Loved The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu: a history of US “speech industries”—as Wu terms any information industry

It begins with Alexander Bell’s telephone and tracks its path to commercialization noting that:

time and time again, it is investors as much as inventors who decide what our future will look like, and what we call genius might better be described as smarts coupled with capital.

The phone of course leads us swiftly to AT&T – the book’s central character or perhaps more accurately villain – and its archetypal leader Theodore Vail:

We must try to understand Theodore Vail, for his basic character type recurs in other “Defining Moguls,” the men who drive the Cycle and populate this book. Schumpeter theorized that men like Vail were rare, a special breed, with unusual talents and ambitions. Their motivation was not money, but rather “the dream and the will to found a private kingdom”; “the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others”; and finally the “joy of creating.” Vail was that type. As his biographer put it, “he always had a taste for conquest … here was a new world to subjugate.”

Vail and AT&T appear again and again as themselves or reincarnated across all the media industries as does “the cycle” which takes us:

“from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.”

The cycle is the story of radio (RCA), Hollywood (Paramount / Warner), television (NBC) and the book’s open question is whether or not the inherently distributed Internet can be moulded to follow this tested arc.

Was the Internet truly different, a real revolution? We don’t yet know the answer. But here, at its origins, we can gain the first inklings of what might account for that sense. The evidence boils down to the idea that of its singularity, the computer and the Internet attempted to give individuals a degree of control, of decision-making power unprecedented in a communications system. These were systems whose priority was human augmentation rather than the system itself. The aim was therefore an effort to create a decentralized network, and one that would stay that way.

One of the joys of the book for me was the shedding of new light on how recent seemingly eternal American ideals of competition and deregulation really are:

We fancy having in the United States the most open of markets for innovation, in contrast to the more controlled economies of other nations. In truth, however, the record is decidedly uneven, even given to excesses that would shame a socialist, with the federal government, at the behest of an entrenched industry, putting itself in charge of the future. Fortunately for the Free World, while the Nazis may have beaten us to television, we nicked them out for the Bomb.

in the 1930s, the United States, once a nation of small businesses and farms, was dominated by monopolies and cartels in nearly every industry. As the economist Alfred Chandler famously described it, the American economy was now dominated by the “visible hand” of managerial capitalism.

Can’t be bothered reading the whole book? Try this Tim Wu WSJ op-ed, his Apple Vs Google framing at Slate or this Nick Bilton NYTimes Q&A.

My Kindle highlights are here. Tim Wu and Clay Shirky talk Wikileaks on NPR here.