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

by Jonathan Taplin

Paperback, 2018

Status

Available

Call number

303.4833

Genres

Collection

Non-Fiction

Publication

Pan Books (2018), 320 pages

Description

Tells the story of how a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs began in the 1990s 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.

User reviews

LibraryThing member rivkat

I’m not a good reviewer for this book because I am very much Taplin’s enemy, the kind of person he describes as bought off by Google and its lackey the EFF (which opposed SOPA/PIPA in the name of stealing stuff from artists). That’s too bad in a way, because I actually agree with him that the

collapse of antitrust enforcement is a huge problem. But the book is a list of everything wrong with the internet, blaming mostly Google and secondarily Facebook for the fallen state of the world, when not all the problems are problems of monopoly—click fraud, for example. This book is not about making actual arguments addressing the counterarguments Google makes about why it’s not a monopoly, or addressing any other counterarguments really. You should read Zeynep Tufekci and Evgeny Morozov instead for sophisticated (but still really mean, for the latter), internet-skeptical arguments that engage with the complicated reality and don’t just whine about how hard it is to get financed in the way that artists were (for half a century) financed.

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LibraryThing member paven

Expected another book with I was part of this unicorn and this is why we are best. This book has a more critical view of how the societal effects of the monopolies building up around us. And some other perspectives. It widen my view in a good way.

LibraryThing member BraveKelso

At under 300 printed pages, this is a reasonably short and readable book. The author has real experience in music and film production and finance, and has considered the disruptions of the techologies of converting, copying and publishing artistic works online. The author discusses the shift in

American legal (anti-trust) thinking on monopoly and regulating the tech giants, although not in the same detail as other writers (e.g. Timothy Wu, Shoshana Zuboff) on telecommunications monopolies and surveillance capitalism.

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