Move Fast and Break Things is a fast-paced, pointed, and timely critique of Facebook, Google, and Amazon by Jonathan Taplin, the recently retired director of the Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. Today's online giants, in Taplin's view, threaten not only the livelihood of countless content creators—musicians, filmmakers, journalists, and writers—but also the very foundations of democracy.

Taplin initially intended to write about the cultural divide between the producers and distributors of music, movies, news, and books. Having begun his research, he shifted his focus to the economic “war” between monopoly and competition (p. 5). In the eleven-year period between 2004 and 2015, according to Taplin's calculation, $50 billion shifted from content creators to digital platforms. His sympathies lie with the former, including, in particular, those musicians whose income stream has been reduced to a trickle following the advent of digital streaming. Having himself worked for several years as a rock-and-roll music promoter, Taplin writes with conviction about the predicament of musicians of a certain age who have found it impossible to thrive in today's online marketplace. With the rise of the “monopolies platforms” came the fall of the content creators, or at least those toward whom Taplin is the most sympathetic: “The two are inextricably linked” (pp. 7–8).

Like many trade books intended for a broad popular audience, Taplin's is organized around a relatively small cast of heroes and villains who stand in for large-scale trends. The libertarian political activists Charles and David Koch receive prominent attention, as does Kim Dotcom, the founder of the illicit music-sharing site Megaupload. Among Taplin's heroes is digital pioneer Tim Berners-Lee. Had Berners-Lee's vision of decentralized digital infrastructure been implemented, Taplin posits, it would have created an informational environment far more hospitable to, and lucrative for, the content creators Taplin admires than the digital infrastructure that exists today. Indeed—or so Taplin confidently predicts—could Berners-Lee's ideas be translated into reality today, it might well provide the economic foundation for a veritable “Digital Renaissance” (p. 18).

To explain what went wrong, Taplin fingers a “libertarian counterinsurgency” masterminded by venture capitalist Peter Thiel and legal theorist Robert Bork (p. 67). Thiel, an early Facebook investor, astutely recognized that the antiregulatory “free-market gospel” provided the promoters of digital start-ups with the necessary ideological fig leaf to neutralize the “unthinking demos” (Thiel's phrase), while enabling their ventures to rapidly attain levels of economic concentration that would otherwise have prompted unwelcome regulatory scrutiny (p. 125). Bork, an antitrust expert who as a Yale law professor taught both Bill and Hillary Clinton, saw nothing wrong with the new digital platforms so long as consumer prices remained low: “In Bork's view, as long as the customer gets lower prices, society should not care that writers cannot make a living, that independent bookstores go out of business, and that publishers die” (p. 124).

The crux of Taplin's critique is the danger posed by the “techno-determinism” of libertarian high-tech promoters who favor capitalism over democracy and look to technology to solve the problems that they believe that politics have caused. To check the power of Facebook, Google, and Amazon—corporations that, by historical standards, have in fact attained extraordinarily high levels of economic concentration—he documents the costs of digital innovation and offers up a menu of antimonopoly policy options: for example, what if lawmakers declared Google a natural monopoly and, following the precedent established for Bell Labs, obliged it to license on a nonpreferential basis every patent it owned for a nominal fee? “Big changes could happen,” Taplin confidently predicts, “if we approach the problem of monopolization of the Internet with honesty, a sense of history, and a determination to protect what we all agree is important: our cultural heritage” (p. 280).

Taplin's critique echoes arguments advanced in recent years by historians of technology, historians of political economy, and those business historians who, like this reviewer, are unpersuaded by the technological determinism that has long been a pillar of the internalist tradition in the field. Facebook, Google, and Amazon, in Taplin's view, are too lightly regulated, while each pursues a morally dubious business plan that is unduly dependent on the mining of consumer data, or what he calls “surveillance marketing” (p. 282). Is it good for America, he asks rhetorically, for three of the country's most powerful digital platforms to rely on a business mode that assumes they “hold the secret formula to continually arousing our desires” (p. 277). The “small is beautiful” economist E. F. Schumacher would assuredly have answered “no,” Taplin reflects, and Taplin concurs.

Had Taplin completed his book following the recent revelations of the extent of Russian interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election, he would presumably have had even more to say about the role of Facebook and Google in facilitating the circulation of fake news. Taplin's Zuckerberg is not, like Thiel or Google CEO Larry Page, an avowed libertarian. Yet if Zuckerberg wishes to build “strong and healthy communities,” as he has publicly proclaimed, it would indeed seem to be incumbent, as Taplin proposes, for Facebook to take a more forthright stand in monitoring its content (p. 170).

Move Fast and Break Things reads more like a journalistic exposé than an academic monograph and, like most writing in this genre, sometimes oversimplifies to make a point. In particular, Taplin proposes an origin myth for today's commercial digital economy that is excessively one-dimensional while advancing several questionable claims about the U.S. political economy—for example, have Hamiltonian “financial elites” run the show, with the exception of the two Roosevelt presidencies? Yet it is not as a historical primer that its principal value is to be found. Rather, it is a provocative think piece that belongs on the small but growing shelf of insider accounts that diagnose endemic problems with some of today's most powerful corporations. Whether or not Taplin has the right answers, his questions are apt, and all historians interested in the relationship of business, technology, and politics should applaud his attempt to provide us with a “moral framework” for the U.S. political economy in the digital age (p. 31).