Narrator: In December 2015, a 33-year-old man named Joshua Burwell was walking along the scenic Sunset Cliffs in San Diego. Witnesses saw him looking down at an electronic device in his hands, completely engrossed. Not watching where he was going, he walked straight off the edge, falling sixty feet to his death. While a personal tragedy, this incident serves as a stark metaphor for a much larger problem. Are we, as a society, so captivated by the screens in our hands that we are failing to see the cliffs we are heading towards?

In his book Move Fast and Break Things, author Jonathan Taplin argues that this is precisely what is happening. He contends that the digital world we inhabit was not built by accident. It is the product of a specific, radical libertarian ideology that has allowed a handful of tech giants—namely Google, Facebook, and Amazon—to build unchecked monopolies. In the process, they have not only cornered culture and devalued the work of artists, but have also begun to systematically undermine the very foundations of our economy and democracy.

Narrator: The internet’s early days were filled with a utopian, countercultural spirit. Pioneers like Doug Engelbart, who gave the "Mother of All Demos" in 1968, envisioned computers as tools to augment human intellect and foster collaboration. Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, saw technology as a means for individual empowerment, creating an early online community called the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, or WELL. The guiding principle was decentralization and the empowerment of the individual.

However, Taplin argues this dream was hijacked. A new, more radical ideology took root in Silicon Valley, heavily influenced by the writings of Ayn Rand and championed by figures like Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and early investor in Facebook. This philosophy celebrated radical individualism and saw government regulation as an enemy of progress. Thiel famously stated that he "no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible" and taught his followers that the goal of a great business is not to compete, but to build a monopoly. This new ethos, which prioritized profit and power above all else, set the stage for a few dominant players to rewrite the rules of the internet for their own benefit.

Narrator: To understand the real-world cost of this new digital order, Taplin tells the story of Levon Helm, the legendary drummer and singer for The Band. In the 1960s and 70s, the music business, while imperfect, allowed artists like Helm to make a decent living from their recordings. But in the digital age, that system collapsed. Despite his iconic status, Helm found himself struggling financially in his later years, battling throat cancer while needing to constantly tour to pay his medical bills. His recorded music, consumed by millions on platforms like YouTube, generated almost no income for him.

Helm’s story is a microcosm of the widespread economic destruction wrought upon creative industries. The "move fast and break things" ethos was perfectly embodied by Sean Parker’s Napster, which normalized the idea that music should be free. This was followed by platforms like YouTube, which built their empires on user-uploaded, often copyrighted, content. While these platforms generated billions in advertising revenue, only a pittance trickled down to the actual creators. The result is a winner-takes-all economy where a few superstars thrive, but the vast majority of artists, musicians, and journalists can no longer make a sustainable living from their work.

Narrator: The rise of these digital monopolies was not inevitable; it was enabled by a fundamental shift in American law. For decades, antitrust law was used to break up companies that grew too powerful, based on the fear that concentrated economic power would lead to concentrated political power. But in the 1970s, a legal scholar named Robert Bork successfully argued for a new standard. He claimed that the only thing that mattered was "consumer welfare," which was narrowly defined as lower prices. As long as a company wasn't raising prices for consumers, its monopolistic practices were acceptable.

Taplin explains that this "Bork rule" became the perfect cover for companies like Google and Amazon. Since many of Google's services are "free" and Amazon relentlessly drives down prices, they have been allowed to acquire hundreds of competitors and achieve near-total market dominance without facing serious antitrust challenges. Furthermore, these companies protect their position through "regulatory capture." For example, Google spends millions on lobbying and has a revolving door of employees moving between the company and powerful positions in Washington. When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff recommended suing Google for anticompetitive behavior in 2013, the commissioners overruled their own experts and dropped the case, a decision many believe was influenced by Google's immense political pressure.

Narrator: If you are not paying for the product, you are the product. This saying is the key to understanding the business model of Facebook and Google. These companies are not primarily technology companies; they are surveillance marketing businesses. They offer free services in exchange for the right to monitor every click, search, "like," and location, amassing the most comprehensive dossiers of personal data in history. This data is then sold to advertisers who can target users with unprecedented precision.

This model has profound social and political consequences. Taplin details how Facebook conducted a massive emotional manipulation experiment on nearly 700,000 users in 2012 without their knowledge, altering their news feeds to see if it could make them happier or sadder. It could. This power to manipulate emotion and control the flow of information has had a corrosive effect on democracy. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, fake news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than real news from major outlets, as the platform’s algorithms are designed to prioritize engagement over truth. Facebook has become, in effect, the most powerful and least accountable editor the world has ever known.

Narrator: While many in Silicon Valley project a progressive image, Taplin draws a direct line between their libertarian ideology and the political agenda of right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers. Both groups share a common goal: a world with minimal taxes, minimal regulation, and minimal government interference. The Kochs have spent decades and hundreds of millions of dollars building a political machine to achieve this vision, funding think tanks and organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

For a time, both Google and Facebook were members of ALEC, working alongside companies like ExxonMobil to push for legislation that would benefit their bottom lines, often at the public's expense. While they eventually left under public pressure, their initial membership revealed their core priorities. The anti-regulation, anti-tax environment the Kochs helped create is the very environment that allowed tech monopolies to flourish. They are two sides of the same coin, both contributing to a system that concentrates wealth and power at the top and widens the gap of economic inequality.

Narrator: Despite this bleak picture, Taplin argues that a different future is possible. He ends not with despair, but with a call for a "Digital Renaissance," a movement to reclaim the internet's original, democratic promise. He points to concrete examples of resistance that show a path forward.

One powerful story is that of Chattanooga, Tennessee. When the city's municipally-owned Electric Power Board (EPB) decided to offer ultra-high-speed fiber internet to its citizens, the incumbent monopoly, Comcast, did everything in its power to stop them. But EPB persisted, and today Chattanooga has one of the fastest and most affordable internet services in the country, sparking an economic revival. Taplin also advocates for creative cooperatives, modeled after the Sunkist Growers co-op, where artists could band together to collectively bargain with platforms like YouTube and Spotify. These solutions, combined with stronger antitrust enforcement and copyright reform, could help decentralize the internet and build a more sustainable and equitable culture.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Move Fast and Break Things is that the internet we have today is not the result of technological inevitability. It is the result of deliberate choices, driven by a radical ideology that has concentrated immense power in the hands of a few unaccountable monopolies. This concentration of power has come at a tremendous cost, breaking our creative industries, our political discourse, and our shared sense of reality.

The book challenges us to stop being passive consumers of a system designed to exploit our data and attention. It asks a fundamental question: Will we continue to stare at our screens while our society walks off a cliff, or will we look up and demand a digital world that serves human values, not just monopoly profits? The choice, Taplin insists, is still ours to make.