Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

by Jonathan Taplin Narrated by Jonathan Taplin

Overview

The book that started the Techlash.

A stinging polemic that traces the destructive monopolization of the Internet by Google, Facebook and Amazon, and that proposes a new future for musicians, journalists, authors and filmmakers in the digital age.

Move Fast and Break Things is the riveting account of a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs who in the 1990s began to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms -- Facebook, Amazon, and Google -- that now determine the future of the music, film, television, publishing and news industries.

Jonathan Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the men who founded these companies, including Peter Thiel and Larry Page: overlooking piracy of books, music, and film while hiding behind opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users in order to create the surveillance-marketing monoculture in which we now live.

The enormous profits that have come with this concentration of power tell their own story. Since 2001, newspaper and music revenues have fallen by 70 percent; book publishing, film, and television profits have also fallen dramatically. Revenues at Google in this same period grew from $400 million to $74.5 billion. Today, Google's YouTube controls 60 percent of all streaming-audio business but pay for only 11 percent of the total streaming-audio revenues artists receive. More creative content is being consumed than ever before, but less revenue is flowing to the creators and owners of that content.

The stakes here go far beyond the livelihood of any one musician or journalist. As Taplin observes, the fact that more and more Americans receive their news, as well as music and other forms of entertainment, from a small group of companies poses a real threat to democracy.

Move Fast and Break Things offers a vital, forward-thinking prescription for how artists can reclaim their audiences using knowledge of the past and a determination to work together. Using his own half-century career as a music and film producer and early pioneer of streaming video online, Taplin offers new ways to think about the design of the World Wide Web and specifically the way we live with the firms that dominate it.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Jon Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things is a provocative and long overdue examination of the giant Internet monopolies that have come to dominate our economy, politics and culture with grave consequences for the quality of our lives. Well written and highly entertaining, this is an ideal book for the lay reader and for students. I like it so much I am using it in my classes this year."
—Robert W. McChesney, co-author, People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy

"Jonathan Taplin, more than anyone I know, can articulate the paralyzing complexities that have arisen from the intertwining of the tech and music industries. He counters the catastrophic implications for musicians with solutions and inspiration for a renaissance. He shows the way for artists to reclaim and reinvent subversion, rather than be in servitude to Big Tech. Every musician and every creator should read this book."
—Rosanne Cash, Grammy-winning Singer and Songwriter

"Jonathan Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things, a rock and roll memoir cum internet history cum artists' manifesto, provides a bracing antidote to corporate triumphalism—and a reminder that writers and musicians need a place at the tech table and, more to the point, a way to make a decent living."
—Jeffrey Toobin, author of American Heiress

"Move Fast and Break Things goes on my bookshelf beside a few other indispensable signposts in the maze of the 21st Century—The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul and The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan. I pray the deepest and highest prayer I can get to that this clarion warning is heeded. The survival of our species is at stake."
—T Bone Burnett, Grammy-winning producer and musician

"In a remarkably innovative and precise amalgam of political economy and cultural criticism, Taplin delivers a devastating critique of our "knowledge-based" economy. This book is a profound analysis of the ruinous impact of the internet economy on the promise of American life."
—Benjamin Schwarz, national editor, The American Conservative, former national editor, The Atlantic

"This is an essential book and a singular hybrid—lucid alternate history of our digital transformation, digital memoir of a pioneering culture industry player, and bracing polemic on how our culture was hijacked and might still be redeemed. And my reaction to Move Fast and Break Things was a three-party hybrid too—provoked, enlightened and inspired."
—Kurt Andersen, host of the Peabody-winning public radio program Studio 360

"Jonathan Taplin's new book could not be more timely. Twenty years after the initial euphoria of the Web, ten years after the invention of social media, it's time to stop breaking things and start thinking seriously about the new habitat we're creating. Move Fast and Break Things provides a blueprint for a future that humans can live in."
—Frank Rose, author of The Art of Immersion

Kirkus Reviews

2017-02-20
When American representative democracy collapses, blame it on Facebook.The internet can be used for immoral purposes, writes tech pioneer Taplin, director emeritus of USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab, from selling drugs and pornography to enabling the piracy of intellectual property. It can also be used to do good, enhancing the economies of remote places by linking them to the world. But if it is largely amoral, that, by Taplin's account, owes little to those who are making fortunes on the Web by controlling and selling information and ransoming eyeballs. Among Taplin's heavies are Facebook, Google, and PayPal, as exemplified by founders and executives Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Peter Thiel, the last of whom emerges as a kind of dark lord of the Hobbesian, libertarian internet (a characterization echoed by other observers). Google enables piracy, guiding readers to sites where albums and movies can be downloaded. Though hiding behind a do-no-evil mantra, Google could simply stop listing pirate sites just as it stopped listing illegal drug sites—"after it paid a $500 million fine for linking" to them. What does all this have to do with democracy? For one thing, it promotes inequality—and, as Taplin notes, with Robert Bork's "protrust" view of antitrust laws now dominant in legal and governmental circles, monopolies are often encouraged rather than prohibited. For another, it narrows choice despite the seemingly endless offerings of Amazon, Wal-Mart, et al. The author offers a modest program of resistance, among whose planks is the interesting notion that creators, especially musicians, would do well to follow the Sunkist model, forming cooperatives to control their works just as citrus growers banded together in common interest. "I have no illusion that the existing business structures of cultural marketing will go away," he writes, "but my hope is that we can build a parallel structure that will benefit all creators." A powerful argument for reducing inequality and revolutionizing how we use the Web for the benefit of the many rather than the few.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173636393
Publisher:	Hachette Audio
Publication date:	04/18/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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