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

Author: Taplin, Jonathan

Edition: Illustrated

Features:

• LITTLE BROWN

Format: Illustrated

Number Of Pages: 320

Details:

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.

Reviews:

Praise for Move Fast and Break Things A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice An Amazon Best Business & Leadership Book of the year Longlisted for Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year A strategy+business Best Business Book of the year An Inside Higher ED Best Book of the year

"Jonathan Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things argues that the radical libertarian ideology and monopolistic greed of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs helped to decimate the livelihoods of musicians and is now undermining the communal idealism of the early internet."

― Walter Isaacson,

New York Times Book Review

"Taplin is uniquely poised to deliver us Move Fast and Break Things, a relentless critique that seeks to answer the above question of why the internet has hindered, rather than helped, those trying to make a living in the arts."

― New York Daily News

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

― The Guardian

"A radical remedy."

― The Economist

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

― The Nation

"Taplin brings an informed perspective to his task, and an idiosyncratic background...[his] broader explanation of the upheaval in the music and media industries is illuminating."

― Wall Street Journal

"An impassioned new book...Taplin is at his strongest when he pulls back the curtain on vague and lofty terms such as 'digital disruption' to reveal the effects on individual artists...His prose is bold...his overall point is an important one."

― Washington Post

"A so...

EAN: 9780316275774

Release Date: 18-04-2017

Languages: English

Item Note: Great shape- pages are unmarked and sharp.Has a remainder mark. Hardcover Used - Like New Ships fast! 2017Illustrated

Item Condition: UsedLikeNew

Binding: Hardcover