Reading List

About This Page
This page will collect books referred to and discussed in the Rebel Wisdom interviews, as well as other books that members have discovered are relevant and contribute to the topics explored throughout the various the Rebel Wisdom interview channels, sense-making courses, community conversations and RW Circle Campfire spaces. The inclined reader may wish to study these to learn more about the particular topics in question.

Contributing to This Page
Feel free to add other books to this list. When doing so, please add them in alphabetical order and fill out the basic information: title (and year), author, description (e.g. from the back of the book), keywords about the book’s theme(s), and links to related Rebel Wisdom videos (if any). You can also add additional comments about why this book is particularly relevant.

The Attention Merchants – The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads (2016)
Author: Tim Wu

Description: In every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Few spaces have remained uncultivated by the ‘attention merchants’. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the by-product of recent inventions but the end result of more than a century’s growth and expansion in the industries that profit from catching our eye. He describes the revolts that have risen against these relentless attempts to influence our consumption, but he makes clear that attention merchants grow ever-new heads, and their means of luring us in have given rise to the defining industries of our time, changing our nature in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.

Keywords: Advertising, Attention Capture, Game A, Information Ecology, Media, Race to The Bottom, Social Media

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Related Rebel Wisdom Videos:
 * Can Truth Survive Big Tech? Tristan Harris - July 21, 2020
 * The War on Sensemaking, Daniel Schmachtenberger - August 19, 2019