Pay Attention (How the Algorithms and Media Wars Are Suppressing Truth and Rewiring Your Brain)

With a provocative follow up to his New York Times bestselling The Echo Machine, David Pakman offers a dire warning on the cultural and technological forces that are already melting our brains and transforming the pursuit of truth into an almost impossible, even quaint activity.

Has the dystopian future of 1984 and Brave New World arrived? As Pakman forewarns in Pay Attention, we confront a very Orwellian threat of totalitarianism, as technological “advancements” have rendered us not just passive but willing participants in a Huxleyesque world where our humanity becomes swallowed by the Attention Economy. Drawing on his experience fighting in the digital trenches, Pakman illustrates how and why political news and commentary has become more fragmented, extreme, and divisive in a self-fulfilling, self-feeding media environment. His reports from the front line of the media and culture wars are beyond eye-opening, including:

• How he rose to prominence by methodical trial and error in an ever-changing media landscape
• How a requirement for controversy means we are already losing the battle for truth
• How audience capture is rewiring our brains
• The dark science behind thumbnails
• Why the Right is built for the Attention Economy
• The myth of media “independence”
• How the user has become the product…and why we no longer even need human creators to mine this product.
• The future is already here—and with AI creep, it’s only accelerating!

Sure to speak to his millions of avidly engaged viewers, as well as to readers of such titles as Chris Hayes’ The Sirens’ Call, Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing, and Ezra Klein’s Why We’re Polarized, Pay Attention is a perfectly timed book that will show us how “the machine” works…and what we must do lest we become part of it.