The Master Switch Quotes

“It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately amount to censorship.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“The economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“If we believe in liberty, it must be freedom from both private and public coercion.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Unlike almost every other commodity, information becomes more valuable the more it is used. Consider”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“If we want to define how “open” any industry is, we should start with a number: the cost of entry. By this we simply mean the monetary cost of getting into the business with a reasonable shot at reaching customers. Is it in the neighborhood of $100? $10,000? Or more like $1 billion? Whatever the magnitude, that number, most definitively, is what determines whether an industry is open or closed.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“JUST WHAT IS GOOGLE? In 1902, the New York Telephone Company opened the world’s first school for “telephone girls.” It was an exclusive institution of sorts. As the historian H. N. Casson described the qualifications for admission in 1910: “Every girl shall be in good health, quick-handed, clear-voiced, and with a certain poise and alertness of manner.” There were almost seventeen thousand applicants every year for the school’s two thousand places.10 Acquiring this credential was scarcely the hardest part of being a telephone girl. According to a 1912 New York Times story, 75 percent were fired after six months for “mental inefficiency.” The”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“The reason such prototypes are sustainable, however briefly, and ultimately important is not their capacity to do what the technology is meant to do; rather, their value is in exposing a working model to more minds that might muse upon it and imagine a more evolved version. And”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“It is inconceivable,” said Herbert Hoover, secretary of commerce, at the first national radio conference in 1922, “that we should allow so great a possibility for service, for news, for entertainment, for education, and for vital commercial purposes to be drowned in advertising chatter.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Here is Lee De Forest addressing young people on the joys of the wireless: If you haven’t a hobby—get one. Ride it. Your interest and zest in life will triple. You will find common ground with others—a joy in getting together, in exchange of ideas—which only hobbyists can know. Wireless is of all hobbies the most interesting. It offers the widest limits, the keenest fascination, either for intense competition with others, near and far, or for quiet study and pure enjoyment in the still night hours as you welcome friendly visitors from the whole wide world.10”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Markets are born free, yet no sooner are they born than some would-be emperor is forging chains. Paradoxically,”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“An empire long united, must divide; an empire long divided, must unite. Thus it has ever been, and thus it will always be.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“The owner of an iPod or iPad is in a fundamentally different position: his machine may have far more computational power than a PC of a decade ago, but it is designed for consumption, not creation. Or,”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Hollywood’s content, AT&T’s lines, and Apple’s gorgeous machines—an information paradise of sorts, succeeding”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“like late Rome, the Bell system now existed as an eastern and a western empire—Verizon and AT&T (whose”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“There is no understanding communications, or the American and global culture industry, without understanding the conglomerate. Yet”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Cable was born commercial, while the Internet was born with no revenue model, or”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“the mogul makes the medium: the imprint of the personality inevitably informs it, often no less than the technology underlying it. Turner”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“while television is supposed to be free, it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“the best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation. That is to say, the industry learned how to secure the enactment of seemingly innocuous and sensible regulations that nonetheless spelled doom for any rival. In”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“The rise of Hollywood and of the Zukor model is another definitive closing turn of the Cycle. In the course of a single decade, film went from one of the most open industries in the United States to one of the most controlled. The flip shows how abruptly industrial structure can change when the underlying commodity is information. For”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“It’s the same old story,” he would say, years later; “the inventor gets the experience, and the capitalist gets the invention.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to. How”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“As a character in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, set in 1876, remarks, “Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“The story of Daniel Lord and the Legion of Decency goes to a central contention of this book: in the United States, it is industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“The Cycle is powered by disruptive innovations that upend once thriving industries, bankrupt the dominant powers, and change the world. Such innovations are exceedingly rare, but they are what makes the Cycle go.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It is in this context that Fred Friendly, onetime CBS News president, made it clear that before any question of free speech comes the question of “who controls the master switch.”
― Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires