# Tim Wu Tim Wu (b. 1972) is an American legal scholar at Columbia Law School who coined the term "net neutrality" and, in his 2016 book *The Attention Merchants*, wrote the definitive history of the [[Attention Economy]] — the business model of harvesting and reselling human attention that runs from the nineteenth-century penny press through radio, television, and the social-media platforms. Wu traces a recurring cycle: a new medium captures attention with free or cheap content, monetizes that attention through advertising, over-saturates until users revolt, and is then displaced by a new entrant promising relief — only to repeat the pattern. He later served in the Biden administration as a special assistant for technology and competition policy, bringing an antitrust lens to platform power. ## Core Ideas ### The attention merchants Wu's central argument, developed at [[Attention Economy]], is that an entire class of businesses exists to capture human attention and resell it to advertisers, and that this model has steadily colonized more of daily life. Each technological generation extends the reach of attention harvesting deeper into private time, from the living room to the pocket to every waking moment. ### The cycle of revolt and capture Wu identifies a repeating "disenchantment effect": audiences eventually rebel against over-commercialized media, creating an opening for a new entrant that promises a cleaner experience — which then commercializes in turn. Streaming's rise against cable, and the recurring promise of "ad-free" subscriptions, follow this pattern. ### Antitrust and the curse of bigness In *The Curse of Bigness* (2018), Wu argues that the concentration of economic and informational power in a few platforms threatens democracy itself, reviving the trust-busting tradition. This connects directly to the vault's [[Media Consolidation]] coverage. ## Relevance to the RWKB Wu supplies the long historical frame for the vault's platform coverage: the engagement-maximizing outrage machine is the latest stage of a century-old attention-harvesting business, not a novel pathology. His cycle of capture and revolt explains the perpetual churn of right-wing media platforms — each new entrant ([[Parler]], [[Truth Social]], [[Rumble]]) promising freedom from the previous gatekeepers before reproducing the same attention-extraction logic. His antitrust framework links media theory to the vault's coverage of monopoly power and [[Media Consolidation]], and his time in government marks one front of the policy fight over platform regulation. ## See also - [[Attention Economy]], [[Surveillance Capitalism]], [[Filter Bubble]] - [[Shoshana Zuboff]], [[Zeynep Tufekci]], [[Eli Pariser]] - [[Media Theory Hub]] — the subject hub