Tim Wu: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Theodore Newton Vail, born July 16, 1845, was a U.S. telephone industrialist. His philosophy of using closed systems, centralized power, and as much network control as possible, in order to maintain monopoly power, is what’s come to be known as Vailism. He served as the president of American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) between 1885 and 1889, and again from 1907 to 1919 (the company was named “American Telephone & Telegraph” before 1894). Vail convinced President Woodrow Wilson that the telephone as a medium of communication would spread more rapidly if brought under one monopoly, so as to ensure uniform provision of services throughout the country. He called this "one system, one policy, universal service."

“Mr. Vail is a big man.”

- Thomas Edison

According to Columbia University, professor and policy advocate Tim Wu (Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World), the great information empires of the 20th century have followed a clear and distinctive pattern: after the chaos that follows a major technological innovation, a corporate power intervenes and centralizes control of the new medium: the master switch. Tim Wu chronicles the turning points of the century’s information landscape: those decisive moments when a medium opens or closes, from the development of radio to the Internet revolution, where centralizing control could have devastating consequences. To Tim Wu, subjecting the information economy to the traditional methods of dealing with concentrations of industrial power is an unacceptable control of our most essential resource. He advocates not a regulatory approach but rather a constitutional approach that would enforce distance between the major functions in the information economy—between those who develop information, those who own the network infrastructure on which it travels, and those who control the venues of access—and keep corporate and governmental power in check. By fighting vertical integration, a Separations Principle would remove the temptations and vulnerabilities to which such entities are prone. The Tim Wu book is engaging, a remarkable historical narrative that makes for a compelling and galvanizing cry for sanity—and necessary deregulation—in the information age.

“History shows a typical progression of information technologies: from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel—from open to closed system.”

- Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

“Wireless is going to be a big problem because as these smart phones develop into more complex devices, I think the consumers will expect the same kind of experience on their wireless device than they expect on their wired connection at home. There may be a performance difference, but you wouldnt expect that you would be told you cant use certain applications.”

- Scott Jordan, professor at the University of California at Irvine

In December 2010, David Leonhardt wrote “From Hobby to Industry” for The New York Times. AT&T is the star of the new Tim Wu book, an intellectually ambitious history of modern communications. The organizing principle — only rarely overdrawn — is what Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, calls “the cycle.” “History shows a typical progression of information technologies,” he writes, “from somebody’s hobby to somebody’s industry; from jury-rigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel — from open to closed system.” Eventually, entrepreneurs or regulators smash apart the closed system, and the cycle begins anew. The Master Switch covers the history of phones, radio, television, movies and, finally, the Internet. All of these businesses are susceptible to the cycle because all depend on networks, whether they’re composed of cables in the ground or movie theaters around the country. Once a company starts building such a network or gaining control over one, it begins slouching toward monopoly. If the government is not already deeply involved in the business by then (and it usually is), it soon will be. Tim Wu argues that the government has little choice. Not only are communications businesses particularly prone to consolidation, but the political effects are far greater than they would be in other industries. The Tim Wu book’s title comes from a line by Fred Friendly, the longtime CBS News executive, in which he distinguished between free-speech laws and “exclusive custody of the master switch.” They are two different things, but either has the ability to shape the flow of information. The same cannot be said, Tim Wu notes, “of orange juice, heating oil, running shoes or dozens of other industries, no matter their size.”

“The reason people like Google or Facebook is it's just simpler. If we go back to AT&T in the 1910s, we had a monopoly for 70 years, and why was that? It was easy—you picked up the telephone, and it worked. There's nothing wrong with that. But our desire to follow the leader does tend to lead to monopolization.”

- Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (Borzoi Books)

Lisa Margonelli: Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long, Strange Trip to Your Tank

From the New America Foundation: Lisa Margonelli writes about the global culture and economy of energy. Her book about the oil supply chain, Oil On the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to Your Tank, was published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in 2007. Recognized as one of the 25 Notable Books of 2007 by the American Library Association, Oil On the Brain also won a 2008 Northern California Book Award for general nonfiction. Ms. Margonelli has been published in The Atlantic, New York Times online, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Wired, Discover, Salon, Business 2.0, San Francisco Magazine, and California Monthly, among other publications. Her column, "Money Tales," which combined economics and oral history in the San Francisco Chronicle online, won an Excellence in Journalism award from the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists in 2003. In 1999-2000, she was awarded a Sundance Fellowship. She is a graduate of Yale University.



Publisher-provided book-description: Oil on the Brain is a smart, surprisingly funny account of the oil industry—the people, economies, and pipelines that bring us petroleum, brilliantly illuminating a world we encounter every day. Americans buy ten thousand gallons of gasoline a second, without giving it much of a thought. Where does all this gas come from? Lisa Margonelli’s desire to learn took her on a one-hundred thousand mile journey from her local gas station to oil fields half a world away. In search of the truth behind the myths, she wriggled her way into some of the most off-limits places on earth: the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the New York Mercantile Exchange’s crude oil market, oil fields from Venezuela, to Texas, to Chad, and even an Iranian oil platform where the United States fought a forgotten one-day battle. In a story by turns surreal and alarming, Margonelli meets lonely workers on a Texas drilling rig, an oil analyst who almost gave birth on the NYMEX trading floor, Chadian villagers who are said to wander the oil fields in the guise of lions, a Nigerian warlord who changed the world price of oil with a single cell phone call, and Shanghai bureaucrats who dream of creating a new Detroit. Deftly piecing together the mammoth economy of oil, Margonelli finds a series of stark warning signs for American drivers.





Lisa Margonelli recently wrote "Forget About $5 Gas: $3 Gas Is Bad Enough" for the periodical, The Atlantic. The author wrote: James Schlesinger famously said that Americans have two modes when it comes to oil: complacency and panic. This week, it seems, we're having both at the same time. Today the national retail average for gasoline is $3.07 per gallon, which is higher than it's been since 2008. But instead of freaking out about that, the media has been focusing on the possibility of $5 gasoline in 2012, a claim made by former Shell President John Hofmeister. Hofmeister's point (he heads a non-profit called Citizens for Affordable Energy) is that the problem is that we're "essentially frittering at the edges of renewable energy, stifling production in hydrocarbon energy," leading to "blackouts, brownouts, gas lines, rationing." When Platts printed Mr. Hofmeister's predictions the day after Christmas, he became an instant media sensation. Even Platts claimed to be surprised by the ruckus, since Mr. Hofmeister had predicted the same many times before, and it would imply that the price of crude reaches $180 a barrel, which even the boldest analysts think is too high.





In May of 2010, the author, Lisa Margonelli, wrote "A Spill of Our Own" for The New York Times, and said this: THE history of American oil spills is the history of the environmental movement. The 1969 blowout of an oil platform off Santa Barbara, Calif., gave rise to Earth Day as well as President Richard Nixon’s National Environmental Policy Act, and led to a moratorium on new drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts. Twenty years later, the spill from the Exxon Valdez tanker near Alaska quashed the first Bush administration’s ambitions for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and ushered in the laws that made oil shippers liable for damage caused by their cargo. Now 5,000 barrels of oil a day are apparently spilling from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon rig off New Orleans, and ghastly floating pads of emulsified oil are reaching the sensitive marshlands and coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, coating birds and fish. On Thursday, as the scent of fuel hovered over New Orleans, residents joked online that they should eat fish now, because they might not be able to again for a while. One longtime offshore oil worker told me this looked like a “game changer,” and he was thinking about finding another line of work.

Brian Greene: The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

Brian Greene (born February 9, 1963) is an American theoretical physicist and one of the best-known string theorists. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi-Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point. He has become known to a wider audience through his books for the general public, The Elegant Universe, Icarus at the Edge of Time and The Fabric of the Cosmos, and a related PBS television special. Source: Wikipedia.





Official product description for the book: From the best-selling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos comes his most expansive and accessible book to date—a book that takes on the grandest question: Is ours the only universe? There was a time when “universe” meant all there is. Everything. Yet, in recent years discoveries in physics and cosmology have led a number of scientists to conclude that our universe may be one among many. With crystal-clear prose and inspired use of analogy, Brian Greene shows how a range of different “multiverse” proposals emerges from theories developed to explain the most refined observations of both subatomic particles and the dark depths of space: a multiverse in which you have an infinite number of doppelgängers, each reading this sentence in a distant universe; a multiverse comprising a vast ocean of bubble universes, of which ours is but one; a multiverse that endlessly cycles through time, or one that might be hovering millimeters away yet remains invisible; another in which every possibility allowed by quantum physics is brought to life. Or, perhaps strangest of all, a multiverse made purely of math. Greene, one of our foremost physicists and science writers, takes us on a captivating exploration of these parallel worlds and reveals how much of reality’s true nature may be deeply hidden within them. And, with his unrivaled ability to make the most challenging of material accessible and entertaining, Greene tackles the core question: How can fundamental science progress if great swaths of reality lie beyond our reach? Sparked by Greene’s trademark wit and precision, The Hidden Reality is at once a far-reaching survey of cutting-edge physics and a remarkable journey to the very edge of reality—a journey grounded firmly in science and limited only by our imagination.

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Daniel Yergin: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

Recently, USA Today invoked the author in a story about the demand for gas in the United States: "A combination of demographic change and policy change means the heady days of gasoline growing in the U.S. are over," says Daniel Yergin, chairman of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the oil industry. This isn't the first time in U.S. history that gasoline demand has fallen, at least temporarily. Drivers typically cut back during recessions, then hit the road again when the economy picks up. Indeed, the Great Recession was the chief reason demand fell sharply in 2008. But this time looks different. Government and industry officials — including the CEO of ExxonMobil— say U.S. gasoline demand has peaked for good. It has declined four years in a row and will not reach the 2006 level again, even when the economy fully recovers. Read that USA Today report here.

P. W. Singer: Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century

Public Radio International recently had the author on its "How We Got Here" program. The story and segment was called, "Drones – The New Normal." The webpage for this story says this: P.W. Singer, the author of Wired for War tells us about the use of drones (robotic, or unmanned, or remotely-piloted aircraft) — in war. He says the fact that pilots can engage in war from thousands of miles away and without risk to themselves represents a fundamental change in the nature of warfare as it has been waged for thousands of years. He also likens the development of the drone to the development of the airplane itself–that each followed similar stages of evolution. As for the political, legal, and ethical dilemmas they pose–he points out that the technology is moving faster than the ability of human organizations to keep up with the implications. Just as it has been with the computer. This week’s How We Got Here is full of insights from a scholar who says flying robots are no longer the futuristic stuff of science fiction; they are the new normal. Download the podcast to that show, here. See also: Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry, Updated Edition (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs).



The Santa Barbara Independent recently mentioned the book and author in a piece titled, "A Kinder, Friendlier Predator? The Risks and Rewards of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles."

P. W. Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and 21st Century Conflict, told me in an email that he believes the proliferation of UAVs in civilian life will outstrip the legal framework for dealing with their ramifications just as has happened with militarized UAVs. (There are no clauses in the Hague Conventions that address unpiloted, missile-launching airplanes, cruising through Asia, controlled by operators in a trailer outside of Las Vegas.) The civilian example Singer offered comes from law enforcement: “I recall a conversation I had with a federal District Court judge who talked about the deep questions of privacy and probable cause raised by a system that carried out unblinking observation from above. A law enforcement agency for instance could easily and even inadvertently gain info that it previously needed a warrant for. He predicted we’d soon have some Supreme Court cases on this as the technology began to be used more and more.”

Read that article here. See also: Military Robots (High Interest Books), Ultimate Weapons: Robotic Warriors.

John C. Bogle: Don't Count on It!: Reflections on Investment Illusions, Capitalism, "Mutual" Funds, Indexing, Entrepreneurship, Idealism, and Heroes

In December of 2010, Seeking Alpha, a premium financial newsletter, wrote this about the book and author: Don't Count on It!: Reflections on Investment Illusions, Capitalism, "Mutual" Funds, Indexing, Entrepreneurship, Idealism, and Heroes (Wiley, 2011) is an anthology of recent writings and speeches by John C. Bogle, the venerable founder of Vanguard. It is a substantial book, over 600 pages long, and, as its subtitle indicates, covers a range of topics. Here I'm going to confine myself to two. I'll begin by exploring three principles that underlie Bogle's well-known case for low-cost passive index funds. Then I'll jump to the lecture he gave to the Risk Management Association in October 2007: "Black Monday and Black Swans." Read the full review and article here. The WNYC Radio program, The Brian Lehrer Show, recently aired a show, "Vanguard of Finance," in which the author was a guest. See also: Common Sense on Mutual Funds: Fully Updated 10th Anniversary Edition, The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns (Little Books. Big Profits), Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life.

The China Study: The Most Comprehensive Study of Nutrition Ever Conducted and the Startling Implications for Diet, Weight Loss and Long-term Health

In March 2010, The Boston Globe mentioned the book, "The China Study," this way:

Eric Faulkner, a professional in high tech, is baking a batch of vegan cookies in his Lowell loft. He minces few words to explain why he became a vegan. “I’m scared to death of cancer,’’ says the lanky 42-year-old. After reading “The China Study’’ (Benbella Books), which purports that animal protein can accelerate the growth of cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, Faulkner ate his last cheeseburger. For the past eight months meals in his household have been healthy remakes of meaty standbys. “I make a great avocado Reuben sandwich, a faux meat loaf, roasted butternut squash soup, and lots of pasta,’’ says Faulkner, whose wife and 8-year-old daughter have also converted.

Read the rest of that Boston Globe piece, here. There's plenty criticism about the book, however. Take Chris Masterjohn at Cholesterol-And-Health.Com as an example:

The generalization from the milk protein casein to all "nutrients from animal-based foods" is clearly unwarranted. If Campbell took caution to study the issue further before generalizing from casein to all proteins, why didn't he take the same caution before generalizing from casein to all animal proteins or all animal nutrients? Indeed, in later pages of The China Study, Campbell acknowledges that he is making this generalization: ". . . casein, and very likely all animal proteins, may be the most relevant cancer-causing substances that we consume."16 Why this generalization is "very likely" to be true is left unexplained. Campbell is aware that casein has been uniquely implicated in health problems, and dedicates an entire chapter of The China Study to casein's capacity to generate autoimmune diseases.17 Whey protein appears to have a protective effect against colon cancer that casein does not have.18 Any effect of casein, then, cannot be generalized to other milk proteins, let alone all animal proteins. Other questions, such as what effect different types of processing have on casein's capacity to promote tumor growth, remain unanswered. Pasteurization, low-temperature dehydration, high-temperature spray-drying (which creates carcinogens), and fermentation all affect the structure of casein differently and thereby would affect its physiological behavior.

Read that full article here.

Michael Pollan: Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

Austin 360 recently wrote:

In his most recent book, "Food Rules," Pollan doles out 64 guidelines that are as easy to remember as his most well-known mantra: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. (His second most-repeated rule? "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.") "I really don't want people to have to count calories and to read labels," he says. How we eat has changed so much in the past 50 years that we all could use the reminders: "Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk." "Always leave the table a little hungry." (One of his personal favorites is "The whiter the bread, the sooner you'll be dead.") Pollan says that one of the biggest problems is that we've been conditioned, primarily by food marketers and manufacturers, to think that we're supposed to spend as little time as possible shopping for, cooking and eating our meals.

Find the rest of that article here.

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean

Author Susan Casey spent five years following waves, surfers and ocean scientists. The result is her compelling nonfiction work "The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean," which conveys how it feels to be in the grasp of a sea monster. It is a sequel to her best-selling "Devil's Teeth," about white sharks that terrorize the Northern California coastline. After taking readers into the cold, clear danger beneath the surface, Casey now chases another oceanic phenomenon in a riveting tale that packs the narrative power and dexterity of Richard Preston's "The Wild Trees." She picks up where Sebastian Unger's "The Perfect Storm" ends by blending scientific mysteries with extreme-sport "why-do-they-do-this?" Casey gets closer than any spectator would dare, witnessing famous surfers in action from photographers' vantage points just yards away. Eventually, at a celebrated Maui break, she also shoots down the face of a colossal wave on the back of a Jet Ski.

This was out of the San Jose Mercury; you can find that article here. The Daily Show had Casey on as a guest, below is that interview. Case also wrote: The Devil's Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America's Great White Sharks, Women Invent!: Two Centuries of Discoveries That Have Shaped Our World.

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Devra Davis: Disconnect: The Truth About Cell Phone Radiation, What the Industry Has Done to Hide It, and How to Protect Your Family

In "Is your BlackBerry making you sick?" from the Washington Post, Juliet Eilperin writes:

I've seen enough scientific reports about the potential hazards associated with cellphones to make me concerned about his exposure, but also enough contradictory studies to leave me confused. In October, for example, the European Journal of Oncology published a study that found a link between wireless radiation and heart irregularities. Two new books - Ann Louise Gittleman's "Zapped" and Devra Davis's "Disconnect" - promise to settle the debate about whether mobile devices are bad for you. [...] Davis makes a compelling case for U.S. authorities to update their standards, especially in light of how much we now use our devices and the number of teenagers who now have them. Even the National Cancer Institute, which says there is no consistent link between cellphones and cancer, notes that children may be at a greater risk because their nervous systems are still developing at the time of exposure.

See that Washington Post piece here. The Seattle Times mentioned the book and author's work in "Put down that cellphone and back away: Do an EMF audit of your house."

In "Disconnect," scientist Devra Davis focuses on cellphone radiation and what she believes (and shows pretty convincingly) the industry has done to bury the bad news. Health writer Ann Louise Gittleman, author of "Zapped," also tackles cellphones, but she goes even further, pointing out that potentially dangerous electromagnetic fields (EMFs) are and lurking in places we'd never suspect: wall outlets, electric blankets, dimmer switches, hair dryers, iPod docking stations, refrigerators, electric razors, digital cameras, and even those electronic collars dogs wear that let them through their doggy doors.

See that Seattle Times piece here. See also: Advances in Electromagnetic Fields in Living Systems: Volume 5, Health Effects of Cell Phone Radiation, Lawsuits call for more information on dangers of cell phone radiation.: An article from: Trial, Radiation Rescue: Safer solutions for cell phones and other wireless technologies, Cell Phones and The Dark Deception: Find Out What You're Not Being Told...And Why, Cell Phones: Invisible Hazards in the Wireless Age: An Insider's Alarming Discoveries About Cancer and Genetic Damage, The Invisible Threat: The Risks Associated With EMFs & Effective Interventions.



In "The disturbing truth about cellphones," from The Globe and Mail, this is reported: Dr. Davis says brain cancers typically take decades to develop, and the fact that they're being found after 10 years in cellphone users after relatively light exposure by today's usage standards is worrisome. “For such a risk to show up in cellphone users within 10 years given what we know about brain tumours, which is that they can have a latency of 40 years, is deeply, deeply disturbing,” she said in an interview. [...] Dr. Davis writes that experiments indicate these waves do pack a biological punch. Rats exposed to just two hours of microwave radiation had broken strands of DNA, the damage known to occur in cancer. The rats also had brain-cell alterations, memory lapses and fluids leaking from their brains into their blood, indicating a breach of the blood-brain barrier.





From the Environmental Health Trust: Designated a National Book Award Finalist for When Smoke Ran Like Water (2002, Basic Books), Devra Davis founded Environmental Health Trust in 2007 in Teton County, Wyoming to provide basic research and education about environmental health hazards and promote constructive policies locally, nationally and internationally. Dr. Davis lectures at Georgetown, Harvard, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and other universities, and was Founding Director, Center for Environmental Oncology, University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, and Professor of Epidemiology at the Graduate School of Public Health (2004-2009). The Secret History of the War on Cancer was a top pick by Newsweek, is forming the basis for national cancer policy revisions by the South African Cancer Society, and is being used at major schools of public health, including Harvard, Emory, and Tulane University. Dr. Davis also was the founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the U.S. National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences and Scholar in Residence, 1983-1993. Her new book, Disconnect, selected by TIME magazine as a top pick, provides shocking detail about cell phone radiation and your health, is receiving kudos from experts and policy makers around the world, and is the subject of broad multi-media coverage.





From Wikipedia: Devra Lee Davis (born 1946) is an American epidemiologist and writer. She was born June 7, 1946, in Washington, DC, the daughter of Harry B. and Jean Langer Davis, and was raised in Donora, Pennsylvania and in Pittsburgh, where she graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School. Her book When Smoke Ran Like Water, which begins with the tale of the Donora Smog of 1948, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2002. Davis's second book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer was published by Basic Books in October 2007. Her new book, "Disconnect," debuted in September 2010. It discusses the dangers of modern cell phone use and the ways in which the cell phone industry has gone to lengths to cover these up.

The Man Who Turned Taxidermy Into An Art Form from NPR Podcast Talk of the Nation

In Kingdom Under Glass, author Jay Kirk tells the life story of Carl Akeley, the pioneering taxidermist and adventurer who once killed a leopard with his bare hands. Taxidermist David Schwendeman runs his family's 90-year-old studio and describes the techniques and hazards of modern taxidermy.

Download the podcast here.

Tim Wu: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires from Forum Network | Soapbox Podcast Podcast

Tim Wu, policy advocate, expert on copyright and communications, and creator of the phrase "net neutrality", talks about his book, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.

Download the podcast here. There's a pairing with Tim Wu; see that pairing here. On the note of couplings and pairings, check out this Blogging Heads debate; it's enlightening, if not entertaining. Sarah Lacy said this on her TechCrunch page:

In this longer debate on bloggingheads.tv, Wu raises a few good counter arguments that concern him about the industry’s future. And they hit home because they are two things I worry about too: Silicon Valley’s increasing reliance on acquisitions for exits and apps running on top of platforms like the iPhone and Facebook for distribution. We also talk about the distinction between the computer Web and the mobile Web when it comes to openness.

Check that TC page here. We might as well mention Lacy's book; it's more interesting to outsiders of the Valley that want to "get in" than any other sort of reader: Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0

The Rise and Fall of Information Empires from KERA's Think Podcast

[2010-12-13 12:00:00] Who actually owns the internet and all the information that flows freely on the world-wide-web? We'll explore issues surrounding net neutrality this hour with Tim Wu, the Columbia Law Professor and policy advocate who coined the term. His new book is "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires" (Knopf, 2010).

Download the podcast here. See also: Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World