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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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this insightful analysis of the intersection of technology and culture, Taplin, director emeritus of the University of Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab and a longtime figure in the music and movie industries, explains how the rise of modern Internet monopolies has changed the face of information and entertainment. "The rise of the digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries in our country, " he argues as he explores the rise of the Internet, the emergence of new media platforms, and the legacy of the influential players who shaped the way we conduct ourselves online. His focus is on Facebook, Google, and Amazon and the way they gather and sell information, but he also goes back to the earlier days of Napster and other pirate sites to show how the convenience of file sharing affected the entertainment industries as a whole, and likewise looks at how social media affected the 2016 election. The book reads like a collection of essays revolving around a series of related topics; the sections never form a coherent, cohesive whole. 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, even if he's a little unfocused.
