Sunday, January 8, 2017

Tim Wu: ‘The internet is like the classic story of the party that went sour’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/08/tim-wu-interview-internet-classic-party-went-sour-attention-merchants
Tim Wu looks back at attempts by entrepreneurs to capture the public imagination.
In 2010, for example, he published The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, a sobering history of the great communications technologies of the 20th century – the telephone, movies, broadcast radio and television. In telling the history, Wu perceived a recurring cycle in the evolution of these technologies. Each started out as open, chaotic, diverse and intensely creative; each stimulated utopian visions of the future, but in the end they all wound up “captured” by industrial interests.