Home > Work > The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
1 " Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash. "
― Tim Wu , The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
2 " When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? "
3 " 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. "
4 " 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. "
5 " The economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? "
6 " Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is. "
7 " Unlike almost every other commodity, information becomes more valuable the more it is used. Consider "
8 " It’s the same old story,” he would say, years later; “the inventor gets the experience, and the capitalist gets the invention. "
9 " like late Rome, the Bell system now existed as an eastern and a western empire—Verizon and AT&T (whose "
10 " we see that the enlightened monopolist can occasionally prove a delusional paranoid. "
11 " The story of Daniel Lord and the Legion of Decency goes to a central contention of this book: in the United States, it is industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech. "
12 " Without exception, the brave new technologies of the twentieth century—free use of which was originally encouraged, for the sake of further invention and individual expression—eventually evolved into privately controlled industrial behemoths, the “old media” giants of the twenty-first, through which the flow and nature of content would be strictly controlled for reasons of commerce. "
13 " As a character in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, set in 1876, remarks, “Every age thinks it’s the modern age, but this one really is. "
14 " the mogul makes the medium: the imprint of the personality inevitably informs it, often no less than the technology underlying it. Turner "
15 " The owner of an iPod or iPad is in a fundamentally different position: his machine may have far more computational power than a PC of a decade ago, but it is designed for consumption, not creation. Or, "
16 " while television is supposed to be free, it has in fact become the creature, the servant, and indeed the prostitute, of merchandising. "
17 " if everything is entrusted to a single mind, its inevitable subjective distortions will distort, if not altogether disable, the innovation process. "
18 " All these disconnected communities and houses will be united through radio as they were never united by the telegraph and the telephone. The President of the United States delivers important messages in every home, not in cold, impersonal type, but in living speech; he is transformed from what is almost a political abstraction, a personification of the republic’s dignity and power, into a kindly father, talking to his children. "
19 " If we want to define how “open” any industry is, we should start with a number: the cost of entry. By this we simply mean the monetary cost of getting into the business with a reasonable shot at reaching customers. Is it in the neighborhood of $100? $10,000? Or more like $1 billion? Whatever the magnitude, that number, most definitively, is what determines whether an industry is open or closed. "
20 " Thus did AT&T in deadly earnest go about hushing the Hush-A-Phone. At the two-week trial (technically a hearing), the company showed up with dozens of attorneys, including a top litigator from New York City, and no few expert witnesses. Legal representatives of each of the twenty-one regional Bells came as well, necessitating that extra seats be installed in the hearing room—bleachers for AT&T’s lawyers. On Hush-A-Phone’s side were Harry Tuttle, his lawyer, the acoustics professor Leo Beranek, and one expert witness, a man named J.C.R. Licklider.7 "
