Content area
Full Text
Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy . By Jonathan Taplin . New York : Little, Brown, and Company , 2017. 321 pp. Figures, notes, index. Cloth, $19.72. ISBN: 978-0-316-27577-4 .
Book Reviews
Move Fast and Break Things is a fast-paced, pointed, and timely critique of Facebook, Google, and Amazon by Jonathan Taplin, the recently retired director of the Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Today's online giants, in Taplin's view, threaten not only the livelihood of countless content creators--musicians, filmmakers, journalists, and writers--but also the very foundations of democracy.
Taplin initially intended to write about the cultural divide between the producers and distributors of music, movies, news, and books. Having begun his research, he shifted his focus to the economic "war" between monopoly and competition (p. 5). In the eleven-year period between 2004 and 2015, according to Taplin's calculation, $50 billion shifted from content creators to digital platforms. His sympathies lie with the former, including, in particular, those musicians whose income stream has been reduced to a trickle following the advent of digital streaming. Having himself worked for several years as a rock-and-roll music promoter, Taplin writes with conviction about the predicament of musicians of a certain age who have found it impossible to thrive in today's online marketplace. With the rise of the "monopolies platforms" came the fall of the content creators, or at least those toward whom Taplin is the most sympathetic: "The two are inextricably linked" (pp. 7-8).
Like many trade books intended for a broad popular...