The Master Switch (2010) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Characters/People edit see section history

• Tim Wu: Add a description of this character.
• David Sarnoff
• Adolph Zukor
• Farnsworth
• Armstrong
• Whitacre
• Steve Wozniak
• Gerald Levin
• Schumpeter
• Steven Ross
• Laemmle
• Tuttle
• Jenkins
• Hodkinson
• Ralph Lee Smith
• Baird
• Baran
• Hoover
• Breen
• Hubbard
• Beranek
• Hayes
• Licklider
• Engelbart
• Fox
• Steve Jobs
• Dempsey
• Klein
• Google
• Eisner
• Steve Case
• Kennedy
• Arnold
• Hickman
• Ted Turner
• Vint Cerf
• Thomas Edison
• Huxley
• Burch
• Kahn
• J. P. Morgan

Quotes edit see section history

• “It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.”

• “Of course the human urge to speak, create, build things, and otherwise express oneself for its own sake, without expectation of financial reward, is hardly new. In an age that has radically commoditized content, it is well to remember that Homer had no expectation of royalties.”

• “This is the essential weakness of a centralized approach to innovation: the notion that it can be a planned and systematic process, best directed by a kind of central intelligence; that it is simply of <sic> matter of assembling all the best minds and putting them to work in unison. Were it so, the future could be planned and executed in a scientific manner.”

• “Yet if all resources for solving any problem are directed by a single, centralized intelligence, that mastermind has to be right in predicting the future if innovation is to proceed effectively. And that's the problem: monopoly presumes a prescience that humans are seldom capable of”

• “In the final draft of the TCP protocol, Jon Postel, another Internet founder, inserted the following dictum: 'Be conservative in what you do. Be liberal in what you accept from others.'It may seems strange that such a philosophical, perhaps even spiritual principle should be embedded in the articulation of the Internet, but then network design, like all design, can be understood as ideology embodied, and the Internet clearly bore the stamp of the opposition to bigness characteristic of the era.”

• “What I propose is not the sort of nationalization that found favor in Western Europe and briefly in the United States during the 1930s. Far from it. For history shows that in seeking to prevent the exercise of abusive power in the information industries, government is among those actors whose power must be restrained."”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Kronos Effect: the efforts undertaken by a dominant company to consume its potential successors in their infancy.

  Highlighted by 156 Kindle customers

• In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately amount to censorship.

  Highlighted by 132 Kindle customers

• Sustaining innovations are improvements that make the product better, but do not threaten its market. The disruptive innovation, conversely, threatens to displace a product altogether.

  Highlighted by 132 Kindle customers

• At the most basic level, Schumpeter believed that innovation and economic growth are one and the same. Countries that innovated would grow wealthier; those that did not would stagnate.

  Highlighted by 115 Kindle customers

• in the United States, it is industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech.

  Highlighted by 114 Kindle customers

• Here we see a rift that will appear in virtually every information industry, the fault line between the virtues of centralized and of decentralized decision making, between the imperative to produce at scales that justify production costs and the desire for variety.

  Highlighted by 95 Kindle customers

• We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It is in this context that Fred Friendly, onetime CBS News president, made it clear that before any question of free speech comes the question of “who controls the master switch.”

  Highlighted by 88 Kindle customers

• But in the hands of an outside inventor, a patent serves a different function: as sort of corporate shield that can prevent a large industrial power from killing you off or seizing control of your company and the industry. In that oblique sense, a strong patent can sow the seeds of creative destruction.

  Highlighted by 80 Kindle customers

• 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.

  Highlighted by 73 Kindle customers

• History also shows that whatever has been closed too long is ripe for ingenuity’s assault: in time a closed industry can be opened anew, giving way to all sorts of technical possibilities and expressive uses for the medium before the effort to close the system likewise begins again. This oscillation of information industries between open and closed is so typical a phenomenon that I have given it a name: “the Cycle.”

  Highlighted by 44 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Theodore Vail
• Hollywood
• America
• United States
• New York City
• Heaven
• Washington
• San Francisco
• D.c.
• Paramount
• Chicago
• White House
• Europe
• Germany
• Atlanta
• Edison Trust
• Texas
• Bell Labs
• London
• Los Angeles

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Tim Wu (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year (2010: Nonfiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: HE7631.W8 2010
• Dewey: 384.041

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Business & Investing › Skills › Communications

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Tim Wu: The author's homemade website, with photos, articles and lots and lots of random stuff.
• Book Review: Most cyberlaw tracts or Internet policy books today lament a world full of corporate conspiracies, closed systems, “kill switches,” and squashed consumer rights. The world loves a good tale of villainy and misery, and that’s exactly what Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, delivers in The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. Lawrence Lessig, the well-known legal scholar, kicked off this genre of hand wringing with his seminal 1999 book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, which warned that an unfettered digital marketplace would be anathema to our freedoms. “Left to itself,” Lessig predicted, “cyberspace will become a perfect tool of control.” Control, that is, by corporate forces hellbent on dictating the course of commerce and culture. Lessig argued that collective action was needed to counter these forces.

More Books Like This edit see section history

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history