SUBPRIME ATTENTION CRISIS

A deep dive into the marketplace that is the internet.

Hwang, the former global public policy lead on artificial intelligence at Google, examines the role of advertising in the online realm as “a marketplace for attention,” one that aims to grab your eyes, if even for a moment, and with any luck sells you something—an idea, a product, a political candidate. This marketplace may once have resembled a local fair. However, as the author shows, it has been thoroughly upscaled, with vast technologies and a commercial realm known as programmatic advertising, which “leverages software to automate the buying and selling of advertising inventory.” This automated, algorithmically driven advertising has its creepy dimensions—e.g., you look at an ad for a toaster, and the next day a dozen toaster manufacturers bombard you with their approaches. Human ad-sales teams are rapidly becoming a thing of the past with the advent of this machine-informed advertising, as Google’s sales force discovered when AdWords and AdSense took pride of place. Our attention—the vaunted target of the machine—has thus become “commodified to an extent that it has not been in the past,” made part of a massive system. Champions of programmatic advertising hold that it allows for better price transparency, but Hwang argues that it has created “an unsustainable market due for a painful correction” and certainly not one amenable to self-regulation. Online advertising must be regulated in the same way as hedge funds, requiring the intervention of government into an arena beloved of libertarians for its anarchic nature, albeit one that “remains murky and opaque, constantly oversold by an unhealthy ecosystem of conflicted players.” That call for regulation alone is likely to make Hwang’s book controversial, but it would help level a playing field that is dominated by a few big actors—Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the like.

Thoughtful citizens of the digital world will want to have a look at Hwang’s intriguing exploration.