Tim Wu Quotes & Sayings

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. — Tim Wu

It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life's immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels. — Tim Wu

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. — Tim Wu

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. — Tim Wu

The Church was the one institution whose mission depended on galvanizing attention; and through its daily and weekly offices, as well as its sometimes central role in education, that is exactly what it managed to do. At the dawn of the attention industries, then, religion was still, in a very real sense, the incumbent operation, the only large-scale human endeavor designed to capture attention and use it. — Tim Wu

by the FCC's own reckoning, the cable companies will soon enjoy an uncontested monopoly over broadband Internet in much of the United States beyond the East Coast, and they are also seeking control of more Hollywood studios and television networks. — Tim Wu

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

We're going to put Hulu ahead of you, unless you pay up — Tim Wu

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. — Tim Wu

For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it. — 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. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine. — Tim Wu

The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact. — Tim Wu

The best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation. — Tim Wu

BE THE MEDIA is uplifting and empowering. — Tim Wu

It is in the contest that Fred Friendly, onetime CBS News president, made it clear that before any questions of "who controls the master switch. — Tim Wu

The only communications truly without influence are those that one learns to ignore or never hears at all; this is why Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected - rural dwellers or the urban poor - who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate. — Tim Wu

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

The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire. — Tim Wu

Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent. — Tim Wu

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. — Tim Wu

History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody's hobby to somebody's industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel-from open to closed system. — Tim Wu

In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately amount to censorship. — Tim Wu

If we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable. — Tim Wu

Industries, unlike organisms, have no organic limits on their own growth; they are constantly in search of new markets, or of new ways to exploit old ones more effectively; as Karl Marx unsympathetically observed, they 'nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. — Tim Wu

Every instant of every day we are bombarded by information. In fact, all complex organisms, especially those with brains, suffer from information overload. Our eyes and ears receive lights and sounds (respectively) across the spectrums of visible and audible wavelengths; our skin and the rest of our innervated parts send their own messages of sore muscles or cold feet. All told, every second, our senses transmit an estimated 11 million bits of information to our poor brains, as if a giant fiber-optic cable were plugged directly into them, firing information at full bore. In light of this, it is rather incredible that we are even capable of boredom. — Tim Wu

We've already seen the attention merchant's basic modus operandi: draw attention with apparently free stuff and then resell it. but a consequence of that model is a total dependence on gaining and holding attention. This means that under competition, the race will naturally run to the bottom; attention will almost invariably gravitate to the more garish, lurid, outrageous alternative, whatever stimulus may more likely engage what cognitive scientists call our 'automatic' attention as opposed to our 'controlled' attention, the kind we direct with intent. The race to a bottomless bottom, appealing to what one might call the audience's baser instincts, poses a fundamental, continual dilemma for the attention merchant-just how far will he go to get his harvest? If the history of attention capture teaches us anything, it is that the limits are often theoretical, and when real, rarely self-imposed. — Tim Wu

Sometimes the crowd is right; often it is wrong. It remains for science to read the balance. — Tim Wu

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

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

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash. — Tim Wu

The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson's idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical one. — Tim Wu

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

Defenders of the prosecution seem to think that anyone charged with a felony must somehow deserve punishment. That idea can only be sustained without actual exposure to the legal system. Yes, most of the time prosecutors do chase actual wrongdoers, but today our criminal laws are so expansive that most people of any vigor and spirit can be found to violate them in some way. Basically, under American law, anyone interesting is a felon. The prosecutors, not the law, decide who deserves punishment.

Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life. — Tim Wu

Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically, it sometimes happens that the only way to preserve freedom is through judicious controls on the exercise of private power. If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion. — Tim Wu