagandists and advertisers have always understood this.

By encouraging anyone to capture the attention of others with the spectacle of one's self—in some cases, even to the point of earning a living by it—it warps our understanding of our own existence and its relation to others. That this should become the manner of being for us all is surely the definitive dystopic vision of late modernity. But perhaps it was foretold by the metastatic proliferation of the attention merchants' model throughout our culture.

Hollywood's content, AT&T's lines, and Apple's gorgeous machines—an information paradise of sorts, succeeding