Reddit reviews The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

For those of ya'll who aren't familiar with Tim Wu and are interested in learning more about his stance (especially w.r.t. net neutrality), I highly recommend his book, The Master Switch.

I'm always amused about how the studios rail against pirates, given their history. The only reason they exist came about as a result of them thumbing their nose at the patents held by Thomas Edison and fled the East for California and began producing the type of movies that the establishment wouldn't permit. Check out The Master Switch by Tim Wu.

The big budgets required to make block busters these days carry so much risk, studios are afraid to try anything that is not already proven - which is why there was only one original movie amongst the top 10 box office hits in 2014. - the other nine where remakes, reboots or sequels.

The thing to be worried about is the consolidation of content creators and carriers: more of a problem in the US than here, thanks to the NBN, but why we see tighter controls on piracy in this country and will be impacted in any event because most of the content comes from the US.

I claim we had Peak Internet in 2014. Everyday, as government gets more and more involved, the internet is going to get a little more shittier every day (to wit: GST for online purchases, website blocking, internet filtering, three strike rules, etc.)

He also wrote The Master Switch which is often recommended to solidify net-neutrality support.

The book does allow the reader to perceive some half-century long patterns across telephony, radio, film, and TV. Examples include optimistic, tech-savvy founders being replaced by stodgy profit-maximizing MBA types, fertile, entrepreneurial environments decaying into rigid monopolies/duopolies, creative, rebellious media gradually transitioning into state-and-advertiser-sanctioned stale garbage, and disruption by new forms of media as old media quality decays.

That said, I found the subject matter a bit too high-level, and central refrain (this process is already happening to the internet) a bit overbearing. If you have the time, I'd recommend smaller-scope books on the individual media technologies instead.

If you're interested in this, I highly recommend The Master Switch by Tim Wu.

I read The Master Switch (mentioned in the article) last week and I can't recommend it enough. It's a great look at how we got here.

I'm currently reading a book about how several different tech industries developed, from phone and radio to TV, movies, and the internet. It's called The Master Switch. It's not as much about how the tech was created, but more about how it became mainstream.

The Master Switch by Tim Wu is a very interesting read.

Basically outlines how all info technologies become ossified and controlled.

The FCC has almost always been used to further corporate interests. See Tim Wu's The Master Switch if you want a good account of how it has basically always been business's way of controlling the industry.

A really good book which is potentially related based on me reading the title of this post: Master Switch by Tim Wu.

https://www.amazon.com/Master-Switch-Rise-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993

>Boys Don’t Cry was about a trans man pretending to be a cis man to seduce a woman, and had hardcore-enough sex scenes to receive an NC-17 rating on its first cut.

There's a film called "this film Is Not Yet Rated" that examines the MPAA and how subjective it is as a control system for what gets into the public's eye. A segment of this film discussed the MPAA's issues with Boys Don't Cry.

From a blogger:

>In addition, the MPAA system often fails to take context into account. For instance - as director Kimberly Peirce comments in "This Film is Not Yet Rated" - the MPAA threatened Peirce's brilliant "Boys Don't Cry" with an NC-17 rating based in part on the very rape scene that is directly central to the movie. In the scene, the protagonist is raped as a brutal "punishment" for what her attackers see as her impersonation of a boy. Here, the MPAA's rating seems especially senseless: How could it hurt a sixteen-year-old's psyche to see a depiction of a brutal hate crime, presented as exactly what it is? If anything, the film is rightly educational.

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From Roger Ebert:

>"This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is a catalog of grievances against the MPAA: The membership of the ratings board is anonymous, so the filmmakers have no right to appeal directly to the people who are judging their work. The ratings board is supposed to be comprised of "parents" -- but hardly any have children under 18, which is the only age group to whom the ratings apply. Although the MPAA ratings were allegedly created as a way of heading off government censorship, some say that has always been a ruse -- and, besides, a government system would actually require rules, documentation, transparency, accountability and due process. These are not things the secretive MPAA is fond of.
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>And although the MPAA ratings are supposedly "voluntary," agreements between the studios that fund the organization, the exhibitors who show their films, and the media in which those films are advertised, make it something less than optional for most films. Check your newspaper to see if "This Film Is Not Yet Rated" is playing in your town. If that newspaper accepts advertising for unrated films ("This Film" was originally awarded an NC-17 for "graphic sexual content," but the rating was "surrendered"), you'll see that "This Film" is not playing at one of the studio-owned theater chains.
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>[...]
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>The whole kangaroo court is founded on a doozy of a Catch-22: The MPAA insists that it has procedures that it applies evenhandedly. But the procedures are secret so nobody can tell what they are. If something is not allowed, it's because it's against the invisible rules.
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>So, how do you make sense out of the MPAA's decisions? As "This Film" demonstrates, you don't. The Kafkaesque absurdity behind the movie ratings is beyond belief. Matt Stone ("South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," "Team America: World Police") testifies from experience that studio pictures are treated a lot more kindly than independently financed and distributed ones. Kimberly Peirce ("Boys Don't Cry") and Wayne Kramer and Maria Bello ("The Cooler"), intuit that the raters are uncomfortable with depictions of female sexual pleasure, while Allison Anders("Grace Of My Heart") suggests that orgasms of any kind are frowned upon (although women's do tend to last longer, and may therefore make the raters more uncomfortable), and that the male body is even more verboten that the female body. And everybody agrees that the MPAA is very liberal when it comes to violence, and conservative when it comes to sex.

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the MPAA is important to this discussion largely due to their rating influence which affects the marketing and release of a film. This is why you hear so much about the studio trying to get a 'PG-13' rating instead of an 'R' (or in the case of Boys Don't Cry, trying to get an 'R' rating, settling for 'NC-17' after making cuts to shake the 'X' rating). The biggest issue issue sin't necessarily the rating system, but the power enshrined in a select group of anonymous and unaccountable influencers. It's pretty eye opening to see how much power they have over culture.

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link to film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpbxzP2mkoA

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Great write up!

Also, I'm a Gen-Xer and recall all of thee films and the milieu very well. It's interesting to see analysis from a younger viewer.

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If you like this topic I'd also suggest "Pictures At a Revolution" which discusses the 5 Best film nominations of the 1967 Oscars, and how these films changed the Hollywood. It's a nice context for how we got to 1999.

>In the mid-1960s, westerns, war movies, and blockbuster musicals like Mary Poppins swept the box office. The Hollywood studio system was astonishingly lucrative for the few who dominated the business. That is, until the tastes of American moviegoers radically- and unexpectedly-changed. By the Oscar ceremonies of 1968, a cultural revolution had hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami, and films like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, In the Heat of the Night, and box-office bomb Doctor Doolittle signaled a change in Hollywood-and America. And as an entire industry changed and struggled, careers were suddenly made and ruined, studios grew and crumbled, and the landscape of filmmaking was altered beyond all recognition.

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As a supplement, I also suggest Tim Wu's "The Master Switch" which goes into detail about the rise of various media, how they supplanted the old media (i.e. telephone vs. telegraph; broadcast tv vs. Cable tv) and were in turn supplanted by other technological industries. There is a bit about the various takeovers of the film industry in the mid 90's that set the stage for the making of these films and the subsequent dawn of the Internet age. It's probably in need of a new edition now, but I really enjoyed reading about media and technological history in this context.

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu. I was already out of law school when it came out, but I did a lot of work in broadband regulation while in law school, and this book just nails what's so important about protecting the internet.

I am going to start doing this in every US telecommunications thread.

Read Tim Wu's The Master Switch.

It is a thorough, extremely interesting, and very smart examination of the history and the possible futures of the telecom industry. All these random redditor comments add nothing to it, and if everybody read it, the discussion could be so much better.

Two other related books I've enjoyed are Good To Great by Jim Collins and The Master Switch by Tim Wu, maybe others here are familiar with them too?

I've got a week long trip planned soon and because I've read 2 books out of your list (Zero to One and Rework,) I'll be looking into the rest of your list for some suggestions, thanks!

just this

> this is a conspiracy for the government to gain access to the legislative right to censor the internet?

yes.

> Show me any example where that was ever in question that it was argued that the US government simply lacked the legislative jurisdiction to do so.

You are asking me to prove the various reasons for inaction. That isn't how evidence works. Fuck off.

> There have been questions of first and fourth amendment overreach, sure ... but show me a case where, had the internet been a title 2, it would have made any difference.

I already have. Closed platforms like TV and broadcast are commandeered and applied with bright line rules and regulations. You really don't get it. It's not like people now are actively getting on TV and radio and breaking the rules that the FCC have put in place. It is the very fact that those rules exist before someone breaks them. It is the difference between offense and defense. Between overt violence and structural violence. Between Realpolitik and Noopolitik. It isn't about playing cat and mouse like they have been doing. It is about subverting the freedom online by co-opting the platform and making it their turf that they control. If you create the maze you can lead people wherever you want. Perhaps you should do more reading on the history of opened and closed platforms