Move Fast and Break Things

Since 2001, newspaper, music, publishing, film, and television revenues have fallen dramatically, while profits at these industries’ three biggest access points—Facebook, Amazon, and Google—have skyrocketed. More creative content is being consumed than ever before, but less revenue is flowing to the creators and owners of the content.

Move Fast and Break Things, a new book by media and entertainment expert Jonathan Taplin, tells the story of how a small group of entrepreneurs began in the 1990s to seize the original decentralized vision of the Internet, creating a concentration of power that now determines the future of culture. But the stakes go far beyond any one artist or journalist: as a shrinking group of companies become the source of news and entertainment for more and more Americans, their status as cultural arbiters—and their impact on democracy—continues to grow.

Join New America NYC at CORE: club for the launch event of Move Fast and Break Things, featuring a conversation with Jonathan Taplin and Jeffrey Toobin on the twentieth-century World Wide Web, the internet economy, and the impact they're having on the promise of American life.

PARTICIPANTS

Jeffrey Toobin @JeffreyToobin
Staff writer, The New Yorker
Senior Legal Analyst, CNN
Author, American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

Copies of Jonathan Taplin's Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy will be available for purchase. 

Follow the conversation online using #MoveFastBreakThings and by following @NewAmericaNYC.