Tim Wu on the Master Switch
January 11th, 2011
Tim Wu is a policy advocate, a professor at Columbia Law School, and the chairman of media reform organization Free Press. Wu was recognized in 2006 as one of 50 leaders in science and technology by Scientific American magazine, and in 2007 Wu was listed as one of Harvard’s 100 most influential graduates by 02138 magazine.
Here he discusses themes and ideas from his most recent book “The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires.”
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1. Max | January 27th, 2011 at 8:30 pm
Puzzling contradiction, or am I misunderstanding something?
Hi Tim,
Early on in your talk you note that by 1938, AT&T was actively suppressing a technology (magnetic tape recording > answering machines) that everyone would ultimately agree was tremendously valuable. Then just a few minutes later you remarked that each emergent monopoly invariably ushers in a golden age of products and services — that these monopolies tend to be happily embraced by consumers, at least initially. So the question is: do you think that consumers would have been equally welcoming of the AT&T monopoly if they were fully aware of the technology and services that they were effectively foregoing (for half a century, as it turned out) in return for the enhanced “quality of service” that the monopolist promised — or are you suggesting that this tradeoff really *was* worth it, i.e., that AT&T made the “right” choice on behalf of the US (and world) economy, even if none of the other participants in that economy were ever aware that a choice had been made? I don’t think you can have it both ways.
MH
P.S. Your increasingly frequent recourse to Austrian Economics in this talk is more than a bit troubling. Of course the answer to the above question, in any situation, will be self-evident to a true devotee of von Mises, Hayek, and/or any of their intellectual heirs, but I can’t imagine how you might go about squaring the canonical Austrian answer with the broader intellectual and normative goals of the Berkman Center. You might also wish to think carefully about what the signature Austrian “great entrepreneur on a white horse” theory of economic development implies for those who have already been waiting for decades (and may have decades more to wait) before meaningful Internet access comes to them. The Austrians have bequeathed us some amazingly useful insights into the processes behind economic evolution, but their continued marginality is directly related to their perennial obtuseness to one particular dimension of time — namely the inevitability of time’s measurement in *individual* human terms, and the ultimate limits of individual human patience.
It’s a recurring if not quite common phenomenon for deep scholarship in the humanities and social sciences to ultimately lead the scholar to embrace some form of fatalism (or eternal recurrence) as a personal worldview. Unfortunately, for all practical purposes advocacy of such a philosophical position in a public (much less public policy) context is effectively indistinguishable from championing the status quo. In this sense, one may never make a lot of converts, but then you’ll probably never be short of enthusiastic supporters anyway…