Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet

by Tim Hwang

Overview

From FSGO x Logic: a revealing examination of digital advertising and the internet's precarious foundation

In Subprime Attention Crisis, Tim Hwang investigates the way big tech financializes attention. In the process, he shows us how digital advertising—the beating heart of the internet—is at risk of collapsing, and that its potential demise bears an uncanny resemblance to the housing crisis of 2008.

From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented. And if online advertising goes belly-up, the internet—and its free services—will suddenly be accessible only to those who can afford it.

Deeply researched, convincing, and alarming, Subprime Attention Crisis will change the way you look at the internet, and its precarious future.

FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374538651
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	10/13/2020
Series:	FSG Originals x Logic
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	228,257
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Tim Hwang is a writer and researcher. He is the former director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, and previously served as the global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Prologue 3

Introduction 9

1 The Plumbing 17

2 Market Convergence 33

3 Opacity 59

4 Subprime Attention 75

5 Inflating the Bubble 93

6 Exploding the Bubble 113

Epilogue 139

Notes 143

Acknowledgments 165

Editorial Reviews

"[A] bracing debut . . . Using apt analogies and accessible terminology, Hwang makes a persuasive case that the internet bubble is bound to burst. This wake-up call rings loud and clear." —Publishers Weekly

"A deep dive into the marketplace that is the internet . . . Thoughtful citizens of the digital world will want to have a look at Hwang’s intriguing exploration." —Kirkus

"In this well-grounded, heretical attack on the fictions that uphold the online advertising ecosystem, Subprime Attention Crisis destroys the illusion that programmatic ads are effective and financially sound. One can only hope that this book will be used to pop the bubble that benefits so few." —danah boyd, author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, founder of Data & Society, and Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research

"Digital promised us a new era of ad targeting and accountability, but today's marketer is wrestling with programmatic's murky measurement standards, costly information arbitrage, and outright click fraud. Subprime Attention Crisis examines the commoditization of attention, and draws an important analogy with the opacity and exuberance in real estate that ushered in the 2008-9 financial crisis. Most importantly, Tim Hwang reminds us that a precipitous crash of the digital advertising model would extend far beyond an industry bubble burst to fundamentally threaten the business model of the web we all rely on." —Perry Hewitt, renowned marketing and digital strategy consultant, and advisor to Harvard Business School's Digital Initiative

From the Publisher

2020-07-29
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.

Kirkus Reviews