Through the 1970s each of the great information empires of the 20th century was fundamentally challenged or broken into pieces, if not blown up altogether, leading to a new period of openness. The results were unmistakably invigorating for both commerce and culture. But like the T-1000 killer robot of Terminator 2 the shattered powers would reconstitute themselves, either in uncannily similar form (as with AT&T) or in the guise of a new corporate species called the conglomerate (as with the revenge of the broadcasters and of Hollywood).
By the dawn of the 21st century, the second great closing will be complete. The one exception to the hegemony of the latter-day information monopolists will be a new network to end all networks. While all else was being consolidated, the 1990s would also see the so-called internet revolution, though amid its explosive growth no one could see where the wildly open new medium would lead. Would the internet usher in a reign of industrial openness without end? Or would it, despite its radically decentralised design, become in time simply the next logical target for the insuperable forces of information empire, the object of the most consequential centralisation yet?
Reading all this, you may yet be wondering, “Why should I care?” After all, the flow of information is invisible, and its history lacks the emotional immediacy of, say, the second world war or the civil-rights movement. The fortunes of information empires notwithstanding, life goes on. It hardly occurred to anyone as a national problem when, in the 1950s, a special episode of I Love Lucy could attract more than 70% of households. And yet, almost like the weather, the flow of information defines the basic tenor of our times, the ambience in which things happen, and, ultimately, the character of a society.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to make this clear. Steaming from Malaysia to the United States in 1926, a young English writer named Aldous Huxley came across something interesting in the ship’s library, a volume entitled My Life and Work, by Henry Ford. Here was the vivid story of Ford’s design of mass production techniques and giant centralised factories of unexampled efficiency. Here, too, were Ford’s ideas on things like human equality: “There can be no greater absurdity and no greater disservice to humanity in general than to insist that all men are equal.” But what really interested Huxley, the future author of Brave New World, was Ford’s belief that his systems might be useful not just for manufacturing cars, but for all forms of social ordering. As Ford wrote, “the ideas we have put into practice are capable of the largest application—that they have nothing peculiarly to do with motor cars or tractors but form something in the nature of a universal code. I am quite certain that it is the natural code…”
When Huxley arrived in the States, Ford’s ideas fresh in mind, he realized something both intriguing and terrifying: Ford’s future was already becoming a reality. The methods of the steel factory and car assembly plant had been imported to the cultural and communications industries. Huxley witnessed in the America of 1926 the prototypes of structures that had not yet reached the rest of the world: the first commercial radio networks, rising studios for film production, and a powerful private communications monopoly called AT&T.
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When he returned to England, Huxley declared in an essay for Harper’s Magazine called The Outlook for American Culture that “the future of America is the future of the World”. He had seen that future and been more than a little dismayed by it. “Mass production,” he wrote, “is an admirable thing when applied to material objects; but when applied to the things of the spirit it is not so good.” Seven years later, the question of the spirit would occur to another student of culture and theorist of information. “The radio is the most influential and important intermediary between a spiritual movement and the nation,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, quite astutely, in 1933. “Above all,” he said, “it is necessary to clearly centralise all radio activities.” It is an underacknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to. How do you hear the voice of political leaders? Whose pain do you feel? And where do your aspirations, your dreams of good living, come from? All of these are products of the information environment.
My effort to consider this process is also an effort to understand the practical realities of free speech, as opposed to its theoretical life. We can sometimes think that the study of the First Amendment is the same as the study of free speech, but in fact it forms just a tiny part of the picture. Americans idealise what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes called the “marketplace of ideas”, a space where every member of society is, by right, free to peddle his creed. Yet the shape or even existence of any such marketplace depends far less on our abstract values than on the structure of the communications and culture industries. We sometimes treat the information industries as if they were like any other enterprise, but they are not, for their structure determines who gets heard. It is in this context that Fred Friendly, one-time CBS News president, made it clear that before any question of free speech comes the question of “who controls the master switch.”
The immediate inspiration for this book is my experience of the long wave of easy optimism created by the rise of information technologies in the late-20th and early-21st centuries, a feeling of almost utopian possibility and idealism. I shared in that excitement, both working in Silicon Valley and writing about it. Yet I have always been struck by what I feel is too strong an insistence that we are living in unprecedented times. In fact, the place we find ourselves now is a place we have been before, albeit in different guise. And so understanding how the fate of the technologies of the 20th century developed is important in making the 21st century better.
Tim Wu’s The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires is published by Atlantic Books (hardback £19.99)