The Internet Is Not the Answer (36 page)

55 Ibid.

56 “Amazon’s Power Play,” Editorial Board,
New York Times
, June 3, 2014.

57 Yglesias, “The Prophet of No Profit.”

58 Ryan,
A History of the Internet and the Digital Future
, p. 125.

59 “Yahoo! Still First Portal Call,” BBC News, June 5, 1998.

60 Steven Levy,
In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), pp. 69–120.

61 Ryan,
A History of the Internet and the Digital Future
, p. 115.

62 Levy,
In the Plex
, p. 22.

63 Ibid.

64 Ibid.

65 Ibid., p. 32.

66 Ibid., p. 33.

67 Ibid., p. 73.

68 Ibid., p. 99.

69 Ibid., p. 93.

70 Ibid.

71 “Google’s Income Statement Information,”
investor.google.com/financial/tables.html
. See also Seth Rosenblatt, “Google Demolishes Financial Expectations to Close 2013,” CNET, January 30, 2014.

72 Danny Sullivan, “Google Still World’s Most Popular Search Engine by Far, but Share of Unique Search Dips Slightly,” SearchEngineLand, February 11, 2013.

73 Moises Naim,
The End of Power: From Boards to Battlegrounds and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be
(New York: Basic Books, 2013).

74 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier,
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013), p. 113.

75 “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software,” O’
Reilly.com
, September 30, 2005.

76 Astra Taylor,
The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), p. 202.

77 Josh Constine, “The Data Factory—How Your Free Labor Lets Tech Giants Grow the Wealth Gap,”
TechCrunch
, September 9, 2013,
techcrunch.com/2013/09/09/the
-data-factory.

78 Anoushka Sakoul, “Concentrated Cash Pile Puts Recovery in Hands of the Few,”
Financial Times
, January 22, 2014.

79 John Plender, “Apple, Google and Facebook Are Latter-Day Scrooges,”
Financial Times,
December 29, 2013.

80 Ibid.

81 Ben Mezrich,
The Accidental Billionaires
(New York: Heinemann, 2009), pp. 62, 73, 74, 175.

82 Stephen Silberman, “The Geek Syndrome,”
Wired
, September 2001.

83 Rebecca Savastio, “Facebook Founder Zuckerberg’s Asperger’s Problem,”
Las Vegas Guardian
, September 5, 2013.

84 Nicholas Carlson, “Coping with Asperger’s: A Survival Manual for Mark Zuckerberg,”
Business Insider
, July 25, 2008.

85 Austin Carr, “Facebook Everywhere,”
Fast Company
, July/August 2014.

86 Felix Gillette, “The Rise and Inglorious Fall of MySpace,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, June 22, 2011.

87 David Kirkpatrick,
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World
(New York: Simon & Schuster), p. 16.

88 Carr, “Facebook Everywhere.”

89 Kirkpatrick,
The Facebook Effect
, p. 305.

90 Carr, “Facebook Everywhere.”

91 Kirkpatrick,
The Facebook Effect
, p. 316.

92 Ibid., p. 332.

93 Ibid., p. 313.

94 “Journal That Published Facebook Mood Study Expresses ‘Concern’ at Its Ethics,” Associated Press, July 3, 2014.

95 Kirkpatrick,
The Facebook Effect,
p. 314.

96 Charlie Warzel, “Your Next Phone Will Be the Ultimate Surveillance Machine,”
Buzzfeed
, November 27, 2013.

97 Kirkpatrick,
The Facebook Effect
, p. 199.

98 Ibid., p. 210.

99 Matthew Sparkes, “Young Users See Facebook as ‘Dead and Buried,’”
Daily Telegraph
, December 27, 2013.

100 Maria Konnikova, “How Facebook Makes Us Unhappy,”
New Yorker
, September 10, 2013.

101 Charlie Warzel, “Americans Still Don’t Trust Facebook with Their Privacy,”
Buzzfeed
, April 3, 2014.

102 Alexandra Sifferlin, “Why Facebook Makes You Feel Bad About Yourself,”
Time
, January 24, 2003.

103 Berners-Lee,
Weaving the Web
, p. 36.

104 Michael Sandel,
What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012), p. 5.

105 Evan Spiegel, LA Hacks Keynote Address, April 11, 2014.

106 Joseph A. Schumpeter,
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
(New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 83.

107 Marc Andreessen, “Why Bitcoin Matters,”
New York Times
, January 21, 2014.

108 Ibid.

109 Colin Lecher, “How Did a $10 Potato Salad Kickstarter Raise More than $30,000?,”
Verge
, July 7, 2014.

110 Sarah Eckel, “You Want Me to Give You Money for What?,”
BBC Capital
, May 1, 2014.

111 Ryan Lawler, “Airbnb Tops 10 Million Guest Stays Since Launch, Now Has 550,000 Properties Listed Worldwide,”
TechCrunch
, December 19, 2013.

112 Sydney Ember, “Airbnb’s Huge Valuation,”
New York Times
, April 21, 2014. See also Carolyn Said, “Airbnb’s Swank Digs Reflect Growth, but Controversy Grows,”
SFGate
, January 27, 2014.

113 Thomas L. Friedman, “And Now for a Bit of Good News . . .”
New York Times
, July 19, 2014.

114 Will Oremus, “Silicon Valley Uber Alles,”
Slate
, June 6, 2014.

115 See Dan Amira, “Uber Will Ferry Hampton-Goers Via Helicopter This July 3rd,”
New York
, July 2013,
nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/07/uber
-helicopter-uberchopper-hamptons-july-3rd.html.

116 Jessica Guynn, “San Francisco Split by Silicon Valley’s Wealth,”
Los Angeles Times
, August 14, 2013.

117 Paul Sloan, “Marc Andreessen: Predictions for 2012 (and Beyond),” CNET, December 19, 2011,
news.cnet.com
/8301-1023_3-57345138-93/marc-andreessen-predictions-for-2012-and-beyond.

118 Mark Scott, “Traffic Snarls in Europe as Taxi Drivers Protest Against Uber,”
New York Times
, June 11, 2014.

119 Kevin Roose, “Uber Might Be More Valuable than Facebook Someday. Here’s Why,”
New York
, December 6, 2013,
nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/uber
-might-be-more-valuable-than-facebook.html.

120 Erin Griffith, “Meet the Uber Rich,”
Fortune
, June 5, 2014.

Chapter Three

1 In his afterword to the 2000 edition of
Neuromancer
, the American science fiction writer Jack Womack speculated that the book might have inspired the creation of the World Wide Web. “What if the act of writing it down, in fact,
brought it about
,” Womack wrote.

2 Michael Keene, “Rochester Crime Rates,”
Examiner.com
, February 4, 2010. For data on Rochester’s very high 2012 murder rate, see Karyn Bower, John Klofas, and Janelle Duda, “Homicide in Rochester, NY 2012: Comparison of Rates for a Selection of United States and International Cities,” Center of Public Initiatives, January 25, 2013.

3 Rory Carroll, “Silicon Valley’s Culture of Failure . . . and the ‘Walking Dead’ It Leaves Behind,”
Guardian
, June 28, 2014.

4 “How I Failed,” Cultivate Conference, New York City, October 14, 2013,
cultivatecon.com/cultivate2013//files/13/57/59/f135759/public/schedule/detail
/31551.

5 “‘Fail Fast’ Advises LinkedIn Founder and Tech Investor Reid Hoffman,” BBC, January 11, 2011.

6 “Failure: The F-Word Silicon Valley Loves and Hates,”
NPR.org
, June 19, 2012,
npr.org/2012/06/19/155005546/failure
-the-f-word-silicon-valley-loves-and-hates.

7 Eric Markowitz, “Why Silicon Valley Loves Failure,”
Inc.
, August 16, 2012,
inc.com/eric
-markowitz/brilliant-failures/why-silicon-valley-loves-failures.html/1.

8
MIT Technology Review
, September/October 2013,
technologyreview.com/magazine/2013/09
. The young entrepreneur featured on the cover was Ben Milne, the founder and CEO of a digital payments startup called Dwolla, who, the magazine claimed, was seeking to “demolish” the finance industry. Milne seems to think of himself as a big-time demolisher. On his own Instagram page, for example, he posted an image saying:
“MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS.”
instagram.com/p/epyqnEHQwg
.

9 David Wills,
Hollywood in Kodachrome
(New York: HarperCollins, 2013), p. xiii.

10 Ibid. Kodachrome film was also used to make eighty Oscar winners of the Best Picture award. See Rupert Neate, “Kodak Falls in the Creative Destruction of the Digital Age,”
Guardian
, January 19, 2013,
theguardian.com/business/2012/jan/19/kodak
-bankruptcy-protection.