Review: Move Fast and Break Things, by Jonathan Taplin

[Russ Allbery]

Move Fast and Break Things
by Jonathan Taplin

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Copyright: April 2017
Printing:  2018
ISBN:      0-316-27574-3
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     288

Disclaimer: I currently work for Dropbox, a Silicon Valley tech
company. While it's not one of the companies that Taplin singles out in
this book, I'm sure he'd consider it part of the problem. I think my
reactions to this book are driven more by a long association with the
free software movement and its take on copyright issues, and from
reading a lot of persuasive work both good and bad, but I'm not a
disinterested party.

Taplin is very angry about a lot of things that I'm also very angry
about: the redefinition of monopoly to conveniently exclude the largest
and most powerful modern companies, the ability of those companies to
run roughshod over competitors in ways that simultaneously bring
innovation and abusive market power, a toxic mix of libertarian and
authoritarian politics deeply ingrained in the foundations of Silicon
Valley companies, and a blithe disregard for the social effects of
technology and for how to police the new communities that social media
has created. This is a book-length rant about the dangers of monopoly
domination of industries, politics, on-line communities, and the arts.
And the central example of those dangers is the horrific and
destructive power of pirating music on the Internet.

If you just felt a mental record-scratch and went "wait, what?", you're
probably from a community closer to mine than Taplin's.

I'm going to be clear up-front: this is a bad book. I'm not going to
recommend that you read it; quite the contrary, I recommend actively
avoiding it. It's poorly written, poorly argued, facile, and unfair,
and I say that with a great deal of frustration because I agree with
about 80% of its core message. This is the sort of book from an
erstwhile ally that makes me cringe: it's a significant supply of straw
men, weak arguments, bad-faith arguments, and motivated reasoning that
make the case for economic reform so much harder. There are good
arguments against capitalism in the form in which we're practicing it.
Taplin makes only some of them, and makes them badly.

Despite that, I read the entire book, and I'm still somewhat glad that
I did, because it provides a fascinating look at the way unexamined
premises lead people to far different conclusions. It also provides a
more visceral feel for how people, like Taplin, who are deeply and
personally invested in older ways of doing business, reach for a sort
of reflexive conservatism when pushing back against the obvious abuses
of new forms of inequality and market abuse. I found a reminder here to
take a look at my own knee-jerk reactions and think about places where
I may be reaching for backward-looking rather than forward-looking
solutions.

This is a review, though, so before I get lost in introspection, I
should explain why I think so poorly of this book as an argument.

I suspect most people who read enough partisan opinion essays on-line
will notice the primary flaw in Move Fast and Break Things as early as
I did: this is the kind of book that's full of carefully-chosen quotes
designed to make the person being quoted look bad. You'll get a tour of
the most famous ill-chosen phrases, expressions of greed, and
cherry-picked bits of naked capitalism from the typical suspects:
Google, Facebook, and Amazon founders, other Silicon Valley venture
capitalists and CEOs, and of course Peter Thiel. Now, Thiel is an
odious reactionary and aspiring fascist who yearns for the days when he
could live as an unchallenged medieval lord. There's almost no quote
you could cherry-pick from him that would make him look worse than he
actually is, so I'll give Taplin a free pass on that one. But for the
rest, Taplin is not even attempting to understand or engage with the
arguments that his opponents are making. He's just finding the most
damning statements, the ones that look the ugliest out of context, and
parading them before the reader in an attempt to provoke an emotional
reaction.

There is a long-standing principle of argument that you should engage
with your opponents' position in its strongest form. If you cannot
understand the merits and strengths of the opposing position and
restate them well enough that an advocate of the opposing view would
accept your summary as fair, you aren't prepared to argue the point.
Taplin does not even come close to doing that. In the debate over the
new Internet monopolies and monopsonies, one central conflict is
between the distorting and dangerous concentration of power and the
vast and very real improvements they've brought for consumers. I don't
like Amazon as a company, and yet I read this book on a Kindle because
their products are excellent and the consumer experience of their store
is first-rate. I don't like Google as a company, but their search
engine is by far the best available. One can quite legitimately take a
wide range of political, economic, and ethical positions on that
conflict, but one has to acknowledge there is a real conflict. Taplin
is not particularly interested in doing that.

Similarly, and returning to the double-take moment with which I began
this review, Taplin is startlingly unwilling to examine the flaws of
the previous economic systems that he's defending. He writes a paean to
the wonderful world of mutual benefit, artistic support, and economic
fairness of record labels! Admittedly, I was not deeply enmeshed in
that industry the way that he was, and he restrains his praise
primarily to the 1960s and 1970s, so it's possible this isn't as
mind-boggling as it sounds on first presentation. But, even apart from
the numerous stories of artists cheated out of the profits of their
work by the music industry long before Silicon Valley entered the
picture, Taplin only grudgingly recognizes that the merits he sees in
that industry were born of a specific moment in time, a specific
pattern of demand, supply, sales method, and cultural moment, and that
this world would not have lasted regardless of Napster or YouTube.

In other words, Taplin does the equivalent of arguing against Uber by
claiming the taxi industry was a model of efficiency, economic
fairness, and free competition. There are many persuasive arguments
against new exploitative business practices. This is not one of them.

More tellingly to me, there is zero acknowledgment in this book that I
can recall of one of the defining experiences of my generation and
younger: the decision by the music and motion picture industries to
fight on-line copying of their product by launching a vicious campaign
of legal terrorism against teenagers and college students. Taplin's
emotional appeals and quote cherry-picking falls on rather deaf ears
when I vividly remember the RIAA and MPAA setting out to deliberately
destroy people's lives in order to make an example of them, a level of
social coercion that Google and Facebook have not yet stooped to, at
least at that scale. Taplin is quite correct that his ideological
opponents are scarily oblivious to some of the destruction they're
wreaking on social and artistic communities, but he needs to come to
terms with the fact that some of his allies are thugs.

This is where my community departs from Taplin's. I've been part of the
free software community for decades, which includes a view of copyright
that is neither the constrained economic model that Taplin advocates as
a way to hopefully support artists, nor the corporate libertarian
free-for-all from which Google draws its YouTube advertising profits.
The free software community stands mostly opposed to both of those
economic models, while pursuing the software equivalent of artist
collectives. We have our own issues with creeping corporate control of
our communities, and with the balance to strike between expanding the
commons and empowering amoral companies like Google, Facebook, and
Amazon to profit off of our work. Those fights play out in software
licensing discussions routinely. But returning to a 1950s model of
commercial music (which looks a lot like the 1980s model of commercial
software) is clearly not possible, or even desirable if it were.

And that, apart from the poor argumentative technique and the tendency
to engage with the weakest of his opponents' arguments, is the largest
flaw I see in Taplin's book: he's invested in a binary fight between
the economic world of his youth, which worked in ways that he considers
fair, and a new economic world that is breaking the guarantees that he
considers ethically important. He's not wrong about the problem, and I
completely agree with him on the social benefit of putting artists in a
more central position of influence in society. But he's not looking
deeply at examples of artistic communities that have navigated this
better than his own beloved music industry (book publishing, for
example, which certainly has its problems with Amazon's monopsony power
but is also in some ways stronger than it has ever been). And he's not
looking at communities that are approaching the same problem from a
different angle, such as free software. He's so caught up on what he
sees as the fundamental unfairness of artists not being paid directly
by each person consuming their work that he isn't stepping back to look
at larger social goals and alternative ways they could be met.

I'm sure I'm making some of these same mistakes, in other places and in
other ways. These problems are hard and some of the players truly are
malevolent, so you cannot assume good will and good faith on all
fronts. But there are good opposing arguments and simple binary
analysis will fail.

Taplin, to give him credit, does try to provide some concrete solutions
in the last chapter. He realizes that you cannot put the genie of easy
digital copies back in the bottle, and tries to talk about alternate
approaches that aren't awful (although they're things like
micropayments and subscription services that are familiar ground for
anyone familiar with this problem). I agree wholeheartedly with his
arguments for returning to a pre-Reagan definition of monopoly power
and stricter regulation of Internet advertising business. He might even
be able to convince me that take-down-and-stay-down (the doctrine that
material removed due to copyright complaints has to be kept off the
same platform in the future) is a workable compromise... if he would
also agree to fines, paid to the victim, of at least $50,000 per
instance for every false complaint from a media company claiming
copyright on material to which they have no rights. (Taplin seems
entirely unaware of the malevolent abuses of copyright complaint
systems by his beloved media industry.) As I said, I agree with about
80% of his positions.

But, sadly, this is not the book to use to convince anyone of those
positions, or even the book to read for material in one's own debates.
It would need more thoughtful engagement of the strongest of the
arguments from new media and technology companies, a broader eye to
allied fights, a deep look at the flaws in the capitalist system that
made these monopoly abuses possible, and a willingness to look at the
related abuses of Taplin's closest friends. Without those elements, I'm
afraid this book isn't worth your time.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-10-24

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>