5. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999).
6. Erik Barnouw, A History of Broadcasting in the United States, vol. 3, The Image Empire, from 1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 36–38.
7. See, for example, Gary Wolf, Wired: A Romance (New York: Random House, 2003), 107, noting that the rationale for requiring user registration was to “give sponsors exact information about viewers and eventually allow targeted advertisements to hit specific users.”
8. See, for example, Matt Haughey, “State of MetaFilter,” MetaTalk, May 19, 2014, metatalk.metafilter.com/23245/State-of-MetaFilter; Tavi Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter,” Rookie, Nov. 30, 2018, www.rookiemag.com/2018/11/editors-letter-86.
9. See Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 7, which discusses the psychological role of “anchors” in determining market bubbles.
10. “About the NBER,” National Bureau of Economic Research, www.nber.org/info.html.
11. See Solomon Fabricant, Toward a Firmer Basis of Economy Policy: The Founding of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1984), 11, www.nber.org/nberhistory/sfabricantrev.pdf.
12. Michael Kaplan, “The Self-Consuming Commodity: Audiences, Users, and the Riddle of Digital Labor,” Television and New Media 21, no. 3 (Jan. 11, 2019), 240–59.
13. Lauren Johnson, “When Procter & Gamble Cut $200 Million in Digital Ad Spend, It Increased Its Reach 10%,” Adweek, March 1, 2018, www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/when-procter-gamble-cut-200-million-in-digital-ad-spend-its-marketing-became-10-more-effective/amp.
14. Jessica Davies, “After GDPR, The New York Times Cut Off Ad Exchanges in Europe—and Kept Growing Ad Revenue,” Digiday, Jan. 16, 2019, digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exchanges-europe-ad-revenue.
15. Natasha Lomas, “The Case Against Behavioral Advertising Is Stacking Up,” TechCrunch, Jan. 20, 2019, social.techcrunch.com/2019/01/20/dont-be-creepy.
16. Roger Lowenstein, “Economic History Repeating,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 13, 2015, www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-hall-of-mirrors-by-barry-eichengreen-1421192283.
17. See Joel Seligman, The Transformation of Wall Street: A History of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Modern Corporate Finance (New York: Aspen, 2003), 26–28.
18. Ibid., 34–35.
19. Ibid., 44–46.
20. Ibid., 31.
21. Ibid., 37.
22. See, for example, David Pegg, “The Tech Giants Will Never Pay Their Fair Share of Taxes—Unless We Make Them,” Guardian, Dec. 11, 2017, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/11/tech-giants-taxes-apple-paradise-corporation-avoidance.
23. Seligman, Transformation of Wall Street, 44.
24. Ibid., 46.
25. Ibid., 39.
26. Ibid., 53.
27. Allen Ferrell, “The Case for Mandatory Disclosure in Securities Regulation Around the World” (Harvard Law and Economics Discussion Paper no. 492, Sept. 2004), www.ssrn.com/abstract=631221.
Epilogue
1. World Bank, Global Economic Prospects 2007: Managing the Next Wave of Globalization (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2006), elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/978-0-8213-6727-8.
2. See Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018), 42–43.
3. Robert E. Lucas, Jr., “Macroeconomic Priorities,” American Economic Review 93, no. 1 (2003).
4. See, for example, Dipayan Ghosh and Ben Scott, “Facebook’s New Controversy Shows How Easily Online Political Ads Can Manipulate You,” Time, March 19, 2018, time.com/5197255/facebook-cambridge-analytica-donald-trump-ads-data.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Moira Weigel, Ben Tarnoff, Jackson Howard, Emily Bell, and the teams at Logic and FSG, who encouraged me to write this book and offered invaluable advice throughout the entire process. I’d also like to acknowledge Adi Kamdar, whose collaboration with me on a 2013 paper about “peak ads” inspired many of the arguments contained in these pages. Finally, I’d like to extend a special thanks to Lea Rosen, whose tireless editing and frank feedback over the past year have sharpened my thinking and made the book orders of magnitude better.
A Note About the Author
Tim Hwang is a writer, lawyer, and technology policy researcher based in New York. Previously, he was at Google, where he was the company’s global public policy lead on artificial intelligence. Dubbed “the busiest man on the internet” by Forbes, Hwang focuses on the future of the attention economy and the geopolitics of computational power. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Prologue
Introduction
1. The Plumbing
2. Market Convergence
3. Opacity
4. Subprime Attention
5. Inflating the Bubble
6. Exploding the Bubble
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Copyright
FSG Originals × Logic
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2020 by Tim Hwang
All rights reserved
First edition, 2020
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-72124-4
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