Contemporary Authors

• Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy Little, Brown (New York, NY), 2017

1. Move fast and break things : how Facebook, Google, and Amazon cornered culture and undermined democracy LCCN 2016959692 Type of material Book Personal name Taplin, Jonathan T., author. Main title Move fast and break things : how Facebook, Google, and Amazon cornered culture and undermined democracy / Jonathan Taplin. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Little, Brown and Company, [2017] ©2017 Description x, 308 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm ISBN 9780316275774 (hardback) 0316275778 (hardback) 9780316508278 (international paperback) 0316508276 (international paperback) CALL NUMBER HM851 .T365 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. The Band photographs, 1968-1969 LCCN 2015038667 Type of material Book Personal name Landy, Elliott, photographer. Main title The Band photographs, 1968-1969 / Elliott Landy ; commentary: John Simon ; editor: Rachel Ana Dobken ; introduction: Jonathan Taplin. Published/Produced Milwaukee, WI : Backbeat Books, An imprint of Hal Leonard Corporation, 2015. ©2015 Description 160 pages : chiefly illustrations (some color), portraits ; 32 cm ISBN 9781495022517 (hardcover, standard regular edition ; alk. paper) 9780962507373 (hardcover, signature regular edition ; alk. paper) 9780962507366 (deluxe edition ; alk. paper) Publisher no. HL00146104: Backbeat Books CALL NUMBER ML421.B32 L36 2015 Copy 1 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113)

• Jonathan Taplin Home Page - http://www.jontaplin.com/about-2/

  Jonathan Taplin is Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. he was a Professor at the USC Annenberg School from 2003-2016. Taplin's areas of specialization are in international communication management and the field of digital media entertainment. Taplin began his entertainment career in 1969 as Tour Manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. In 1973 he produced Martin Scorsese's first feature film, Mean Streets, which was selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Between 1974 and 1996, Taplin produced 26 hours of television documentaries (including The Prize and Cadillac Desert for PBS) and 12 feature films including The Last Waltz, Until The End of the World, Under Fire and To Die For. His films were nominated for Oscar and Golden Globe awards and chosen for The Cannes Film Festival five times.

  In 1984 Taplin acted as the investment advisor to the Bass Brothers in their successful attempt to save Walt Disney Studios from a corporate raid. This experience brought him to Merrill Lynch, where he served as vice president of media mergers and acquisitions. In this role, he helped re-engineer the media landscape on transactions such as the leveraged buyout of Viacom. Taplin was a founder of Intertainer and has served as its Chairman and CEO since June 1996. Intertainer was the pioneer video-on-demand company for both cable and broadband Internet markets. Taplin holds two patents for video on demand technologies. Professor Taplin has provided consulting services on Broadband technology to the President of Portugal and the Parliament of the Spanish state of Catalonia and the Government of Singapore.

  Mr. Taplin graduated from Princeton University. He is a member of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and sits on the International Advisory Board of the Singapore Media Authority and is a fellow at the Center for Public Diplomacy. Mr. Taplin was appointed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to the California Broadband Task Force in January of 2007. He was named one of the 50 most social media savvy professors in America by Online College and one of the 100 American Digerati by Deloitte’s Edge Institute.

• PC - https://www.pcmag.com/article/355211/jonathan-taplin-not-quite-ready-to-move-fast-and-break-thin

  Taplin Not Quite Ready to 'Move Fast and Break Things'
  Taplin is the author of 'Move Fast and Break Things,' but he's not necessarily sold on the tagline popularized by Facebook and other Silicon Valley whiz kids.
  Dan Costa Icon
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  Dan Costa
  July 28, 2017 8:00AM EST
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  Jonathan Taplin on Technology's Discontents
  On this week's episode of Fast Forward, we have Jonathan Taplin, the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. But he wears many hats; Taplin produced the first Martin Scorsese film, Mean Streets, and he worked as a tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band. Most importantly for today's discussion, he is the author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered the Culture and Undermined Democracy. Read and watch our full discussion below.
  "Move fast and break things" comes from Mark Zukerberg, and that mission has helped make Facebook one of the largest, most successful companies in the world. But has it made the world a better place? Jonathan, what is your central criticism of that statement?

  The idea of "move fast and break things" is that the tech companies know where they're going. They believe that they need to disrupt everything in order to get where they want to go. And we don't get a vote in that, they just do it. A lot of this comes out of a very libertarian ethos that came from Ayn Rand that informed the thinking of Larry Page and Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos, which was, "I don't have to ask permission. Who's going to stop me?" That was what Ayn Rand said.
  Fast Forward Bug ArtSo my thesis is that the internet, originally, was conceived as a very decentralized, communitarian network. It was funded by government money. And, in the late 80s, early 90s, when these libertarians came out of Silicon Valley, it changed radically. They understood that the internet could be a winner-takes-all business, and that there would be a single winner in search, a single winner in e-commerce, and, eventually, what developed as social networks; a single winner in that. And that's essentially what happened.
  Today, if you look at it, Google has 88 percent market share in search and search advertising. Facebook and all its associated companies like Instagram and WhatsApp have about 75 percent of mobile social media, and Amazon has 75 percent of the books business in e-commerce, and a huge market share in many other segments of e-commerce, and they're just extending their reach farther, and farther, and farther. So the question becomes, "Is that what was originally intended, and is that a good thing?" And I make the argument that that's not a good thing that three companies basically control the internet. The effect that that has on creative artists, whether they're journalists, or musicians, or filmmakers, or photographers, is that most of the money gets creamed off by the platforms, and very little trickles down to the individual creative artist, and that's a bad thing.
  Watch: Move Fast and Break Things Author, Jonathan Taplin: Fast Forward
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  Newspaper advertisement has fallen by 75 percent since this started. Music revenues have fallen by 78 percent. Revenues for photographers have fallen by 80 percent. So this is not something that's healthy for the society, it's not healthy for the culture, and I don't think it can go on forever like this.

  Let's talk a little bit about the music industry, which was an early victim of digital transformation. As a consumer, it's never been a better time to be a music fan. You have unlimited availability of music online, often just by requesting it from Amazon Alexa. But talk a little bit, because I know you've got a long history in the music industry, of what's happened, and the real impact it's had on the industry, and on individual musicians.
  In my book I use an example of Levon Helm; he was the drummer in The Band, and the lead singer. You probably have heard "The Weight" or "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," "Up On Cripple Creek"; all these great songs that he sang. For many, many years, he was able to make a very good living, even though The Band stopped recording in 1979 after we did "The Last Waltz." The record business continued to turn out royalties on old records, and in the 80s, the CD came in, so everybody renewed their library.
  Jonathan Taplin
  All of that continued until the year 2000 when Napster started, and then it stopped. And it just so happened that Levon got throat cancer in 2000, too. So he couldn't even have enough money to pay for his healthcare, and a bunch of musicians in Woodstock rallied around him and tried to support him, but he died, basically, penniless. Benefit was had for his wife to hold onto their house, but you could go on YouTube and realize that there were three, four, five million streams on YouTube, but Levon was not getting any of that money.
  The basic problem is that a platform like YouTube makes a proposition to the music business, which is like this, "Your music is going to be on YouTube whether you want it to or not. The only choice you have to make is, do you want a little bit of advertising revenue or not?" So that's not a fair buyer/seller relationship at all. YouTube, if you got a million downloads on iTunes, you, the musician, or the record company, could get $900,000. If you had a million streams on YouTube, you would get $900. So it's that 1,000x differential that for me [is] the real problem for musicians.

  In 2016, record label Warner Music made $3.25 billion in revenue, and more than a billion of that came from streaming services. There's a long history in the music industry of the labels keeping the money and not letting it flow down to artists. Are we seeing that same thing happen now?
  No, I'm not sure of that. I'm not in the music business now, but when I was in the 60s and early 70s, the artist could actually make a really decent living being, what I call, a middle-class artist. The Band was not a big, huge success. They didn't make the kind of money that The Rolling Stones or Cream made, but they could sell 300,000 albums and make a very good living. In those days, the record company would advance a very small amount of the money—$50,000 to make an album—and you could end up having a really good living from that.
  Now, the problem with the music business today is that it's, again, because of streaming and everything, it's a winner-takes-all business. We used to think of the 80/20 rule; a record company or a movie company would make 80 percent of the revenue off of 20 percent of their product. So last year in the music business, it was 80/1. In other words, 80 percent of the revenue came from 1 percent of the product.
  So Taylor Swift and Beyonce and Jay-Z did really well, and the average musician barely made a living from that at all. The streaming platforms are not, today, the solution. That isn't to say they won't be the solution at some point if we could get YouTube to play fairly, because Spotify said by 2017, 75 percent of their customers would be on the premium service. It's 25 percent. So why is it that so few people go on the premium service? Because there's YouTube out there; everything in the world there for free. You've got to get a level playing field, and until YouTube cleans up its act, which it could do, easily, nothing's going to really change.
  And it is that free option. That's what Napster introduced. It's not that you couldn't buy music, and for a while, you could still buy tracks on iTunes, but it was, having that free option distorts the market if you have a platform that enables that for the vast majority of the population.

  Totally. I used to think that the real problem was pirate sites, but pirate sites have got a bad reputation now, you get viruses on them, and all sorts of other stuff. Really, the problem is YouTube. As long as every tune in the world is sitting on YouTube as an audio file, not as a video, but just as an audio file, you've got a distorting factor, and that's what needs to be changed.
  Let's talk a little bit about fake news. This is in your book, and obviously in the headlines. It's easy to get political when we start talking about fake news, but I think what's more interesting are the mechanics of fake news, and the fact that fake news was enabled by the free market and the way social networks were constructed, and the way people make money online.
  Right. Let's think about the way fake news as a business gets done. You have four kids in their pajamas in Macedonia in a bedroom who come to the conclusion that, if they put out stuff about Trump, Trump's people will respond to it. So, essentially, they start manufacturing stories. They create phony websites, which have a Google AdSense account on them, and then they get a fake Facebook page; fake Facebook account. Those two tools, Google AdSense plus Facebook account, allow them to then put up a story, "Donald Trump is Endorsed by the Pope."
  I literally saw that story on Facebook.
  Right. Then they get their friends, who have access to bots, and say you have 500,000 bots that you can deploy to click on that story. It pops to the top of the news feed, it pops to the top of the Google search algorithm, and it becomes the most popular story. Literally, the day that Zuckerberg decided, due to a lot of pressure from the right wing, Fox News, and Breitbart, to take the humans out of the trending topics algorithm, you can see fake news just go up like a rocket. Once there were no humans to say, "Well, obviously Donald Trump didn't endorse the pope," and just let the algorithms say, "Well, what's the most popular story," then it was very easy to manipulate that.

  Jonathan Taplin
  The people who run these platforms, Facebook and Google, would say, "Well, we're just a platform. We don't have any control over content." But that's not true. You notice, there is no pornography on Facebook. There's no pornography on YouTube. So it's selective decision that, "Look, we can make a lot of money off fake news." Everybody's making money. The kids in Macedonia are making $8,000 a month manufacturing this stuff. The kids in Facebook too, because, quite frankly, a click on a fake news story is just as good as a click on a true story. So that became the problem.
  Now, interestingly enough, Facebook is beginning to think about this. The French presidential candidate, Macron, pressured Facebook big time, and got them, before the election, to shut down 30,000 fake French accounts. Facebook has never told us how many fake accounts were in the United States, but if there were 30,000 French fake accounts, you can imagine that there were 200,000 or 300,000 fake American accounts during the election, but we never heard about that. So my take on this is that both Facebook and Google know a lot more about where this stuff is coming from, and from YouTube's point of view, they even know where the advertising money is directed back to. Right? I mean, these kids in Macedonia have a bank account, which Google knows to pay the AdSense money to.
  What's the best way for an individual to identify fake news if platforms aren't stepping up?
  Well, this assumes that you're willing to do a little research. This assumes you're willing to go and check on PolitiFact, or some other place, "Did the pope endorse Donald Trump?" And maybe tell your friends, "This is BS." You know? We all have to have a little bit of literacy. Now, I argue that Facebook could do that for you. When I was in London a month ago, Facebook took out full-page ads before the British election saying, "Here's how you find what fake news is." And it was like five or six different steps, some of which is, "Well, these fake news sites have weird URLs, and things are not really what they seem." But why does Facebook require that you do that rather than them do that? I mean, they could filter out a lot of this junk, easily. Now, they're beginning to try to do that, but I don't think they're trying very hard.

  Yeah, and I think, in the conversation, what the book makes really clear, is that titans of industry have always had enormous power and enormous influence. But something about the digital transformation makes it different in terms of consolidating power. In the media industry in particular this year, Google's going to collect 41 percent of all digital ad revenues, Facebook's going to collect another 39 percent, so those two companies will take 80 percent of all digital advertising, and that leaves 20 percent for all of the rest of the media companies, including PCMag, which would be happy to get 1 percent.
  Right. You would be thrilled if you got 1 percent.
  We would be thrilled to get 1 percent.
  Okay, so this is what people are calling the digital duopoly; that these two companies control 80 percent of the market. It seems to me to be obvious that they're a duopoly, which is two companies monopolizing an industry. That seems, to me, needs to be changed, because what's happening is, the money is not filtering down. The New York Times and PCMag have problems, but their problems are nothing compared to the problems of the Nashville Tennessean or the New Orleans Times-Picayune, who've seen their advertising revenue drop by 80 percent and are barely hanging on. They can't even support a local reporter to go down to city hall anymore.
  The very nature of local news, which Facebook's not interested in doing anything about, is getting worse and worse. This problem is ... when I talk about democracy, this is a problem for democracy. If we cannot solve this and can't figure out a way for Facebook to funnel more money into the local news because, "Okay, I got this many clicks on Nashville Tennessean, they should get this much money this week." If we can't figure that out, then local news is just going to die.

  Yeah, and, in fact, local news took one of the first hits when they lost all their classified advertising; Craigslist helped destroy the newspaper industry. But let's talk about some potential solutions here. These are private companies operated for profit, independent and, if you look at it from Facebook's perspective, they are not a news business themselves. It's not their job to create local news, or to cover city hall. Why is it their responsibility? How do we solve this problem?
  Well, look, if you go on a book tour like I've just been, you find all these local newspapers are telling their reporters, "Your success has got to do with how many clicks you get on Facebook; how many times your article gets shared." Okay, so if my article is getting shared a lot, and a lot of people are looking at it, then I should get some of that revenue that Facebook [earns]. So Facebook's answer is, "Okay, we have this great thing called Instant Articles, and we're going to keep your content inside of Facebook so people don't have to go off to PCMag.com, because it'll be a better user experience." But then they're not sharing the revenue with you if you're stuck inside of Facebook.
  I would argue it is Facebook's responsibility to start funneling more of their unbelievable profits to [others]. Remember, these businesses are 30 percent net margin businesses, compared to your business, or CBS, or anybody else that's advertising...which are 10 percent margin businesses. And that's because they're not spending a lot of money creating content. They're just free-riding on top, and creaming off all the advertising. That's the first step. They've got to help do that.
  Jonathan Taplin
  The second step would be fairly simple. In the music business, for instance, with YouTube, there should be a takedown/stay down law. In other words, if I'm a musician and I don't want my tune on YouTube, I should be able to tell YouTube to take it down and keep it down. The way it works now is, I tell YouTube to take it down, it goes down. The next day, it goes right back up from another user, so it's a game of whack-a-mole. It's just useless. It should then be YouTube's responsibility to keep it down, which, they could do easily. They have Shazam-like filter things that knows who to pay from which tune, so they could block it, just the way they block porn. Those are two kind of interim steps.

  The third thing that I think that we're going to have to come to grips with is this notion of privacy. I've been on the road, and a guy came up to me who was a neurobiologist and he said, "You know, you've been talking about this device and everything." He said, "I'm going to send you a research paper that shows that the accelerometer in this device can detect Parkinson's disease, because there's a very specific tremor to Parkinson's, and it could park it in the same place as how many stairs you climbed yesterday, and it's just out in the open." He says, "So what's to keep them from selling that information to health insurance companies, or your employer, or anybody else?" Well, there is nothing. You know?
  So I think we're going to have to think about privacy, too, because this is only going to get more serious. Maybe in two years your health insurance company says, "If you want a discount, you've got to wear a Fitbit and upload your heart rate information and all this other health information that we're collecting every night to the health insurance company." Then maybe three years after that they say, "Unless you wear a Fitbit, you're not going to get health insurance." So that's the slippery slope we're headed down.
  And we're already on it, if you know where to look. So, Progressive insurance offers a little adapter that you can put in your car that will monitor your driving, see how hard you stop, see if you're a reckless driver, and feed all that data back to the insurance company, and then they set your rates based on how good a driver you are.
  Okay, but guess what that is also detecting? Where you drive. Consumer Reports has done a report on auto insurance rates, and they're set much less on how you drive than where you drive. If two women both lived in a nice suburb, and one of them drives to a funky neighborhood to teach at a school, and the other doesn't, and she parks there, she's going to get a much higher auto insurance rate and everything. And it's those devices, or the mobile phone that determines what those rates are set. So this notion that the millennial generation is not interested in privacy, I think, may get turned on its head in the next few years.
  And the thing that strikes me in most of these cases is, there's just such an asymmetry of information, where the companies and the corporations have data that the consumer doesn't have, and they use that in order to set prices, in order to craft their products, and the consumer winds up taking what they can get, and don't have, really, a lot of choices in the matter.

  Right. Because, look, when you go into a physical store, the price of the item is sitting right there for everybody to see. Right? When you go on Amazon, you have no idea the price that's being presented to you is the same as the price that's being presented to me. They could think that my willingness to pay for that book is higher than yours, so they will price it lower for you than for me, because they know I'm a huge book buyer, and I'm going to buy it easier, and have less question. This notion of willingness to pay, and all of that, is all in their database, and that's only going to get weirder when you think about what an Amazon Whole Foods is going to look like. Maybe there are no prices on the items at all and you have to carry an Amazon device in there and scan the item in your basket, and it's all going to be delivered to your house. I mean, who knows?
  And this is where artificial intelligence comes in, so that Amazon's got this database of all your past shopping behavior. They know how likely it is you're going to buy that book, they may know how much you make, they know where you live, so of course they're going to charge you $25 for the book that I will be more likely to buy at $19, and they will have all of that information, and it will all work in the background, and ultimately, the consumer won't even know that it's happening.
  Well, here's the deal. It seems to me that the artificial intelligence business is built on huge data pools. So the leaders in artificial intelligence right now are Google, Amazon, and Facebook, because they have the largest data pools; because their datasets are bigger, they get more people, they make their product better, the ability of Amazon to present stuff that you might like, you might buy, gets better, and because they make more money than anybody else, they're also able to hire the best data scientists. My guess is that their ability to push their businesses out into many peripheral parts of the economy, way beyond tech, is all going to be based on AI. So if you think about Google's autonomous car business, or Google's medical instrument business, or Amazon and other shopping businesses, or Amazon's Web Services cloud business, or Facebook's ability to move into other businesses, this is just the start of what would be the ability of these companies to move way out into other parts of the economy and to use their extraordinary outsize profits to acquire companies and dominate the economy even more than they do now.
  Remember, the top five corporations in the world are Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook. Ten years ago, only Microsoft was in that list, and the rest were companies like General Electric, or Citibank, or Royal Dutch Shell. Those are gone compared to the tech companies, which dominate the economy.
  Jonathan Taplin

  So, as a libertarian would say, "You know what? The free market can solve for some of these things. These are the companies that are ascended right now, but companies fall from favor. They will slide. In 10 years, Facebook will be an unpopular platform that nobody uses. It'll be like MySpace." Can the market sort this out on its own?
  Well, that's what Evan Spiegel at Snapchat thought, "Oh, we can beat Facebook. We can make a better product with all sorts of cool innovative features, Snapchat stories, and we'll win." But it turned out not to be true, because Facebook could take, and rip off everything that Snapchat did, and use its 2 billion user base to compete against Snapchat's 200 million user base, and go to advertisers and say, "Why would you advertise on Snapchat when you can get 100 times more people on our platform; 1,000 times more people on our platform with the same features?"
  Look what happened; Blue Apron, right? Blue Apron was this kind of cool meal delivery service. [But then] Bezos files the trademark to do exactly what Blue Apron does, and their stock goes down 18 percent. I mean, monopolists have extorting power.
  I know there's a guy at Google [named] Hal Varian. He goes out and gives these speeches, and he says, "Oh, in some garage somewhere there's somebody who's building the Google killer." Nonsense. If you ask your users, "Would you invest in a startup to take on Google in the search advertising business?" I don't think anybody would raise their hand, quite frankly. I mean, I don't think that's true. I don't think anybody, after what happened to Snapchat whose stock was at $28, it's at $14 now; got cut in half. I don't think there's anybody going to want to do that heavy lifting, quite honestly.
  Alright. It sounds like we get to this conclusion where, ultimately, the only thing that could change is government intervention. There need to be laws that, we declare these companies monopolies, and then we start to force competition somehow.

  Well, look, Teddy Roosevelt, in 1906, came to the conclusion that there was no market solution to taking on the Standard Oil Company, which had basically bought up every small oil company in America, and had, at that point, had about 80 percent of the oil market in America. This is 1906, before the car. This was oil for heating, oil for kerosene, you know, that kind of thing. So he concluded that there was not a market solution, and the only solution was to break up Standard Oil into a bunch of small companies, which he did. That created a different kind of competition, because they all had to compete with each other.
  So the notion that forcing Google to sell YouTube, forcing Google to sell DoubleClick, its advertising subsidiary, that might be one solution. Forcing Facebook to sell Instagram or WhatsApp; that might be part of a solution, because then they'd have to compete with each other. I think that's a big reach...in the political atmosphere of [today]. And it's not just Republicans protecting big business. Democrats were just as bad. I mean, the Obama administration completely protected Google when the Federal Trade Commission wanted to sue them for exactly the violation that the Europeans sued them for $2.7 billion two weeks ago; the exact same violation. They had them dead to rights, and the Obama administration overrode the staff at the FTC. I mean, look, when companies get big enough, they get political cover.
  They hire lobbyists.
  Yeah, and no politician wants to make Google mad, because, "There's a lot of money at Google, and I need that money for my next campaign." So this is not a situation that's easy to solve. I mean, I think the reason the Europeans were willing to take them on is, quite honestly, the Europeans don't finance their campaigns the way we do. They have publicly financed elections.
  Is there anything that individual consumers can do in terms of the choices that they make, in order to protect themselves?

  I mean, small things. Don't let your kid take their smartphone into their bedroom at night. Try and keep your kid from not getting addicted to an app. There's a wonderful kid named Tristan Harris who's trying to think about these things. His idea is, "They're trying to rob you of your attention." You walk down the street in New York and you're constantly dodging people, just so addicted to their phones. We all have to think about that. Maybe you start with what people are calling the digital Sabbath. You just take one day off a week where you don't look at any of your devices, you don't go on any social network, you just see what life is like without it. Now, the kids I taught at USC thought that that was the scariest thing that could be imaginable. But maybe that's useful.
  In the book I talk about going to this Buddhist monastery in Big Sur for three days where there was no Wi-Fi, no cellular service, no nothing. The only thing you could have was a physical book, in terms of media. By the end of three days, it was kind of cool. I think that's basically where you start. You think about, as the questioner asked, you think about, "Is this story true, or is it not true on fake news? Can I tell my friends that this story is BS?" That's a start.
  Right next to the Like button, we should have a BS button.
  Right, exactly!
  Alright. Let me get to the questions I ask everybody. We've talked about a lot of your concerns already, but what is the technological trend that concerns you the most?

  Well, AI concerns me the most, in the sense of this: If Marc Andreessen, big Silicon Valley VC, is right, that in eight years the long-haul trucking business will all be self-driving trucks, that's 4 million working class men and women out of a job. When asked about that, he says, "That's not my problem. That's a government problem." But is there a single politician in America talking about that possibility? No. The Treasury secretary, when asked about that problem said, "This won't happen for 100 years." He literally said that; Steve Mnuchin.
  There's a big gap between 100 years and eight years.
  Yeah, he's says, "The possibility of artificial intelligence taking substantial jobs is 100 years away." Now, if he was still working for Goldman Sachs, which he used to work for, they would fire his ass for something that stupid. I mean, there's just a disconnect. These people are not paying any attention to this. And it's not just truck drivers. If you talk to lawyers they say, "We used to hire all these young kids straight out of law school, and they would spend the first three years of their life in the law library researching cases for senior partners." There is no point in the world of sending humans to do that job anymore. You put a case in, you put all the keywords in, and the artificial intelligence software brings up every citation you need in like, a half hour, from 10,000 cases everywhere; something that would take five young people five weeks to do, it does in a half hour.
  If you're a radiologist, your job is not going to exist in five years. But nobody is thinking about these things. That's what worries me. And Marc Andreessen says, "Well, we'll invent all sorts of new jobs that we've never imagined." But nobody's told me what those jobs will be yet.
  On the optimistic side, is there anything in technology that inspires wonder; that you're really excited about?

  As far as tools that I use, I use an iPad. I think it's one of the simplest, coolest, everything in one place ... I can travel, I have my books with me, I have all my research library with me, I have all this ability, all the stories I'm working on, everything is in one place, and it's easy to use. I think that's a brilliant piece of technology. I don't think it's been topped by that.
  I noticed you left Apple out of your cover; your book title.
  Well, I don't think Apple is a monopoly. I think Apple competes in a very competitive business with Samsung and a bunch of other hardware companies. Let's be clear, most of Apple's profits come from hardware, and also, Apple is not in the advertising business, so it has been very strong in supporting ad blockers and other things, much to Google's consternation. So it's in a very different business than Google and Facebook.
  And, by the way, Apple has made a business out of treating musicians well. When you look at these services, for instance, Amazon, Amazon's streaming service and its music service has, like, 21,000 what they called NOIs, which are, basically, these are tunes that we don't know who wrote the songs, so we can't send them their money, so they just file this NOI. Apple has zero NOIs. So what's the difference? Well, it's obvious. Amazon's just not trying very hard to find the Beach Boys. I mean, literally, it's the Beach Boys. They could find them easily if they tried, but they'd rather just keep the money and file this piece of paper called an NOI. So I think Apple's been pretty good for musicians.
  In terms of other things, I think augmented reality could be an interesting, useful, educational tool. I think the ability to do things and have a little bit of assist ... I noticed yesterday that Google has begun to talk about Google Glass again, but just as a pure industrial thing, so you've got a guy working on airplane repair, and the manual is in his Google Glass while he's doing the repair. That's a good use of augmented reality. I mean, I can look at the thing, there's the manual right there. I don't have to keep looking away. That will have uses.

  Virtual reality, I'm less sure about, partially because I made a bunch of movies with Marty Scorsese, and when I talk to him about virtual reality he says, "I hate that idea. Because I'm trying to tell a story, and I compose a shot, I don't want someone looking the other direction. I want to illicit the emotions I want through editing and stuff. I don't want them looking wherever they want to look. I mean, obviously for first-person shooter video games, and we can talk for days about what that means, it's probably useful, but I don't think for storytelling, film-wise, it's going to be that big a deal.
  At the very least, we're going to have to invent new ways of storytelling, and tell different stories. They're not going to be the same stories.
  Yeah. I mean, I think it's actually useful in non-fiction. I mean, some of the stuff the New York Times is doing in VR, "Okay, I'm going to plunk you down in a Syrian refugee camp and let you wander around and feel a real experience of what it is like to be a refugee." That's probably, you know, people in my lab call it an empathy machine. That's probably pretty useful.
  So, if people want to follow you online, they want to interact with you, they want to argue with you, how do they find you?
  On Twitter I'm @jonathantaplin, and I have a public Facebook account, and I even have an Instagram account.

  Very good. And, of course, the book, Move Fast and Break Things is available on Amazon. And it's probably going to do most of its sales on Amazon.
  It's true. You know? You can't avoid the monopoly.
  So check out his book. Thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.
  Thanks Dan. I really appreciate it.
  For more Fast Forward with Dan Costa, subscribe to the podcast. On iOS, download Apple's Podcasts app, search for "Fast Forward" and subscribe. On Android, download the Stitcher Radio for Podcasts app via Google Play.

Book World: Pirated music is free, but artists pay a price
Emily Parker
The Washington Post. (May 15, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Listen
Full Text:
Byline: Emily Parker

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

By Jonathan Taplin

Little, Brown. 308 pp. $29

---

The Internet revolution has a human cost. A case in point: Levon Helm was a member of the Band, a country-rock group that played with Bob Dylan. He once made a good income from royalties, but then the money dried up. People still liked his music, but now they listened to it on the Internet. After Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer, he struggled to pay his medical bills. When he died in 2012, his friends held a benefit concert so his wife wouldn't lose their house.

Jonathan Taplin tells this story in his impassioned new book, "Move Fast and Break Things." Taplin is a former tour manager for Dylan and the Band as well as a film producer. He has had a front-row seat to the digital disruption of the music and film industries, and he is furious about it.

A few years ago, Taplin had a public debate with Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, apparently a proud downloader of free music and movies. Ohanian said musicians like Helm should make money from touring, not old recordings. Taplin was appalled. In an attempt to make amends, the Reddit founder wrote an open letter to Taplin, offering to "make right what the music industry did to members of The Band." Ohanian suggested honoring Helm with a new album that would be funded on Kickstarter and launched on Reddit.

Taplin did not like this idea, to put it mildly. In an open letter of his own, he accused Ohanian of celebrating the bloodsucking pirates who made millions off of musicians' labor. He called Kickstarter a "virtual begging bowl." Taplin concluded: "Take your charity and shove it. Just let us get paid for our work and stop deciding that you can unilaterally make it free." Ohanian did not respond.

This exchange, detailed in Taplin's book, provides a good illustration of the author's arguing style. His prose is bold, entertaining and occasionally over the top. But his overall point is an important one. Many hoped that the Internet would have a democratizing and decentralizing effect. Instead, Taplin argues, power became concentrated in a small number of digital giants, such as Amazon (whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post), Facebook and Google.

This "winner take all" scenario also applies to artists. People may be consuming more content than ever, but most creators aren't reaping the gains. Part of the problem is piracy, but the streaming music business isn't helping much, either. Spotify, for example, doesn't pay artists very much. In 2015, Taplin notes, "vinyl record sales generated more income for music creators than the billions of music streams on YouTube and its ad-supported competitors."

Not everyone would agree with Taplin's gloomy assessment. In a recent New York Times article, technology columnist Farhad Manjoo argued that the Internet is saving culture, not killing it. "Digital technology is letting in new voices, creating new formats for exploration, and allowing fans and other creators to participate in a glorious remixing of the work," Manjoo wrote. People are starting to pay for music, movies and even news. Manjoo acknowledged that it has been hard to make a living off of streaming, but some artists are finding a workaround. "Thanks to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, artists can now establish close relationships with their fans. They can sell merchandise and offer special fan-only promotions and content," Manjoo wrote. They can use sites like Patreon, which allow fans to directly subscribe to artists.

Taplin paints a far more dystopian picture of technology's effect on culture. The Internet might create breakout stars, but they are far from the norm. In some cases, we'd be better off without them. Taplin points to PewDiePie, a since-disgraced YouTube celebrity who racked up billions of views with posts of himself playing video games. "The Internet revolution was supposed to usher in a new age of digital democracy, opening up distribution pipelines to anyone with talent," Taplin argues. "But what are we to make of a teenage phenom whose sole talent is playing a video game? ... Have the four hundred hours of video uploaded to YouTube (BEGIN ITAL)every minute(END ITAL) produced the new Scorsese or Coppola? Could it be that the economics of 'more' is drowning us in a sea of mediocrity?"

Taplin offers various prescriptions to help artists survive in the Internet age. Right now, it's too easy for people to post pirated clips on YouTube. Taplin recommends that the Library of Congress issue a precise definition of fair use, and YouTube clips that do not fit this definition should stay blocked. He suggests that artists run a video and audio streaming site as a nonprofit cooperative, giving artists a lion's share of the revenue. He also advocates for the creation of a good public media system, in part to become less dependent on advertisers that avoid edgy material. As Taplin writes, "Imagine Picasso having to persuade an executive at Pernod to support his earliest cubist paintings." He offers other recommendations as well.

"Move Fast and Break Things" aims to be a corrective to the techno-utopian belief that the Internet is fundamentally a liberating and democratizing force. But if the techno-utopians get carried away in their exuberance, Taplin sometimes veers too far in the other direction.

He is at his strongest when he pulls back the curtain on vague and lofty terms such as "digital disruption" to reveal the effects on individual artists. Let's hope this book makes people think twice about how their behavior shapes digital culture. We don't have to click on clickbait. We can choose not to download pirated content, and we can choose to buy music from sites that pay artists fairly. The Internet is not inherently good or bad. The Internet is us.

---

Parker, a Future Tense fellow at New America, is the author of "Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices From the Internet Underground."

Taplin, Jonathan: MOVE FAST AND BREAK
THINGS
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Taplin, Jonathan MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS Little, Brown (Adult Nonfiction) $29.00 4, 18 ISBN: 978-0-
316-27577-4
When American representative democracy collapses, blame it on Facebook.The internet can be used for immoral
purposes, writes tech pioneer Taplin, director emeritus of USC's Annenberg Innovation Lab, from selling drugs and
pornography to enabling the piracy of intellectual property. It can also be used to do good, enhancing the economies of
remote places by linking them to the world. But if it is largely amoral, that, by Taplin's account, owes little to those
who are making fortunes on the Web by controlling and selling information and ransoming eyeballs. Among Taplin's
heavies are Facebook, Google, and PayPal, as exemplified by founders and executives Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page,
and Peter Thiel, the last of whom emerges as a kind of dark lord of the Hobbesian, libertarian internet (a
characterization echoed by other observers). Google enables piracy, guiding readers to sites where albums and movies
can be downloaded. Though hiding behind a do-no-evil mantra, Google could simply stop listing pirate sites just as it
stopped listing illegal drug sites--"after it paid a $500 million fine for linking" to them. What does all this have to do
with democracy? For one thing, it promotes inequality--and, as Taplin notes, with Robert Bork's "protrust" view of
antitrust laws now dominant in legal and governmental circles, monopolies are often encouraged rather than
prohibited. For another, it narrows choice despite the seemingly endless offerings of Amazon, Wal-Mart, et al. The
author offers a modest program of resistance, among whose planks is the interesting notion that creators, especially
musicians, would do well to follow the Sunkist model, forming cooperatives to control their works just as citrus
growers banded together in common interest. "I have no illusion that the existing business structures of cultural
marketing will go away," he writes, "but my hope is that we can build a parallel structure that will benefit all creators."
A powerful argument for reducing inequality and revolutionizing how we use the Web for the benefit of the many
rather than the few.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Taplin, Jonathan: MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911527&it=r&asid=318f13e3fcf04c5a27bf2f7b3e4c9ec4.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A482911527
10/15/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1508103948853 2/2
Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook,
Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and
Undermined Democracy
Publishers Weekly.
264.9 (Feb. 27, 2017): p93.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
Jonathan Taplin. Little, Brown, $29 (320p)
ISBN 978-0-316-27577-4
In this insightful analysis of the intersection of technology and culture, Taplin, director emeritus of the University of
Southern California's Annenberg Innovation Lab and a longtime figure in the music and movie industries, explains
how the rise of modern Internet monopolies has changed the face of information and entertainment. "The rise of the
digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries in our country, " he argues as he explores the
rise of the Internet, the emergence of new media platforms, and the legacy of the influential players who shaped the
way we conduct ourselves online. His focus is on Facebook, Google, and Amazon and the way they gather and sell
information, but he also goes back to the earlier days of Napster and other pirate sites to show how the convenience of
file sharing affected the entertainment industries as a whole, and like-wise looks at how social media affected the 2016
election. The book reads like a collection of essays revolving around a series of related topics; the sections never form
a coherent, cohesive whole. Taplin provides a keen, thorough look at the present and future of Americans' lives as
influenced and manipulated by the technological behemoths on which they've come to depend. His work is certainly
food for thought, even if he's a little unfocused. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy."
Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 93. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485671238&it=r&asid=80849c89c019f79c7ecd372de6a8cc28.
Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485671238

Parker, Emily. "Book World: Pirated music is free, but artists pay a price." Washington Post, 15 May 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491737109&it=r&asid=297a44c6596fbb933f3950e16ebfaef7. Accessed 15 Oct. 2017. "Taplin, Jonathan: MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA482911527&it=r. Accessed 15 Oct. 2017. "Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy." Publishers Weekly, 27 Feb. 2017, p. 93. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485671238&it=r. Accessed 15 Oct. 2017.

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/26/move-fast-and-break-things-jonathan-taplin-review-damage-silicon-valley
  Word count: 1519

  Move Fast and Break Things by Jonathan Taplin review – the damage done by Silicon Valley
  Taplin’s starting point is the music of Levon Helm and the Band, but the fight against the spoiled brats of Google, Amazon and Facebook is much bigger

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  David Runciman
  Wednesday 26 April 2017 04.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.35 EDT
  In 2012, Jonathan Taplin took part in a public debate with Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit, about what the digital economy was doing to the creative arts. Taplin, who had once been manager of the Band, and was the producer of Martin Scorsese’s magnificent film of their farewell concert The Last Waltz, had a particular grievance about the fate of his friend Levon Helm, the Band’s drummer. Helm was suffering from cancer, but had been forced back on the road at the age of 70 to help pay his medical bills because the new culture of “free music and movies” had destroyed his income as a recording artist. Ohanian, clearly a little chastened by this tale, wrote to Taplin offering to help “make right what the music industry did to members of the Band”. He suggested a reunion concert or album, funded by kickstarter, and launched on Reddit.

  Taplin’s reply, which he reprints here in all its eviscerating glory, points out that this plan won’t work because in the meantime Helm has died. Moreover, he tells Ohanian, “It wasn’t the music industry that created Levon’s plight; it was people like you.” He concludes: “You are so clueless as to offer to get the Band back together for a charity concert, unaware that three of the five members are dead. Take your charity and shove it. Just let us get paid for our work and stop deciding that you can unilaterally make it free.” Ohanian, unsurprisingly, did not respond.

  This exchange sums up the argument of Taplin’s new book: the titans of the digital age frequently behave like spoiled and ignorant brats with far, far more money than sense; and their victims include many of the artists who create things of real value and who can no longer earn a living from doing so. Taplin’s sense of outrage is palpable and his case is often compelling. Unfortunately, the two parts of the argument don’t really hang together. The first claim is hard to dispute – Silicon Valley does increasingly resemble some kind of nightmarish children’s playground, populated by overgrown babies with no idea of the consequences of their actions – but the evidence he marshals is mainly second hand, drawn from newspaper commentary and some well-known histories of the digital revolution. As a result, it feels a little overfamiliar. The more personal and original sections of the book concern his own experiences in the music and film industries. He harks back to the glory days of the 1960s and 1970s, when people like him and his friends could make their music and movies on their own terms and still get paid for it. The trouble is, this sounds a lot like special pleading. He would say that, wouldn’t he?

  The Band were unquestionably important artists and The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down is a great song, if not quite the transcendent masterpiece Taplin takes for granted here. So, yes, they deserved their original success, and it’s painful to see people like that scrabbling around for scraps in the age of streamed content. But before the digital revolution turned them into victims, the Band were the fortunate beneficiaries of an earlier age of cultural production, as will be true of any group of artists who make it. The music industry of that time – dominated by earnest and slightly pretentious white men, some of whom (like the superstar reviewers at Rolling Stone) had an effective monopoly on their audiences – suited what they had to offer. It also suited Taplin, a Princeton-educated lawyer who happened to find himself in the right place at the right time. He clearly had a hell of a ride. But it’s hard to feel all that sorry for lucky people when their luck runs out.

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  He leans too heavily on the assumption that the 1960s and 70s represented an artistic golden age whose like we will never see again. Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde aren’t quite enough to build a case like that. Any era will value its own products, and that will be especially true of the people who helped make them. Imagine a period 30 or 40 years from now when podcasting has been destroyed by some new economic model (though it will probably happen far sooner than that). It’s easy to picture the makers of Serial and S-Town pointing out that something of great value has been lost. They will be right, though it’s hard to see many people caring. Of course, Serial and S-Town have their critics, but so does the music Taplin loves: I know people who would rather eat stinging nettles than sit through the whole of The Last Waltz.

  Taplin couches his argument in terms of Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, which sees vastly outsized rewards going to a few dominant players at the top of the market, and the rest distributed in tiny amounts to the millions of self-starters who can now find whatever audience is out there via YouTube and online retailers. The people who get crushed are those in the middle. Weirdly, though, Taplin identifies the Band not merely as part of the squeezed middle but as “middle-class musicians”. This is ironic because one of Helms’s problems was that he was too busy leading a life of hedonistic excess to have time to write the songs. The only member of the group who conformed to the bourgeois value of hard work was Robbie Robertson, whom Taplin describes as getting up to put in a songwriting shift each morning while his bandmates were sleeping off their hangovers. As a result, Robertson was still making money from royalties – even in the age of Spotify – while the rest of the Band lost out.

  The real story is not what’s happening in the transfers between the people in the middle and at the bottom of the scale, but what’s happening at the top. This is now a winner-takes-all market, and it extends far beyond the culture industries. Indeed, making the case on behalf of creative artists versus the brainless YouTube monopolists – The Big Short and Spotlight versus PewDiePie – looks like a sideshow. This isn’t about art; it’s about money and power. The real players here are the people who own the platforms and the networks on which not merely creative production but most of human communication and commerce now takes place. Taplin recognises this and devotes a lot of time to exploring the business models through which Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos et al have managed to gobble up the world. In the face of that kind of influence and reach, firing back with tales of rock stars in their glory days is a bit like taking a peashooter into battle with a hurricane.

  Taplin suggests that the BBC might serve as a model for US policy-makers looking for a political and cultural institution that can fight back against the new digital behemoths. This seems pretty optimistic given the kind of political pressures the BBC finds itself up against, never mind the commercial ones. Taplin also notes in passing that the EU remains one of the very few international organisations with both the appetite and the clout to take on Google and Facebook at their own game. He even goes so far as to say that the watchword for how power should be organised in the 21st century is “subsidiarity”. How sad then that the BBC will soon no longer be able to count on even that level of protection.

  In the end, Taplin is reduced to hoping that the dominant players of the digital world will come to their senses and realise the damage they are doing. Of Zuckerberg, he writes: “I hope that the young CEO of Facebook will be willing to pause and think about where his company is taking the media business.” So that’s what we’ve been reduced to: wishing for a “good emperor” to hear his people’s distress. It’s a sign of how slavish the world built by Silicon Valley has become. Taplin’s own experience with Ohanian should show us just how dangerous it is to be dependent on the goodwill of spoiled brats.

  • Move Fast and Break Things is published by Macmillan. To order a copy for £14.24 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• Forbes
  https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradauerbach/2017/04/18/move-fast-and-break-things-how-facebook-google-and-amazon-cornered-culture-book-review/#15e09963422f
  Word count: 965

  APR 18, 2017 @ 07:04 PM 2,703
  Review: Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture

  Brad Auerbach , CONTRIBUTOR
  Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
  Jonathan Taplin has authored a book called Move Fast and Break Things, published today. Taplin started as a tour manager for Bob Dylan; he then moved into film and concert production (Mean Streets, Concert for Bangladesh, The Last Waltz), and then into academia where he directed the Annenberg Innovation Laboratory at USC. His background is perfect for the topics he explores.

  Taplin’s book posits that intellectual property has been usurped by what he calls the new “marketing monoculture” led by Facebook, Amazon and Google. He calculates that $50 billion annually is inexorably moving from those who create the content to the owners of such “monopoly platforms.”

  The tension between creators and technology goes back to the gramophone and zoetrope, but Taplin does a fine job of elucidating the massive implications underway today. Much ink has been spilled (digitally or otherwise) over the last few decades about the chasm between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but much of it has been an overly simplistic discussion of differing perspectives.

  Instead, Taplin provides a solid qualitative and quantitative analysis supporting his position.

  In essence, Taplin points out that Google and Facebook achieve their massive net profit margins because they dominate the means by which content is distributed on the net, while creating very little of it themselves. He points out that You Tube (owned by Google) has in excess of 55% of the streaming audio business but only contributes 11% of the revenue distributed to the creators. Whereas Spotify has been striking deals with record companies that drive more revenue back to the creators of content, the collapse of the fixed format (compact disc) sector of the music business has been catastrophic for many artists. Facebook refuses to negotiate agreements for the distribution of music and video on its platform.

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  In addition to articulating the tectonic shifts in the entertainment market triggered by the Facebook and Google business models, Taplin explores the political tension generated by organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation. John Perry Barlow is a founder of EFF, and I generally like Barlow’s perspective on the confluence of media and technology. But EFF’s steadfast support of free speech at all costs puts the organization in the untenable position of supporting all elements of the Dark Web, what Taplin describes as a “cesspool of crime, child pornography, and sex trafficking that exists like a parallel universe apart from the Web most of us use.”

  Eric Schmidt [left] definitely not dressed for a Google board meetingBrad Auerbach
  Eric Schmidt [left] definitely not dressed for a Google board meeting
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  Taplin also touches on the psychological aspects of Facebook’s designs. He notes that studies by B.F. Skinner in the 1960s reveal a quirk fundamental to Facebook’s model. When Skiner’s mice hit a lever and were given the same reward, they soon hit the lever far less vigorously than the mice who were given variable rewards. Ponder your behavior when it comes to reacting to the ping of a new text or a Facebook update.

  Much of Taplin’s book was written before the last US election, but before going to print he was able to add material relating to fake news and Facebook’s inevitable influence on voters. Taplin also cites research by Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology that Google could “determine the outcome of upwards of 40 percent of all national elections” due merely to the placement of the candidates’ Google search rankings. Neither Facebook nor Google have any incentive to curtail the business model that economically benefit the purveyors of fake news.

  One can only hope that the growing chorus of voices, now joined by Taplin, will cause Facebook and Google to follow through more vigorously on their efforts to address the fake news debacle. But Trump’s decision to name Peter Thiel to his transition team and Pence’s announcement that Marc Short (who had run Koch’s Freedom Partners) is not good news.

  Nonetheless, most every creator of music and film that should welcome the clarion call of Taplin’s book.

• National
  https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/book-review-jonathan-taplin-s-move-fast-and-break-things-homes-in-on-the-human-cost-of-the-digital-revolution-1.47436
  Word count: 1714

  Book review: Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things homes in on the human cost of the digital revolution
  Jonathan Taplin's book asks : why is it that creating culture – good culture that people really want – just doesn’t pay the bills anymore? How have the filmmaker, journalist and musician become the casualties of the digital age?

  Carl Miller
  Carl Miller
  May 3, 2017
  Updated: May 3, 2017 04:00 AM
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  A worker pushes a cart among shelves lined with goods at an Amazon warehouse in Brieselang, Germany. In the United States, Amazon accounts for 65 per cent of all new book sales. Sean Gallup / Getty Images
  A worker pushes a cart among shelves lined with goods at an Amazon warehouse in Brieselang, Germany. In the United States, Amazon accounts for 65 per cent of all new book sales. Sean Gallup / Getty Images
  Culture is dying. At a time when more is being written, made, read and listened to than ever before, the grand human endeavour of artistic creation is in serious trouble. Something sinister is happening, says Jonathan Taplin in Move Fast and Break Things. And the reason for it is the digital revolution.

  How can it be that the arrival of a digital network composed of billions of music fans has not been a boon to musicians? There are more eyeballs reading more articles than ever before, yet why do journalists struggle to make ends meet? This is the question at the heart of Taplin’s book and it is an important one: why is it that creating culture – good culture that people really want – just doesn’t pay the bills anymore? How have the filmmaker, journalist and musician become the casualties of the digital age?

  Taplin has a number of threads to unravel to find the answer. The first is ideology and what the digital revolution has really been about. The internet and ideology have always gone together, and in Silicon Valley, building technology has always been more than a business and the technologists have always been more than businessmen. They are social visionaries, and the technology they have built has always been an agent of societal change, intended to rattle the status quo and realise a new kind of social order.

  But what vision have they wanted to realise? The internet began, Taplin explains, with the counter-culture and humanism of the 1960s. Many of the early internet pioneers were “New Communalists”; geeks on acid who imagined the internet to free our minds. They saw that the internet would create “a realm of intimate personal power … power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” Computers were “personal creativity devices” that would unlock the human mind.

  But the story of cultural destruction really begins in the 1980s, when a new kind of thinking was beginning to muscle out this hippy ideal. Ayn Rand had spearheaded the rise of libertarianism that saw the world as a place where superior people, people of drive, ambition and guts were struggling against the suffocating mob. A new generation of libertarian technologists reimagined the kind of emancipation that computers would bring. They saw that computers could free individuals from government regulation and taxes. And so the internet project was “hijacked by a small group of right-wing radicals to whom the ideas of democracy and decentralisation was anathema.”

  The second thread is money, as the rise of the internet has catapulted those libertarian dreamers of the 1980s into positions of spectacular economic power. Over the last 20 years, we have lived through an unprecedented concentration of wealth into a single valley in California. The biggest companies in the world are now the tech companies, and many of the richest people in the world are the tech entrepreneurs. But most importantly, the digital revolution has not just created an industry of competing services that is generally wealthy, it has created a handful of vast digital monopolies. In the United States, Amazon accounts for 65 per cent of all new book sales. Facebook, with 1.6 billion users, is already bigger than any country, but it also owns WhatsApp (1 billion), Messenger (900 million) and Instagram (400 million). And Google, the most powerful tech giant of all, dominates search, video, maps, mobile and browser.

  This is the rise of “winner-take-all” economics. Gone is the functioning marketplace of different players competing for your custom. Gone also are all the dynamics that push prices down and keep people honest. The size of the networks the tech giants have and the amount of data that they collect means that, in Taplin’s eyes, they might now be seen as “natural monopolies” much like rail or water companies. And if they are, Taplin argues, we need to regulate the hell out of them.

  The third thread is politics, as the combination of libertarian thinking and the political power of the tech giants have not only made regulation very difficult, but also allowed the tech giants to shape the legal landscape away from one that protects the producers of culture towards one that protects the vast monopolies that control the distribution of content. Charles and David Koch – of natural-­resources conglomerate Koch Industries – have, says Taplin, conducted a “thirty-five-year assault on our democratic process”. The end result, he says, has been the removal of the will of democratic governments (and here he really means the US) to challenge the new monopolies of the tech giants. Antitrust laws, privacy regulation, general taxation and copyright protection have all been undermined exactly when, he argues, we need them most.

  Much of Taplin’s narrative, up to this point, has been covered at great length by technology commentators before him. Evgeny Morozov in The Net Delusion was one of the first to cry foul on the techno-­utopian assumption that the internet was making all of us more free. In Who Owns the Future, Jaron Lanier introduced the idea of “Siren Servers” – the biggest, most powerful machines that control the networks – to explain why we have seen the rise of winner-take-all outcomes in tech. This is now a busy area for writers and commentators, and there are thousands of studies, exposés, news articles and other material detailing the new and manifold pressures the tech giants are under. The charge sheet against the tech giants is long and Taplin doesn’t always marshal this huge pool of secondary writing in a way that makes complete sense to the reader. He is prone to jump from the topic of racism on Twitter to the “gamergate” scandal and misogyny in tech, to the shortcomings of social media for constructive political debate, the vapidity of YouTube stars and the proceeds of cyber crime in a way that can make his book feel, at times, more like a grab-bag of general grievances than anything else.

  That aside, Taplin achieves something important. This book isn’t only about the technology that imperils culture, but also about why culture needs to be saved. Taplin was a tour manager for Bob Dylan and a producer for Martin Scorsese’s film Mean Streets. Woven among the lines of criticism towards the libertarians, tech companies and their political allies is a moving, deeply persuasive account of how important culture really is. Taplin writes beautifully about seeing Dylan go electric at Newport for the first time in 1965. When he writes about the Hollywood of Scorsese and Coppola in the 1970s, you wish you had been there. After reading what he says about learning the art of slowness in music one evening in Woodstock from Levon Helm, you believe him when he says: “I know brave and passionate art is worth protecting and is more than just click bait for global advertising monopolies.”

  So when Taplin writes about how the vast monopolies have dismantled the “cultural infrastructure” that allows this kind of art to happen, it is with an eloquent and genuine pain and anger. Partly this dismantling is happening through the concentration of bargaining power: Amazon can push down the prices of books simply because publishers don’t have anywhere else to turn. Partly it is because enforcing copyright has become so much harder, and the tech giants, with all their political power, have been reluctant to enforce it. Partly it is because these platforms have allowed amateurs – whether writers or musicians – to create enormous amounts of culture, freely available, competing for people’s attention. But overall, the decline in revenue to the content creators, artists and publishers, is staggering. US newspaper advertising revenue has fallen from US$65.8 billion (Dh241.64bn) in 2000 to $23.6bn in 2014. For newspapers in the United Kingdom, ad spend went from $4.7bn to $2.6bn, global recorded-music revenues were $27.3bn in 2000 and dropped to $10.4bn. Home-video revenue fell from $21.6bn in 2006 to $18bn in 2014. At the same time that re­venues crash­ed across the creative industries, the income of the tech giants soared. The money is now not in produ­cing culture, but in distributing it.

  At its core, this book is a deeply humanistic plea. The most powerful argument in it is not the statistics, but the example of Taplin’s friend, Helm. A singer and drummer for the Band, which brought meaning and delight to huge audiences and inspiration to generations of later musicians, Levon “just wanted to earn an honest living off the great work of a lifetime”. But he couldn’t, and after the royalties dried up, Levon was forced to continue to perform after being diagnosed with throat cancer. “Here is the human cost of the digital revolution”. The decimation of culture, of course, isn’t just ruinous for the makers of it, but for all of us. The film scene that makes you contemplate your own death, or the poem that makes you remember someone you’ve lost, these are not “content”. These are what makes us who we really are.

  Carl Miller is research director at Demos, the UK-based think tank. His debut book Power is being published by William Heinemann.

• Daily News
  http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/theater-arts/move-fast-break-internet-ruined-culture-article-1.3207667
  Word count: 889

  ‘Move Fast and Break Things’: How the internet ruined culture
  BY SHANE SAXTON
  DAILY NEWS CONTRIBUTOR Tuesday, May 30, 2017, 7:47 PM

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  "Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy" is out now.
  "Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy" is out now. (LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY)
  TITLE
  MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS
  AUTHOR:
  Jonathan Taplin
  “How can it be that the arrival of digital networks composed of billions of music fans has not been a boon to musicians?”

  So ponders Jonathan Taplin, a Renaissance man who has dabbled in pursuits as varied as managing tours for The Band and Bob Dylan, producing documentaries and Scorsese films, running mergers and acquisitions, and developing early internet startups. Given his singular background in media and business, Taplin is uniquely poised to deliver us “Move Fast and Break Things,” a relentless critique that seeks to answer the above question of why the internet has hindered, rather than helped, those trying to make a living in the arts.

  After all, as Taplin notes, the internet was founded upon highly counter-cultural and communal notions. One individual, profiled in Move Fast, who typifies the nascent ideology of the World Wide Web is early tech pioneer Doug Engelbart. This influential inventor hobnobbed with Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey and their Bay Area hippie acolytes, yet also received federal funding from the defense research agency DARPA. Engelbart and company were “geeks on acids, dreaming of the future. But financed by the military-industrial complex.”

  The tech community is still ostensibly centered around the progressive ideals of the 1960s. But the web is no longer primarily advanced by bohemian-minded individuals, or even a Keynesian government. Somewhere along the way, these idyllic beginnings were sabotaged by a small crew of “libertarian internet billionaires.” Of this crew, Taplin takes aim primarily at Google’s Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. These three individuals take their philosophical cues from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” and the economic theories of Milton Friedman, not “The Whole Earth Catalog” or “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”

  Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is now the world's second richest person
  Page, Bezos, and Thiel have no regard for the “unthinking demos”: Thiel’s condescending term for the 98% of the population who are not the all-knowing “scientists, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists.” For Bezos, “the notion of installing air-conditioning in (Amazon’s) giant warehouses goes against his notion of liberty.” And in a particularly extreme example of this ideology, the venture capitalist Paul Graham boasts of “encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them detailed instructions showing how.”

  What has resulted from this West Coast libertarian ethos is the wholesale monopolization of media markets in the past decade or so. The new Big Three — Facebook, Google and Amazon — have afforded us all remarkable advances in access to arts, culture and information. But in their radical business models, “economic value has moved from the creators of content to the owners of monopoly platforms.” In other words, it’s no longer the artists receiving the profits of their hard work, but rather the digital middle men who distribute said art.

  For Taplin, this business model first started wreaking havoc via Sean Parker’s Napster at the dawn of the new millennium. Napster wrought a terrible drought upon the royalty stream that so many musicians could make a living off of in the 20th century. Taplin saw the deleterious effects of this drought up close and personal, due to his association with Levon Helm and company. In his words, “it was horrifying to see The Band members go from a decent royalty income of around $100,000 per year to almost nothing.” I have to wonder what hope there is that young creators will be able to pursue their craft to its fullest, when the economic prospects are so bleak for long-established artists.

  But Taplin assures us not all is doom and gloom for the future of musicians. Towards the end of “Move Fast,” he offers us speculations about a so-called “digital renaissance.” By presenting us past examples of individual and governmental intervention against monopolies and corruption, he gives us a layout for how to narrow the chasm of inequality between artists and the “techno-determinists” like Bezos, Thiel and Page.

  ‘A Gambler’s Anatomy’ review: Jonathan Lethem’s latest
  At best, one hopes that “Move Fast and Break Things” becomes this century’s “The History of the Standard Oil Company” — a text that spurs the breakup, or at least the reining in, of these damaging digital trusts. However, it is difficult to say how many will dare to take action against these ubiquitous internet firms, or even how many will bother to read Taplin’s book in the first place. But if we do neither, one thing is certain: “Every one of us will stand in the shoes of the artist before long.”

  "Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy" is out now fromLittle, Brown and Company.

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