Tim Wu Quotes

#1. Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

Tim Wu

#2. 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.

Tim Wu

#3. We're going to put Hulu ahead of you, unless you pay up

Tim Wu

#4. It's the same old story," he would say, years later; "the inventor gets the experience, and the capitalist gets the invention.

Tim Wu

#5. we see that the enlightened monopolist can occasionally prove a delusional paranoid.

Tim Wu

#6. It is in the contest that Fred Friendly, onetime CBS News president, made it clear that before any questions of "who controls the master switch.

Tim Wu

#7. In an information industry the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately amount to censorship.

Tim Wu

#8. 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.

Tim Wu

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

Tim Wu

#10. A man need merely light the filaments of his receiving set and the world's greatest artists will perform for him,

Tim Wu

#11. Sometimes the crowd is right; often it is wrong. It remains for science to read the balance.

Tim Wu

#12. Industries, unlike organisms, have no organic limits on their own growth; they are constantly in search of new markets, or of new ways to exploit old ones more effectively; as Karl Marx unsympathetically observed, they 'nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

Tim Wu

#13. As a character in Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, set in 1876, remarks, "Every age thinks it's the modern age, but this one really is.

Tim Wu

#14. by the FCC's own reckoning, the cable companies will soon enjoy an uncontested monopoly over broadband Internet in much of the United States beyond the East Coast, and they are also seeking control of more Hollywood studios and television networks.

Tim Wu

#15. 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

#16. like late Rome, the Bell system now existed as an eastern and a western empire - Verizon and AT&T (whose

Tim Wu

#17. For all our secular rationalism and technological advances, potential for surrender to the charms of magical thinking remains embedded in the human psyche, awaiting only the advertiser to awaken it.

Tim Wu

#18. The best antidote to the disruptive power of innovation is overregulation.

Tim Wu

#19. The story of Daniel Lord and the Legion of Decency goes to a central contention of this book: in the United States, it is industrial structure that determines the limits of free speech.

Tim Wu

#20. It is no coincidence that ours is a time afflicted by a widespread sense of attentional crisis, at least in the West - one captured by the phrase 'homo distractus,' a species of ever shorter attention span known for compulsively checking his devices.

Tim Wu

#21. the mogul makes the medium: the imprint of the personality inevitably informs it, often no less than the technology underlying it. Turner

Tim Wu

#22. As William James observed, we must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fully realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.

Tim Wu

#23. BE THE MEDIA is uplifting and empowering.

Tim Wu

#24. Every time you find your attention captured by a poster, your awareness, and perhaps something more, has, if only for a moment, been appropriated without your consent.

Tim Wu

#25. It is a common enough mid-career urge: having taken care of life's immediate needs, some of us yearn to chase villains, right wrongs, fight on the side of the angels.

Tim Wu