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The blessing of the state, implicit or explicit, has been crucial to every twentieth-century information empire.

Tim Wu

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Tim Wu
Age: 54
Academic
Journalist
Legal Scholar
Washington
District of Columbia
Timothy Wu
Timothy Shiou-Ming Wu
吳修銘
Century
Information
Implicit
State
Explicit
States
Twentieth
Every
Empire
Empires
Crucial
Blessing

More quotes by Tim Wu

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I don't think anyone at Google feels happy about it, but they've been in some sense, you know, enslaved to their business model, and so they have to satisfy their advertisers.
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The case for industry breakups comes from Thomas Jefferson's idea that occasional revolutions are important to the health of any system. As he wrote in 1787, “a little rebellion every now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical one.
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The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.
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I'm afraid when too many people know too much about you, it actually makes us all a lot more boring because you're afraid to express yourself.
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In the media, traditional media like print, we had boundaries. You know, we had spaces that ads didn't leave. They stayed where they were on the page. They didn't float around over the text. And we're kind of lost on the internet. We don't have any barriers. We have a demand for growth that is insistent.
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Advertising always corrupts the goal of the search engine, which is to try to give you the most important stuff, not the stuff someone paid there to be there.
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Hitler had this understanding that you speak to people's deepest, darkest emotions and give them voice that can be incredibly effective.
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I do think the best thing for companies like Google and Facebook, if they are afraid of this ethical trap of advertising, is they should start letting people pay who want to pay and avoid some of the advertising.
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Trolling is an ancient problem. It's been around as long as there has been media.
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BE THE MEDIA is uplifting and empowering.
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Every time you click on a like button on another site, you've told Facebook that you're doing that. And so therefore advertisers know who their fan base is.
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Starting with radio, starting with television, we got used to this idea of stuff being free as long as you just watch a few ads.
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One thing that all the totalitarian states did was make the great leader's face everywhere.
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We have just decided we have to have everything for free. And I think we're starting to pay for it in terms of our mental states.
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In fact, the big steps forward for advertising, especially after World War I were when government just began employing the tools of advertising for its own purposes to get people to join the army and other things.
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Wikipedia, a nonprofit, is an enormously popular website but has managed to operate without advertising. And, you know, maybe it's a little simpler than Google and YouTube, but it does show there's another way.
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Hitler understood the demagogues' essential principle to teach or persuade is far more difficult than to stir emotion.
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There's a problem which is when you're trapped in your own identity and everything is really you, then you feel less freedom to sort of explore who you want to be. So I think it's kind of something we're stuck with as long as humans are the way we are.
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Now, he doesn't control the media, but Donald Trump has been incredibly successful in having his face appear everywhere. You cannot go a day without seeing that face somewhere maybe 10 times.
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Movies you pay for - well, sometimes they throw some ads at the beginning now - but generally you pay for ads. And that business model - actually, much more ancient, paying for stuff - is much more straightforward in terms of the incentives of the people who are then giving you the stuff.
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