The Master Switch

The Master Switch

The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Tim Wu

Winner's Lock

Winners eliminate competition; victory becomes permanent control.

The cornerstone of the studio system was the victory Zukor won over the large first-run theater in major cities and the ongoing block booking system. In America’s ninety-two largest cities, the studios owned more than 70 percent of them. And though these first-run movie palaces comprised less than 20 percent of all the country’s theaters, they accounted for most of the ticket revenue. As the writer Ernest Borneman put it in 1951, “control of first run theaters meant, in effect, control of the screen.”
Winning Coalition

Organizations minimize coalitions needed to maintain control.

Behind the very notion of separation is a theory of countervailing power. Separations are an effort to prevent any single element of society from gaining dominance over the whole, and by such dominance becoming tyrannical.
Multiple Discovery

Ripe ideas emerge independently across the world.

There was, it is fair to say, no single inventor of the telephone. And this reality suggests that what we call invention, while not easy, is simply what happens once a technology’s development reaches the point where the next step becomes available to many people. By Bell’s time, others had invented wires and the telegraph, had discovered electricity and the basic principles of acoustics.
Legibility Tax

Standardization enables scale but destroys local knowledge.

But what prevented monopoly and all centralized systems from realizing these efficiencies, in Hayek’s view, was a fundamental failure to appreciate human limitations. With perfect information, a central planner could effect the best of all possible arrangements, but no such planner could ever hope to have all the relevant facts of local, regional, and national conditions to arrive at an adequately informed, or right, decision.
Kronos Cycle

Open systems consolidate into monopoly, then repeat.

Schumpeter’s cycle of industrial life and death is an inspiration for this book. His thesis is that in the natural course of things, the new only rarely supplements the old; it usually destroys it. The old, however, doesn’t, as it were, simply give up but rather tries to forestall death or co-opt its usurper—à la Kronos—with important implications.