Move Fast and Break Things is the riveting account of a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs who in the 1990s began to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms--Facebook, Amazon, and Google--that now determine the future of the music, film, television, publishing and news industries.

Jonathan Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the men who founded these companies, including Peter Thiel and Larry Page: overlooking piracy of books, music, and film while hiding behind opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users in order to create the surveillance-marketing monoculture in which we now live. 

 

The enormous profits that have come with this concentration of power tell their own story. Since 2001, newspaper and music revenues have fallen by 70 percent; book publishing, film, and television profits have also fallen dramatically. Revenues at Google in this same period grew from $400 million to $74.5 billion. Today, Google's YouTube controls 60 percent of all streaming-audio business but pay for only 11 percent of the total streaming-audio revenues artists receive. More creative content is being consumed than ever before, but less revenue is flowing to the creators and owners of that content.

 

The stakes here go far beyond the livelihood of any one musician or journalist. As Taplin observes, the fact that more and more Americans receive their news, as well as music and other forms of entertainment, from a small group of companies poses a real threat to democracy. Move Fast and Break Things offers a vital, forward-thinking prescription for how artists can reclaim their audiences using knowledge of the past and a determination to work together. Using his own half-century career as a music and film producer and early pioneer of streaming video online, Taplin offers new ways to think about the design of the World Wide Web and specifically the way we live with the firms that dominate it.

數位科技與網際網路的進步，助長了三大網路巨擘的權力，使它們發展成力量足以與世界抗衡的數位怪獸。這些巨大並持續快速發展的組織，究竟是為人類社會帶來進步與幸福的數位革命家，還是帶來毀滅與災難的掠奪者？

《大破壞：Facebook、Google、Amazon制霸，如何引爆全球失衡》作者塔普林提出一個簡潔有力的歷史觀，解釋了網路生活如何依照這些公司創立者的價值觀被塑造，包括彼得‧提爾（Peter Thiel）和賴瑞‧佩吉（Larry Page）忽視書籍、音樂和影片的盜版，並躲藏在晦暗的企業運作下，犧牲個人使用者的隱私，以便製造我們現今生活的監視行銷式同質文化。

臉書、谷歌和亞馬遜這些大型的數位壟斷公司，為我們提供了較以往更多的原創性內容，藉此收獲更豐厚的廣告利潤。但是創作者和版權所有者卻只得到微薄的報酬，還必須獨自力抗盜版的氾濫，生存條件嚴苛。

此外，全球獲利的重新分配也導致了權力的移轉，使臉書、谷歌和亞馬遜享有不下大型石油公司及藥廠的政治影響力，因而對人類的實質民主產生巨大威脅。

身為資深音樂人及電影製作人，塔普林根據自身經驗，在書中提出具前瞻性的大膽解方，呼籲內容創作者應團結起來，利用專業及決心奪回觀眾，制衡日益壯大的數位掠奪者。人們的聲音終將勝出，數位烏托邦時代終將來臨。