In The Attention Merchants, Tim Wu examines with precision and eloquence “the mad scramble to get inside our heads.”

For example, consider this brief passage: “The first great harvester of attention, it must never be forgotten, was religion. The impulse to idolize has no faded in our secular age, only gone seeking after strange gods. The very expression ‘celebrity worship’ may seem a figurative exaggeration; but insofar as intensity and duration of attention can separate devotion from other motivations, it would be hard to argue that what we have seen in our culture is anything less than an apotheosis. Still, in our predominantly monotheistic sense of religion, the idea of describing our intense regard for people who are famous as being essentially religious may ring false. But if we would remember that the ancient version of celebrity was a hero, and that the line between heroes and deities was never absolute, who could dispute our attention industries have enabled the creation of a new pantheon? And as we shall see [in Part IV], it was the indefinite expansion of that pantheon that would carry the attention merchants into the twenty-first century.”

Also, it is noteworthy that the original meaning of charisma is “divine gift.”

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Tim Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School, and best known for his development of Net Neutrality. He is the author of aforementioned The Attention Merchants, The Master Switch, and Who Controls the Internet? He previously worked for the White House under President Barack Obama and is a Silicon Valley veteran. He was a law clerk for the United States Supreme Court. He graduated from McGill University (B.Sc.), and Harvard Law School. Wu has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, T Magazine, Washington Post, Forbes, Slate magazine, and others, and once worked at Hoo’s Dumplings.

The Attention Merchants was published by Albert A. Knopf (October 2016).