Robert Bork, a professor at Yale Law School, almost singlehandedly changed the way that antitrust law was applied in the US. His interpretation of antitrust law was heavily influenced by Chicago school libertarian thought, and gave primacy to consumer welfare, rather than competition. This change has directly led to the consolidation of many industries, as well as the rise of big tech firms, where consumer welfare is high (as alluded to in yesterday's post) even though competition may be minimal. The impotence of antitrust law has allowed the libertarian founders of big tech firms such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon, to monopolise culture and undermine democracy. That is essentially the message underlying Jonathan Taplin's 2017 book Move Fast and Break Things, which I just finished reading.
Taplin has led an interesting life, including stints as a tour manager for The Band, a film producer, and most recently as an academic. He brings his considerable experience of the entertainment scene to the book, with many interesting stories and examples throughout. However, the book lacks a central thesis, and is little more than an extended polemic against the big tech firms, and like all polemics it lacks balance and offers little in the way of insight.
And because of the lack of a central thesis, the book often loses its way. There are whole sections on the activities of hackers, ISIS beheading videos, Silk Road, GamerGate, and Chinese surveillance, that left me wondering how they fit into the overall picture. Answer: other than as part of a whole "look how bad big tech is" argument, they don't fit. Whole parts of the book simply come across as Taplin shouting at clouds.
Of course, there are serious problems that Taplin identifies. The best polemics encourage the reader to imagine a better world. Move Fast and Break Things doesn't do that. Given that antitrust is the issue, the best that Taplin can offer is the banal recommendation to revise the way that antitrust laws are applied. He also suggests that music production could move to a co-op structure. The problem with co-ops is that they work well when goods are homogeneous, but not when they are heterogeneous. Can you imagine Taylor Swift and Jay-Z signing up to the music production co-op and sharing their worldwide earnings with struggling artists?
Taplin also insufficiently explains references to some basic economics. At one point, he suggests that Google and Facebook create negative externalities in the same way that oil extraction does. I struggle to see how one person giving their data to Google or Facebook makes other people worse off, which is what a negative externality implies. I'm sure that you could make a case for it, but Taplin doesn't do that. Similarly, he uses Akerlof's 'market for lemons' (which economists would know as adverse selection), but doesn't show how asymmetric information about YouTube videos leads the market for videos to fail. In fact, that market is especially successful. A better metaphor drawn from economics would have been Gresham's law - the bad quality videos drive out the good quality ones.
Big tech firms are responsible for some negative things, alongside some good things. However, simply bringing together a collection of stories about their negative impacts doesn't help us to understand how the negative impacts may be prevented or mitigated. If you are interested in these questions, I wouldn't recommend this book, and instead offer Doctorow and Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism (which I am partway through reading) as a much better alternative.
No comments:
Post a Comment