Attention Merchants and Platform Taste

In Episode 463 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with media and technology historian Tim Wu about how the rise of platform power has become the defining economic event of our time, why it's responsible for much of the current dysfunction (from politics and media to housing and healthcare), and what we can do about it.

Wu and Kofinas spend the first hour of their conversation discussing how platform power has become the central form of economic control in our era, why the Internet went from being a free-wheeling and optimistic ecosystem of entrepreneurship and creativity to one whose business models of extraction dominate it today, and how platforms have been weaponized against their users in order to capture and extract economic value rather than create it.

The second hour is devoted to a discussion about the plethora of readily available solutions to our current predicament, like antitrust enforcement, "line of business" restrictions, utility rules and caps, mandated transparency of platform objective functions, and the need for alternative business models that don't treat human users like industrial farm animals to be milked and sheared until every exploitable moment of their attention has been harvested and exhausted.

They discuss why the failure of democracy to address obvious economic problems makes the appeal of authoritarianism more attractive, examine the breakdown of healthcare delivery services resulting from platform extraction, and consider whether a publicly funded alternative to large social media platforms like Meta and X could serve the function of a digital public square by improving our public discourse rather than corrupting it.

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

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Episode Recorded on 02/09/2026