CHAPTER ONE: THE VALLEY IS WHOLE, THE WORLD IS ONE
as an “Indian freak”: Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968), 2, 11.
child of an advertising executive: For biographical details about Brand, I leaned heavily on three excellent books: Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago Press, 2006); John Markoff, What the Dormouse Said (Viking Penguin, 2005); Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (Simon & Schuster, 2014).
“cosmic consciousness”: Turner, 59.
“tend to be extra-planetary”: Sherry L. Smith, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power (Oxford University Press, 2012), 52.
“a peyote meeting without peyote”: Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury (Random House, 1984), 19.
messing around with acid: Markoff, 61.
he represented the “restrained, reflective wing”: Wolfe, 12.
“scorned computers as the embodiment of centralized control”: Isaacson, 268.
“operation of the machine becomes so odious”: Turner, 11.
“Please do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate me”: Turner, 2.
“Defense Calculator”: Paul E. Ceruzzi, A History of Modern Computing (MIT Press, 2003), 34–35.
“were not at odds with the Soviet political system”: Ceruzzi, 12.
“Oh Wow! confabulation”: Theodore Roszak, From Satori to Silicon Valley (Don’t Call It Frisco Press, 1986), 16–17.
commune population swelled to 750,000: Judson Jerome, Families of Eden (Seabury Press, 1974), 18.
“a way to be of use to communes”: “From Counterculture to Cyberculture: The Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog,” Stanford University symposium, November 9, 2006.
“one of the bibles of my generation”: Steve Jobs, Stanford University commencement address, June 12, 2005.
“We are as gods”: Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968.
“We can’t put it together. It is together”: The Last Whole Earth Catalog, June 1971.
“[The catalog] helped create the conditions”: Turner, 73.
“he was the guy who was giving us the early warning system”: Katherine Fulton, “How Stewart Brand Learns,” Los Angeles Times, October 30, 1994.
“Those magnificent men with their flying machines”: Stewart Brand, “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” Rolling Stone, December 7, 1972.
“When computers become available to everybody”: Brand, “Spacewar.”
injected an important new phrase into the lexicon: Stewart Brand, II Cybernetic Frontiers (Random House, 1974).
“Ever since there were two organisms”: Turner, 121.
“Today, after more than a century”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, 1964), 3.
“desert of classified data”: Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds., Essential McLuhan (Basic Books, 1995), 92.
“Today computers hold out the promise”: McLuhan, 80.
“Life will be happier for the on-line individual”: Isaacson, 261.
“Hope in life comes from the interconnections”: Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (HarperCollins, 1999), 209.
“Money is not the greatest of motivators”: Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun (HarperCollins, 2001), 227.
“Competition means strife”: Tim Wu, The Master Switch (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 8.
“America’s most famous financier”: Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 54.
“We preach competition”: Peter Thiel, Zero to One (Crown Business, 2014), 35.
“transcend the daily brute struggle”: Thiel, 32.
“The big technology markets actually tend to be winner take all”: Alexia Tsotsis, “Marc Andreessen On The Future Of Enterprise,” TechCrunch, January 27, 2013.
CHAPTER TWO: THE GOOGLE THEORY OF HISTORY
at times, he struggled to breathe: Larry Page, University of Michigan commencement address, May 2, 2009. My description of Carl Page relies heavily on my conversations with several of his colleagues from Michigan State, such as Hsu Wen Jing. The Page family requested that his closest friends decline interviews with reporters, so they spoke with me on the condition of anonymity.
his dad brought home an Exidy Sorcerer: Verne Kopytoff, “Larry Page’s Connections,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 31, 2000.
“I think I was the first kid in my elementary school”: Larry Page interview, Academy of Achievement, October 28, 2000.
convert Legos into an ink-jet printer: David A. Vise and Mark Malseed, The Google Story (Delacorte, 2005), 24.
build a computing outpost on a periphery of the digital world: Vise and Malseed, 22.
Grateful Dead concerts: Vise and Malseed, 22.
“In each case a central concept restructures understanding”: Sherry Turkle, The Second Self (Simon & Schuster, 1984), 247.
his father had instructed him with religious intensity: Ken Auletta, Googled (Penguin Press, 2009), 28, 32.
Carl broke from his jovial form: Larry Page, Google I/O 2013 Keynote, May 15, 2013.
“it’s AI complete”: Larry Page, “Envisioning the Future for Google: Always a Search Engine?” (lecture, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, May 1, 2002.)
“directly attached to your brain”: Steven Levy, “All Eyes on Google,” Newsweek, April 11, 2004.
“a little version of Google”: Vise and Malseed, 281.
Horrified by his discovery, the captain dragged Descartes’s creation: Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes (Oxford University Press, 1995), 1.
“an extended, non-thinking thing”: Steven Nadler, The Philosopher, the Priest, and the Painter (Princeton University Press, 2013), 106.
“prison of the body”: David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 144.
“I am a thinking thing”: Nadler, 107.
“I shall now close my eyes”: Noble, 145.
“He believed that his philosophical method”: Noble, 147.
“The seclusion of a medieval monastery”: Isaacson, 41.
“the gift for solitary thinking”: Stuart Hampshire, “Undecidables,” London Review of Books, February 16, 1984.
“One day ladies will take their computers for walks”: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing (Vintage, 2012), 418.
“We may hope that machines will eventually compete”: B. Jack Copeland, ed., The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press, 2004), 463.
His parents, Viennese Jews, fled on the eve of the Anschluss: Ray Kurzweil, Ask Ray blog, “My Trip to Brussels, Zurich, Warsaw, and Vienna,” December 14, 2010.
he made an appearance on Steve Allen’s game show, I’ve Got a Secret: Ray Kurzweil, “I’ve Got a Secret,” 1965, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4.
“to invent things so that the blind could see”: Steve Rabinowitz quoted in Transcendent Man, directed by Barry Ptolemy, 2011.
“profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it”: Transcendent Man.
“strong AI and nanotechnology can create any product”: Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (Viking Penguin, 2005), 299.
“Each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly”: Kurzweil, Singularity, 40.
“version 1.0 biological bodies”: Kurzweil, Singularity, 9.
“We will be software, not hardware”: Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines (Viking Penguin, 1999), 129.
“What, after all, is the difference between a human”: Kurzweil, Spiritual Machines, 148.
“Virtual sex will provide sensations that are more intense”: Kurzweil, Spiritual Machines, 147.
“Anybody who is going to be resisting”: Peter Diamandis, quoted in Transcendent Man.
“Our civilization will then expand outward”: Kurzweil, Singularity, 389.
“Apocalyptic AI is the legitimate heir”: Robert M. Geraci, “Apocalyptic AI: Religion and the Promise of Artificial Intelligence,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 1 (March 2008): 158–59.
once said that he wanted to live to 102 so that he could laugh: Wendy M. Grossman, “Artificial Intelligence Is Still the Future,” The Inquirer, April 7, 2008.
“the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence”: Kurzweil, Singularity, back cover.
“represents a community of many of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest”: John Markoff, Machines of Loving Grace (HarperCollins, 2015), 85.
Google invests vast sums: Alphabet Inc., Research & Development Expenses, 2015, Google Finance.
“Google is not a conventional company”: Larry Page and Sergey Brin, “Letter from the Founders: ‘An Owner’s Manual’ for Google’s Shareholders,” August 2004.
The aphorism became widely known only: Josh McHugh, “Google vs. Evil,” Wired, January 2003.
“We’re at maybe 1%”: Greg Kumparak, “Larry Page Wants Earth to Have a Mad Scientist Island,” TechCrunch, May 15, 2003.
“This is the culmination of literally 50 years”: Robert D. Hof, “Deep Learning,” Technology Review, www.technologyreview.com/s/513696/deep-learning.
“The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line”: Sara Jerome, “Schmidt: Google gets ‘right up to the creepy line’,” The Hill, October 1, 2010.
Singularity University: David Rowan, “On the Exponential Curve: Inside Singularity University,” Wired, May 2013.
Google has donated millions so that students can attend SU: “Google Pledges $3 Million to Singularity University to Make Graduate Studies Program Free of Charge,” Singularity Hub, January 28, 2015.
“If I were a student, this is where I would like to be”: Exponential Advisory Board brochure, Singularity University.
“One of the things I thought was amazing”: “Time Talks to CEO Larry Page About Its New Venture to Extend Human Life,” Time, September 18, 2013.
“There was a cloak-and-dagger element to the procedure”: Steven Levy, In the Plex (Simon & Schuster, 2011), 354.
“If you don’t have a reason to talk about it, why talk about it?”: Levy, In the Plex, 355.
“Google’s leadership doesn’t care terribly much about precedent or law”: Levy, In the Plex, 353.
“We are not scanning all those books to be read by people”: George Dyson, Turing’s Cathedral (Pantheon, 2012), 312–13.
“Being negative is not how we make progress”: Page, Google Keynote, May 15, 2013.
“How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do”: Steven Levy, “Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter,” Wired, January 17, 2013.
how Google will someday employ more than one million people: Levy, Wired, January 17, 2013.
CHAPTER THREE: MARK ZUCKERBERG’S WAR ON FREE WILL
But they were really small-minded paper-pushers: Steven Levy, Hackers (O’Reilly Media, 2010), 29, 96.
a box that enabled free long-distance calls: Markoff, Dormouse, 272.
In high school—using the nom de hack Zuck Fader: Patrick Gillespie, “Was Mark Zuckerberg an AOL Add-on Developer?,” patorjk.com, April 9, 2013.
“One thing is certain,” he wrote on a blog: Ben Mezrich, The Accidental Billionaires (Anchor Books, 2009), 49.
“We’ve got this whole ethos that we want to build a hacker culture”: Levy, Hackers, 475.
“just this group of computer scientists who were trying to quickly prototype”: “Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on stumbles: ‘There’s always a next move,’” Today, February 4, 2014.
“Move Fast and Break Things”: “Mark Zuckerberg’s Letter to Investors: ‘The Hacker Way,’” Wired, February 1, 2012.
“It was always very important for our brand”: David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect (Simon & Schuster, 2010), 144.
“radical transparency” or “ultimate transparency”: Kirkpatrick, 209.
“The days of you having a different image for your work friends”: Kirkpatrick, 199.
“To get people to this point where there’s more openness”: Kirkpatrick, 200.
“In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government”: Kirkpatrick, 254.
“Software is eating the world”: Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011.
“You have to make words less human”: Laura M. Holson, “Putting a Bolder Face on Google,” New York Times, February 8, 2009.
“You know I’m an engineer”: Ben Thompson, “Why Twitter Must Be Saved,” Stratechery, November 8, 2016.
“When one compares . . . one’s own small talents with those of a Leibniz”: Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic (W. W. Norton, 2006), 12.
If ten can’t be divided by six, and six can’t be divided by ten: Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language (Blackwell, 1995), 274.
Sadly, whenever he tested the machine for an audience: Stewart, 141.
“Once this has been done, if ever further controversies should arise”: Eco, 281.
He explained how automation of white-collar jobs: James Gleick, The Information (Pantheon, 2011), 93.
The essence of the algorithm is entirely uncomplicated: John MacCormick, Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future (Princeton University Press, 2012), 3–4.
“We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses”: Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired, June 23, 2008.
Walmart’s algorithms found that people desperately buy strawberry Pop-Tarts: Constance L. Hays, “What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits,” New York Times, November 14, 2004.
Sweeney conducted a study that found that users with African American names: Latanya Sweeney, “Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery,” Communications of the ACM 56, no. 5 (May 2013): 44–54.
Every product you use: Charlie Rose Show, November 7, 2011.
a “personalized newspaper”: Alexandra Chang, “Liveblog: Facebook Reveals a ‘New Look for News Feed’,” Wired, March 7, 2013.
Many users—60 percent, according to the best research: Motahhare Eslami, Aimee Rickman, Kristen Vaccaro, Amirhossein Aleyasen, Andy Vuong, Karrie Karahalios, Kevin Hamilton, and Christian Sandvig, “I always assumed that I wasn’t really that close to [her]: Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds,” CHI’15 Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2015, 153–62.
“We have, perhaps for the first time ever, built machines we do not understand”: Jon Kleinberg and Sendhil Mullainathan, “We Built Them, But We Don’t Understand Them,” Edge, 2015.
“a microscope that not only lets us examine social behavior”: Tom Simonite, “What Facebook Knows,” Technology Review, June 13, 2012.
Facebook sought to discover whether emotions are contagious: Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (June 17, 2014): 8788–90.
“Anyone on that team could run a test”: Reed Albergotti, “Facebook Experiments Had Few Limits; Data Science Lab Conducted Tests on Users With Little Oversight,” Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2014.
“It is possible that more of the .60% growth in turnout between 2006 and 2010”: Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle, and James H. Fowler, “A 61-Million-Person Experiment in Social Influence and Political Mobilization,” Nature 489, no. 7415 (September 13, 2012): 295–98.
Facebook can predict users’ race, sexual orientation, relationship status, and drug use: Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, “Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 15 (April 9, 2013), 5802–5.
“a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships”: Michael Rundle, “Zuckerberg: telepathy is the future of Facebook,” Wired, July 1, 2015.
Some news wires use algorithms to write stories: Joanna Plucinska, “How an Algorithm Helped the LAT Scoop Monday’s Quake,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 18, 2014.
CHAPTER FOUR: JEFF BEZOS DISRUPTS KNOWLEDGE
“I’m grumpy when I’m forced to read a physical book”: “Jeff Bezos in Conversation with Steven Levy,” Wired Business Conference, June 15, 2009.
creating an “everything store”: Brad Stone, The Everything Store (Little, Brown and Company, 2013), 24.
Adam Smith, it’s fair to say, didn’t anticipate Jeff Bezos: My discussion of the economics of knowledge relies on David Warsh’s excellent Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (W.W. Norton, 2006).
called “rivalry”—if I own a shovel, you can’t own that shovel: Paul M. Romer, “Endogenous Technological Change,” Journal of Political Economy 98, no. 5 (October 1990): S71–102.
“We can’t stop copying on the Internet, because the Internet is a copying machine”: Cory Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free (McSweeney’s, 2014), 41.
“The defining feature of the Internet is that it leaves resources free”: Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas (Random House, 2001), 14.
“Value is derived from plentitude”: Kevin Kelly, New Rules for the New Economy (Viking Penguin, 1998), 40.
“atomic unit of consumption for news”: Astra Taylor, The People’s Platform (Metropolitan Books, 2014), 204.
Between 2006 and 2012, the world’s information output grew tenfold: Paul Mason, Postcapitalism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 125.
“What information consumes is rather obvious”: Herbert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World,” in Martin Greenberger, ed., Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 40.
“Searching and filtering are all that stand between this world and the Library of Babel”: Gleick, 410.
But he initially refused to build the iPod so that it would block unlicensed content: Chris Ruen, Freeloading (OR Books, 2012), 7.
“Google has as much interest in free online media as General Motors does in cheap gasoline”: Robert Levine, Free Ride (Doubleday, 2011), 9.
“pressure premium content providers to change their model”: Scott Cleland, “Grand Theft Auto-mated,” Forbes, November 30, 2011.
“Our goal is to give every person a voice”: Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook post, November 12, 2016.
CHAPTER FIVE: KEEPERS OF THE BIG GATE IN THE SKY
“Seven years of declining revenues will give you new ideas”: Staci D. Kramer, “Don Graham on the Sale of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, and the Pace of Newsroom Innovation,” NiemanLab, August 6, 2013.
White had struck up a correspondence with an editor: David Manning White, “The ‘Gate Keeper’: A Case Study in the Selection of News,” Journalism Quarterly 27 (December 1950): 383–90.
“So long as there is interposed between the ordinary citizen and the facts”: Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920), 7.
“The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large”: John B. Judis, The Paradox of American Democracy (Pantheon, 2000), 23.
“News was to be separate from editorial judgment”: Judis, Paradox, 22.
“Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer”: Katharine Graham, Personal History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 465.
“hated for the Post or its writers to look as though they were”: David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (Knopf, 1975), 188.
“Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation”: Jeff Bezos, Letter to Amazon shareholders, 2011.
“I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere”: Thomas L. Friedman, “Do You Want the Good News First?,” New York Times, May 19, 2012.
“The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower”: Bezos, Letter, 2011.
“Take a look at the Kindle bestseller list, and compare it”: Bezos, Letter to shareholders, 2011.
“Our touchstone will be readers”: Jeff Bezos, “Jeff Bezos on Post Purchase,” Washington Post, August 5, 2013.
Amazon, on the other hand, considers the profession to be filled with “antediluvian losers”: George Packer, “Cheap Words,” New Yorker, February 17, 2014.
“should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”: Stone, Everything, 243.
“No technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever”: Daniel Lyons, “Why Bezos Was Surprised by the Kindle’s Success,” Newsweek, December 20, 2009.
“By the early twenty-first century, literally 99.9 percent of contemporary daily papers”: Ben H. Bagdikian, The New Media Monopoly (Beacon Press, 2004), 121.
Back in the eighties, a convention of the most powerful media magnates: Bagdikian, 16.
For a media company to survive the inevitable stinkers, it will try to distribute: Wu, Master Switch, 219–21.
“It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of broadcasters”: Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism (Nation Books, 2010), 152.
When Random House bought Alfred A. Knopf in 1960: André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (Verso, 2000), 1.
When Time-Life, the blue whale of publishing, wanted to inhale Random House: Bennett Cerf, At Random (Random House, 1977), 285.
CHAPTER SIX: BIG TECH’S SMOKE-FILLED ROOM
“Victorian Internet”: Tom Standage, The Victorian Internet (Bloomsbury, 2014), 215.
The Western Union monopoly had many accomplices: Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media (Basic Books, 2004), 171–73.
Between 1866 and 1900, congressmen introduced seventy bills: Starr, 176.
More than 80 percent of the copy in western papers: Menahem Blondheim, News over the Wires (Harvard University Press, 1994), viii.
“not in any way encourage or support any opposition”: Blondheim, 151.
“onerous” and “grievous” monopoly: David Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 1832–1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 44.
“Unlike the British telegraph companies”: Starr, 177.
“third rate nonentity”: Wu, Master Switch, 22.
the organization came to be known as the “Hayesociated Press”: Starr, 187.
The Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain has spun the following hypothetical scenario: Jonathan Zittrain, “Facebook Could Decide an Election Without Anyone Ever Finding Out,” New Republic, June 1, 2014.
“On election night he was in our boiler room”: Joshua Green, “Google’s Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama’s Big Data Brains,” BloombergBusinessweek, May 31, 2013.
“Early on, [the Obama campaign] turned to Google Analytics”: “Obama for America uses Google Analytics to democratize rapid, data-driven decision making,” Google Analytics Case Study, 2013.
Marius Milner, an engineer at Google: Steve Lohr and David Streitfeld, “Data Engineer in Google Case Is Identified,” New York Times, April 30, 2012; David Streitfeld, “Google Is Faulted for Impeding U.S. Inquiry on Data Collection,” New York Times, April 14, 2012.
“On all measures, opinions shifted in the direction of the candidate who was favored”: Robert Epstein, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election,” Politico, August 19, 2015; Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson, “The Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) and Its Possible Impact on the Outcomes of Elections,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 33 (August 18, 2015): E4512–21.
In 1973, ads for a board game called Hūsker Dū?: Les Brown, “Subliminal Ad Pops Up in National TV Promotion,” New York Times, December 27, 1973.
CHAPTER SEVEN: THE VIRALITY VIRUS
Companies that manufacture tchotchkes sold on Amazon: Greg Bensinger, “Competing with Amazon on Amazon,” Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2012.
Jonah Peretti, the founder of BuzzFeed and the William Randolph Hearst of our era: Jonah Peretti, “Mormons, Mullets, and Maniacs,” New York Viral Media Meetup, August 12, 2010.
“The pull of dollars towards sensationalism”: Michael Schudson, The Sociology of News (W. W. Norton, 2011), 73.
“reign of terror” fed by a “hurricane of demagogy”: John Morton Blum, ed., Public Philosopher: Selected Letters of Walter Lippmann (Ticknor & Fields, 1985), 133–34.
“In an exact sense the present crisis of western democracy”: Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 5.
“We really wrote for one another. . . . We knew that no one would jump on our stories as quickly”: Robert Darnton, “Writing News and Telling Stories,” Daedalus 104, no. 2 (Spring 1975): 175–94.
Over the course of a decade, journalism shed $1.6 billion worth of reporter and editor salaries: Taylor, 87.
One survey ranked newspaper reporter as the worst job in America: “The Worst Jobs of 2015,” CareerCast.com.
“A lot of what we do at BuzzFeed is give dashboards to every person”: Andy Serwer, “Inside the Mind of Jonah Peretti,” Fortune, December 5, 2013.
“Nobody wants to eat the boring vegetables. Nor does anyone want to pay to encourage people to eat their vegetables”: James Fallows, “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media,” Atlantic, April 2011.
“The very first step, however, should be a deliberate push to abandon our current metaphors”: “Innovation,” New York Times, March 24, 2014.
“Everything looks the same, reads the same”: “Hello again,” Joshua Topolsky blog, July 11, 2015.
Andrew Sullivan made sport of pointing this out: Andrew Sullivan, “Guess Which Buzzfeed Piece Is An Ad,” The Dish blog, February 21, 2013.
CHAPTER EIGHT: DEATH OF THE AUTHOR
His lectures and speeches were gripping spectacles of intellect, punctuated by multimedia: Evan Osnos, “Embrace the Irony,” New Yorker, October 13, 2014.
One magazine profile described him as “a kind of Internet messiah”: Simon van Zuylen-Wood, “Larry Lessig, Off the Grid,” New Republic, February 5, 2014.
“Never before in the history of human culture had [creative culture] been as professionalized”: Lawrence Lessig, “Laws That Choke Creativity,” TED, March 2007.
“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal”: T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays 1917–1932 (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932), 182.
“If communism vs. capitalism was the struggle of the twentieth century”: Taylor, 23.
some of the organizations that Lessig created to advance his arguments received checks from Google: Robert Levine, Free Ride (Doubleday, 2011), 84.
“Amateurs are sometimes separated from professionals by skill”: Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus (Penguin, 2010), 82.
“No one can succeed by themselves. . . . The only way you can achieve something”: Thomas L. Friedman, “Collaborate vs. Collaborate,” New York Times, January 12, 2013.
“God alone creates”: Thomas Aquinas, Basic Writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, ed. Anton C. Pegis (Random House, 1945), 312.
Once a writer sold a manuscript, he surrendered control over it: Mark Rose, Authors and Owners (Harvard University Press, 1993), 18.
“I am ‘sort of’ haunted by the conviction”: Percy Lubbock, ed., The Letters of Henry James: Volume 1 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920), 424.
“Of genius the only proof is, the act of doing well what is worthy to be done”: William Wordsworth, The Poems of William Wordsworth (Methuen and Co., 1908), 516.
“Deny it to him, and you unfeelingly leave a weight upon his spirits”: Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, eds., The Construction of Authorship (Duke University Press, 1994), 5.
A reader in London would have spent about $2.50 for a copy of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs (New York University Press, 2001), 50.
By 1830, ten houses in Philadelphia alone were churning out copies of Sir Walter Scott: Vaidhyanathan, 45.
“[the] business lived to a large extent on what was morally, if not legally, thievery”: Robert Spoo, Without Copyrights (Oxford University Press, 2013), 42.
“I am the greatest loser by the existing Law”: Jenny Hartley, ed., The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens (Oxford University Press, 2012), 96.
“Because you print the stolen property aforesaid very vilely and uncleanly”: Rudyard Kipling, Kipling’s America: Travel Letters, 1889–1895, ed. D. H. Stewart (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), xx.
“Few men have ever [depended on their pen for income] happily”: Henry Holt, “The Commercialization of Literature,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1905.
“This country is being flooded with the best of English literature at prices which make a package of water closet paper”: Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, Bernard L. Stein, eds., Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals, Volume II, 1877–1883 (University of California Press, 1975), 414.
“theoretical socialist, and a practical aristocrat”: John William Crowley, The Dean of American Letters (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 11.
“It is a comfort to be right theoretically and to be ashamed of one’s self practically”: Crowley, 11.
“the golden goose was found for the author”: Holt, “Commercialization of Literature.”
“the one thing that always made you feel good”: Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa (Scribner, 2015), 50.
Fitzgerald, who described himself as a “professional” with a “protective hardness”: James L. W. West III, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald, My Lost City: Personal Essays, 1920–1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 189.
even noting the $0.34 he received in 1929 for the English royalties of The Great Gatsby: William J. Quirk, “Living on $500,000 a Year,” American Scholar, Autumn 2009.
“There were just too many of us wedged onto the single bench”: Alfred Kazin, Starting Out in the Thirties (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1962), 15.
It found that full-time writers made a median income of about $11,000 per year: Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin, Walter W. Powell, Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing (University of Chicago Press, 1985), 233.
Authors Guild’s 2009 findings, which uncovered a median income of $25,000: Authors Guild, “The Wages of Writing,” 2015 Member Survey, September 2015.
Turns out, a work like Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 4 is a stubborn thing: William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, Performing Arts (Twentieth Century Fund, 1966).
“Trade book publishing is by nature a cottage industry”: Jason Epstein, Book Business (W.W. Norton, 2001), 1.
“In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job”: “Chris Anderson on the Economics of ‘Free,’” Der Spiegel, July 28, 2009.
“Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others”: Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (Viking, 2010), 237.
“The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book”: Kevin Kelly, “Scan This Book!,” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 2006.
“In a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text”: Kelly, “Scan This Book!”
“By enabling people from diverse backgrounds to easily connect and share their ideas”: Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here (PublicAffairs, 2013), 292.
CHAPTER NINE: IN SEARCH OF THE ANGEL OF DATA
and the Internet began its own journey to the free market: Shane Greenstein, How the Internet Became Commercial (Princeton University Press, 2015). My narrative of the Internet’s privatization relies heavily on Greenstein’s history.
forbidding “extensive use for private or personal business”: Ceruzzi, 321.
“I want to create an oasis from regulation in the broadband world”: “Competition and Deregulation: Striking the Right Balance,” Remarks of William E. Kennard, United States Telecom Association Annual Convention, October 18, 1999.
“From somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel”: Wu, Master Switch, 6.
“The accumulated data can probably paint a better picture of how you spend your time”: Bruce Schneier, Data and Goliath (W. W. Norton, 2015), 2.
“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about”: Schneier, 22.
“Positive feedback makes the strong get stronger and the weak get weaker”: Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules (Harvard Business School Press, 1999), 175.
“a God-like view of the marketplace”: Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke, Virtual Competition (Harvard University Press, 2016), 71.
what he described as “the feeble judgment of the common herd”: Thurman W. Arnold, The Folklore of Capitalism (Beard Books, 2000), 66.
“Men like Senator Borah founded political careers on the continuance of such crusades”: Arnold, 217.
The Senate confirmed Arnold, although Borah allowed that Arnold should “revise that chapter on trusts”: Nomination of Thurman W. Arnold, Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, 75th Congress, 3rd session, March 11, 1938, 5.
“That debate is like arguing whether tall buildings are better than low ones”: Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent (Harvard University Press, 1996), 241.
When the Economist analyzed the question last year, it found that most sectors of the economy: “Too Much of a Good Thing,” Economist, March 26, 2016.
“markets are now more concentrated and less competitive than at any point since the Gilded Age”: K. Sabeel Rahman and Lina Khan, “Restoring Competition in the U.S. Economy,” Roosevelt Institute Report, June 2016.
“The final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties”: Jeffrey Rosen, Louis D. Brandeis (Yale University Press, 2016), 48.
“the protection from surveillance or interference when we are engaged in the processes of generating ideas”: Neil Richards, Intellectual Privacy (Oxford University Press, 2015), 95.
“The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people”: Rosen, 22.
“The American people have as little need of oligarchy”: Louis D. Brandeis and Norman Hapgood, Other People’s Money (F. A. Stokes, 1914), 142.
Traveling Amazon employees carried misleading business cards: Stone, 290–91.
When states began collecting, household spending at Amazon dropped by 10 percent: Robb Mandelbaum, “When Amazon Collects Sales Tax, Some Shoppers Head Elsewhere,” New York Times, April 28, 2014.
Stone described this dodging as “one of the company’s biggest tactical advantages”: Stone, 287.
“employing every trick in the book, and inventing many new ones”: Stone, 294.
Amazon hatched Project Goldcrest: Harry Davies and Simon Marks, “Revealed: How Project Goldcrest Helped Amazon Avoid Huge Sums in Tax,” Guardian, February 18, 2016; Simon Marks, “Amazon: How the World’s Largest Retailer Keeps Tax Collectors at Bay,” Newsweek, July 13, 2016.
Calculations by the IRS show that Project Goldcrest helped Amazon: Davies and Marks, “Revealed”; Gaspard Sebag and David Kocieniewski, “What Is Amazon’s Core Tech Worth? Depends on Which Taxman Asks,” BloombergTechnology, August 22, 2016.
By the end of 2015, it had “permanently reinvested” $58.3 billion of its profits: “Fortune 500 Companies Hold a Record $2.4 Trillion Offshore,” Citizens for Tax Justice, March 3, 2016.
Facebook bilked the treasury by taking a single deduction: “Facebook’s Multi-Billion Dollar Tax Break,” Citizens for Tax Justice, February 14, 2013.
Walmart, the supposed Beast of Bentonville, handed over about 30 percent of its income in taxes: David Leonhardt, “The Big Companies That Avoid Taxes,” New York Times, October 18, 2016.
Google executives set foot in the Obama White House more often than those of any other corporation: David Dayen, “The Android Administration,” Intercept, April 22, 2016.
By one count, Google poured more into its D.C. apparatus than any other public company: “Mission Creep-y,” Public Citizen report, November 2014.
“Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government”: Dayen, “Android Administration.”
Somehow Google managed to overcome the recommendation of staffers on the Federal Trade Commission: Brody Mullins, Rolfe Winkler, and Brent Kendall, “Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2015.
“Assuring the public has access to a multiplicity of information sources”: McChesney and Nichols, Death and Life, 151.
CHAPTER TEN: THE ORGANIC MIND
“fresh-frozen life in some prepackaged suburb”: Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change (Cornell University Press, 2007), 62.
“Not only do they provide bread aplenty, but the bread is as soft as floss”: Belasco, 49.
“White vs. brown was a central contrast. . . . Whiteness meant Wonder Bread, White Tower, Cool Whip”: Belasco, 48.
“Though seldom articulated as such, the attempt to redefine, or escape, the traditional role of consumer”: Michael Pollan, “The Food Movement, Rising,” New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010.
“To overcome falling ad prices you had to redouble audience growth”: Michael Wolff, Television Is the New Television (Portfolio/Penguin, 2015), 50.
“Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences”: John Herrman, “Mutually Assured Content,” The Awl, July 30, 2015.
In 2010, a site needed about ten million unique visitors per month to score a meaningful buy”: Wolff, 73.
“We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased”: Taylor, 184.
“The cost of reading, even if you buy books instead of borrowing them”: George Orwell, “Books v. Cigarettes,” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 94.
“It is not a proud record for a country which is nearly 100 per cent literate”: Orwell, 95–96.
He used subliminal images of vaginas: Alan Bilton, Silent Film Comedy and American Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 16.
“Propaganda,” he wrote chillingly, “makes it possible for minority ideas to become effective more quickly”: Public Relations, Edward Bernays and the American Scene (F. W. Faxon Company, 1951), 19.
“Where there are bookshelves, there will be books”: Larry Tye, The Father of Spin (Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 52.
“the allure of propriety and abundance, which could be realized”: Ted Striphas, The Late Age of Print (Columbia University Press, 2009), 29.
“We are profiting at the moment from the need for books in individual homes”: Striphas, 28.
“Colere had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship”: Raymond Williams, Keywords (Oxford University Press, 1976), 87.
“one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”: Williams, 87.
the very thing that obsessed Louis Brandeis, his fixation on “developing the faculties”: Rosen, 48.
“Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier”: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Harvard University Press, 1984), 6.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE PAPER REBELLION
“good things don’t have to be static, unchanging”: Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable (Viking, 2016), 81.
“It’s happening in 5 years”: MG Siegler, “Nicholas Negroponte: The Physical Book Is Dead In 5 Years,” TechCrunch, August 6, 2010.
In 2015, e-book revenue dropped by 11 percent: “U.S. Publishing Industry’s Annual Survey Reveals Nearly $28 Billion in Revenue in 2015,” Association of American Publishers, July 11, 2016.
As the historian Steven Roger Fischer puts it, “to read” was to read aloud: Steven Roger Fischer, A History of Reading (Reaktion Books, 2003), 27.
“Active silent reading now prevailed, which demanded engagement”: Fischer, 202–3.
“Our very mastery seems to escape our mastery”: Michel Serres, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (University of Michigan Press, 1995), 171–72.