Move Fast and Break Things

How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Have Cornered Culture and What It Means For All Of Us

By: Jonathan Taplin

Narrated by: Jonathan Taplin

A Financial Times 'Best Thing I Read This Year' 2017

LONGLISTED FOR THE FT & MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD

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.

Critic reviews

Taplin wields his axe mercilessly...by the end of this book you will agree with Taplin that the tech firms are abusing their monopoly power to rip us off and debase our culture - breaking the world as he sees it...It is time for consumers to break back. This manifesto is a punchy start.

A bracing, unromantic account of how the internet was captured…Move Fast and Break Things is a timely and useful book

Taplin is angry as hell about the immense size and power of the tech giants, and has a compelling pitch for why we should all be worried too

Comprehensive…Where Taplin excels is by putting all this into the context of the changing global economy

A new analysis of the dark side of the digital revolution...Taplin goes beyond familiar critiques

Taplin’s sense of outrage is palpable and his case is often compelling

A nuanced look at the downside of what is glibly tossed around as "disruption" by various cyber-messianic blowhards. Taplin is hunting big game; it is his contention that the giants of the cyberworld-from Google to Amazon-are threats to the fundamental foundations of democracy and that they also cement inequality into our systems in new and dangerous ways

Mr Taplin brings an informed perspective to his task

Jonathan Taplin's new book could not be more timely. Twenty years after the initial euphoria of the Web, ten years after the invention of social media, it's time to stop breaking things and start thinking seriously about the new habitat we're creating. Move Fast and Break Things provides a blueprint for a future that humans can live in

Move Fast and Break Things goes on my bookshelf beside a few other indispensable signposts in the maze of life in the 21st Century--The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul, The Image by Daniel Boorstin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, The Medium is the Message by Marshall McLuhan, The Media Monopoly by Ben Bagdikian, Christ and the Media by Malcolm Muggeridge, and Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. I pray the deepest and highest prayer I can get to that this clarion warning is heeded. The survival of our species is at stake

Jonathan Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things, a rock and roll memoir cum internet history cum artists' manifesto, provides a bracing antidote to corporate triumphalism - and a reminder that musicians and writers need a place at the tech table and, more to the point, a way to make a decent living

A powerful argument for reducing inequality and revolutionizing how we use the Web for the benefit of the many rather than the few

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

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

Revealing

A revealing account of how techno giants manipulate and control our world usurping everything on their way.