MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

A Financial Times Best Thing I Read This Year 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 Amaz