Jonathan Taplin

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 a path-breaking polemic in support of the future of the creative industries in the age of the Internet platform. The title, taken from a term coined by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, originally referred to reckless hacker culture at the social media behemoth. In Taplin's telling, Move Fast and Break Things piquantly describes the way in which the largest Internet platforms--Facebook, Google and Amazon-used the music, news and film industries to build their businesses to scale only to sideline them, and the millions of Americans who work for them. The result is a news industry subservient to social media traffic, a music industry in which life is harder than ever for the "middle class" musician, and a book industry threatened by the overwhelming digital market share of a single retailer. As broadband ubiquity increases, the film and television industries will be the next victim. Taplin's story, studded with unforgettable stories from his half century as a music and film producer and early pioneer of streaming video online, begins with a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Larry Page among them, who in the 1990s began to hijack the original decentralized version of the Internet to create the monopoly firms which now determine the financial destiny of most cultural products in the United States. Taplin offers a masterful interpretation of the way these firms and individuals began to shape online life in their own image: tolerating piracy of books, music and film while at the same time promoting opaque business practices and subordinating privacy of individual users to create the surveillance marketing monoculture of sponsored content and other forms of relentless advertisement from which so many are alienated. Unafraid to cut through Silicon Valley jargon, Taplin assesses the economic toll of the digital shift and interprets in a vital, forward-thinking way how artists everywhere can reclaim their audiences with knowledge of the past and a determination to work together.

A Financial Times 'Best Thing I Read This Year' 2017LONGLISTED FOR THE FT & MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDGoogle. 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.