I initially thought the book was about building a product (in some ways this isn’t incorrect), but it is more of an exploration of tech companies becoming too big and powerful. Taplin has been many things in his life, but it was his role in the music industry which triggered him to write the book.
To be frank, I take my Spotify account for granted. I have an almost free access to music that I can pick and choose what to play at any given time. As a customer, we sometimes do not think the cost producing things, and who profits most from them. All I know is that my music is affordable, but we are not necessarily giving the artists proper due.
We live in an age of monopsony, where the platform owners make the most profit from creators and merchants selling to their users. The old cliché of ‘if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product’ rings true more than ever, but even if you are paying for things, it is likely that you still became the product. Monopsonies are dominant in platforms (Google in search, Facebook in social, Amazon in ecommerce) so that they can provide the lowest cost to customers at the expense of the producers.
Big data speaks and speaks loudly. Facebook knows more about my tastes now than my mother knows about me. Advertisers will pay a premium for this privilege of my data, and I am privately concerned. Companies have already started sharing this data with governments and the implications are terrifying.
The moral is simple, and we know this already, but Taplin puts it in detail with concrete examples. Big companies are benefitting, and benefitting big time. We’re stuck as cogs in the machinery, like Taplin himself would admit, waiting for our next dopamine fix when we get that notification.
While the ideas of the book isn’t radical, and Taplin’s examples are sometimes confused with his arguments, the book raises a good question of what the internet should be — democratic, distributed and secure. The timeline of internet commercialisation have followed the timeline of American democracy itself — noble aims tend to be exploited by the few.
