Move Fast and Break Things Quotes

“Despite Marc Andreessen’s and Peter Thiel’s belief that the outsize gains of tech billionaires are the result of a genius entrepreneur culture, inequality at this scale is a choice—the result of the laws and taxes that we as a society choose to establish.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“The Internet’s self-curated view from everywhere has the amazing ability to distract us in trivial pursuits, narrow our choices, and keep us safe in a balkanized suburb of our own taste.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Thiel’s Randian ethical framework makes it easy to cast Parker as someone who’s “turning the wheels of history” despite the morally challenged projects his fame is built upon. The notion that Parker is a great disrupter cannot be disputed, but the fact that his businesses were built on copyright theft (Napster) and deep consumer surveillance (Facebook) leads us to question what exactly these attention harvesting industries create and whether they’re aiding the larger culture or destroying”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Here is the paradox that libertarians just don’t get: the Internet was conceived and paid for by the US government. It was not a product of the free market as we think of it today—the realization of some young entrepreneur’s dreams. It was painstakingly researched and executed by a bunch of academics for whom IPO billions weren’t a reason to work. Rather, these people were fundamentally convinced that they could make the world a better place with their inventions. Every piece of code—HTML, TCP/IP—was donated to the ARPANET project royalty-free.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“In this zero-marginal-cost economy, the only way to make money is to scrape consumer data from your users and sell it to advertisers. In the creative world, nowhere does the fixed cost to produce high-quality music, video, books, and games get factored into this equation. How are musicians, journalists, photographers, and filmmakers going to survive in the zero-marginal-cost economy? For the media economy to continue, we are going to have to find ways to deal with the paradox that Summers and DeLong point to.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Huxley’s assertion was that technology would lead to passivity. The ease with which we could consume mind-numbing entertainments and distractions would ultimately rot our democracy. And this is exactly what may be happening.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Those seeking political and economic change should consider embracing art. Part of our role as citizens is to look more closely at the media surrounding us and think critically about its effects—specifically, whose agenda is being promoted and whether it’s the agenda that will serve us best.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“The current narrative we seem to tell ourselves about our privacy is that it is a sort of currency we trade to corporations in return for innovation. But the corporation has an insatiable appetite for our most personal data in order to drive us to consume during our every waking moment. I think this is critical, because in some ways social networks are powerful engines of conformity. The ability for students to develop their own ideas, identities, and political affiliations should take place outside of the panopticon view of Facebook, but whether this is any longer possible is an open question. My own memory is that the development of my political and cultural persona between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one had a lot to do with being outside the zone of judgment of my parents, their conservative peers from my hometown, Cleveland, and maybe even from my siblings. I’m not sure that it could happen if we were all on Facebook together.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“a new set of gatekeepers—Google and Facebook—has replaced the old.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Data is fabulous for showing people what’s already popular, but it’s terrible for pointing the way toward art—great breakthroughs arising from something that has never been done before. Reliance on data leaves both Hollywood and the music business stuck in a remake-and-sequel culture—artifacts that data agrees will be successful. As the writer Kurt Andersen pointed out in Vanity Fair, “Even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“It could be that the very nature of search engines, which push the most popular items to the top of the search results, is reinforcing this winner-takes-all economy. Is a tiny percentage of constantly circulating material the rich diversity the Internet has brought us?”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“What we have been witnessing since 2005 is a massive reallocation of revenue from creators of content to owners of platforms.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“the “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which Bill Clinton had signed into law just weeks after Google went live on the Web. The statute protected online service providers (OSPs) such as Google and YouTube from copyright infringement prosecution provided that the OSP not have the requisite level of knowledge of the infringing activity… not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity [and] upon receiving proper notification of claimed infringement… expeditiously take down or block access to the material. Since Hurley’s 2005 email, this has been YouTube’s strategy: pretend not to know there is infringing material being uploaded by users and take down the content when notified by the copyright owner. But this of course neglects one crucial provision of the DMCA—does YouTube receive financial benefit directly attributable to the presence of infringing content on the site? The answer, of course, is yes: in fact you could argue that YouTube achieved success in a crowded field precisely because of its laxity toward pirated content.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Google chairman Eric Schmidt told The Atlantic, “We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Page and Brin set out to deliberately “disrupt” the classic idea of a public corporation. The very idea of shareholder democracy was anathema to them. They wanted all the advantages of the public’s investment capital but none of the disadvantages of having to answer to shareholders.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“This need for control also played itself out when Google went public. Brin and Page set up a two-class stock structure (mimicking monopoly cable firms such as Comcast) in which their own shares had ten times the voting power of the shares offered to the public.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“The disrupters of Silicon Valley have a very high opinion of their place in history and the role of technology in forcing change and evolving the economy. As Parker puts it, “It’s technology, not business or government, that’s the real driving force behind large-scale societal shifts.” But as the atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer discovered after Hiroshima,”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“The futurist Jaron Lanier once described Google chief scientist Ray Kurzweil and his concept of “the singularity”: the point in time when an artificially intelligent machine will be capable of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself. Lanier noted, “These are ideas with tremendous currency in Silicon Valley; these are guiding principles, not just amusements, for many of the most influential technologists.… All thoughts about consciousness, souls, and the like are bound up equally in faith, which suggests something remarkable: What we are seeing is a new religion, expressed through an engineering culture.” Bill Gates commented, “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“As Farhad Manjoo pointed out in the New York Times, “The larger Amazon gets, then, the more its rules—rather than any particular nation’s—can come to be regarded as the most important regulations governing commerce.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“there will be very few winners in each sector of tech. The combination of scale and network effects makes it very hard to dislodge the winners, especially if you are in a business like tech, which is so lightly regulated.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“anarcho-capitalism or paleo-libertarianism. Its two main philosophers are Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Hoppe wrote a book called Democracy: The God That Failed, which makes the argument that we need to return to a more authoritarian form of government”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“while libertarian philosophy may have been regarded as a fringe movement in American politics, epitomized by Ron Paul followers, it has become the mainstream economic philosophy for both Silicon Valley and the Republican Party, thanks to the Koch brothers.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Stewart Brand abandoned his communard dreams for a new calling: corporate consultant. He had gotten a taste of the power of a social network at the WELL. If a company could sponsor an online community and if it could convince its customers that they were engaging in social rather than economic activity, then they could increase customer allegiance and their own profits. From this insight flowed the Global Business Network. Forget going back to the land—there was gold in preaching that Whole Earth message in the suites of the Fortune 500. The corporate conquest of the Web had started.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Information is an abstraction, and it doesn’t ‘want’ anything.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“In his 1972 Rolling Stone article, Brand identified these enthusiasts as “hackers,” saying, “The hackers are the technicians of this science—It’s a term of derision and also the ultimate compliment. They are the ones who translate human demands into code that the machines can understand and act on. They are legion. Fanatics with a potent new toy.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“for Berners-Lee today there is some regret as he looks back at the birth of the Web. The Web was built to decentralize power and create open access, yet, he noted, “popular and successful services (search, social networking, email) have achieved near-monopoly status. Although industry leaders often spur positive change, we must remain wary of concentrations of power.” Notice the tentative voice: he doesn’t mention Google and Facebook by name. Tim Berners-Lee never got rich on his invention. He gave it to the world for free, so he remains dependent on research funding from giant corporations.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“The first version of a computer using the PARC architecture, the Lisa, was a commercial failure, but when Jobs introduced the Macintosh in an iconic advertisement that aired during the 1984 Super Bowl, the long-awaited vision of the future arrived.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Almost every version of the story of Steve Jobs visiting PARC for a demonstration in December of 1979 is wrong.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“These two innovations—a decentralized network and a personal creativity machine—became the core of the Internet revolution. Despite the revolution’s value, the culture of PARC—which Brown describes as being one of “long hair and no shoes”—was a bit of a mismatch for Xerox.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Everything done at PARC, from the Alto to Bob Metcalf’s Ethernet architecture, was geared to making a decentralized network of personal computers function efficiently. This was new. The second core principle flowed from Alan Kay’s Dynabook. As Brown says, “The Dynabook and then the Alto were inspirations meant to empower the artistic individual.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy