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The Current Transcript for November 14, 2016

Host: Anna-Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

When I get down to city hall the gravy train is over. Well folks, the gravy train is over.

[Sound: crowd cheering]

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: The Clinton campaign never thought it had anything to learn from the rise of Rob Ford in Toronto municipal politics. But his form of populism had real parallels to the Trump campaign. Populist leaders have held or are holding sway in more than one country. From Italy's Silvio Berlusconi to Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines. As the US president-elect works on transition and cabinet choices against a backdrop of demonstrations against him in cities across the US, we are asking about the record of populist leaders in other jurisdictions to try to shed some light on what to expect in a Trump presidency. We'll get to that in just a moment. And then, the reality of a fentanyl overdose.

SOUNDCLIP

The person was so blue and gray that I thought they were dead. I really did. I was like oh my God, in my head I was like OK this isn't going to work.

AMT: From long time addicts to teens experimenting first time on weekends. Fentanyl is not discriminating in who it kills. An antidote drug called Narcan or Naloxone can actually counter a fentanyl overdose, but it takes a toll on the patient and on the frontline health workers who find themselves continually facing life and death scenarios. We will hear from three such workers on fentanyl overdoses in half an hour. And then, you may not realize it but you are the keeper of the hottest commodity on the market today, your attention.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: And I love the taste of your fresh brewed coffee.

VOICE 2: Oh thanks, but it’s not fresh brewed.

ADVERTISER VOICE: Still going, [smashing sounds] nothing outlasts the energizer. They keep going and going and going.

AMT: What used to be a straight up scrimmage for advertising attention has evolved into clever cyber seduction to harvest our attention and sell it. Author Tim Wu argues we're having so much fun online we don't even realize we have become the product. Hear him in an hour. I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

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From Trump to Ford to Berlusconi: How well do populist leaders govern?

Guests: Daniele Albertazzi, Amanda Taub, Don Gillmor

SOUNDCLIP

NIGEL FARAGE: The sun has risen on an independent United Kingdom. It's a victory for ordinary people, decent people. It's a victory against big politics.

DONALD TRUMP: Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people. [crowd cheering]

ROB FORD: I hear you loud and clear Toronto. The party with taxpayers’ money is over ladies and gentlemen. [crowd cheering]

DONALD TRUMP: There is nothing the political establishment will not do. No lie that they won't tell to hold their prestige and power at your expense and that's what's been happening.

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: Well, the American President-elect Donald Trump has ridden a populist wave to power, but he's hardly the first to do so in recent months or years. From the Brexit vote in the UK to former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and more, populist campaigns have proven successful of late. Today we're asking how populist candidates tend to actually govern once they are in power. We have three guests standing by with their thoughts. Don Gillmor is an author and journalist in Toronto. He's with me in our Toronto studio. Amanda Taub is a columnist with The New York Times. She's in our Washington studio. And Daniele Albertazzi is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies and a Senior Lecturer in European Politics at the University of Birmingham England. And we have reached him just outside Birmingham. Hello to all of you, welcome.

DON GILLMOR: Good morning.

AMANDA TAUB: Good morning, thanks for having me.

AMT: Daniele Albertazzi, first of all, what is populism?

DANIELE ALBERTAZZI: Well, I think as the quotations that we heard right at the beginning of the program made quite clear, populism is about defining the people as united and homogenous, and seeing the establishment, as Trump calls it, or the elites, as inevitably driven by the desire to take away from the people what it belongs to them. Whether it's wealth, whether it's their identity, whether it's their way of life. So basically, populism is about this constant clash. And then in right-wing populism, the elites are always represented as being supported and helped by a series of enemies of the people that tend to be in kind of recent years always foreigners. But they don’t have to be foreigners, they could also be a specific religion within the country or gay communities. That depends on the political developments of the country itself. So that's what populism is.

AMT: Amanda Taub, what makes a candidate a populist?

AMANDA TAUB: So I think there are two ways to answer that question. One way is that they embrace the kind of rhetoric that Daniele has just described, where they promise to be the champion of the people and say that the people are kind of the sole legitimate holders of power and they promise to tear down the corrupt establishment. So that's sort of what a populist candidate looks like. The reasons for doing this I think are a little bit more complex and it tends to happen at a time when there is some sort of change happening in the political system, some reason why people are frightened or mistrustful of the main, you know, I would say I guess ordinary political establishment that has made the candidacy kind of ripe for finding a real audience.

AMT: Don Gillmor, which Canadian examples come to mind? We’ve mentioned Rob Ford off the top, who else?

DON GILLMOR: I think probably the best example we have is Ralph Klein, because he was most enduring example and because, you know, he represented the triumph of image over reality. And when he came to office for example, he said that the, you know, the sleazy developers were ruining Calgary when he became mayor. And then as soon as he became mayor, he essentially dismantled the city planning department and turned the city over to the developers, and that was a pattern we saw throughout his career. And so you end up having the elites are still ruling but they have this absolutely wonderful, potent symbol and this sort of rumpled, portly, drunken every man. And so you get the best of both worlds from a political perspective.

AMT: It's interesting eh, because when he became premier of Alberta, he was part of a long line of conservatives, he was part of the establishment but he was seen as still anti-establishment.

DON GILLMOR: And by the time he left, I mean, it looked like a monarchy rather than a democracy. And the fact that he gave out checks for 400 dollars to every resident of Alberta, this was a very kind of populist sort of thing. Instead of doing something like building schools or hospitals, you just give everyone a check. And it was a very satisfying thing for a large part of that population.

AMT: Daniele Albertazzi, what similarities do you see between Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and US President-elect Donald Trump?

DANIELE ALBERTAZZI: There are certainly some obvious similarities. Berlusconi's pointed them out himself. I think just yesterday he was interviewed by Corriere della Sera. Well, first of all, when Berlusconi created his party out of nothing in 1994, his selling point was precisely I have no experience of politics, I'm a businessman, I built an empire so I can bring this experience to politics and I will do for the country what I did for myself. And this is obviously one of the key messages that resonate now in America with Donald Trump. So the inexperience becomes an advantage. As Michael Gove said during the campaign, he had to leave the EU, Michael Gove, a very prominent conservative politician who supported the leave side. We have had afflux of experts, right? The people has had enough of experts. And Berlusconi understood this more than 20 years ago, so he was kind of presenting himself as an outsider. That's a very important similarity. The other one is obviously Berlusconi was the owner of his party, I know in Trump's case this is not the case obviously, he ran even against the Republican establishment. But he can finance his campaign and he's got a lot of resources to kind of support what he does, which was exactly what Berlusconi did back in 1994. There are also some differences if you want me to expand on that.

AMT: Such as?

DANIELE ALBERTAZZI: Well, for instance, Berlusconi never focused very much, especially during the first few years on well, let's call it the working class, it’s now an out of date term perhaps, but people at the bottom of society. Initially his message was for the middle class and they had been kind of been left without a political referent after the collapse of Christian democracy in Italy. And if you look at the data, he did get votes from the working classes originally, but he did get millions of votes from rather well-off middle class people. Now, Trump also did well in many states among middle class people but if you look at his message, it’s clear that he was focused much more than Berlusconi on people who have been left behind. And either they are not doing too well or they are still doing OK, but they are terrified that what is around the corner is, you know, losing their house or losing a job or not doing as well anymore.

AMT: Amanda, we look now at the numbers and it looks like though, the white middle class, and not necessarily, like, well-paid white middle class was predominantly voting for Trump. Can you pick up on that on the populist?

AMANDA TAUB: Sure. So I think that there are a few things going on that Daniele kind of really highlighted here. So it is true that Trump's supporters by and large were not the poorest in the United States, although among white voters there was a pretty significant shift among the kind of poorer voters towards Trump and away from the Democratic Party. But what we really saw is that Trump had particularly strong support in communities where people are not necessarily doing that badly now but they see the writing on the wall that, you know, cities and rural areas that were previously dependent on industry or on factory jobs, those jobs if they have not left already, they are, you know, slowly shutting down. This country is becoming more urban, we're shifting towards a more kind of knowledge-based economy. And among people who are uncomfortable with those changes, there was a lot of Trump support. So you see that come up geographically, you see it in terms of income. You know, for all that Trump supporters tended to be relatively high income themselves, they were disproportionately concentrated throughout the campaign, in terms of his support during the primaries as well, in areas that are predominantly white and where children are likely to be less well off than their parents. So if you think about what that means, that means not just that people are anxious about their own families and their own futures but it suggests that those are communities that are contracting rather than expanding. They are places where people are more likely to need to leave in order to find jobs, those that do stay are struggling. And so I think that created a kind of baseline of anxiety that was not necessarily about low income but it was about the loss of identity and stability and confidence that come with living in a place that's [unintelligible].

AMT: [crosstalk] And so how racialized was this vote, and is this populism?

AMANDA TAUB: I would say the vote, if you look at the numbers, was divided quite strongly along racial lines. And I've spent the last year talking to political scientists and other social scientists to try to figure out what explains Trump's support in this way. And they told me a few things. So one is that when a community changes its demographics suddenly, so when there is an influx of immigrants, when there is a sudden change in the ethnic makeup for some other reason, there tends to be a really sharp increase in anti-immigrant populism. People are uncomfortable with change and they are particularly uncomfortable with change that they sort of see on the horizon but haven't experienced yet and are wondering what will happen. And that is happening in a lot of American states. Immigrant communities for the past two decades have been moving from their sort of traditional city and border strongholds into places like Arkansas, which have not traditionally had large immigrant populations. So I think that's part of this. And then I think part of it is just what we could call the collapse of white identities. So for a long time in this country whites have enjoyed certain privileges, they have enjoyed a certain expectation of what their lives would be like, and I think we can differentiate that a little bit from racism in that people got to enjoy those privileges whether they were personally bigoted or racist or not. And now perhaps they've never had to think about them and they're disappearing, and I think that's also a source of stress.

AMT: Don Gillmore, what are you thinking?

DON GILLMOR: Well, you know, I think if you look at politics, the tents that most politicians are happiest in is the future, generally, things are going to get better and life is going to change. I think with populism, it's the opposite. You often have populist politicians going back to a nostalgic past and, you know, we saw it with Reagan who kind of invoked this image of America that was somewhere between Norman Rockwell and a Jimmy Stewart movie, and it just was very comforting. And I think with Trump you're seeing the same sort of thing, where he's saying making America great again and it's really, it's regressing to a time when there was this comfortable white working or middle class. And I think you saw it a bit with Ford here and I think the increasingly unsubtle subtext is that, you know, we're going back to a landscape that is ruled by the white male base.

AMT: So how is that not racist?

DON GILLMOR: It is racist. I mean, and I think, that we're going to see at some point, I mean, I think this is a, it may be wrong, this could be a blip, you know, and then we'll see a kind of resurgence. But this is something that's been pent up for a long time and it was the same in Alberta and the same in Toronto, when you saw Ford making comments where he’d said Orientals, as he called them, work like dogs and they're going to take over. And so, there's this, you know, going to those white fears of their landscape is changing.

AMT: Daniele, what is it about populist leaders that gives them the ability to weather major scandals, to be able to say things that other people will say it will destroy their political careers?

DANIELE ALBERTAZZI: I think what is it about them is that they are the only one who have now the college, if you want, to talk about certain issues that liberals and left-wing politicians just don't want to cover. The fact that they talk about these issues in using a language that obviously that's a lot of people would find objectionable and proposing solutions that are never going to work, does not take away from the fact that nobody else talks about globalization, nobody talks about international trade, nobody else talks about how the identity of people is changing very rapidly, including people who may not understand why is it that their community needs to go through such a process of rapid change. So what I'm saying is my impression also by looking at populist leaders in Europe, I mean, the obvious example again is Berlusconi, was obviously found to have committed all sorts of things even while he was in power. My impression is that a lot of people who vote for them do know about these things and then are unaware of these things, but, you know, they are using them as kind of nuclear bombs against the political establishment.

AMT: And how do they govern once they're in power, do they actually deliver on their economic promises?

DANIELE ALBERTAZZI: You see, one of the kind of ideas that gets repeated by academics and often also by commentators on the media, is that populists can never govern. I don't think that is the case. Sometimes they do successfully deliver on their promises. Berlusconi didn't, but Berlusconi's allies of the Northern League in Italy, who have also been in Government four times, the last time they were in government managed to get parliament to pass a reform of the state which went in a federal election, which is what they've been arguing for for 25 years. They managed to pass a law and order legislation that had promised to their supporters. If you look at Christoph Blocher in Switzerland, who turned the Swiss People's Party into a populist party, when he managed to get into government he did deliver a reform of the asylum system, which he had been talking about for a long time. When you look at the populists in Poland and in Hungary, I mean, the initiatives they are taking which are upsetting of course, the European Commission and had caused so much trouble with the EU, are all in the direction of bringing about a kind of much more conservative society. So this idea that, you know, populists get into government and they either become exactly like all the others or they just fail and their supporters will abandon them, yes, it did work like that in some cases. I mean, the most prominent one is Haider in his first government in Austria in 2000. Another example is List Pim Fortuyn in Holland in 2002.

AMT: OK, so let's just, let's move this to Trump then. Amanda, Trump gave an interview yesterday basically saying the wall might be a fence, he's still going to go strong against Roe v. Wade. How do you expect him to govern?

AMANDA TAUB: I think that's very much an open question. We don't know what he'll do, we don't know who he will be relying on. If you look at the two people who it sounds like are going to be his closest advisers. One is Priebus, who’s going to be the Chief of Staff in the White House, who's very much a Republican establishment figure. And one is Steve Bannon, who is this kind of, you know, much further to the right outsider figure with very strong ties to the alt-right and other groups like that. So it's very difficult to know who Trump will be relying on for guidance when it comes to actual policy. And it's also very difficult to know how much he will be at war with the Republican establishment and how much he'll be working with them hand in hand now that they control all three houses of government.

AMT: And Don Gillmor, is populism necessarily a bad thing?

DON GILLMOR: No, I don't think so. I mean, with every example you see something being done. In the case of Klein, I mean, the way he managed the 1988 Olympics was, I think masterful, understanding that the population had to be completely engaged, otherwise the Olympics would be a flop, and they at that point had been controlled by a small elite group. So you do see where it's effective. But I think the downside is that it's often a kind of big lie, that it's a sort of front for business as usual and you really just have this very kind of potent symbol sitting at the front of what is very similar machinery.

AMT: And we're almost out of time here. But Daniele Albertazzi, we haven't even talked about Duterte in the Philippines who also rode a populous wave from mayor to head of the Philippines. The death count is now like above 4,000 because he's against drug addicts. How worried should we be about a populist wave in the US, after what, some of the stuff we've been seeing in other parts of the world?

DANIELE ALBERTAZZI: I think that, I mean, the key issue that worries me about populism in recent years is the fact that populist parties tend to always target some of the key principles and values of liberal democracy wherever they are. So there is this idea that because we represent the people, and it’s a kind of united and homogenous people, and we know what the people want, we don't understand why we should kind of be limited and constrained in delivering what we've promised. Just because, you know, [chuckling] liberal democracy is organized in such a way that the executive is limited by the judiciary and so on--

AMT: [interposing] OK. Daniele, we have to leave it there. I think there's more to talk about but we're hitting a clock here. So thank you for your thoughts, all of you.

DANIELE ALBERTAZZI: Thanks for having me.

AMT: That is Don Gillmor in Toronto. Amanda Taub of The New York Times. And Daniele Albertazzi at the University of Birmingham. Stay with us. The news is next. This is The Current.

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Patients 'as blue as a Smurf ': Fentanyl overdoses take toll on front-line workers

Guests: Christy Sutherland, Linda Fox, Ryan Woiden

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, advertisers have been shelling out big bucks to get inside our heads for over 150 years. Coming up, I'll speak with an author who says the biggest commodity of our time is the buying and selling of what you're giving me right now, your attention. But first, the antidote that is bringing people drowning in the opioid crisis back from the brink of death.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: ambulance sirens]

VOICE 1: He’s not breathing right now.

VOICE 2: OK. Where is he?

VOICE 3: Right here.

[Sound: door opening and closing]

VOICE 4: Got the Narcan?

[Sound: ventilator breathing sound]

AMT: That's the life or death scenario unfolding in Vancouver. What you're hearing is the aftermath of a man who overdosed by taking a drug laced with the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl. Narcan, which also goes by naloxone, is an antidote that will bring him back and save his life. The CBC's Natalie Clancy was on that call with first responders. Once the man was revived, firefighter Jason Lynch explained what happened.

SOUNDCLIP

JASON LYNCH: So we walked in and the patient was barely breathing and he had taken some fentanyl and he was told it was stronger fentanyl and a lot of people were overdosing. And so he took 10 dollars worth. And so we had to administer three separate rounds of Narcan, which is a total of .12 Narcan. And we were begging him for probably about 10 minutes before he came out of it. This is our tenth time doing it today. It’s a daily routine.

AMT: 2,000 Canadians died from opiate overdoses last year, according to the Center for Addiction and Mental Health. It predicts that number is going to rise sharply next year. In response, people on the frontlines of the crisis are being armed with new training and doses of Narcan. They’ve become the so-called Narcan warriors, first responders, harm reduction staff and family and fellow users who pull people who overdose back from the brink. I'm joined by three of them. But before I introduce them, a warning, we're going to have a candid talk about drug use and overdosing, some people may find this disturbing. Linda Fox is the Manager of the Gateway and Boulevard Shelters in Surrey, BC. They offer a range of services and support, including crisis intervention and a 24 hour a day drop in. Christy Sutherland is a family doctor and addiction medicine specialist. She is also the Medical Director of the Portland Hotel Society in Vancouver's downtown eastside. And Ryan Woiden and has been a paramedic for 17 years. He is in Winnipeg. Hello to all of you.

MANY VOICES: Good morning. Morning.

AMT: So we heard that firefighter describe this new part of his job as a daily routine. How would you describe the use of fentanyl where you are? Let's start with Linda.

LINDA FOX: When I heard those sirens going off in the clip, I just closed my eyes for a second and I could just, that's such a familiar sound and I guess I would describe it as an epidemic that’s rocked our community in Surrey. And by the community I mean the folks that use the drop in centre and it's their safety place, it's a place where they know they can get help from, you know, the people that work there. They trust us. And so now we've been put in this position on a daily basis of doing these critical interventions because this fentanyl has been introduced into the environment.

AMT: Ryan Woiden, is there a so-called typical fentanyl user?

RYAN WOIDEN: You know what, maybe there used to be but I mean, you certainly have the people that have addictions and addictions is a disease, as we all know. But there's a change out there with, I think, the youth that we're seeing anyway. We’re seeing it being used in house parties we're seeing it being used before people go out, I guess, to party. And we're finding them in all sorts of places here in Winnipeg.

AMT: And of course when you say you're seeing it it's because you're getting called, because they're ODing.

RYAN WOIDEN: Mmhmm.

AMT: Dr. Christy Sutherland, what are you seeing?

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: We've intervened in over 1,000 overdoses this past year in the downtown eastside throughout all of our housing projects. The staff at the Portland Hotel Society are quite stressed with the number of overdoses they've intervened in. One of our staff has intervened in 25 just on her own, with other staff support, but 25 overdoses over one year for one staff is really hard on someone's emotions. And I think a key part of the fentanyl epidemic is that it's contaminated in many drugs of abuse that are not opiates. So it's contaminated in marijuana, in crystal meth, in cocaine. So often people who are not intending to use opiates end up overdosing on fentanyl unintentionally.

AMT: And so when someone is overdosing on fentanyl, what's happening to them?

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Opiates interfere with our drive for respiration. So in an opiate overdose, someone stops breathing but their heart can still be beating and that's the time you want to intervene as quickly as possible to restore their oxygen so that they don't have brain damage.

AMT: And when you talk about intervening, what, you're saving them with Narcan. Tell us what it is.

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Yeah, so Narcan is a molecule that reverses opiates inside the brain, so it wakes the person up basically. It can be quite dramatic when you reverse an opiate overdose because the person goes from being blue to being often quite angry at you and so confused because they don't know what's happened.

AMT: And they’re blue because..

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Because they're not breathing, so they don't have enough oxygen.

AMT: And so there's a window? What do you do, you inject it, what do you do?

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Yeah, you inject it into the muscle. We have oxygen and ambu bags and masks for ventilation, so the staff are able to administer oxygen and provide ventilation to the people while we wait for paramedics.

AMT: OK. Linda Fox, let's talk about the use of Narcan. How concerned were you the first time you used it on someone who was overdosing?

LINDA FOX: Yeah, so that's interesting story. The first time I ever had to use it I had just started in Surrey, you know, earlier this year and had just been trained like the day before. So I wasn't expecting, I was downstairs talking to somebody in the front room and all of a sudden we hear this, Narcan [yelling]. So I run out to the street with my little bag. We had to run through a little field. I slipped on something, fell. I'm OK, I'm coming. And then we get there and the person was so blue and gray that I thought they were dead. There was no pulse, there was no anything, so I was calling 911. One of the persons was doing breaths, one was doing chest compressions in between. And then the person doing chest compressions got so tired, and then we found the pulse and then we're getting the Narcan ready to inject. We gave him one injection and we're still continuing to do the breaths because all he had was a pulse but still blue. Few more minutes go by, we're trying to time it because they're telling us, you know, three to five minutes. And so five minutes later we give him another injection and suddenly the colour starts to come back. And you're so filled with adrenaline while this is going on, you know, his colour’s coming back, OK, then you hear a little raspy breathing and then suddenly he just pops up. You know, your feelings are like wow. This person was literally looked like they were dead. But then it starts to fade down and the reality of what just happened sort of strikes you, like it’s not something you do in your everyday job. I've never done it before.

AMT: Mm. When you say they’re blue, how blue is blue?

LINDA FOX: As blue as a smurf. They look that blue. Like, they're blue.

AMT: Ryan, you're nodding. I can hear you nodding.

RYAN WOIDEN: [laughs] Yeah.

AMT: What do you want to say?

RYAN WOIDEN: Yeah, it's an adrenaline moment. You have to continually put your training first and you just get through the call and I happen to agree with Linda when, you know, the call is over you still have this adrenaline rush, and the reality starts to set in and you realize how close somebody was. But I guess when you do it for a living, as I do here in Winnipeg, you know, the next call could be another one and then another one. And, you know, when those feelings start to turn to, you know, that you certainly have sadness, like we're human beings, right? And you don't realize that it creeps in sometimes. But when you when you see these fentanyl overdoses and car overdoses, these people are vulnerable like, without you--

AMT: [interposing] What do you mean car fentanyl overdose, what’s that?

RYAN WOIDEN: Carfentanil is different than fentanyl. It is the, I guess we can call it a large animal tranquilizer, and it's starting to make its way into Winnipeg as well. And it's, I mean, what is it 10,000 times more powerful than morphine? When someone's on carfentanil and we have a carfentanil overdose, we are using much more Narcan to bring somebody back. We're into dose five and six and we're still not getting them back.

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Oh yeah, we’re the same for here.

RYAN WOIDEN: You know, and so at that point we realize how much fentanyl or is this fentanyl? And so the carfentanil has been used and that's what we had heard, it was coming from BC and made its way into Winnipeg. So, very dangerous.

AMT: Christy Sutherland, that's an elephant tranquilizer isn't it?

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: There are so many different types of opiates and they all work on the same receptor in the brain. But some of them are stickier to that receptor than others and so are stronger and harder to reverse. And that's why it's taking a higher dose of Naloxone to take it off the receptor and restore the person's breathing.

AMT: Ryan, you're the head of the paramedics union in Winnipeg. What are your members telling you about their experiences with Narcan?

RYAN WOIDEN: We're certainly seeing repeat patients. So we'll pick someone up and it'll be a fentanyl or carfentanil overdose and we'll see them again three days later in the same situation, or we'll see them again five days after that. And so it's scary. It's scary. You know, just to go into these houses where people are, it's something that I think it needs to be talked about at the parent level for sure, because I don't think that there's enough getting out there to explain exactly what we're seeing and why we're seeing it. And that's the part that scares me.

AMT: With these houses, you're talking about house parties?

RYAN WOIDEN: You know, being a paramedic for 17 years I can remember going for a call, you know, to a house party where you'll see five to ten teenagers and there's, you know, booze everywhere, there's beer bottles, there's music playing, there's, you know, somebody usually throwing up in the corner, someone's, you know, loud and belligerent or whatever and we're going there to check on somebody, you know. And worst case scenario is someone probably had, you know, maybe smoked a little bit of marijuana and drank too much and now they're kind of passed out and they really are unable to look after themselves and we’ll go. But today it's different.

AMT: What do you see? What's it like?

RYAN WOIDEN: Well, you're standing at the door and you're looking at five to ten people let's say. And they're staring back at you. These people are pale, they've got sunken eyes, they are breathing very slowly. And I really mean no disrespect to anybody out there that's been affected by this but I use the word zombie. And the scary part for paramedics is we know that there's one person there that someone has called 911 for, but often we end up going back to that same address because now five minutes later someone else's fentanyl has kicked in to the point where they aren't breathing and we returned to that house with another unit. And so really it's just scary that you don't know how many patients you're really looking at.

AMT: You're talking for multiple overdoses essentially.

RYAN WOIDEN: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

AMT: And you're saying, like, the house party, you're talking what? Teenagers, suburban teenagers sometimes? Like that's the scenario?

RYAN WOIDEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is--

AMT: These are kids in school and they are like, maybe mom and dad are away or they've got somebody's house and then they're using fentanyl.

RYAN WOIDEN: Yeah, yeah.

AMT: OK. So the BC coroner's office is going to hold an inquest into the death of a 20-year-old by the name of Brandon Jansen. That inquest begins early in the new year. He was addicted to fentanyl, he died at a private drug treatment centre. Michelle Jansen is Brandon's mother. She also has a younger son who was addicted to fentanyl and is now in recovery, and she has spoken to students. This is what she had to say to students at a high school in Port Coquitlam about Narcan.

SOUNDCLIP

If you're in a peer group that parties a couple of times a month or parties at all, I would suggest that at least someone have one of those kits available in the event that there is an overdose. No one plans for it, nor do you sit there on Friday night planning to go out and thinking OK, oh my gosh, check, check, you know let's check for a Naloxone kit. Just do it. People are dying, kids are dying, your friends are dying. There's more funerals that we're attending than not, and it’s a new wave. This is something that hasn't hit before and it's hitting your age group. This is where it starts. The decisions that you make going forward here can be devastating.

AMT: Dr. Christy Sutherland, what do you think of Michelle Jansen’s message?

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Oh my goodness. Well, it's so sad. No one should die of opiate overdose, it's a preventable death. So it just sort of breaks my heart that young people are dying in this way. You know, it's always the argument in harm reduction that harm reduction might encourage drug use. And so with Insite, which we operate in the downtown eastside, it doesn't encourage drug use. Drug use didn't go up with providing this sort of indoor space with dignity and safety for drug users. So I would never want someone to be unsafe with their drug use. I always want them to be using clean needles, I always want them to be using with someone else and I always want them to have a Narcan kit.

RYAN WOIDEN: Michelle, as she said, is right. Putting that Narcan kit in your bag, in your backpack before you go to a party is a great idea. I really think it is. But it's also a double edged sword. If people have it, I don't want them to believe that now that they have it, you know, it's OK to use it. And if they do use it, we really want people to understand that calling 911 is extremely important. You know, Narcan works for so long and then they can fall back into an overdose and at that point they may not have people around them and they may just start feeling real tired and when they go to sleep, that's it.

AMT: And well, even administering it, right?

RYAN WOIDEN: That’s right.

AMT: Knowing how much, because sometimes it's not one dose of Narcan.

RYAN WOIDEN: That's right.

AMT: Mm. And you've all talked about reviving people and reviving the same person more than once. Linda have you and your staff had to use Narcan to save the same person, like you do get a lot of that?

LINDA FOX: Oh yeah. A large number of our guests we've Narcanned eight to 20 times. In this year alone at the front room site, we've narcanned from January to now over 250 people. I don't know if tolerance goes down after a while, I know we've just had moments in time like, what they call hot spots, over a weekend we had at one point we had 40 overdoses in a weekend.

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: That’s so scary. And I think that this really shows how terrible addiction is, because it doesn't seem to make sense that if someone has one non-fatal overdose and they're brought back to life, why would they use opiates again? Like, it seems baffling. But I think that this is, you know, a really great example of why addiction is such a terrible disease. Their brain changes because of chronic opiate use, and in recovery the brain can change back. But there is something about that drive to opiates that the brain is telling that person that they need opiates to survive that causes them to take these horrific risks and, you know, almost die over and over, and it's because they have, you know, such a terrible illness.

AMT: And Christy Sutherland, is there a toll? There's obviously the toll of addiction, but the overdosing and then the revival and then the overdosing and revival again, what does that do to the brain?

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Oh, well it's definitely harmful and it definitely sets them up for a fatal overdose. And so I often chat with patients, it's a really good moment to intervene as an addiction physician after someone's fatal overdose, to say like, I am so worried about you. Like, let's start you on methadone, let's start you on suboxone. You know, you just need some relief from this. My patients call it the grind, where opiates, you know, heroin usually lasts about eight hours, and they don't actually get much euphoria from heroin anymore, they only use to alleviate withdrawal. And opiate withdrawal is like torture, it's pain, it's nausea, they have goose bumps and sweats and tremors. Like, my patients know when they use heroin the clock starts and eight hours later they have to get their next heroin dose, otherwise they'll suffer this excruciating pain. And so within that eight hours they have to find heroin. They have to find money, so they're binning or they're doing sex work or stealing to try to get the next fix of heroin to not suffer. That's called being on the grind. And for some of my patients, they've been doing that for 20 years. And when you start them on methadone, you alleviate their withdrawal, you take away their cravings and it helps the brain heal. Suddenly, they have this free time, they have more money and then, you know, it's such a beautiful moment as a doctor because I can say like, well, what are your hobbies, like, what did you like to do before you used heroin? They’ll be like oh, I always loved swimming and so you’ll help them go to the pool and get their gym pass, and people rebuild their lives when they get on medication.

AMT: Linda, I can hear you nodding on the radio. What are you thinking?

LINDA FOX: Oh, I'm just thinking you, know, she's talking about her patients. Many of the people we see, they don't even have doctors. And after multiple overdoses, we notice that it takes way longer to revive that person and they don't want to go to hospital. The people that have been Narcanned a few times and have gone to hospital, they're then refusing after to go to hospital and there's so much more anger at the drop in site. Since this crisis has started, it's like, clients are volatile right now. People that are using this substance are very aggressive.

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Yeah, and to echo what Linda’s saying that Narcan only lasts for four hours. So if someone overdoses on a longer acting opiate, they can overdose after four hours. So they can sort of come back to life miraculously and you try to get them to the hospital where they can be monitored. But many people refused to go to hospital because they're so uncomfortable, and often they feel that they're not treated well at the hospital. And so they're at risk if you just sort of let them go, of re overdosing in another four hours after that Narcan has worn off and that opiate then becomes free to reattach into the brain receptors.

AMT: There's something called yoyoing. What is it?

RYAN WOIDEN: Well, I was on the phone a couple of weeks ago with a friend of mine, a colleague that's a paramedic out in BC, and that was one of the terms that they began to use out there just on those calls that they went to where they had addicts or someone who's been around fentanyl use more than the average person. And what it was was that they were injecting an opiate, whether it be fentanyl mixed with heroin or something like that, but in the back end of the syringe they have their Narcan. And so they would inject the opioid fentanyl for that two, three minute high whatever type of euphoric feeling that they get, but the Narcan was going in right with it as well and it would just take a little bit of time and then it would kick in and that way it's almost like they were protecting themselves from an overdose.

AMT: Is that a good thing? I mean, obviously not to have the overdose is a good thing, but is it a good thing to be using it like that?

RYAN WOIDEN: No, no, I couldn't possibly endorse anything like that whatsoever. It's dangerous is what it is and it's people trying to be I suppose, you know, thinking that they might be safer but, you know, just fentanyl use in general is just, you know, it's so risky with what they're mixing it with as the doctor said.

AMT: Is Narcan just a band-aid solution to a bigger problem Christy Sutherland?

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Yeah, I would say so. Like, addiction is a chronic disease. So, you know, I really appreciate that clip you played for us because we need to reach out to youth to let them know about the dangers of addiction because it's the first use that we want to avoid because it's that first use that tips people off. And then when people do have addiction, they deserve robust medical treatment that is based in the evidence. So they need safety, they need clean needles, they need a safe place to use. So I’m very supportive of supervised consumption sites all around Canada would save a lot of lives and they need access to robust pharmacotherapy, so methadone and suboxone to protect them from death and protect them from HIV.

AMT: What percentage of youth even know they're taking fentanyl, versus having at laced into something that they're not aware of. Can you even tell?

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: I couldn't tell, but most of my patients are surprised that they're using fentanyl. But there definitely are a portion of people with addiction who are fentanyl seeking because it's so strong and it's so euphoric their addiction shifts to the drug that's stronger from heroin.

AMT: So where does this fentanyl crisis go in the coming years, Linda Fox?

LINDA FOX: I don't know. You know, I always think of this as like, it's like, an epidemic that is affecting, you know, people who survive because they've figured out how to make themselves invisible. And as long as a lot of people don't think it affects them it only affects people who use, I think a lot of people don't even know that this epidemic is happening. I mean, now they do it's all over the paper but--

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: [interposing] Yeah, it's so sad when people die in the bathroom of the Starbucks or something like that--

LINDA FOX: Yeah.

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Because they're trying to hide. Also, I think opiates are different than other drugs of addiction. With cigarettes, people stop and then they start and they stop and they start. And I'm so supportive of my patients when they stop and it takes an average of 15 quit attempts for someone to stop smoking for their life. But the thing that's different with cigarettes and opiates is that relapse is not fatal. Whereas with opiates, after a period of abstinence people have lost their tolerance and so their first opiate use after abstinence can be the fatal opiate overdose. So for me, when I have patients who've had multiple non-fatal overdoses, I'm so worried about their high risk of death and I want to capture them into care and start them on methadone or suboxone to protect them from death.

AMT: And how easy is that to do?

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: It can be challenging. Like, these medications are a lot of work for the person to take, methadone involves daily witnessed ingestion, so a trip to the pharmacy each day and titration of dosing up to therapeutic place and it can take a lot of time and a lot of effort on that patient's part to get to a place where they're protected from overdose.

AMT: So that's not always easy for an addict who's down and out, in other ways.

CHRISTY SUTHERLAND: Yeah, it can be quite challenging, yeah.

AMT: OK, well we'll leave it there. It's really important to hear your voices on this. Thank you.

MANY VOICES: Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

AMT: Ryan Woiden is a paramedic and has been for 17 years. He joined us from Winnipeg. Linda Fox is the Manager of the Gateway and Boulevard Shelters in Surrey, BC. Christy Sutherland is a Doctor and a Medical Director of the Portland Hotel Society in Vancouver. If you are surprised at what they're talking about, let us know what you're thinking. You can tweet us we're @TheCurrentCBC, find us on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent and click on the contact link, or go to our Facebook page. If you're joining us partway through, you can hear this interview online or listen to the podcast, find it at the App Store or Google Play, wherever you get your podcast, and and take a listen again if you like. And stay with us. Coming up next, as advertisers get increasingly desperate for our attention, the quality of what we're paying attention to is turning into a race to the bottom. You knew that right? Tim Wu has some ideas for a solution. He will join me to talk about the rabid effort advertisers are using to get inside our heads and he makes the case for paying to keep them out. I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, this is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM and online on cbc.ca/thecurrent.

[Music: Extro]

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How your attention has become the biggest commodity

Guests: Tim Wu

ANNA-MARIA TREMONTI: Hello, I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, this is The Current. Coming up, the all-out battle for our most precious remaining resource, our attention. But first, a word from our sponsor.

SOUNDCLIP

ADVERTISER VOICE: Ladies and gentleman, I'm going to show you the greatest kitchen appliance ever made.

OLD SPICE MAN: Hello ladies. Look at your man, now back to me. Now back at your man, now back to me.

SENIOR LADY 1: Hey, where’s the beef? I don’t think there’s anyone back there.

CROWD: I’d like to buy the world a coke and keep it company. That’s the real thing. I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

AMT: Some memorable commercials from over the years, but imagine how many ads on radio, television, especially online have caused you to turn the dial, zap the channel, scroll away or glaze over completely. To be alive today is to be bombarded with promotional messages large and small. Though it hasn't always been that way and it might not have to be. That's part of the message of a new book from Tim Wu. The Columbia University professor is well known for having coined the term net neutrality. His new book is called The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Tim Wu is with us from New York City. Hello.

TIM WU: It's a pleasure to be here.

AMT: You know, you're a law professor, a scholar of media and technology, you're basically a smart guy. Do you click on those annoying online ads like so many of us?

TIM WU: Well I got to tell you, some of them are so powerful it's almost impossible not to I find. You know, do you ever have this experience where you feel like your hand is moving almost out of your control? Less on ads but on the stories, in particular click bait stories. Three celebrities from the 90s who never really made it or whatever it is, you know, I find I--

AMT: [interposing] Yeah, I ignore them. I ignore them for a while and then I go back. [laughs]

TIM WU: Yeah, well maybe you have better willpower than I have.

AMT: No, because I still end up there. [laughs]

TIM WU: [chuckles] One of the reasons I wrote this book was that feeling I had or the experience I had where I would sit down to write a single email and then suddenly three hours would go by and I would say what just happened. And, you know, I was clicking on that, clicking on this, going around and not only the ads but seeing the ads and I was like wow things have really gotten to a different kind of place than they were, and that motivated me to write this book.

AMT: How much of the time that we spent online today do you think is spent tied up with ads or those kinds of distractions?

TIM WU: I mean, I think most of it. There's very few places on the web in particular that aren't advertising based, whether it's Facebook, whether it's Google, you know, our email, most people use Gmail or Yahoo mail or something. There's very few spaces on the web. You know, Wikipedia is one of the few I can think of that aren’t now somehow ad saturated. And so it's really changed, some ways I think it's become almost unbearable. But that's where we are right now.

AMT: Well let's talk about what it means to be a so-called attention merchant. You trace this back to the 1830s in a certain newspaper in New York City. What did it invent that is still with us today?

TIM WU: It invented a business model, which at the time was unusual, unprecedented, but now has come to dominate many spheres of our life. The business model was this, you sell the product at a loss, maybe you give it away for free, this was the newspaper, and you make the money back by collecting a massive audience and then selling that audience to advertisers. And what you're really selling when you look at it carefully is you're selling access to the minds of those people. So, you know, when you're on Facebook or when you're watching regular commercial television, you are the product. You know, the access into your brain is what's being resold. And that's the business model they came up with in the 1830s in New York and it was called the printing press, the ones who brought it up. And that is a business model which has gone from that very limited obscure area, you know, the old line media into so many areas of our life. You know, Facebook is interesting because I have this three-year-old daughter and she's very cute pics. And one thing that's funny is when I'm posting these pictures, I'm creating content for advertisers to piggyback upon. You know, I'm like my own little TV network. The weird thing is I'm not paid for it. I guess what I get in compensation is I get to see other people's pictures. But yes we have created an ad platform out of our social lives. It's strange. I think people from another generation would say your friends sell you things or you let your friends be an advertising medium. But it is what has happened, the social sphere has been colonized by advertising.

AMT: Well, OK, so let's keep moving then. The next big thing in media was radio after the penny paper, of course that got commercialized in North America. But if we jump to the other side of the ocean, into the thirties and fourties, radio was put to a very different use.

SOUNDCLIP

[Adolf Hitler yelling in German]

[Sound: crowd cheering]

VOICE 1: Mr. Hitler has just said that the Treaty of Versailles is for us Germans and has been for us Germans not a law.

AMT: Adolf Hitler. Tim Wu, what did Hitler understand about being an attention merchant?

TIM WU: Hitler profoundly understood the importance of attentional harvesting of the power that you get from having access to the minds of millions of people, in his case. And he set up, and he and his lieutenant Goebbels, set up the German radio network so that 80 million people would be subject to his will. He was actually in his early career, people don't know this, but he worked in the advertising industry. And if you ever read Mein Kampf, you'll realize that it's full of ideas from advertising and marketing. You know, the message has to be interesting, it has to be simple, repeated over and over and over again. He took the Nazi ideology and made it into a sellable product and therefore dominated his society.

AMT: So they were harvesting the attention of the masses in order for him to push something and he wasn't the only one who was doing this kind of thing. We this, what, in other places where there was control over communication systems then, right? Like, Soviet Union would have done this?

TIM WU: Yes. I would say though, that the German Third Reich took it to levels that were unprecedented. I mean, yes there were propaganda papers in the Soviet Union. So what I think is so terrifying about Hitler and some of the other totalitarian states is the fact that they made, that they used this attention harvesting technique, you know, developed first by advertisers for the purposes of controlling their wills and giving voice to very dark emotions controlled by one man.

AMT: Do you see that style at work for anyone in politics today?

TIM WU: [chuckles] You know, it has been something that politicians have always sometimes gone to. I think successful politicians often speak to people's unfelt emotions. I don't want to, it's obviously I don't want to compare any politician to Hitler directly, but I have to say the stirring up of hatred and a sense of anxiety and a sense of redress has been successful for the Trump campaign. But I don't want to say that, you know, he's like Hitler. I think people have often spoken to a sense of grievance and they, you know, Hitler obviously took it to the darkest possible extent.

AMT: Mm. Let's hear a couple of more clips that lead up to the present day. This is September 9th, 1956.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: crowd screaming]

ELVIS PRESLEY: This is probably the greatest honour that I've ever had in my life. There's not much I can say except I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. And now..

[Sound: guitar music playing]

[Sound: crowd screaming]

AMT: OK Tim, what are we listening to?

TIM WU: That's Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan Show, I think on a Sunday night on the CBS television network, a top rated show in its time. And in the book identify that moment, that exact moment as peak attention in the United States and North America. The moment where more people than at any other time were listening to the same message at the same time. I think the audience for that particular recording was something like 100 million people which was an amazing number and, you know, as we discussed earlier, the totalitarian regimes had successfully achieved that with a lot of sticks. But here was the effect of everyone listening the same thing achieved not by, you know, criminal coercion, but by the appeal of Elvis Presley. So it's a remarkable moment in the history of the century and frankly of human civilization.

AMT: And it’s never happened again, has it? In terms of that percentage of Americans looking at one thing?

TIM WU: Yeah, that's the highest percentage ranking. Now, there's been larger single events because we have more population in the world now. But that was the highest ratings of any show in history.

AMT: 82.6 per cent of American television viewers watching.

TIM WU: Right.

AMT: At the same time. OK. What did the fact that so many millions of Americans were looking at the same thing at the same time mean to the attention merchants of the day?

TIM WU: You know, I think it is something really unusual in human history, something in the 20th century that we may never quite have again, which is exactly what you said, everyone in the country at the same time listening to the same thing. So when you harvest people's attention, as I said, you're getting access to their minds, their brains and it cannot help but affect you to be listening to the same thing that everyone else is listening to. I think it did a lot. Everyone, they’re right when they say this to forge a single identity. That's one reason some of the totalitarian regimes wanted that kind of thing, as they wanted the entire nation to be one identity. And I think there's a reason the 1950s were remembered as the high mark of conformism, because in fact when everyone was listening to the same thing and I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it did make people more similar and feel like one nation. And I think that was useful for a lot of reasons, but it is also among other things, really great for selling products because you had 100 million people listening, then on came the commercial for Coca-Cola and then on came the commercial for Marlboro cigarettes and somehow the brands of the fifties became identified with being American. You know, Coca-Cola to drink Coca-Cola was to be America, there was no other choice. To smoke Marlboros was to be a man. So the fifties advertising was very successful in this appeal to being one kind of nation, one unified person almost, and that's what I think was so important about that era.

AMT: It's interesting because they were harvesting the attention but everybody was paying attention to the same thing, so then they could share that amongst themselves and that only strengthened the fact that they were paying attention to the things the attention merchants wanted.

TIM WU: Exactly, and I think a lot of people have a nostalgia for that era. I have somewhat mixed feelings about it myself. Well, I wasn't actually alive so [chuckles] I can't speak to it directly but it's true, I think if you have a culture where everyone listens to the same thing, you know, actually in Canada, fewer stations so more people watching or listening to CBC, I think that does forge a greater unity. The question is whether it also leaves room for you to be your own person. You know, at the extreme well Germany is the extreme but even America in the fifties is an extreme, not necessarily as much room for dissenting or alternative viewpoints.

AMT: OK, well, let's jump ahead a decade to this.

SOUNDCLIP

TIMOTHY LEARY: Turn on. Tune in. And drop out.

[Sound: guitar riff playing]

AMT: OK, the voice of Timothy Leary, the sixties counter-culture guru. What does his message have to do with human attention?

TIM WU: Well, what's interesting about Timothy Leary is if you look carefully at his message, which by the way was crafted together with Marshall McLuhan, the famous Canadian media theorist, he was calling for an attentional revolution. He wanted people to turn away from television, turn away from mainstream culture, you know, turn away from advertising and go inward and turn towards nature, turn towards each other, sort of human revolution. He, you know, using the technology of the times thought that LSD was the key to achieving this kind of thing. He really wanted a spiritual revolution that fundamentally was attentional in its nature. What do you pay attention to everyday? Is it television or is it the inner spirit, is it, you know, love, peace and rock and roll. That was the whole, when you have this tune in idea, you know, tune out, that's what he was talking about.

AMT: The revolution in attention didn't happen though, that he wanted.

TIM WU: Not quite. I think that [chuckles] what's interesting about the 1960s is that while many of the countercultural leaders wanted people to turn away from mainstream culture, advertisers and ultimately broadcasters saw things differently. They saw that people had felt repressed in the fifties and wanted new options and they felt they could sell to those options. And so Pepsi was one of the leaders of marketing to counter cultural ideas as a lifestyle. You drink Pepsi and you are kind of free and having a great time. Coca-Cola ultimately, you know, you heard that ad at the beginning, we want to give the world a Coke. Ultimately, counterculturalism became something people sold to. [chuckles] And I think that was in the end more successful in the long run than Leary's revolution. I don't want to say Leary had no effect, I think a lot of people took it seriously. But it's not as if commerce died.

AMT: In other words, tune in, turn on, drop out becomes adopted as an advertising slogan.

TIM WU: It does in fact. There's a large number of companies that actually use that as their advertising slogan. You know, tune in drop out with Sparkle cola or something. Essentially, some of the movement was co-opted. And what's amazing about capitalism and about consumerism is even anti-consumerism can be catered to and sold to. You have people who don't want, you know, who hate capitalism, well, you can sell them a t-shirt that says they hate capitalism. So the advertisers in the end, I think, sort of won that decade in the long run. You know, I don't deny that the ideas had some effect but the hope for revolution never happened.

AMT: Well, let's get to one more clip that brings us a little closer to the present day.

SOUNDCLIP

MEG RYAN: I turn on my computer.

[Sound: dialup internet sound]

MEG RYAN: I go online.

COMPUTER VOICE: Welcome, welcome.

MEG RYAN: And my breath catches in my chest until I hear three little words.

COMPUTER VOICE: You’ve got mail.

MEG RYAN: You’ve got mail.

AMT: That’s Meg Ryan in the movie You've Got Mail, from the dawn of the e-mail age. [laughs] Did you hear the dial up there? [laughs]

TIM WU: That was great, I loved it. [chuckles]

AMT: Email, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram everything that would follow is inherently social. What did that social interaction mean for the attention merchants?

TIM WU: Well more than one thing. So we talked earlier about the importance of prime time as an attention harvesting opportunity. People sitting down every day and watching several hours of television and watching all the advertisements. The other next big revolution was when people started checking in, whether it was checking in to email very early on, checking into AOL, seeing what was there. And you just heard that clip where like I've got mail, you know, so exciting. [chuckles] One of the things I talk about in the book is how the variable rewards scheme of email. You never know if you're going to get one, if it's going to be interesting, it keeps people coming back almost like a slot machine you never quite know whether it's going to pay out or not, especially in the early days. So that's a big deal that we all develop this, maybe you feel this, an urge to oh, I got to check my email, or got to go into Facebook and got to go onto Twitter, see what's going on. The other major thing that happens as well, there's a new screen. People start spending time in front of their computers. Now, if you told someone in the eighties that one day the computer will be a major advertising platform, that it will constantly be trying to get you to pay attention to its ads. You would have said you've got to be kidding me, that thing? You know, with the green screen and no graphics. But in the 1990s, with AOL in particular, you have the very beginnings of what is now such a big part of our life, advertising on computers. And finally, the idea of our social sphere is something AOL was so successful on getting people on computers so they could meet each other, whether on chat rooms or on e-mail. That social sphere becoming a commercial advertising opportunity was AOL's invention and one which has certainly influenced our times.

AMT: And so it's true huh? Like, 15 years ago the idea, people would kind of say, you know, people's time on screens, computer screens would supersede times in front of television screens and people thought that was crazy.

TIM WU: Right.

AMT: It wasn't that long ago.

TIM WU: Wasn't that long ago. That's true. It seemed, you know, AOL when it first began selling its packages, I think if people five hours a month of time. [chuckles] That was the amount of time they thought you'd use on your computer, five hours a month. And then after that you started paying and then, you know, later it increased and so forth. But that was in the original conception. No, it's definitely, you know, we have frankly at least three screens, most of us, television, the ones we carry, BlackBerry bears some responsibility for that, and of course the computer screen. And, you know, the way we live has certain, I mean, I'm not the first to say this, but it's certainly changed. But when I'm focused on is all of these have become ad platforms in a way that I think would have shocked the inventors of these technologies years ago.

AMT: And, you know, you say we're turning away or we're becoming more savvy about, like, getting away from that so they become more savvy about chasing us. But also our attention is very, like, we didn't have as many places to put our attention before. We had a remote on a television but now we have endless access. We can we can look up anything, we can look here and there, so in the online world that we live today who wins the attention merchant game?

TIM WU: Well it's a very competitive contest, I'll tell you that. Online at least, the biggest winners are Google and Facebook. But I want to get back to something you said at the beginning of your question. You know, one thing we are not anymore is bored, [chuckles] you know, and that's a good thing, I guess. But in our desperate urge to escape boredom, I mean, I think some people can't stand it if their cell phone runs out of batteries and they're stuck in a waiting room, it's like the worst possible torture. We are completely intolerant of being bored now. We're kind of constantly amused but I think that it's starting to have some effects. I mean, tension is access to our brain and we're sort of constantly in this mode of being mildly distracted or mildly stimulated. It's getting harder for a lot of people to read things that are of any length, you know, here I am selling writing a book. But, you know, everything is shorter, needs to be pithier. I think that our brains are actually changing as a consequence of these ad models that drive us to shorter, clickier content that we're constantly cycling through. You know, one of the reasons I wrote this book, I was very motivated by this philosopher William James who wrote about attention in 19th century. And he said, you know, at the end of your life when you look back at it, your life experience will have been what you have chosen to pay attention to. That's it. You know, we say other things like oh I did this, I did that but really your moment to moment experience is just what you are paying attention to. That is what life is at a very deep level. And so I think our attention is scarce. We can't expand it. And one of the things I call on people in this book is to really think about how you spend your attention and try to direct it towards what you'd like to do with your life. I think it's part of sort of self-determined life or even building of your own character that you are very careful about how you choose to spend your attention.

AMT: And, you know, you talk about how the attention merchants can lead us to a place where we don't feel that we are going to be fulfilled then in life because we're paying attention to the wrong things. But can it hurt them too? Google's founders once said that advertising would ruin a search engine.

TIM WU: Yeah, I don't believe in there’s a group of evil attention merchants that have tried to seize your attention. You know, obviously someone like Hitler was an evil person who was trying to seize your attention. I think many of the companies feel trapped themselves. They needed money, advertising seemed like a good revenue model but now they're stuck in the situation where a company like Google or a company like Facebook is facing constant pressure to deliver more advertising to more people all the time. And so they have many of their best engineers in Silicon Valley are spending their considerable efforts trying to get people to click on ads. And you talk to them and they're like oh my god I didn't think this is what I wanted to do with my life. You know, here I am this computer science genius and I've gotten fooling people to click on things. It is really kind of a bad situation for all involved. And I I think, you know, we're almost at rock bottom right now and it's time to try to, especially on the web, try and do something better. I even think that some of the bigger companies Google, Facebook might be able to move to subscription or paid models in some ways. I think that many of the, you know, Wikipedia remains good, I think there is hope. I just think it takes a transformation in the way we realize that what advertising is doing to the web in particular and a realisation that the funding model of any medium will make a huge difference for what it's like. You know, government funded media like we're on right now is just different than commercial media is then different than, you know, BuzzFeed where it has to make money to have 100 people clicking on things. And if we want a better culture, if we want better content, we need to find ways to pay for it.

AMT: But you're making the point that we need to pay attention to who's trying to take our attention.

TIM WU: I definitely am. I mean, I am saying that as many other resources become abundant, you know, we have enough food and shelter in rich countries. Some of the few things left of value are our time and attention. And, you know, for the listeners or for everyone, you know, what you do with that time, how you direct your attention will determine your life and what kind of person you are. So I mean, the stakes actually couldn't be higher. And what's funny, we know just a couple of ads here and there, but what's funny about it is that fact is understood very well by industry. And they would like you to spend it much as it is possible with them, but that's not always in your interest.

AMT: It's really important here what you have to say, thank you.

TIM WU: Oh, it's been a great pleasure. Thank you so much.

AMT: That's Tim Wu. His new book is entitled The Attention Merchants. He joined us from New York City. So what do you think? Are you giving the wrong people all your attention? Are you going down that rabbit hole? Let us know what you think. Tweet us we are @TheCurrentCBC. That's right, go to your online attention seeking devices. To find us on Facebook. Go to Twitter, we are @TheCurrentCBC, or write to us from our site cbc.ca/thecurrent. That is our program for today. Now remember, you can always take The Current with you on the CBC Radio app, it's available from the App Store or Google Play. We want your attention as well. Finally, let's hear a bit more from Tim Wu to end today's show. He's got the backstory to one of the most disruptive technologies of the past century. The remote control. I'm Anna-Maria Tremonti, thank you for listening to The Current.

TIM WE: People are probably not aware of the history of the remote control. The remote control was invented by Zenith, the American radio and television company, who had a CEO and president who hated commercials more than anything. His name was Commodore McDonald, he was a naval reserve officer before he started this company. And, he more than anything, believed that radio and television were being ruined by commercials. So he charged his engineers to come up with an invention that would zap or destroy or block advertising. They came back with a remote control. The first versions of the remote control, when you see them, were shaped like little revolvers. And the idea was that you shoot out the advertising from your television set. I think the significance of the remote control is it symbolized one of the first revolts against advertising, one of the first technological tools that was designed to fight advertising. And it began this history, which we have until our present day, of tools which we use to try to protect our attention against advertising.

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November 14, 2016 full episode transcript

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