Networked Corporations Quotes

“Edison epitomized the new entrepreneur at the heart of a brand-new phase in the development of market societies: an inventor who innovated in order to create monopoly power for himself – not so much for the riches that it provided, but for its own sake; for the sheer glory and the sheer power of it all. He was an entrepreneur who inspired, in equal measure, incredible loyalty from his overworked staff and loathing from his adversaries. He was a friend of Henry Ford, who also famously played a key role in bringing machinery into the lives of ordinary people while, at the same time, turning workers into the nearest a person can come to a machine.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Topsy’s execution was a move on an oversized chessboard between two industrial behemoths. Edison’s invention of the light bulb had been only the first step in creating electricity generating stations and the network of wires which took that electricity into every American home to light up the bulbs produced en masse by his own factories. Without control of the generation and distribution of electricity, his bulbs would not have made him King of the Electron. Thus occurred the so-called War of the Currents against his great adversary, George Westinghouse.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy