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Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. With all our media now traveling a single network, an unprecedented potential is building for centralized control over what Americans see and hear. Could history repeat itself wi In this age of an open Internet, it is easy to forget that every American information industry, beginning with the telephone, has eventually been taken captive by some ruthless monopoly or cartel. Could history repeat itself with the next industrial consolidation? Each invited unrestricted use and enterprising experiment until some would-be mogul battled his way to total domination. Here are stories of an uncommon will to power, the power over information: Adolph Zukor, who took a technology once used as commonly as YouTube is today and made it the exclusive prerogative of a kingdom called Hollywood. And foremost, Theodore Vail, founder of the Bell System, the greatest information empire of all time, and a capitalist whose faith in Soviet-style central planning set the course of every information industry thereafter. Get A Copy. Hardcoverpages. Published November 2nd by Knopf first published More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Master Switchplease sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. I learned a tonne writing it. View all 4 comments. Nov 22, Mario the lone bookwolf rated it really liked it Shelves: wu-tim0-internet0-technology. I believed in the power and existence of the master switch long before the publishing of this book, because many future timelines by many famous Sci-Fi authors point in this direction and because it is a logical and to a certain extent necessary step for both government and industry. We are not at the end of history, but probably at the end of new ways to control the information highways. Augmented reality, virtual reality and invasive techniques to participate better and more efficient all won I believed in the power and existence of the master switch long before the publishing of this book, because many future timelines by many famous Sci-Fi authors point in this direction and because it is a logical and to a certain extent necessary step for both government and industry. There will be standards and competitors and the best product will be used by most customers. One can argue if it is good or bad if all this power lies in the hands of a few people, but in a democratic state the control of all content to avoid extremism up to a dictatorship is something simply necessary and the line between too much and too less censorship is so thin and difficult to draw that it may be good that machines will do the job. Probably they are more objective and less prone do party principles and so the endless circle of corruption between lobbyists, government and dominating industries will go on forever even more efficient. Former industries fell because they are, compared to today's standard, inflexible and unilateral, not so say boring. Just radio, just a rigid TV program, just an offline PC game, come on. Not as if TV- and radio stations, news corporations, etc. Even if they would really want to, they would have to cannibalize themselves, because their push media program without active user participation is oldfashioned. If they would change, the whole subvention circle and political interests in official, state-owned propaganda stations would collapse and the information monopoly would have to be reconsidered. They would have to allow active evaluation by users and let people produce critical, true content, to them better-known as fake news. Pest or cholera, they lose whatever they do. And there are antitrust laws, the youth has the best potential to connect and act together, old ideas become more and more ridiculous and pathetic and the human participation in important decisions becomes less and less. And for me, as a friendly technocratic science adorer, this ist the most important point. Sure there are some ideas to democratize the whole internet, open-source, sharing economy, creative commons, etc. But a national and global standard, infrastructure and supervisory authority will always be needed to let the whole system run and fix problems. I am a proponent of democratic and social innovations and a fairer economic system, but I also see the importance of a master administrator with different kill switches. And one must be realistic, each free and great idea gets commercialized in a certain amount of time and the only viable option is to make the best compromise between civil society and big money. Net neutrality and transparency must be prioritized with the help of techniques like open government and blockchain technology or the worst possible moloch, as seen in China, may arise. View all 5 comments. Nov 02, Elaine Nelson rated it it was amazing Shelves: economicshistoryfavoritesnon-fictionpoliticstechnology. As with Nothing to Envy, I should have written this review right after reading the book. It was fantastic, and I'd like to read it again. Great history of the "Information Empires" of the 20th and early 21st century, the continuing tension between openness and control. It seemed to me that Facebook or its moral equivalents are The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires elephant in the room in that discussion. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires highly recommended. I liked them because they brought out the fundamental patterns that underlie the evolution and behaviour of humans The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires the system of the world respectively. The Master Switch does the same with communication and information empires. It then shifts to industrial scale, predictable outputs, and controlled by a corporation which then decides to make it a closed system. He calls this the Cycle. The author's contention is that all information businesses go through the cycle. The question he seeks to answer is "which is mightier : the radicalism of the Internet or the inevitability of the Cycle? The story begins in the s, when Alexander Graham Bell's small telephone company goes up against the The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires of the times - Western Union. Will get to that in a bit. It is not just the magnificent scope that makes the book interesting. The author retells history in the mould of a thriller! There are anecdotes and not so trivia that make the book really engaging. Multiple inventors of the same technology and uncredited firststowering personalities from JP Morgan to Steve Jobs who left a firm imprint, fascinating origin stories of movie studios like Universal and Warner that are now household names and how movie making is now less to do with the movie and more to do with the business of the franchise a movie is a 2 hour advertisement of an intellectual property which makes money through a franchise that sells everything from tshirts to DVDs to theme parkscompanies that rise The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires like phoenixes in revenge arcs that span a century GE buying Universal! The author obviously does not give a definitive answer to whether The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires Internet will beat the Cycle. The nuance he highlights is that the monopoly actually begins and even continues with noble intentions and utopian values, but loses the plot subsequently. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires like "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. A fantastic read on multiple counts! The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires 06, Mehrsa rated it it was amazing. I started this a while back, got half way, and then moved on to his other books. So I started it again and read it all the way through and I'm so glad I did. It's just as relevant now as when it was written. View 1 comment. Nov 05, Irina slutsky is currently reading it. Most recently Google and Verizon were the two giants rumored to have a plan to let users pay for faster access. Wu has testified on numerous occasions -- has put the question of network neutrality on hold until after the midterm elections. Ad Age spoke to Mr. Wu a few days before his official book tour and asked him to frame the history of those empires in terms of advertising and, of course, Facebook. Wu: Historically, the major resistance to monopoly comes from high prices. But if you have a monopoly supported by advertising, the price isn't noticed by consumers because the price is distributed. Consumers pay for Google through everything being a bit more expensive. If I type "dentist" in Google, and click through to a Google link, the price comes back to me when I pay the dentist. Consumers always pay for everything, but with advertising, it's The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires an extremely indirect fashion. Ad Age: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires about Facebook? Wu: If they charged you money to see all your friends, then they started raising those prices, you would be really mad. The fact that we think Google and Facebook are free deadens resistance to what would be very objectionable. People pay their phone bills and their cable bills and those prices are under scrutiny because those are consumer-facing bills. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires - Tim Wu - Google книги

Winner of the Business Book of the Year Award The Internet Age: on the face of it, an era of unprecedented freedom in both communication and culture. Yet in the past, each major new medium, from telephone to satellite television, has crested on a wave of similar idealistic optimism, before succumbing to the inevitable undertow of industrial consolidation. Every once free and open technology has, in time, become centralized and closed; as The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires power has taken control of the 'master switch. I'm not sure I agree with the conclusions Wu draws, but that is probably my technological idealism overpowering reason. Goes through the modern "information" businesses in the US - telephone, radio, television and film, and internet. A recurrent theme is how upstarts become power-abusing empires. The communication Tim Wu. Beneath the AllSeeing. The Rebels the Challengers and the Fall. Reborn Without a Soul. The Internet Against Everyone. A Note on the Type. A veteran of Silicon Valley, in he was recognized as one of fifty leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine. He is also a fellow of the New America Foundation and the chairman of the media reform organization Free Press. He lives in New York. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date. For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now. Javascript is not enabled in your browser. Enabling JavaScript in your browser will allow you to experience all the features of our site. Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser. NOOK Book. It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry—from the telephone to radio to film—once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel. In this pathbreaking book, Tim Wu asks: will the Internet follow the same fate? Could the Web—the entire flow of American information—come to be ruled by a corporate leviathan in possession of "the master switch"? Chapter 1 Exactly forty years before Bell's National Geographic banquet, Alexander Bell was in his laboratory in the attic of a machine shop in Boston, trying once more to coax a voice out of a wire. His efforts had proved mostly futile, and the Bell Company was little more than a typically hopeless start-up. Bell was a professor and an amateur inventor, with little taste for business: his expertise and his day job was teaching the deaf. His main investor and the president of the Bell Company was Gardiner Green Hubbard, a patent attorney and prominent critic of the telegraph monopoly Western Union. It is Hubbard who was responsible for Bell's most valuable asset: its telephone patent, filed even before Bell had a working prototype. Besides Hubbard, the company had one employee, Bell's assistant, Thomas Watson. That was it. If the banquet revealed Bell on the cusp of monopoly, here is the opposite extreme from which it began: a stirring image of Bell and Watson toiling in their small attic laboratory. It is here that the Cycle begins: in a lonely room where one or two men are trying to solve a concrete problem. So many revolutionary innovations start small, with outsiders, amateurs, and idealists in attics or garages. This motif of Bell and Watson alone will reappear throughout this account, at the origins of radio, television, the personal computer, cable, and companies like Google and Apple. The importance The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires these moments makes it critical to understand the stories of lone inventors. Over the twentieth century, most innovation theorists and historians became somewhat skeptical of the importance of creation stories like Bell's. These thinkers came to believe the archetype of the heroic inventor had been over-credited in the search for a compelling narrative. As William Fisher puts it, "Like the romantic ideal The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires authorship, the image of the inventor has proved distressingly durable. If that's true, how singular could the genius of the inventor really be? There could not be a better example than the story of the telephone itself. On the very day that Alexander Bell was registering his invention, another man, Elisha Gray, was also at the patent office filing for the very same breakthrough. Insixteen years before Bell, a German man named Johann Philip Reis presented a primitive telephone to the Physical Society of Frankfurt, claiming that "with the help of the galvanic current, [the inventor] is able to reproduce at a distance the tones of instruments and even, to a certain degree, the human voice. Another man, a small-town Pennsylvania electrician named Daniel Drawbaugh, later claimed that by he had a working telephone in his house. He produced prototypes and seventy witnesses who testified that they had seen or heard his invention at that time. In litigation before the Supreme Court inthree Justices concluded that "overwhelming evidence" proved that "Drawbaugh produced and exhibited in his shop, as early asan electrical instrument by which he transmitted speech. And this reality suggests that what we call invention, while not easy, is simply what happens once a technology's development reaches the point where the next step becomes available to many people. By Bell's time, others had invented wires and the telegraph, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires discovered electricity and the basic principles of acoustics. It lay to Bell to assemble the pieces: no mean feat, but not a superhuman one. In this sense, inventors are often more like craftsmen than miracle workers. Indeed, the history of science is full of examples of what the writer Malcolm Gladwell terms "simultaneous discovery"-so full that the phenomenon represents the norm rather than the exception. Few today know the name Alfred Russel Wallace, yet he wrote an article proposing the theory of natural selection ina year before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Leibnitz and Newton developed calculus simultaneously. And in four others made the same lunar observations as Galileo. Is the loner and outsider inventor, then, merely a figment of so much hype, with no particular significance? No, I would argue his significance is enormous; but not for the reasons usually imagined. The inventors we remember are significant not so much as inventors, but as founders of "disruptive" industries, ones that shake up the technological status quo. Through circumstance or luck, they are exactly at the right distance both to imagine the future and to create an independent industry to exploit it. Let's focus, first, on the act of invention. The importance of the outsider here owes to his being at the right remove from the prevailing currents of thought about the problem at hand. That distance affords a perspective close enough to understand the problem, yet far enough for greater freedom of thought, freedom from, as it were, the cognitive distortion of what is as opposed to what could be. This innovative distance explains why so many of those who turn an industry upside down are outsiders, even outcasts. To understand this point we need grasp the difference between two types of innovation: "sustaining" and "disruptive," the distinction best described by innovation theorist Clayton Christensen. Sustaining innovations are improvements that make the product better, but do not threaten its market. The disruptive innovationconversely, threatens to displace a product altogether. It is the difference between the electric typewriter, which improved on the typewriter, and the word processor, which supplanted it. Another advantage of the outside inventor is less a matter of the imagination than of his being a disinterested party. Distance creates a freedom to develop inventions that might challenge or even destroy the business model of the dominant industry. The outsider is often the only one who can afford to scuttle a perfectly sound ship, to propose an industry that might challenge the business establishment or suggest a whole new business model. Those closer to-often at the trough of- existing industries face a remarkably constant pressure not to invent things that will ruin their employer. The outsider has nothing to lose. But to be clear, it is not mere distance, but the right distance that matters; there is such a thing as being too far away. It may be that Daniel Drawbaugh actually did invent the telephone seven years before Bell. We may never know; but even if he did, it The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires really matter, because he didn't do anything with it. He was doomed to remain an inventor, not a founder, for he was just too far away from the action to found a disruptive industry. In this sense, Bell's alliance with Hubbard, a sworn enemy of Western Union, the dominant monopolist, was all-important. For it was Hubbard who made Bell's invention into an effort to unseat Western Union. I am The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires saying, by any means, that invention is solely the province of loners and that everyone else's inspiration is suppressed. But this isn't a book about better mousetraps. The Cycle is powered by disruptive innovations that upend once thriving industries, bankrupt the dominant powers, and change the world. Such innovations are exceedingly rare, but they are what makes the Cycle go. Let's return to Bell in his Boston laboratory. Doubtless he had some critical assets, including a knowledge of acoustics. His laboratory notebook, which can be read online, suggests a certain diligence. But his greatest advantage was neither The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires these. It was that everyone else was obsessed with trying to improve the telegraph. By the s inventors and investors understood that there could be such a thing as a telephone, but it seemed a far-off, impractical thing. Serious men knew that what really mattered was better telegraph technology. Inventors were racing to build the "musical The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires a device that could send multiple messages over a single line at the same time. The other holy grail was a device for printing telegrams at home. Bell was not immune to the seduction of these goals. One must start somewhere, and he, too, began his experiments in search of a better telegraph; certainly that's what his backers thought they were paying for. Gardiner Hubbard, his primary investor, was initially skeptical of Bell's work on the telephone. It "could never be more than a scientific toy," Hubbard told him. In contrast, Elisha Gray, Bell's rival, was forced to keep his telephone research secret from his The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires funder, Samuel S. In fact, without White's opposition, there is good reason to think that Gray would have both created a working telephone and patented it long before Bell. The initial inability of Hubbard, White, and everyone else to recognize the promise of the telephone represents a pattern that recurs with a frequency embarrassing to the human race. The demand for a telephone, meanwhile, was purely notional. Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash, and the obvious rewards awaiting any telegraph improver were a distraction for anyone even inclined to think about telephony, a fact that actually helped Bell. For him the thrill of the new was unbeatably compelling, and Bell knew that in his lab he was closing in on something miraculous. He, nearly alone in the world, was playing with magical powers never seen before. On March 10,Bell, for the first time, managed to transmit speech over some distance. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires spilled acid on himself, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires cried out into his telephone device, "Watson, come here, I want you. In his hand he held a Western Union telegram with the potential to decide who would be the next president of the United States. While Bell was trying to work the bugs out of his telephone, Western Union, telephony's first and most dangerous though for the moment unwitting rival, had, they reckoned, a much bigger fish to fry: making their man president of the United States. Here we introduce the nation's first great communications monopolist, whose reign provides history's first lesson in the power and peril of concentrated control over the flow of information. Western Union's man was one Rutherford B. Hayes, an obscure Ohio politician described by a contemporary journalist as "a third rate nonentity. Hayes was a close friend of William Henry Smith, a former politician who was now the key political operator at the Associated Press. More generally, since the Civil War, the Republican Party and the telegraph industry had enjoyed a special relationship, in part because much of what were eventually Western Union's lines were built by the Union army. So making Hayes president was the goal, but how was the telegram in Reid's hand key to achieving it? The media and communications industries are regularly accused of trying to influence politics, but what went on in the s was of a wholly different order from anything we could imagine today. At the time, Western Union was the exclusive owner of the only nationwide telegraph network, and the sizable Associated Press was the unique source for "instant" national or European news.