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

Taplin, Jonathan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316275751 ISBN 13: 9780316275750

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2018

Synopsis

*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.

Featured in New York Times' Paperback Row
A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceAn Amazon Best Business & Leadership Book of 2017
Longlisted for Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2017A strategy+business Best Business Book of 2017
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.

About this title

Review

"A scathing indictment of these tech companies' greed and arrogance."
--The Guardian

"A necessary book that shows how the Internet revolution has damaged the way we interact as human beings, along with democracy itself."
--The Nation


"A breakthrough, must-read book...a tour de force...If you want to understand what has happened to our country and where tech will take us in the era of Trump, put aside some time to read this book. It will take your breath away."
--AlterNet


"Taplin outlines in devastating detail how the digital economy has hurt creative types...a punch to the gut of Silicon Valley's self-righteous posture."
--Fast Company


"A stinging polemic that traces the destructive monopolization of the internet by Google and Facebook."--The Australian

"Required reading...a nuanced look at the downside of what is glibly tossed around as 'disruption' by various cyber-messianic blowhards."--Charles Pierce, Esquire.com


"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."
--Publishers Weekly


"Move Fast and Break Things is a compelling work with a clear central vision and a cumulative power that is convincing ....To read Move Fast and Break Things is to be forced to ponder one's implicit support of technological platforms whose creators are, on matters of markets and deregulation, more closely aligned with the likes of Robert Bork, Paul Ryan, and Grover Norquist than with, say, Ruth Bader Ginsberg...there is a lot at stake in Move Fast and Break Things, and a real urgency to do something about it."--Chapter 16


"Taplin writes eloquently and passionately about the human toll of the Internet age.... This is not a "technology book" because that term would be far too limiting. By reading Move Fast, we can understand much of the acceptance of Donald Trump in 2016."
--Jon Friedman

"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

About the Author

Jonathan Taplin is the Director Emeritus of the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab, and a former tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band, as well as a film producer for Martin Scorsese. An expert in digital media entertainment, Taplin is a member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and sits on the California Broadband Taskforce and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti's Council on Technology and Innovation.

Edition details

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0316275751
• ISBN 13: 9780316275750
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320