Jonathan Taplin > 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

“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

“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

“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

“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 first question that needs to be asked is why we are so willing to surrender our labor and our personal data for free to an immensely profitable monopoly.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“ultimately the connection with the military led to the undoing of Engelbart’s NLS vision.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“They created a world dominated by tech elites, with a set of rules that we are now condemned to live by. Peter Thiel declared that “competition is for losers,” and the following decade would prove just who the losers would be.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“And even if we are aware that Google’s and Facebook’s primary business is “surveillance marketing”—selling our personal information to advertisers for billions of dollars—we somehow trust that they will not exploit this information in ways that might harm us.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Our understanding of the Internet as a propaganda machine rather than simply a benign, ever-flowing source of information changed the game in 2016.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“We continue to surrender more of our private lives believing in the myth of convenience bequeathed to us by benign corporations. As Kevin Kelly, the founding editor of Wired, remarked, “Everything will be tracked, monitored, sensored, and imaged, and people will go along with it because ‘vanity trumps privacy,’ as already proved on Facebook.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Go to a traditional folk music festival. The quality of the playing and singing will blow your mind. But like the rise in vinyl record production, house shows, and other aspects of hipster culture, it is quintessentially “analog”—the sonic equivalent of the farm-to-table movement. The great electronic musician and producer Brian Eno, who has been working in funky analog studios in West Africa, has begun to question the very raison d’être of digital recording, which, thanks to Auto-Tune (the tech tool that allows engineers to correct singers with bad pitch), makes it possible to turn a second-rate singer into a diva: “We can quantize everything now; we can quantize audio so the beat is absolutely perfect. We can sort of do and undo everything. And of course, most of the records we like, all of us, as listeners, are records where people didn’t do everything to fix them up and make them perfect.” Tech’s perfection tools do not make for human art.”
― 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

“Business historian Simon Head, in his book Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans, writes that Amazon is a “prime example of how in the early twenty-first century, state-of-the-art information technologies can be used to re-create the harsh, driven capitalism of the pre–New Deal era.”
― 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

“To be a young musician, filmmaker, or journalist today is to seriously contemplate the prospect of entering a profession that the digital age has eroded beyond recognition.”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Peter Thiel, Larry Page, and others are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in research to “end human aging” and to merge human consciousness into their all-powerful networks.”
― 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

“What is so important about Engelbart’s legacy is that he saw the computer as primarily a tool to augment—not replace—human capability. In our current era, by contrast, much of the financing flowing out of Silicon Valley is aimed at building machines that can replace humans. In a famous encounter in 1953 at MIT, Marvin Minsky, the father of research on artificial intelligence, declared: “We’re going to make machines intelligent. We are going to make them conscious!” To which Doug Engelbart replied: “You’re going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people?”
― Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

“Dear Alexis, Last week at our debate, I talked about the essential unfairness that my friend and colleague Levon Helm had to continue to tour at the age of 70 with throat cancer in order to pay his medical bills. On Thursday, Levon died and I am filled with unbelievable sadness. I am sad not just for Levon’s wife and daughter, but sad that you could be so condescending to offer “to make right what the music industry did to the members of The Band.” It wasn’t the music industry that created Levon’s plight; it was people like you celebrating Pirate Bay and Kim Dotcom—bloodsuckers who made millions off the hard work of musicians and filmmakers. You were so proud during the debate to raise your hand as one of those who had downloaded “free music and free movies.” But it’s just your selfish decision that those tunes were free. It wasn’t Levon’s decision. In fact, for many years after The Band stopped recording, Levon made a good living off of the record royalties of The Band’s catalog. But no more. So what is your solution—charity. You want to give every great artist a virtual begging bowl with Kickstarter. But Levon never wanted the charity of the Reddit community or the Kickstarter community. He just wanted to earn an honest living off the great work of a lifetime. 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.”
― 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

“The American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as “a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism.”
― Jonathan Taplin, The Magic Years: Scenes from a Rock-and-Roll Life

“if bluegrass or country music—if it comes down to that country and it mixes with blues and it dances, then it’s called rock and roll.”
― 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

“First, we don’t know how to deal with rumors. Rumors that confirm people’s biases are now believed and spread among millions of people. Second,… we tend to only communicate with people that we agree with, and thanks to social media, we can mute, un-follow, and block everybody else. Third, online discussions quickly descend into angry mobs.… It’s as if we forget that the people behind screens are actually real people and not just avatars. And fourth, it became really hard to change our opinions. Because of the speed and brevity of social media, we are forced to jump to conclusions and write sharp opinions in 140 characters about complex world affairs. And once we do that, it lives forever on the Internet.… Fifth—and in my point of view, this is the most critical—today, our social media experiences are designed in a way that favors broadcasting over engagements, posts over discussions, shallow comments over deep conversations. It’s as if we agreed that we are here to talk at each other instead of talking with each other.”
― 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

“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