Move Fast and Break Things

How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

De: Jonathan Taplin

Narrado por: Jonathan Taplin

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.

Reseñas de la Crítica

Praise for Move Fast and Break Things
A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceAn 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 yearAn 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 solid qualitative and quantitative analysis...most every creator of music and film should welcome the clarion call of Taplin's book."
—Forbes.com

"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

"An excellent new book...Taplin makes a forceful and persuasive case that companies like Google and Facebook could employ their powerful artificial intelligence programs to prevent the infringement of existing copyright laws."
—Chicago Tribune

"Jonathan Taplin has a bone to pick with Silicon Valley, and it is a big one."—Huffington Post

"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

"An absolute must-read for anyone who wants to gain a little savvy in the internet era."
—Newsweek

Great book, okay performance

The book was amazing, sometimes strayed a bit too far into baby boomer reminiscing through rose-colored glasses, but overall great.
The performance, however, was not so great. The gentleman reading the book sounded as if he had just swallowed a handful of sedatives and then filled his mouth with meatballs. He was difficult to understand at times, and I had to rewind and relisten to certain parts.

I was Moved, Broken and Motivated!

Late to the party to read Jonathan Taplin’s book, but his perspective is knowledgeable, and historical overview considered and scholarly. More than just a romp through the history of how we’ve gotten here, he offers a very intelligent series if ideas that suggest a roadmap home to recapturing some of our personal, private and creative artistic integrity.
Great read and well worth your consideration.

Be Afraid of Tech Monopolies Like Google & Amazon

What made the experience of listening to Move Fast and Break Things the most enjoyable?

I saw the author present at a conference and was simply shocked by what he presented.

What was one of the most memorable moments of Move Fast and Break Things?

Learning how much Peter Thiel has had an influence in silicon valley and how many PayPal "freshman" now helm many important Silicon Valley Firms.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Learning about the evolution of artist royalties and how they have been screwed over by the internet. Hell, how the internet has screwed over creativity in general.

Huxley’s Real World

A precious gift from mr taplan for current and future generations. Fascinating unique experiences while transcending true art and pop culture with the likes of Dylan and the band as well as politics, big money, big data, and anti social media. Unvarnished truths from an authentic voice that should awaken even those of us hero worshippers and wannabes about where this all could be leading to....we are the product

Great Points, But he blames libertarians ?

Spoiler alert: this is an anti capitalism anti libertarian book.

If your a libertarian or capitalist you should read this because it's always important to have many perspectives and to refine your thinking process and beliefs.

The author does a beautiful job pointing out the issues with today's technology monopolies and explains how the media and other industries got destroyed by the current model.

However he blames libertarians for most of the problems of the world Today?

I'm not quite sure how he connected the following as the same...

Milo yilanoplis (I don't even know how to spell his name)
To pewdiepie
To the Koch brothers
To Paul Ryan
To the founder of Silk road
To the founder of Reddit
To Elon Musk

The biggest problem he talks about in the entire book was put into law by bill Clinton yet then he blames the alt right and libertarians for all the problems. This was a new legal precedent put into law by the old industry and the most impactful part of his whole narrative and he brushed it off in one sentence.

The closest answer your going to get to a decentralized and democratized internet is being built by the libertarians.

id love to give micropayments to artists and have programmatic allocation and transparency in corporations and the companies I interact with.

the ideal future the author is requesting is currently being built by libertarians and other people of all beliefs who want to give freedom to people from the tech Bohemiths but it's going to take a long time to find correct block chain applications.

I'm a business owner and YouTuber and educator online. I'd love to give micropayments for licensing songs and images and videos but it's so time consuming it financially doesn't scale for me so I either just use it or I don't use it at all.


however I completely agree with the author that monopolists, censorship, intellectual property theft, rent seeking, and digital addiction are Terrible things.

The author I believe is making one false assumption here, he is applying the selection bias of the most successful tech companies and their idealogy and then applying that to everyone else, essentially just labeling and Grouping which is the exact thing he appears to be fighting.

No point of view or group of people is the problem.

I'd argue People with intentions that are only self Interested are the problem.

By reading this book you will get a good idea of history and many wonderful view points and i agree with him about 90% but the labeling and group blaming waa tough to manage at times.

it appears the author wants to go back to the good old days before tech, at times so do I but we can't go back, we can only go forwards.

you will understand the problems by reading the book but have no answer going forward as there was possibly one solution put forward...

the truth is none of us have a solution going forward it's pretty scary

Bit it all starts with awareness... we can't solve a problem we dont know exists