The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Vintage)

the network is not some renewable natural resource but a man-made structure, one that exists only owing to decades of infrastructure building at great cost to great companies,

This time is different: with everything on one network, the potential power to control is so much greater.

All of these thinkers opposed bigness and prescribed a greater humility about one’s unavoidable ignorance. No one could fully understand all the facts of the dynamic market any more than one could weigh the true costs of introducing a vast new flow of traffic through neighborhoods like New York’s SoHo and West Village, which had developed organical

As it happened, the transformation in Hollywood content was so abrupt as to be shocking, and it demonstrates a substantial vulnerability of highly centralized systems: while designed for stability’s sake, they are in fact susceptible to extremely drastic disruption.

At the most basic level, Schumpeter believed that innovation and economic growth are one and the same. Countries that innovated would grow wealthier; those that did not would stagnate.

But AT&T, as an innovator, bore a serious genetic flaw: it could not originate technologies that might, by the remotest possibility, threaten the Bell system.

For the purposes of our narrative, the conclusion is clear: an open medium has much to recommend it, but not the power to unify the country.

It was beginning to seem that the same might be true of information systems.

innovation platform.