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The Master Switch
- The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
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Publisher's summary
A secret history of the industrial wars behind the rise and fall of the 20th century's great information empires - Hollywood, the broadcast networks, and AT&T - asking one big question: Could history repeat itself, with one giant entity taking control of American information?
Most consider the Internet Age to be a moment of unprecedented freedom in communications and culture. But as Tim Wu shows, each major new medium, from telephone to cable, arrived on a similar wave of idealistic optimism only to become, eventually, the object of industrial consolidation profoundly affecting how Americans communicate. Every once-free and open technology was in time centralized and closed, a huge corporate power taking control of the master switch. Today, as a similar struggle looms over the Internet, increasingly the pipeline of all other media, the stakes have never been higher. To be decided: who gets heard, and what kind of country we live in. Part industrial exposé, part meditation on the nature of freedom of expression, part battle cry to save the Internet's best features, The Master Switch brings to light a crucial drama rife with indelible characters and stories, heretofore played out over decades in the shadows of our national life.
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When scholars write the history of the world twenty years from now, what will they say was the most crucial development in the first few years of the twenty-first century? The attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the Iraq war? Or the convergence of technology and events that allowed India, China, and so many other countries to become part of the global supply chain for services and manufacturing, creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations?
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If you like cliches...
- By Jonathan Shultz on 09-08-07
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The Filter Bubble
- What the Internet Is Hiding from You
- By: Eli Pariser
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.
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Now in the top 3 best books I've ever read
- By Brian Esserlieu on 05-26-11
By: Eli Pariser
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Program or Be Programmed
- Ten Commands for a Digital Age
- By: Douglas Rushkoff
- Narrated by: Douglas Rushkoff
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In 10 chapters, composed of 10 "commands", Rushkoff provides cyber enthusiasts and technophobes alike with the guidelines to navigate the digital new universe. In this spirited, accessible poetics of new media, Rushkoff picks up where Marshall McLuhan left off, helping listeners to recognize programming as the new literacy of the digital age - and as a template through which to see beyond social conventions and power structures that have vexed us for centuries.
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Good book, but with some crazy ranting
- By Bjarne on 02-05-15
By: Douglas Rushkoff
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Becoming Facebook
- The 10 Challenges That Defined the Company That's Disrupting the World
- By: Mike Hoefflinger
- Narrated by: Nicholas Techosky
- Length: 7 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Facebook's founding is legend: In a Harvard dorm, wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg invented a new way to connect with friends...and the rest is history. But for the people who actually molded this great idea into a game-changing $300 billion company, the experience was far more tumultuous and uncertain than we might expect. Mike Hoefflinger was one of those Facebook insiders.
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mainly a tribute to the success of FB
- By Anonymous User on 10-07-18
By: Mike Hoefflinger
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The End of Power
- From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be
- By: Moises Naim
- Narrated by: Matt Kugler
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
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In The End of Power, award-winning columnist and former Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím illuminates the struggle between once-dominant megaplayers and the new micropowers challenging them in every field of human endeavor. Drawing on provocative, original research and a lifetime of experience in global affairs, Naím explains how the end of power is reconfiguring our world.
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Another Power book
- By Anonymous User on 04-12-24
By: Moises Naim
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The Starfish and the Spider
- The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
- By: Ori Brafman, Rod Beckstrom
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: "spiders", which have a rigid hierarchy, and "starfish", which rely on the power of peer relationships.
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Centralized and decentralized models
- By Chan Meng on 12-07-07
By: Ori Brafman, and others
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Service Games
- The Rise and Fall of SEGA: Enhanced Edition
- By: Sam Pettus
- Narrated by: Tom Racine
- Length: 17 hrs and 13 mins
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New Edition! More content, images, and corrected text and facts. Monochrome edition. Starting with its humble beginnings in the 1950s and ending with its swan-song, the Dreamcast, in the early 2000s, this is the complete history of Sega as a console maker. Before home computers and video game consoles, before the Internet and social networking, and before motion controls and smartphones, there was Sega.
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The Story of the Fall of Sega
- By Austin on 01-05-15
By: Sam Pettus
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Trekonomics
- The Economics of Star Trek
- By: Manu Saadia
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman
- Length: 8 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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What would the world look like if everybody had everything they wanted or needed? Trekonomics, the premier book in financial journalist Felix Salmon's imprint PiperText, approaches scarcity economics by coming at it backward - through thinking about a universe where scarcity does not exist. Delving deep into the details and intricacies of 24th-century society, Trekonomics explores post-scarcity and whether we, as humans, are equipped for it.
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An Amusing & Practical Analysis of Fictional Ideas
- By Lost In The Wash on 09-19-16
By: Manu Saadia
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The Square and the Tower
- Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook
- By: Niall Ferguson
- Narrated by: Elliot Hill
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Most history is hierarchical: it's about emperors, presidents, prime ministers, and field marshals. It's about states, armies, and corporations. It's about orders from on high. Even history "from below" is often about trade unions and workers' parties. But what if that's simply because hierarchical institutions create the archives that historians rely on? What if we are missing the informal, less well documented social networks that are the true sources of power and drivers of change?
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Not his best by a long chalk: Read Steven Pinker.
- By David on 02-05-18
By: Niall Ferguson
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Electronic Dreams
- How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer
- By: Tom Lean
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 10 hrs
- Unabridged
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In Electronic Dreams, Tom Lean tells the story of how computers invaded British homes for the first time, as people set aside their worries of electronic brains and Big Brother and embraced the wonder technology of the 1980s. This book charts the history of the rise and fall of the home computer, the family of futuristic and quirky machines that took computing from the realm of science and science fiction to being a user-friendly domestic technology.
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Awesome outline of electronic history
- By Johnny on 09-28-17
By: Tom Lean
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The Network
- The Battle for the Airwaves and the Birth of the Communications Age
- By: Scott Woolley
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the origin story of the airwaves - the foundational technology of the communications age - as told through the 40-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend, Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio.
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The Classic Struggle
- By Jean on 06-01-16
By: Scott Woolley
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In The Outsiders, you'll learn the traits and methods striking for their consistency and relentless rationality that helped these unique leaders achieve such exceptional performance. Humble, unassuming, and often frugal, these "outsiders" shunned Wall Street and the press, and shied away from the hottest new management trends. Instead, they shared specific traits that put them and the companies they led on winning trajectories: a laser-sharp focus on per share value as opposed to earnings or sales growth; an exceptional talent for allocating capital and human resources; and the belief that cash flow, not reported earnings, determines a company's long-term value.
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Virtually all human societies were once organized tribally, yet over time most developed new political institutions which included a central state that could keep the peace and uniform laws that applied to all citizens. Some went on to create governments that were accountable to their constituents. We take these institutions for granted, but they are absent or are unable to perform in many of today’s developing countries—with often disastrous consequences for the rest of the world.
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Few forests, but lots of trees
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What listeners say about The Master Switch
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Joshua Kim
- 06-10-12
'The Master Switch' is the Best Book of 2010
Ours is a vision of a transformed educational economy, one made possible by the invention of the web and the personal computer. To what extent, however, is the realization of a new educational order dependent on the companies that control the networks and the hardware of the Internet age? If the future of education will be increasingly be produced and delivered via the computer and the web, how likely is it that the values of the market will override the values of academy?
In The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu does not examine the place of higher ed in the information economy. But I think that it is essential that our community pay attention to the lessons that he draws. In The Master Switch, Wu traces the history of the major information technology revolutions, and demonstrates how they all started with the promise of democratization and transformation and ended up with a realities of monopoly, limited choice, and restricted opportunities for expression.
The major industry that runs through the narrative is that of the telephone, specifically the evolution, monopoly power, break-up, and re-emergence of AT&T. The telephone monopoly brought universal service, but it also strangled and stalled one innovation after another - from faxes to answering machines to the web itself. In the name of quality of service, AT&T was able to secure a government approved monopoly, that from 1934 to 1984 delivered a phone in every home, high prices, and an almost complete lack of innovative technology. Today, the telecom monopoly has turned into a duopoly, with a reconstituted AT$T in the South and West and a re-branded Bell (Verizon) in the Northeast.
It is AT&T, Verizon and the cable providers (Comcast being the largest) that control most of the Internet connections to the home that so much of our future educational content will be delivered. Today, these Internet providers treat educational content (indeed all content) the same way that commercial content is treated. The principle of net neutrality, coined by Tim Wu, insures that all bits are treated equally. But what if the ISPs are able to give preference to one provider of content over another? What if Disney and Comcast had merged? Or the entertainment industry (TV and film) succeed in making deals with the Internet companies to give preferential treatment (and bandwidth) to consumers willing to pay for their content? Where will this leave education and the open education movement?
The genius of The Master Switch is that it shows that information industries have followed a predictable pattern. Wu looks industries as diverse as telephone, radio, television, and film - tracing how the consolidation of each of these sectors led to less freedom of expression and less innovation. The AM radio networks were able to hold-off the new (and vastly improved) FM radio technologies for years and years. TV networks (NBC, CBS and ABC) fought (through political contributions and their lawyers) the emergence of cable TV, slowing down the roll-out of diverse channels for decades. A film industry dominated by a few studios was able to stifle creativity and controversy in movies from the 1930 to the 1960s. Nor is it clear that today's consolidation of media ownership under the conglomerate model, one in which companies like GE, Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, and Viacom own properties spanning the media landscape (from film to TV to publishing to Internet), is conducive to the creation of films that rise above the level of disposable commodities.
The Master Switch is a warning that if we allow ownership to consolidate in the Internet space in the name of 'quality of service' or 'the logic of the market' that we are in danger of repeating the path tread by other information technologies. Government must play a role in insuring we have a diversity of carriers, a policy of neutrality towards content, and a separation between content creators and content carriers. Our ability to disrupt the educational status quo, in terms of both improved quality and access, will depend on us not allowing the Internet industry to follow the same path towards consolidation and control that befell the information industries that have gone before.
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires is the best book of 2010.
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- R.B.
- 04-08-15
Historical, informative
Who was your favorite character and why?
The story about AT&T and it's sometimes pretty evil power grab over the course of its history is pretty shocking. We are seeing other companies do similar things so this book should come as a warning....
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
How IT Giants Have And Will Rule Your Life
Any additional comments?
Part f the reason we study history is so that we can learn from mistakes. After listening to this book you will find some very current parallels with companies of our age...and many of them are on a path that may not be healthy for modern society.
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awesome all around
this book chronicles the rise of telephones, movies, cable tv and the internet. In the later parts, it gets into the wars between microsoft and apple and google and everyone else. It's quite amazing to see the screen ripped off your computer and know what is really going on with the powerstruggle for net dominance. This book seriously has me at least questioning if I will purchase an Iphone. The decision is not as simple as it would have been before I read this. And... well... the book is pretty well narrated, too!
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- Steve O
- 02-13-18
Wonderful content and very entertainingly read
this book gives a detailed look at the history of media (radio, phones, tv) and makes a well thought out case for a cycle of openness and then closures if all technology. well worth the price
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- JONATHAN
- 05-27-13
Important Topic, Interesting Approach, Bad Reading
What made the experience of listening to The Master Switch the most enjoyable?
Lots of twentieth-century technological/corporate history, convincingly presented as relevant to modern policy.
Would you be willing to try another one of Marc Vietor’s performances?
No. The reading is full of false gravity, which he breaks out of only to half-attempt voices for the quotations, including such watery gems as fake german, fake french, old-timey, fancy old-timey, and presidential. It's ridiculous and distracting. Even worse, he shows no understanding of the text, emphasizing inconsequential words and reading asides with the same ponderousness as the main text.
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- J. Grimes
- 02-14-15
Tough at times
There's a lot of interesting stories and anecdotes, but sometimes the author gets a little preachy and long-winded and I found myself just wishing he would get on with it.
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- PoeticLicensedk
- 12-21-22
Timely in light of #MastodonMigration
#DingDong decided to ruin the party on the #DirtyBird site with a $44 billion offer to purchase it. Considering his partners, the Saudis, the UAE, and Larry Ellison, it seemed pretty obvious before the deal closed that an anti-democratic cabal was making a bold move to control the public square, legally. So I endeavored to resist.
That #DingDong was willing to light his $22 bil stake and his investor's money on fire, and put his core business at risk, made it abundantly clear that the move wasn't about profits but about controlling the political narrative with respect to the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in America. This is the context in which I discovered Tim Wu's legal history of the media industry, with its "Manichean" dichotomy of centralized and decentralized control.
Tim Wu broadened my perspective by revisiting the evolution of America's media / communications industry. I was unaware that key players sought control of a Master Switch, which could be used to decide who has access to mass communications.
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- Horace
- 04-11-11
The Impending Closure of the Internet
This book makes an historical argument that the natural evolution for information industries is a succession of generations, where each generation starts with an open disruptive innovation that at some point transitions to a closed monopoly (or duopoly). The book then expands on this model, by showing a few common, but less natural (i.e., forced) variations on this pattern. The first variation is where the established monopoly destroys the new industry in it infancy (usually involving some criminal thuggery and a good deal of predatory pricing and/or price fixing), thus co-opting the disruption. A less common variation is where the government steps in to breakup or limit the anti-social behaivor of a monopoly.
The book then argues that the Internet is historically unique among information industries, because it has created horizontal monopolies (like Google) instead of the traditional vertical monopolies (like ATT or NBC at their peeks). The result is a much more openness for the same level of industry maturity, which is mostly good for society. The author seems deeply ambivalent about rather this is a stable situation. It presents a rather strong set of arguments for the idea that sometime in the next 10 year (approximately) the Internet will probably transformed from the ???Wild West??? into a closed monopoly much more like TV in the ???70s. But in the end the author is unsure that the Internet is not somehow fundamentally different, so he argues that, while this possibility should be taken far more seriously than most do, the actually outcome is approximately unknowable.
Nevertheless, he embraces the idea that society should want the internet to remain open and should be willing to make changes to ensure that this happens.
Thinking about the internet in the context of the long history of abusive monopolistic practices in U.S. information industries is a surprisingly useful. This is one of the better books I???ve read this year.
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- Zooomer
- 11-20-10
Interesting and informative
Wu's book ties together the stories of the evolution of various information technologies into mass media conglomerates and empires in America over the past 150 years. Just as interesting as the parallel paths of consolidation into monopolies is the impact of the various larger-than-life moguls who built these empires. From Theodore Vail and Adolf Zucker to Steve Jobs these men recognized the opportunities of their lifetimes and seized them by the throat. It is instructive to consider this recurring history when anticipating the likely future of the internet. Will the Googles dominate or will it be a new era of Net neutrality? It may be too early to say, but this book makes you aware of the likely scenario that history implies. A good read.
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- Ilinca
- 12-10-10
Great listen, less than great narration
While the content is interesting, I have a problem with the narrator, who is excessively dramatic and does weird accents when he reads quotes - why?? Th reading is also a bit too slow, which tends to be distracting... Other than than, the book itself is worth reading.
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