Tim Wu is the Julius Silver Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia University, and a renowned scholar on communications networks, having coined the phrase “net neutrality.” He has written extensively on technology and its impact on society and has served both inside and outside of government and academia. Mo Lotman discusses Wu’s 2016  book The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Attention Merchants is a history of advertising, and it’s not pretty.

Mo and Tim discuss our declining private spheres, the current state of the Internet, and the effects of what Wu calls The Cycle, as new communications technologies inevitably move from open to closed. Wu also proved prescient in this interview, describing the deterioration of the advertising model for online content, and how subscription content was a ray of hope (which the success of Substack has since validated). They also discuss Wu’s 2010 book, The Master Switch.

When this interview first ran, Wu was still writing, The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, released in 2018.

In 2021, Wu was appointed Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy.

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