Tim Wu has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.7★ across 37 ratings. The most-rated is The Attention Merchants.
The Attention Merchants
Summary
From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch (a New Yorker and Fortune Book of the Year) and who coined the term "net neutrality” - a revelatory, ambitious, and urgent account of how the capture and resale of human attention became the defining industry of our time. Feeling attention challenged? Even assaulted? American business depends on it. Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers. In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising enticements, branding, sponsored social media, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Few moments or spaces of our day remain uncultivated by the "attention merchants", contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to the explosion of the mobile web; from AOL and the invention of email to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to celebrity power brands like Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, and Donald Trump, the basic business model of "attention merchants" has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu describes the revolts that have risen against the relentless siege of our awareness, from the remote control to the creation of public broadcasting to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants are always growing new heads, even as their means of getting inside our heads are changing our very nature - cognitive, social, political, and otherwise - in ways unimaginable even a generation ago. “A startling and sweeping examination of the increasingly ubiquitous commercial effort to capture and commodify our attention.... We’ve become the consumers, the producers, and the content. We are selling ourselves to ourselves.” (Tom Vanderbilt, The New Republic) “An erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history.... A devastating critique of ad tech as it stands today, transforming 'don't be evil' into the surveillance business model in just a few short years. It connects the dots between the sale of advertising inventory in schools to the bizarre ecosystem of trackers, analyzers and machine-learning models that allow the things you look at on the web to look back at you.... This stuff is my daily beat, and I learned a lot from Attention Merchants.” (Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing) “Illuminating.” (Jacob Weisberg, The New York Review of Books)
©2016 Tim Wu (P)2016 Random House Audio
The Master Switch
Summary
A secret history of the industrial wars behind the rise and fall of the 20th century's great information empires - Hollywood, the broadcast networks, and AT&T - asking one big question: Could history repeat itself, with one giant entity taking control of American information? Most consider the Internet Age to be a moment of unprecedented freedom in communications and culture. But as Tim Wu shows, each major new medium, from telephone to cable, arrived on a similar wave of idealistic optimism only to become, eventually, the object of industrial consolidation profoundly affecting how Americans communicate. Every once-free and open technology was in time centralized and closed, a huge corporate power taking control of the master switch. Today, as a similar struggle looms over the Internet, increasingly the pipeline of all other media, the stakes have never been higher. To be decided: who gets heard, and what kind of country we live in. Part industrial exposé, part meditation on the nature of freedom of expression, part battle cry to save the Internet's best features, The Master Switch brings to light a crucial drama rife with indelible characters and stories, heretofore played out over decades in the shadows of our national life.
©2010 Tim Wu (P)2010 Audible, Inc
The Curse of Bigness
Summary
From the man who coined the term "net neutrality", author of The Master Switch and The Attention Merchants, comes a warning about the dangers of excessive corporate and industrial concentration for our economic and political future. We live in an age of extreme corporate concentration, in which global industries are controlled by just a few giant firms - big banks, big pharma, and big tech, just to name a few. But concern over what Louis Brandeis called the "curse of bigness" can no longer remain the province of specialist lawyers and economists, for it has spilled over into policy and politics, even threatening democracy itself. History suggests that tolerance of inequality and failing to control excessive corporate power may prompt the rise of populism, nationalism, extremist politicians, and fascist regimes. In short, as Wu warns, we are in grave danger of repeating the signature errors of the 20th century. In The Curse of Bigness, Columbia Professor Tim Wu tells of how figures like Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt first confronted the democratic threats posed by the great trusts of the Gilded Age - but the lessons of the Progressive Era were forgotten in the last 40 years. He calls for recovering the lost tenets of the trust-busting age as part of a broader revival of American progressive ideas as we confront the fallout of persistent and extreme economic inequality.
©2018 Tim Wu (P)2018 Random House Audio
Who Controls the Internet
Summary
Is the Internet erasing national borders? Who's really in control of what's happening on the Net--Internet engineers, rogue programmers, the United Nations, or powerful countries? In this provocative new book, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu tell the fascinating story of the Internet's challenge to governmental rule in the 1990s, and the ensuing battles with governments around the world. It's a book about the fate of one idea--that the Internet might liberate us forever from government, borders, and even our physical selves.We learn of Google's struggles with the French government and Yahoo's capitulation to the Chinese regime; of how the European Union sets privacy standards on the Net for the entire world; and of eBay's struggles with fraud and how it slowly learned to trust the FBI. In a decade of events, the original vision was uprooted, as governments time and time again asserted their power to direct the future of the Internet. The destiny of the Internet over the next decades, argue Goldsmith and Wu, will reflect the interests of powerful nations and the conflicts within and between them. Well written and filled with fascinating examples, this is a work that is bound to stir heated debate in the cyberspace community.
©2008 Jack Goldsmith (P)2009 Audible, Inc.
The Stately Home Murder
Summary
There's been a murder at the Manor! At this stately home, now open for public tours, visitors revel in the lush atmosphere created by its three hundred rooms, its exceptional display of fine china, its chilling dungeon with historic suits of armor on display, evoking the spirits of knights from a forgotten age. Young Michael's sister, a visitor to the mansion with their mum, presses her for an explanation of "what's a chastity belt?" while Michael fools around with one of the suits of armor. He lifts the visor and stares inside, only to find a face staring back at him! A dead human body has been stashed inside the armor after having been done in by a savage blow to the back of the head. Detective Inspector C.D. Sloan and his wisecracking sidekick Crosby are called in to figure out whodunit and why. Mystery fans will relish this delightful entry in Catherine Aird's highly esteemed classic series starring Sloan, of the Berebury Criminal Investigations Dept. in Calleshire, England, and his amiable but not very able assistant, Crosby. The two are introduced in The Religious Body, the first of 18 C.D. Sloan mysteries. Aird's work is among the very best of the British police procedural genre, particularly noteworthy for the delightful sense of humor woven throughout. The Stately Home Murder was originally published as The Complete Steel.
©1973 Catherine Aird (P)2000 Chivers Audio Books