Attention Factory

I’ll admit: I approached *Attention Factory* skeptical it could say anything new about TikTok. Boy, was I wrong. Brennan’s access—he was *in the room* during ByteDance’s early pivot from a failing news aggregator to the attention-devouring juggernaut we know—lends the book an urgency most tech histories lack. The chapter on how TikTok’s algorithm was reverse-engineered from user *mistakes* (not genius) had me pausing to scribble notes. That said, the audiobook isn’t without flaws. Zener’s narration, while professional, occasionally flattens the drama of key moments—like the 2018 U.S. congressional hearings—where a touch more gravitas could’ve heightened the tension. And Brennan’s deep dive into ByteDance’s internal politics, while fascinating, sometimes bogs down in acronyms (ever heard of “Toutiao’s A/B testing matrix”? Now you have). Still, the audiobook’s strengths dwarf its quirks. The pacing is razor-sharp in the first half, as Brennan traces TikTok’s rise from a “copycat” app to a cultural force, but it’s the second act—where he unpacks the geopolitical chess match between Beijing, Washington, and Big Tech—that elevates this from business book to *thriller*. The production quality is impeccable, with no distracting edits or volume spikes, though I’d have loved a PDF companion for the data-heavy sections. Bottom line? If you’ve ever scrolled TikTok and thought, *“How is this legal?”*, this audiobook is your answer—just don’t blame me if you start side-eyeing your phone afterward.