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.