Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

From a former music and film producer, a history of the hijacking of the Internet’s original mission by major companies set to steal the profits from artists in the digital age

We all know who the victors of the digital revolution are: multi-billion dollar companies founded and run by shiny young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. What we may have chosen to ignore is how brilliantly, strategically, intentionally the makers of this revolution laid out their plan to remake the world in their own image, a plan for economic, social and political hegemony. But this revolution began with a simple premise: to conquer the world, they would steal the value of art (as well as the value of everything else of importance to human beings) from its creators.

Former producer for Bob Dylan and The Band, George Harrison and Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Taplin has seen this paradigm shift firsthand. Sleeping Through A Revolution tells the story of how a small group of radical libertarians began in the 1990s to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet to create a set of monopoly firms (Google, Amazon, Facebook) that has converted the dream that digital democracy once represented for artists into a nightmare.We are living in the future the hegemonists and monopolists dreamed of. In this work of ＂dramatic reading＂ (Bono), Taplin calls for us to wake up and fight for a different one.

This is the story of the internet. Of the digital revolution. And it is also the story of our complicity in permitting it. ＂An indispensable signpost in the maze of life in the 21^st century＂ (T-Bone Burnett), Sleeping Through A Revoluton is a call to arms to wake up, to say that is enough is enough, to call out the perpetrators of almost inconceivable largescale cultural theft, and to demand that we do everything in our power to create a different future.