Move Fast and Break Things
How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and What It Means For All Of Us
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Move Fast and Break Things
Narrated by:
Jonathan Taplin
Buy Now for £12.99
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Taplin
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By:
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Jonathan Taplin
About this listen
A Financial Times 'Best Thing I Read This Year' 2017
LONGLISTED FOR THE FT & MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
Google. Amazon. Facebook. The modern world is defined by vast digital monopolies turning ever-larger profits. Those of us who consume the content that feeds them are farmed for the purposes of being sold ever more products and advertising. Those that create the content – the artists, writers and musicians – are finding they can no longer survive in this unforgiving economic landscape.
But it didn’t have to be this way.
In Move Fast and Break Things, Jonathan Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel and Larry Page who founded these all-powerful companies. Their unprecedented growth came at the heavy cost of tolerating piracy of books, music and film, while at the same time promoting opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users to create the surveillance marketing monoculture in which we now live.
It is the story of a massive reallocation of revenue in which $50 billion a year has moved from the creators and owners of content to the monopoly platforms. With this reallocation of money comes a shift in power. Google, Facebook and Amazon now enjoy political power on par with Big Oil and Big Pharma, which in part explains how such a tremendous shift in revenues from creators to platforms could have been achieved and why it has gone unchallenged for so long.
And if you think that’s got nothing to do with you, their next move is to come after your jobs.
Move Fast and Break Things is a call to arms, to say that is enough is enough and to demand that we do everything in our power to create a different future.
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Critic reviews
Taplin wields his axe mercilessly...by the end of this book you will agree with Taplin that the tech firms are abusing their monopoly power to rip us off and debase our culture - breaking the world as he sees it...It is time for consumers to break back. This manifesto is a punchy start.
A bracing, unromantic account of how the internet was captured…Move Fast and Break Things is a timely and useful book
Taplin is angry as hell about the immense size and power of the tech giants, and has a compelling pitch for why we should all be worried too
Comprehensive…Where Taplin excels is by putting all this into the context of the changing global economy
A new analysis of the dark side of the digital revolution...Taplin goes beyond familiar critiques
Taplin’s sense of outrage is palpable and his case is often compelling
A nuanced look at the downside of what is glibly tossed around as "disruption" by various cyber-messianic blowhards. Taplin is hunting big game; it is his contention that the giants of the cyberworld-from Google to Amazon-are threats to the fundamental foundations of democracy and that they also cement inequality into our systems in new and dangerous ways
Mr Taplin brings an informed perspective to his task
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
Move Fast and Break Things goes on my bookshelf beside a few other indispensable signposts in the maze of life in the 21st Century--The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul, The Image by Daniel Boorstin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan, The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian, Christ and the Media by Malcolm Muggeridge, and Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. 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
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 musicians and writers need a place at the tech table and, more to the point, a way to make a decent living
A powerful argument for reducing inequality and revolutionizing how we use the Web for the benefit of the many rather than the few
An absolute must-read for anyone who wants to gain a little savvy in the internet era
Insightful.... Taplin provides a keen, thorough look at the present and future of Americans' lives as influenced and manipulated by the technological behemoths on which they've come to depend. His work is certainly food for thought
Jonathan Taplin, who references the above study as well as an interview of Andreessen, firmly believes that its time to worry – and take a stand. He tears into the characterization by the latter of worries about growing unemployment as simply a matter of “reskilling” of workers – suggesting that only someone as rich, and hence out of touch with the common man, as Andreessen can think that a 50-year-old oil technician can simply reskill, learn coding and work for Google when he loses his job.
“Move Fast and Break Things” is a broadside against big tech, as a threat to democracy and cultural values. The growing role played by technology in everyday lives have been examined in quite a few books recently, although those generally focus on either the risks people take with allowing tech too deeply into their lives (broadly termed cybercrime) or are visions of what a future brave new world is going to look like. Taplin’s book worries about the socio-cultural impact, flowing in part from the economic impact of the growing dominance of a few tech giants which is the gist of his arguments.
Citing data showing that inequality has increased significantly in the US (and around the world) in the past 25 years, the book holds tech monopolies and near monopolies as a major factor in creating inequality. Rules that apply to normal companies such as anti-trust, monopolies, taxes - don’t apply the same way to internet companies, as internet entrepreneurs have convinced successive governments that these will come in the way of “efficiency”. The result is a few outsized winners, and many losers.
The problem is that the internet is particularly good at creating monopolies or duopolies as scale is easily achieved. An example of this dominance - Google’s Herfindahl-Hirschmann Index score in the online search segment is 7200. Regulators usually consider markets with HHI of 1500-2500 to be moderately and >2500 to be highly concentrated. The book contains numerous examples to illustrate this fact and its negative fallouts, whether it’s the slow death of traditional magazines and newspapers as online advertising sucks away their ad revenues, or Amazon leading to a shuttering of bookshops, small publishers as well as mom and pop corner stores.
Taplin’s bigger argument is socio-cultural, that society has put tech innovators on a pedestal and is not paying attention to the enormous costs their mode of thinking inflicts on societal cohesion, while almost exclusively celebrating their successes and innovations. As someone from the media and communications industry, he is a passionate believer in the value that artists of all kinds bring to society, something is being sharply eroded by the high concentration levels we are witnessing. He cites examples from personal experience to show how the music industry, or the film-making has changed, and how the artists are actually much worse off in the new regimes.
With insights into the thoughts of various Valley personalities, and their visions of tech driven Utopia, Taplin suggests that their underlying belief is that of a government hands-free libertarianism as espoused by Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand. As he points out, these people forget that the internet was started through government funding, and the initial idea of the internet’s early pioneers, such as Tim Berners Lee, was to democratize and equalize everyone, not to create more inequality. In similar vein, he highlights the internal contradictions and personal and professional moultings of Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and spawner of the “Paypal Mafia” (those who worked at Paypal and went on to found Yelp, Linked, Youtube, Palantir, etc.)
There is a lot of merit in the central arguments which bears thinking about, but the book also suffers from various flaws. Stylistically, there are simply too many quotes! At times chapters feel like assemblages of quotations. That is not to say that he doesn’t have his own mind; he does marshal and furnish various views primarily to support his hypothesis. However, the constant intrusions of quotes make for a jarring reading or listening experience.
His personal experience in the media, entertainment and communications industry make his views on them most authentic, and make his suggestions innovative and positive (such as artists cooperatives much like the Californian orange farmers’ cooperatives to combat Youtube and improve film-making). And it does appear that things have gone off-course a fair bit, whether it’s what we read in the news about Peter Thiel’s increasing megalomania, or of the scarcely believable words of Andreessen considering his Netscape was the first to cry bully at Microsoft in the late Nineties.
But it’s not as if concentration is a problem exclusive to the tech industry, as the author himself acknowledges when he quotes (yes, again) Elizabeth Warren stating the growing concentration in industries as diverse as airlines, drugstores, and health insurance. This suggests that there may be larger factors at play in the American economy.
Finally, apart from the above innovative suggestion for the film industry, Taplin has no positive recommendations to offer other than government intervention to break the monopolies. And here lies the second flaw – the views are US-centric, but while they apply broadly to the world since these same companies dominate these fields in most countries, there are notable exceptions such as China. Knowing the Chinese government’s authoritarianism and the local tech giants’ willingness to abide by government diktats, their state is likely to be even worse. And the recommendations of this book are likely to hamstring one set of American companies against essentially Chinese competition for everything future tech related.
Whither humans, arts & culture in TechTopia??
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current and scary
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enlightning
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Really enjoyed it though and would recommend it!
Worth a listen and a think!
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A very interesting read
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