Liam Stanley

Liam Stanley has spent thirty years inside the architecture Stolen Minds describes — from the earliest days of commercial internet adoption through to the AI systems now being built on top of it.

He has co-founded companies building behavioural-analytics platforms, audience-intelligence systems, narrative- and disinformation-monitoring tools, and AI-powered creative platforms used by media organisations, news outlets, consumer brands, and political campaigns. The book is the product of his being in the rooms where the platforms’ techniques are deployed commercially — and in the rooms where their consequences on real audiences are measured.

It is written against, rather than from, the commercial interests of that work. He is the father of two sons.

The warning the social media generation never got.

The first wave of attention-engineering was something its architects later admitted they hadn’t understood the consequences of. The second wave is different — the people building it are stating publicly that their systems will substitute for human cognitive labour, and the economic infrastructure to make that substitution rational is being built now.

Stolen Minds collects what is being said, names who is saying it, and sets out what a reader can do about it. It is the book Liam went looking for, couldn’t find, and so wrote.

Read about the book

Liam Stanley is a British technologist and creative entrepreneur with thirty years inside the technology industry. He has co-founded companies building behavioural-analytics, audience-intelligence and disinformation-monitoring tools used by media organisations, brands and political campaigns. Stolen Minds: The Engineering of Human Obsolescence is his first book.